The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (17 page)

He was watching. She’d stayed on Main Street, passing the occasional couple strolling along, her own reflection darting in and out of the storefront windows, the stores themselves shuttered in darkness. Surely he wouldn’t come after her on Main. Then she’d had to turn into her neighborhood and walk the three long blocks through the fading light and the blue shadows, with vehicles parked at the curbs and lights coming on in the front windows of bungalows, and people in the safe world inside moving past the windows.

She’d run up the two flights to her apartment, not wanting to enclose herself in the elevator, and had been grateful that Adam was waiting. Yes, she’d agreed. It was best to back off. While he was at Pine Ridge for his uncle’s funeral, she’d concentrate on lining up statements from the other drug-tested Indians, as well as from the few white employees at Mammoth Oil that Mister had said would testify that they’d operated the same equipment as the Indians, yet had never had to take the tests. She’d send the initial letter to Mammoth Oil demanding compensation for the Indian employees discriminated against, and the battle would be on. The kind of battle they’d wanted to fight, the reason they’d both become attorneys, the reason they’d formed the law firm—Holden and Lone Eagle—attorneys for Indian rights.

She’d been dreaming about the girl again, she realized. It was the dream that had awakened her. Maybe it had been the soft crying, the same crying Diana had heard in her dreams. But she wasn’t sure if it was a girl with long, braided hair on the prairie years ago, or the girl in the alley. They were merging, she realized, like shadows moving together.

But it wasn’t only the dream. Something present and real and dangerous was close, like a sudden chill in the air. We could always feel when the enemy was near, Grandmother said. Vicky could hear the familiar voice, as if Grandmother were seated on the chair across the room, Vicky’s and Adam’s clothes piled around her, telling stories of the Old Time that she’d heard from her own grandmother, about how the women always knew.

The enemy would come at night, sneak up on the village when the warriors were asleep. But we would wake up. We’d feel the chill in the air and hear the quiet that was too quiet, and we’d know they were coming. The ponies would start snorting and pawing in the corral. We’d wake the men. All the tipis in the village, the same: Wake up, wake up. They’re coming. And the warriors, drowsy and confused at first
—
let me sleep, woman
—
would throw off the buffalo robes and grab the weapons stored by the flap
—
rifles and bows and arrows
—
and run out into the night
—
run naked ’cause there was no time to dress. And the women would gather the children, hold them close, and try to calm them
—
shush, shush, it’ll be fine
—
and wait, listening to the sound of the rifles firing, the swift parting of air as the arrows whizzed past the tipis.

It was the women who knew.

Vicky slipped out of bed, careful not to pull the sheet or blanket. Adam was quiet now, lapsed into some safe and peaceful place. She found her robe on the chair and managed to pull it around her as she went down the short hallway. This wasn’t the Old Time, she told herself. This was now, and she’d had a bad dream, that was all. The night was warm, and yet she felt chilled. Something wasn’t right.

She stopped at the end of the hallway and surveyed the space that opened into the shadows ahead: the closet-sized kitchen where she and Adam were always bumping into each other when they tried to fix a meal; what passed for a dining room on the other side of the counter. Across the space was the living room with everything normal—the sofa and chairs, the TV and side tables, the wrought iron lamps like black sticks against the walls. Light from outside flared in the windows and deposited wells of light around the counter, on one of the chairs, on the carpet in front of the sofa.

God, what was wrong with her? She had to get ahold of herself. She had to stop obsessing about a girl murdered thirty years ago! The past is not ours to change. Grandmother’s voice again. We must go on. Always remember that. We will go on.

And the girl in the alley, and all the other vulnerable women, and Susan and herself and…

God. God. God. Adam was right. They would do what they could do now for their people. They couldn’t undo what was done. They couldn’t prevent…

And that was it, she realized. That was the invisible curtain always hanging between them. He accepted reality—we will do what we can—and she wanted to prevent the horror, as if that were possible. As if finding a killer who’d escaped justice for thirty years would somehow prevent the murder of any other woman. It was ludicrous, ludicrous, and yet, it was the women, Grandmother said, who tried to prevent the attacks.

She was about to retrace her steps down the hallway when the coldness crept over her again. She could feel the goose pimples erupting on her arms, as if she’d ventured out of doors into a blizzard. She moved past the kitchen and into the dining room, conscious of her bare feet padding over the vinyl, then the carpet. She held her robe closed with one hand; the fingers of her other hand walked across the counter. She surveyed the whole area, satisfying herself that no one was there. There was nothing unusual. God, she had to shake this feeling.

She was aware of moving toward the door, pulled by some invisible force, as if the enemy were there, outside the village. She peered through the peephole, looking up and down the corridor as far as the tiny concave glass allowed. It might have been a corridor in an abandoned building, with all the inhabitants gone, doors closed behind them, and nothing but the carpet worn gray in the middle by the tread of their footsteps and the light bulbs burning dimly from the ceiling, and the bulb near the elevator blinking on and off. Directly across the corridor was the closed door to Mrs. Burton’s apartment. It took an act of will to imagine that the elderly woman was beyond the door, sleeping in her bed. That anyone was beyond the closed doors, and that the doors themselves, like the door at the end of the corridor, next to Mrs. Burton’s, didn’t lead to empty stairs winding between the floors of an abandoned building.

There was no one there.

She started again for the hallway, then reversed direction and made her way through the well of light on the far side of the table to the window. She came at it sideways, aware of the iciness clamping on to her like a vise. She looked down onto the street. The streetlamp threw a circle of yellow light over the asphalt and sidewalk two stories below. She could see Adam’s green pickup parked at the curb.

Across the street was a sedan, gray looking under the overhanging branches.

Vicky moved closer to the edge of the window. Someone was behind the steering wheel. A man, and she was sure of that, despite the knit cap that might have covered a woman’s hair. He sat low in the seat, head turned toward the street, watching over the top of the windowsill.

Watching Adam’s pickup, she realized, as if he expected Adam to emerge from the building entrance below and drive off, leaving him—the killer in the gray sedan—the only one there.

Vicky stepped back along the table, making a wide circle to the counter, so that he couldn’t see her. She picked up the phone, pressed 911, and moved back to the edge of the window, waiting for the buzzing noise to give way to a human voice. And when it came, she said, “There’s a strange man waiting outside my apartment. Please send a car.”

“Has he done anything…”

“He’s wanted by the sheriff,” Vicky said. It was the truth. “He smashed my windshield with a baseball bat this afternoon.”

“Vicky? What is it?” It was Adam’s voice in the hallway, his footsteps pounding the carpet. “What’s going on?” He swung past the kitchen and came toward her.

“Get back,” she shouted, seized with a new fear. The man could have a gun, and then she knew with a certainty as sure and cold as a block of ice that he’d been waiting—waiting at the curb with a clear view of her apartment—waiting for her to move into a window.

But Adam was still coming toward her, and he was the one framed in the window.

“You all right?” The disembodied voice on the phone, a million miles away, was drowned out by the sound of her own screams—“Get down! Get down!”—as Vicky threw herself against Adam, knocking him off step, the two of them bumping against the table. The gunshot sounded like the explosive pop of a firecracker, and Vicky was barely aware of the noise of shattering glass and the sound of shards of glass falling out of the frame like icicles dropping off a frozen roof.

FATHER JOHN FOUND
Jesse Moon at a seedy garage punched out of the rear of a strip mall on Federal. Walking toward him through the noise of hip-hop blaring from a radio somewhere, a paunchy-looking Indian, medium height with wide shoulders and muscular brown forearms that hung beneath the short sleeves of grease-smeared coveralls. He might have been still in his fifties, black hair trimmed short over his ears, exposing half circles of pink flesh. His eyes were black slits cut into a round, fleshy face.

“Lookin’ for somebody?” he shouted over the radio noise without moving his lips. Behind him, a younger-looking version of the man, somewhere in his late teens, stared up into the innards of a black sedan balanced on a metal pole close to the ceiling. Mixed odors of grease, stale coffee, and chemicals floated in the air.

“Father O’Malley, St. Francis Mission,” Father John said, extending his hand.

Jesse Moon grabbed on to his fingers and squeezed hard. “Eric, turn that blasted thing down,” he shouted over one shoulder, then looked back. No change in his expression. “Banner called thirty minutes ago. Said you’d be stopping by.” The radio faded into the background. There was the sound of metal banging metal. “I’m telling you right now, I don’t know nothing about that skeleton. Don’t know how it got there. Don’t how who she was, and tell you something else, don’t care. Not my business. Police work, I gave it up. Leave it to the other chumps.”

“Do you have a few minutes?”

“Pretty busy here.” He threw his head back toward the sedan on the pole and his teenaged look-alike bouncing a wrench against the palm of one hand, staring at them.

“My pickup could use an oil change.” Father John held out the keys.

Jesse Moon’s expression changed at this, a slow crack of understanding that stopped short of a smile. He took the keys and tossed them across the garage in the direction of the teenager who scrambled to pull them out of the air. “We gotta take care of Father John here. Change the oil.”

The kid gave a shrug of annoyance at the inexplicable vagaries of the adult world, then ducked around the rear of the sedan and started drumming on the buttons at a panel on the far wall. There was a humming noise interrupted by a series of staccato squeals as the pole started dropping, the sedan quivering on top.

“Over here,” Jesse said, starting for the front corner of the garage behind an L-shaped wall of brown, plastic panels. He swung around the opening and dropped onto a chair at a card table piled with the kind of papers, Father John thought, that resembled the bills covering his own desk.

He took the only other chair, sliding it sideways to fit his legs in the cramped space until he was at a right angle to the Indian who seemed to be waiting, working over something in his head. Beyond the rectangular window cut into the paneled wall, the kid had started backing the sedan out of the garage.

“Don’t like going back there,” Jesse said. “Not something I like thinking about.”

“I understand,” Father John said. “We’re hoping to chase down the girl’s identity…”

“We?” the Indian cut in.

“The elders,” Father John said. “And some of the women on the rez. We’d like to see her properly buried, her killer brought to justice. Her first name was Liz.”

Jesse nodded and began staring at his hands clasped over the table. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“It’s possible she was killed because somebody in AIM thought she’d given up Daryl Redman’s hiding place.”

“You know what it’s like to kill somebody?”

Father John took a moment. A kind of quiet dropped over the small space, the muffled beat of hip-hop and clank of metal receding into the distance. They were moving into new territory. “You were a police officer doing your duty,” he said, finding his counseling voice.

“You one of them shrinks? I had enough of them after it happened.” Jesse lifted his eyes to a vacant spot on the paneled wall. “Allen and me was partners for three years, went through hell together, trusted each other, know what I mean? I trusted him with my life. He’d say the same about me. We went over to the house in Ethete. Had a delivery truck, like we was making a delivery in the area. Doin’ initial surveillance for the Feds, was all. I wasn’t planning on killing anybody.”

Father John waited for the man to go on—a story he didn’t want to tell, and yet had to tell. There had been so many counseling sessions, so many confessions that opened with “Don’t wanna talk about it,” and always the initial shrugs and nods, and then the person would be plunging into the vastness of it—plunging across the plains, unable to turn back.

“It was the Feds’ deal anyway. Should’ve been them checking on the house. Would’ve been except they’d been all over the rez lookin’ for AIM leaders hiding out here. Sure, people hereabouts were helping ’em out. They seen AIM was trying to help Indians. Trouble was, the Feds were coming in like gangbusters. Surrounding the houses, shouting in bullhorns, ‘Come out, hands up,’ guns trained on the doors. Out came elders and grandmothers leaning on walking sticks, and pregnant women dragging a bunch of kids after ’em, and everybody shaking and throwing up they’re so scared. Tribes got mad at all that harassment. So we worked out an arrangement. We do the initial surveillance, see if there’s anything goin’ on, any strangers hanging around, before the Feds came swooping in. So I ended up killin’ a man.”

“That’s gotta be tough,” Father John said.

“Yeah, tough.” Jesse brought his eyes to Father John’s. “I’m outside a delivery truck, hood up, looking inside. Allen’s behind the steering wheel, like, you know, we’re making a delivery of packages and the frigging truck broke down about fifty feet up the road. Good spot to watch the house. Allen whips out his binoculars from time to time. Looks through the windows and tries to see who’s moving around inside. Looking for visitors, anybody comin’ and goin’. Nobody. We’re thinking it’s a dead-end deal. Maybe the most wanted is inside, but we can’t be sure. Right behind the house is this day-care place, and about the time I’m thinking we oughtta pack up and turn the whole thing over to the Feds, I hear the kids yelling and laughing and I think, no fricking way. We’re sitting here till hell freezes over or somebody comes outta that house, whatever comes first. Then he come out. The most wanted.

“Allen gives him a wave out the window. ‘Got a tow coming,’ he shouts. And how was we gonna get a tow? Not like there was cell phones back then, but that’s what he yells. And Redman figured it out. He turns around like he’s bought the story and he’s going back into the house. Allen and me, we look at each other and we know, that’s the guy the Feds got on the wanted posters. Next thing I know, Redman reels around. He’s got a revolver and he’s blasting the truck, aiming for Allen, and Allen goes down—just drops behind the windshield. Then Redman swings toward me and looks at me for half a second. That was all I needed, that half second. I shot him. Got him twice. Heart, gut. I seen that look on his face, like he knows he’s made a big mistake, hesitating.”

Father John waited a moment. The sounds of the radio and a car door slamming grew into the quiet. Then he said, “What did you do afterward?”

Jesse blinked once, twice, as if he were trying to fit the question into some recognizable pattern. “Went running to Allen, see if he was okay. Bullet grazed his shoulder. God, the poor bastard couldn’t even shoot straight. That made it worse, you know what I mean, ’cause I started thinking, no way he could’ve hit me. I could’ve walked over and knocked the gun out of his hand…”

“He could’ve gotten lucky.”

“You sound like the shrinks, all right. They didn’t see his face. He was scared. Some poor Indian—Lakota from Pine Ridge, is what he was—going to the barricades to get rights for all of us. So he was part of AIM that took over the BIA in Washington. Took over Wounded Knee. Trespassing, damaging property. Jesus, so what?”

“I meant, what did you do when it was all over.”

Jesse Moon waved one hand toward the paneled walls and the garage behind them. There was the grinding noise of an engine turning over. The pickup’s engine. Father John would recognize it anywhere. “Quit the force, got a loan, and bought this place. Been fixing cars ever since, and you know what? I like it that way. Fixing things, finding ways to make them work. Same for my kid. That’s what he’s learning to do. Fix things.”

“The police might have picked up the girl for something. Is she the one who tipped off the police?”

“Like I told you. I don’t know nothing about the girl. What’d she get picked up for?”

“Banner’s checking the records.”

“Tip didn’t come from any arrest,” Jesse said. “Feds got a phone call. Anonymous tip, they said, but everybody knew the Feds had snitches talkin’ to ’em. So the local agent asked for our cooperation. You know, like we’re all cooperating, all great friends goin’ after the bad guys. Like I said, last time the Feds got a tip from one of their so-called anonymous sources, they come close to killing some innocent people. Thing about Indians, they know the Feds are on the prowl, they might call in a tip about a cousin they got a beef with, just to make his life miserable. God, I never stop thinking, how come it wasn’t just some guy mad at his cousin?”

Jesse struggled to his feet, knocking against the edge of the table, scattering some of the papers. “Eric oughtta have your job done,” he said, “else I didn’t teach him nothin’.” He started past the table, then stopped. “One more thing,” he said. “Wasn’t a girl that made that phone call.”

“You sure?” Father John said. Things weren’t making sense; the pattern that had started to emerge began to scramble.

“I remember it real good.” Jesse gave a succession of nods, each nod hammering the memories into place. “The chief says to me and Allen, go check out the house, ’cause some guy called in a tip to the Feds.”

“Guy? You sure he said guy?”

Jesse nodded. “I’d remember if it was a woman.”

Father John took this in for a moment before he said, “Who do you think it was?”

“You think I haven’t had a lot of years of thinking on this? Way I got it worked out, some FBI snitch knew the cops would show up at the house and Daryl was gonna put up a fight. I figure somebody set him up—murder by police officer.” Jesse was shaking his head, a slow back and forth of sadness and resignation. “It happens.”

“Somebody in AIM?”

“That’s how I got it figured. Only AIM leader ever got caught on the rez was Daryl Redman. Rest of ’em hid out here long as they wanted. People looking after ’em, moving ’em around, keeping ’em safe. Must’ve been one of his AIM buddies wanted Daryl out of the picture. Otherwise we never would’ve found him.”

“What happened to the others?”

Jesse gave a shrug. “Moved out, most of ’em. New lives, new names.”

“There might be some still around.”

The man took a moment before he said, “Wouldn’t surprise me none. Might’ve gotten themselves new names and started fitting into the rez, like ordinary folks.”

A phone started ringing. Jesse dropped his head and scanned the piles of papers tumbling over the table, eyebrows moving together in a puzzled line at the fact that there was no phone visible. It was then that Father John realized the ringing came from the cell clipped on his belt. He reached around, pulled it free, and gave a little nod in the direction of Jesse’s back as the man headed out of the cubicle.

“Father John here,” he said. He could hear the clip-clop of Jesse’s boots across the concrete floor on the other side of the paneled partition.

“Found the records you were asking about.” Banner’s voice boomed through the cell as if he were yelling across the reservation. “Turns out a couple of women named Elizabeth were arrested in the summer of 1973. Elizabeth Toldwell, fifty-two years old, public drunkenness, record as long as my arm for drunk and disorderly. Not the Elizabeth we’re looking for. It’s the other one. Twenty-one years old. Stopped for speeding on Seventeen-Mile Road and brought in on a bench warrant August 4, on a citation from two months earlier. Cited for public disturbance at a protest outside tribal offices in Fort Washakie and for refusing lawful orders to disperse. No-show on court date. Not surprising. From what I hear, there was a lot of that in those days. People cited for marching without a permit, blocking public buildings, generally turning the rez into a circus. Not many showed up for court.”

“What was her name?”

“Elizabeth Plenty Horses.”

Elizabeth Plenty Horses. Father John let the name roll around in his head a moment. The skeleton—the fragile, cracked bones and the thick, dusty black braid—now had a name. Elizabeth Plenty Horses.

“Address was a mobile home over on Seventeen-Mile Road,” Banner was saying. “Government houses there now. Mobile homes all cleared out.”

“How long was she in custody?”

“Overnight. Went before the tribal judge the next morning. Fined her three hundred dollars and let her go. She didn’t have any money on her. Here’s the list of contents in her bag: Lifesavers, pack of cigarettes, matchbook, small notepad with something like poetry scribbled on the pages, pencil, tissue, lipstick, six-cents worth of pennies.”

“How’d she pay the fine?”

“She didn’t. Somebody paid it for her. Name of Ruth Yellow Bull. Know her?”

“It’s possible,” Father John said. He might recognize her if he saw her. There were so many faces filling albums in his mind, and not all of them had names attached. Still he felt as if he knew them—the powwows, the rodeos, the celebrations and meetings, even Mass on Easter and Christmas when, it seemed, everyone on the rez came. All the brown faces passing by, all of them familiar now.