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What did it all mean? That’s what Zetta wanted to know. On the one hand, the gun shouldn’t have come as a surprise: a man who leaves everything behind on receipt of a cell phone message advising him to run isn’t living his best life, and fear might be occupying some of his bandwidth. Given Riggins’s military background, the acquisition of one or more guns would be a natural response to a threat. On the other hand, he was working at a cannabis store and attending gallery openings, so he wasn’t exactly hiding in a cave. Yet as soon as theRUNmessage came through, Riggins walked, and in a manner beyond all but the most disciplined of men. He hadn’t said a last goodbye to his girlfriend, hadn’t collected his modest belongings, and hadn’t even tried to retrieve his gun. That suggested he might have had cause to vanish before.

There are two ways to lie low, one more permanent and extreme than the other. The permanent way is akin to witness protection, a new name and a new existence, far from friends and family. You stay away from places you know and people who might know you. It’s what you do when you think your life is in danger and is set to remain so until you no longer have any life left to lose. The second is less extreme but more hazardous, as it’s based on unknowns. It may be that someone wants to find you, someone from whom it might be better to stay out of reach, but you can’t be sure and you don’t want to cast all to the wind on the off chance. So what do you do? You temporarily divest yourself of as many encumbrances as possible—job, romance, whatever dump you’re renting—andfind somewhere quiet and safe. And because you don’t yet have cause to reinvent yourself, which is a time-consuming and costly process, you keep your name, and maybe the place you choose isn’t entirely devoid of friends, the type you can trust to help you if the hammer falls or keep their mouths shut when that special person comes asking after you.

My instinct was that Wyatt Riggins fell into some version of the second camp. He might have had feelings for Zetta Nadeau, but if he did, they weren’t deep enough for him to write a note letting her know he was okay, no hard feelings, ships passing in the night, you know how it is. But he had left the text message on the Nokia, despite taking the time to delete the contacts list. Then, rather than dump the phone, he had dropped it somewhere it might be found, and by someone who knew it was his. It seemed that he wanted to let Zetta know he’d been forced to skip town and wasn’t just ditching her after a good time. He’d struck lucky with her because her home—secure and out of the way—was the perfect spot for a man who might be on edge, but he hadn’t known Zetta before he got to Maine. So, why choose the state as a base while he waited to see how things panned out? A plausible answer was that he had contacts in the Portland metropolitan area, folks who could act as a support structure, help him find work, and brush away his tracks if he had to scoot again. He might have stayed with them for a night or two when he first arrived, but they wouldn’t have wanted him so close for too long, not if he was marked.

“What about friends?” I asked Zetta.

“His or mine?”

“Both, if relevant.”

“Wyatt didn’t socialize much with my friends. I didn’t mind. If he and I stayed together, that would come with time. As for his, he didn’t really have any, except for this one guy, Jason, who also works at BrightBlown. They’d known each other back when they were kids in the South. But Wyatt didn’t see a lot of Jason, even at work. In fact, I think he was surprised to find out that Jason was up here.”

“Does Jason have a last name?”

“If Wyatt told me, I’ve forgotten. BrightBlown will know who I’m talking about. He’s been working for them since they opened.”

I threw a few more curveballs at Zetta, but she’d told me all she could. I assured her I’d stay in touch and urged her not to worry too much. Wyatt Riggins struck me as a man with a well-developed sense of self-preservation. If I failed to find him, Zetta might choose to take that as a good sign: If I couldn’t find Wyatt, there was a chance that the people he was running from wouldn’t be able to find him either, in which case I told her I’d consider refunding any overpayment of my fee, but rounded up to a full day. In return, Zetta gave me the finger and returned to her art.

I considered visiting BrightBlown on my way back to Scarborough, but it had been a long day and I didn’t feel any great sense of urgency about Wyatt Riggins, who currently didn’t want to be found. If that meant Zetta Nadeau struggled to get to sleep for worrying about him, she could take a pill. I no longer had the energy to fight every battle on other people’s terms. As Riggins might have confirmed, had he been around to offer an opinion, that was a sure way to lose a war.

CHAPTERXXIV

The National Museum of the American Indian in New York is situated in the Battery and occupies part of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, a stunning Beaux-Arts building with a footprint covering three city blocks. While the white-marbled rotunda, with its oval skylight and muraled walls, was the most spectacular of the museum’s rooms, the most atmospheric and intimate, at least in Madeline Rainbird’s view, was the Collector’s Office, all Tiffany oak panels, subdued lighting, and depictions of seaports.

Rainbird had been with the museum for ten years, starting out as an intern in Collections Care before becoming a member of the conservation team, specializing in pesticides and pest management. This meant ensuring that the museum’s relics remained safe from insects or rodents and applying chemical analysis to establish what pesticides might have been utilized in the past. Until 1972 and the passage of the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the use of pesticides was unregulated, which meant that even culturally and historically valuable items were often exposed to potentially harmful agents. The fact that Madeline had recourse to the wordsinsecticide, fungicide, and indeedrodenticidein her daily life went some way, she felt, toward explaining why she continued to struggle on the dating front.

Some pesticides were active for only a short time, but others—organophosphates and organochlorides, for example—could retain their toxicity for years. This presented a particular problem when it came to the repatriation of holdings to tribal communities, because it would obviously be unwise to hand back funerary objects or human remains laden with mercury or arsenic. But the museum couldn’t conduct tests without permission from tribal stakeholders, some of whom took a dim view of any further perceived assaults on the dignity of their ancestral dead. One of Madeline’s roles was to explain why such tests might be in everyone’s best interest and reassure tribal elders that the examinations would be conducted with the maximum respect and the minimum of intrusion, since Madeline herself would be responsible for them. Madeline was a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe, and had been born just outside the Sipayik reservation in Washington County, Maine, which meant that those with whom she was dealing could be sure she wasn’t paying lip service to their concerns. To further gild her credentials, she had accrued additional expertise in the care and preservation of human remains—another reason, perhaps, why she could sleep on either side of her bed most nights—which meant she was unlikely to be short of work in her lifetime, not when at least one North American university still held the bodies of up to seven thousand Native Americans in its collection. Making certain such relics were restored to their communities was high on the agenda of many at the museum, Rainbird included.

But all the museum’s efforts came with a cost attached, so it was constantly in search of funds to support its activities. It wasn’t as though it could rely on the resources of the Native American community, which had the highest poverty rate of any minority group in the country. More Native Americans might have been completing high school and going on to college than ever before, but many were also struggling to find jobs, since the kind of employment opportunities on which they used to rely—construction and manufacturing—continued to contract. As forcasinos, if Madeline had a dollar for every time someone had suggested opening a gambling den as a way out of poverty for Native Americans, she could have bought herself better shoes and used them to kick the person in question hard in the ass.

So when a donor came along, especially one offering money without too many onerous conditions, it was cause for celebration, which was why Madeline, along with about a dozen of her co-workers, was currently standing in the Collector’s Office, a glass of sparkling wine in one hand and a napkin in the other, while trying to eat a particularly awkward canapé. The donor being acknowledged was a widow named Elle Louise Douglas, whose late and by all accounts unlamented spouse, an investment banker named Darryl Douglas IV, was a direct descendant of one of the Eel River Rangers. The Rangers were a group of settlers and gunmen led by Walter Jarboe who, over six months between 1859 and 1860, killed almost three hundred Yuki braves, and perhaps at least as many Yuki women and children, in an attempt to annihilate the native population of Round Valley in Mendocino, California, thus facilitating further white settlement. The killers had then billed the state for their services.

Darryl Douglas IV—in common, presumably, with Darryls I, II, and III—was proud of his heritage and regarded the Rangers as fearless protectors of the men and women who had built this great nation. The Yuki, according to Douglas family lore, were cattle thieves and murderers who had provoked the settlers into acting against them. As for the fatalities, the warriors had died in battle, which was how they would have wanted to go, while the Rangers sustained only a handful of casualties in the engagements, suggesting that “massacre” could more aptly have been superseded for “battle.” Per the Douglas version of history, the numbers of women and children killed in the conflict had been greatly exaggerated for political ends, besmirching the courage of their forefather and his fellow fine Americans. Quietly, Madeline Rainbirdhoped that the spirits of Darryl Douglas IV and his predecessors were wandering the afterlife eyeless, eternally lost and afraid.

It was small consolation that Darryl Douglas IV felt the same way about Blacks, Jews, Latinos, and Asians as he did about Native Americans, being a hardened proselytizer for the merits and accomplishments of the white race. He was also, as it emerged after his sudden death on a golf course at the age of sixty-eight, a cocksman of the highest order, incapable of passing a crack in a wall, or possibly even a hole on a golfing green, without wishing to stick his dick in it. Admittedly, his much younger wife had suspected him of a certain level of infidelity, accepting it as part of their marital arrangement, but the scale of it revealed after his death, including payoffs for three abortions, appalled even her. There was also the humiliation of learning that mutual friends had been aware of Darryl IV’s behavior, so she felt as though intimates had been laughing and whispering behind her back for two decades.

Consequently, the widow Douglas set out to use some of her husband’s estate in ways calculated to kill him were he not already dead, including a substantial donation to the National Museum of the American Indian, her only stipulation being that the donor plaque should acknowledge payment being made in recompense for the actions of the Douglas family against the Yuki. This was why she and her three children were now being honored with a small reception in the Collector’s Office. They had brought with them a man named Mark Triton, a dealer in Native art and antiquities, both North and South American, whom the Douglas woman had met at a charity event and who had suggested to her that a contribution to the museum might be an appropriate form of atonement for the Douglas family’s historical failings.

While he had an interest in contemporary art, Triton principally sold Native American ceremonial pipes, weapons, totems, carvings, beadwork, parfleches, clothing, and pottery, generally higher-end material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He maintainedlines of contact with the museum, and was outwardly scrupulous about ensuring that antiquities of unusual importance or sensitivity found their way back to their rightful tribal owners, sometimes taking a financial hit along the way. But despite Triton’s reputation for probity, Madeline still had reservations (and how many times had she heard that particular pun thrown back at her?) about his dealings because fetishes, totems, and similar objects had particular spiritual and hereditary associations for their tribal claimants that he could not possibly share, no matter how many Native Americans he had working for him or how many good causes he supported.

Triton had also clashed with museum curators and tribal representatives over issues of provenance, because it wasn’t always possible to establish how a seller might have come by an item, especially if someone claimed to have discovered it in Grandpa’s attic after the old coot bought the farm. Triton might have been prepared to roll over in exceptional circumstances, but he remained a businessman who reserved the right to buy and sell as he saw fit and wasn’t about to run every acquisition past a committee. Neither was Madeline so naive as to believe that Triton didn’t discreetly pick up and dispose of certain collectibles without ever letting it be known they’d passed through his hands, cutting lucrative deals with connoisseurs who preferred not to have their collections come to the attention of tribal representatives or the authorities. Thanks to his network, Triton also acted as an agent and intermediary, bringing buyers and sellers together and taking a cut for his efforts, which made it even less probable that he would always raise moral objections to an exchange. Finally, he was reputed to have a sideline in pre-Hispanic antiquities, and more than once the Mexican and Peruvian authorities had failed to halt auctions in the United States and Europe in which Triton had an interest, silent or otherwise. Mark Triton might have been honest by the standards of many in art and antiques, but that was a low bar.

In recent years, Triton had commenced stepping back from his business concerns, not only to write a long-mooted book on Native American tribal art but also to enjoy his own collection, which was reputed to be modest in size but very carefully curated and undoubtedly valuable. This reception represented Madeline’s first opportunity in years to question him personally about his plans for Triton Rarities, as she had last been in his company before the COVID pandemic. He hadn’t changed much in the interim, aided by having gone bald in his early thirties and keeping his head shaved for the three decades plus change that followed—like a man, someone once quietly joked, who feared being scalped and had decided to make the effort as worthless as possible. Triton was very bronzed, very slim, and eschewed the Western dress styles favored by some in his trade, preferring casual suits and white shirts worn without a tie. The shirts matched the brilliance of his dentition, so that shirt and teeth might have been composed of a common material.

Madeline finished the canapé without leaving too many crumbs on her clothes and placed the napkin and glass on one of the tall tables scattered around the room. A series of brief speeches commenced, although the widow Douglas was not among the speakers, which was for the best as she had already consumed most of a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs and wasn’t letting any food spoil her appetite. Offered the floor, she might have felt compelled, not for the first time, to unburden herself publicly about her late husband, and nobody liked a messy widow.

The plaque honoring the donation was displayed on a small wooden stand, alongside a gift from the museum to the donor: an early twentieth-century beaver totem, beautifully painted. Beaver totems were associated with avenging wrongs, so it was a suitable offering. The widow volubly expressed her approval of the totem as it was presented, helped by a chorus of quietly impressed noises from Triton, but she greeted the sight of the plaque only with a grimace of satisfaction. Her children—two boys and a girl, all in their mid- to late teens—looked variously bored and bewildered. Madeline wondered if they were ignorant of the resentments underpinning the endowment. Probably not, she decided. Even allowing for the general self-absorption of teenagers, they couldn’t have been unmindful of the imperfections in their parents’ marriage. Madeline hoped the widow Douglas had set aside some of her bequest for family therapy.

Madeline disengaged herself from a quartet of her colleagues and headed in Triton’s direction. He saw her approaching and excused himself from the widow’s company. He and Madeline might have had their differences over the years, but he respected her expertise and regularly sought her advice and assistance. She never refused him, and any help she gave was always reciprocated with a donation to the museum from Triton Rarities. It was also a means of keeping open communication channels and facilitating dialogue over problematic sales or acquisitions.

“It’s been too long,” said Triton. He opened his arms but did not immediately move to embrace her. “Are we doing this again? I’m never sure. If it helps, I’ve had all my shots.”

They hugged. Madeline had to admit that he remained a striking man; not exactly handsome, but singular in looks and with charm to burn. Thankfully, she was immune to his more carnal aspects, which he wasn’t above exploiting. Three failed marriages and a string of conquests to his name indicated that Mark Triton had more in common with Darryl Douglas IV than his widow might have cared to hear. Triton’s current squeeze, Tanya Hook, a buyer for his company, was a quarter century his junior but could have pleaded another five years in the right light. Madeline watched her discreetly dissuade one of the waitstaff from refilling the widow Douglas’s glass while the widow’s older son took less discreet glances at Tanya’s breasts.

“I tried contacting you a month or so ago,” said Madeline to Triton, “but your secretary said you were on a buying trip. Anywhere interesting?”

The barest flicker, but enough of a tell for her to note it.