The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (7 page)

Father John pressed his fist against his forehead. He could hear the sound of Bill Rutherford’s breathing at the other end of the line. So this was the call he’d been expecting for the last three years. It was bound to come.
And what’re you gonna do, son?
His father’s voice sounded in his head. He could see the old man slumped over the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee—half coffee, half whiskey, the mixture of odors permeating the air.
That’s gonna be the hardest, that vow of obedience you’re gonna have to make. You’d better think about it. Think about it. Think about it.

He’d thought about it. Sure, it would be tough, but it would all be tough—celibacy, poverty, obedience. But he would be a priest, and he would do it.

“He is doing fine, isn’t he?” Bill Rutherford said.

“Yes, Ian’s fine.” He could manage St. Francis Mission just fine. Maybe do a better job than Father John had done. The man was more practical, more organized. He had a better handle on finances. The mission would be fine.

“I’m not ready to leave,” he heard himself saying. He was the one who would not be fine. From outside came the noise of a vehicle stopping in front of the administration building.

“Be honest, John. When would you ever be ready? You’ve been there nine years. You know the rules…”

“Six years as superior,” Father John said. He’d been the assistant for three years until Father Peter’s heart had started to give out and the provincial had sent him to a retirement home. Even then, Father Peter hadn’t wanted to leave. “The place gets to you,” he’d said. “Gets under your skin, eats at you, takes chunks out of you, so when you leave, part of you stays here.” He was shaking his head, and Father John remembered the way the light from the desk lamp had shone through his thick white hair. “I’m afraid it will feel like I’m missing an arm or a leg,” he’d said.

“Either way you look at it,” Bill Rutherford said, “I believe it’s time…”

“You’re ordering me to Rome.” There was the click of footsteps on the concrete steps outside, the whoosh of air as the front door opened.

“No, no. A suggestion that you might want to take advantage of a new opportunity. I leave it to you, John, to consider. Consult with Ian, see if you think he’s ready to take over as pastor. Take a little time…”

There was the clack of heels on the wood floor in the corridor, then Vicky stood in the doorway. Father John locked eyes with her. “I’ll get back to you,” he said into the receiver.

FATHER JOHN GOT
to his feet and motioned Vicky forward with the receiver before he set it into the cradle.

“You have to leave?” she asked, still planted in the doorway, her eyes fastened on his.

Leave!
He smiled and shook his head. It was as if she’d been listening in on the conversation, except that he understood she was asking if he’d been summoned by one of his parishioners, somebody in the hospital or in some kind of trouble.

“Not now,” he said. It would be later that he would have to leave, he was thinking. He motioned her to one of the chairs propped against the wall and started around the desk. “Coffee’s hot. Care for some?”

She waved away the suggestion, then walked past him to the oblong window with sunshine flaring in the glass. She was dressed in what she called her lawyer clothes—blue blouse, dark skirt, and silver earrings that dangled and glistened through her black hair. She stared outside a moment—gathering her thoughts, he knew. He always knew when something was bothering her. He perched on the edge of the desk and waited until she swung around and faced him. Her eyes shone with intensity.

“What was it like,” she began, “out in the Gas Hills where the girl was killed?”

Father John waited a couple of beats before he said, “You know the place, Vicky. Desolate. Sagebrush and arroyos. Thomas Whiteman was there. We both blessed the remains…”

“You mean the skeleton,” she cut in. “All that was left of her, a bunch of bones that the coroner says were broken, a skull with a slug inside and some of the teeth knocked out. She was Indian, and she wore a long braid. Strange, isn’t it, the way every part of her was smashed and left to disintegrate, but her braid, where she’d tied up all her worries and fears, all her problems, and tried to put them away—her braid was still there.”

“What’s this all about?” Father John said. How well he knew her. They’d worked together on a lot of cases. Lawyer and priest, a good team, he’d always thought. She never came to the mission unless something was troubling her.

It hit him then. She’d located the girl’s family, been drawn into their grief and outrage, and now she wanted to help them and she wanted
his
help. “You know who she was?” he said.

Vicky tossed her head in a gesture somewhere between defiance and despair. She gathered a piece of hair in her fingers and pushed it back from her face. Tiny beads of perspiration dotted her nose. “Nobody knows who she was,” she said. “Except the monster that killed her.” She stepped back from the window and started circling the room—the chairs, the door, the window. She thought on her feet, he knew, and he could imagine her in the courtroom, circling from the defense table to the jury box to the judge’s desk, arguing all the time, connecting the lines, making the point.

“I just came from Detective Coughlin’s office,” she said, stopping in the middle of the room and crossing her arms. She tapped her fingers against her forearms as if she were playing the scales on a keyboard. “She was twenty years old. She’d given birth.”

Father John pinched the top of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. This was something new. There was a child involved.

Vicky went on: “Forensics places her murder in 1973. Sometime in spring or summer or early fall, in the warm weather.”

“That’s a long time ago,” he said.

“You sound like Coughlin.” She started pacing again, still tapping her fingers. “A cold, cold case, he told me.” She stopped at the window and turned around, a small, dark figure backlit by the brightness outside, her face in shadow. The sun glistened in her hair. “There won’t be a burial until she’s identified, and she may never be identified.”

Father John waited, and after a moment, she went on: “Several women from the rez came to see me. They don’t want her forgotten, John. I don’t want her forgotten. She could be any of us, any Indian woman beaten up, shot, left in the wilderness.”

Then she was pacing again, telling him about being in Denver with Lucas and Susan, coming across a man beating a girl in a downtown alley, jumping out of the car and running to stop the beating. “She would have been killed,” Vicky said. “She might still die. I spoke with the prosecutor in Denver on my way over here. He’s waiting to add murder to the assault charges. All I could think of in that alley was that it could have been Susan. It could have been me. It could have been”—she swept one arm toward the window—“any woman out there. Left to die alone in an alley, like the girl in the Gas Hills. She deserves a name, John. Her killer shouldn’t get away with it.”

“Almost thirty-five years, Vicky. He could be dead.”

She gave a quick, dismissive nod. “He’s walking around. He got into the Jeep somehow, left a message on my dashboard. One word: stop.”

Father John felt his fists clench. He didn’t want to think of her in danger. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone hurting her. “Did you tell Coughlin?”

She waved a hand between them. “I gave him the message.”

“There must be security cameras…”

“Coughlin’s checking on what they may have caught. But anybody clever enough or…” She paused. “Experienced enough to get inside my car would know about the cameras. He would have made sure that his face wasn’t exposed.”

“You have to be careful.”

“At least the message lets Coughlin know the killer is still around,” she hurried on. “He thinks he’s still safe, that nobody’s ever going to know who he is, that he will never have to answer for taking that girl’s life. What am I supposed to tell the women? That her murder may never be solved?” She waited a couple of beats. “Coughlin says he’s accounted for all the women reported missing at that time. In other words, they were found. Some were found dead.”

“She might have come from somewhere else, another reservation.”

Vicky pursed her lips at this, as if he hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know. “It doesn’t mean no one on the rez knew her. Even if she was from somewhere else, she must have had contacts here. Otherwise, why was she here?”

Father John realized he was nodding. It was logical, the path she was taking. “There are people on the rez who were here in the 1970s,” he said. “It’s possible someone knew her. If Coughlin had something to go on, it would help the investigation. He could ask around…”

“He could also run through a canyon with a stone wall at the end. Come on, John. Nobody’s going to talk to a white detective about the seventies. It was a violent time. AIM was on the reservation. Indians from all over. City Indians, my father called them, trying to take over the rez, stirring up trouble. People were divided. My own family was divided. Dad broke with one of his cousins because he’d joined AIM. My parents were progressives, the kind of Indians that AIM called ‘whiteized’ because they sent their daughter to the mission school. Dad went to work on the highways every day, a hundred degrees in the summer and ten below in the winter, it didn’t matter. We had running water and an indoor toilet, the things that AIM scoffed at. Such things weren’t Indian, they said, but Dad said they wanted to take us back to the buffalo days, the Old Time, and those days were gone.”

Father John walked around the desk and perched on his chair. “What makes you think they’d talk to a white priest,” he said.

“They’ll talk to you,” Vicky said. “They might talk to me. We have to try, John, before the investigation is forgotten.”

“I told some of the elders I’d drop by the senior citizens center this afternoon,” he said.

The tension that had lined her face dissolved in the smile she gave him. “Call me if you learn anything,” she said. “Anything at all.” She picked up the bag she’d dropped on a chair, headed toward the door, then turned back. “This is important to me,” she said.

“I understand,” Father John said. She’d told him about Ben, sitting here in his office, weeping into a tissue, saying how she’d never told anyone, how no one would have believed her. Ben Holden, one of the leading men on the reservation, foreman at the Arapaho Ranch. Everybody knew him; everybody respected him, and she had respected that, not wanting him to be diminished. But she’d said something else, he remembered, that made even more sense now. She’d told him that she couldn’t forgive herself—forgive herself!—for protecting him, because it wouldn’t have made any difference. She had protected him for no reason at all. None of his friends would have thought less of a man who considered it okay to beat his wife, because so many of them did the same.

“I knew you’d help,” she said, and then she was gone, her heels clicking in the corridor. There was the slightest disturbance in the air as the door opened and shut.

THE SENIOR CITIZENS
center was a low-slung building under a mansard roof covered with wood shingles that sloped almost to the ground. A few trucks parked at odd angles stood in front. Beyond the building, the brown earth ran unobstructed into the far distances and melted into the pale blue sky. Father John parked next to a white truck. A hot wind beat at his back as he hurried up the graveled sidewalk and yanked open the door.

There was a vacant feeling inside, despite the elders seated at the table in front of the window across the large hall. Other tables and chairs were scattered over the scrubbed-tile floor. Over against the side wall was a table that held a metal coffeepot and stacks of foam cups. From the kitchen beyond the closed door on the right came the rattle of dishes and the clank of metal against metal. The odors of fresh bacon grease mingled with the aroma of fresh coffee.

Father John was halfway across the hall when Thomas Whiteman threw up one hand, like a traffic cop, and nodded toward the table with the coffeepot. “Help yourself,” he shouted. His voice reverberated around the empty hall.

Father John went to the side table and poured some coffee. He stirred powdered milk into the black liquid until it turned the color of caramel, then carried the cup past three vacant tables and sat down on the chair that Thomas had nudged away from the table with his boot.

“Glad you could stop by,” Thomas said. He had on a light blue Western-style shirt with silver snaps in front and brown broncos on the yokes. His white hair was caught in two braids that hung down the front of his shirt. His brown face was mapped with squint lines and laugh lines and worry lines. He sat sideways, one arm resting on the table, and squinted past the light that glowed in the window.

The other elder sipped at the coffee in a foam cup and nodded. Hugh Bad Elk was close to seventy, a big man with the muscular shoulders and the broad chest of a man half his age. He was always at the ten o’clock Sunday Mass, sitting at the end of the second pew on the right, like a door blocking the exit, his wife, Lucy, and grandkids filling up the rest of the pew.

“Sermon you gave last Sunday was okay.” He set the cup on the table. His hair was still black, streaked in gray and pulled back from his pockmarked face into a ponytail. “How the Creator don’t want us staying where we are, how He keeps pushing us forward. Wants us to keep growin’, that what you said?”

“That’s what I said.” Father John shook his head and smiled at the irony. Was that really what he’d said? Two days before the provincial had called? He took a sip of the hot coffee that dropped through his chest like a strand of liquid metal.

Thomas cleared his throat and said the weather’d been so hot, the fields were burning up, and it wouldn’t surprise him if the wind blew the reservation all the way to Nebraska. Hugh added there was so much dust blowing outside his house, he thought he was gonna have to take a shovel to dig out his truck this morning. “Everything okay at the mission?”

Father John said that everything was okay. Then, sensing that the polite preliminaries were over and the time was right to launch into the subject on his mind, he said, “Some of the women on the rez are upset about the murdered girl in the Gas Hills. The autopsy confirms that she was Indian.”

“Took all them tests to come up with that?” Thomas shook his head. “Her hair was braided, wasn’t it? That’s why one of them sheriff’s detectives thought he’d better give me a call. Save himself some trouble later if folks found out she was Indian and there was nobody there to bless her. Called you for the same reason, right?”

Father John nodded. It was a lonely place, sad. He had a hunch that calling one of the Arapaho holy men and the mission priest to the site might have been more for the sheriff’s deputies and the coroner than for what was left of the girl buried in the gulley.

“It looks like she was killed in 1973,” he said.

The elders stared at him with blank faces, waiting for him to go on. It struck him they’d already discussed the matter and had reached the same conclusion.

“Early seventies,” Hugh said finally. “That’s what we figured. AIM people.”

The hall went quiet. Hugh went back to drinking his coffee and Thomas turned toward the window. Outside, clouds of dust whipped across the plains. “Sonofabitch never got caught,” he said, shifting around and squaring himself to the table. He bowed his head and ran his forearm across his brow. Little tracks of perspiration blossomed on the sleeve of his blue shirt.

“The women want to know what happened to her,” Father John said. “They want her murder solved.”