Murder on High (21 page)

“It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”

11

Half an hour later, they were back at the retreat center, feeling a bit silly about the whole incident. “I guess everybody around here is a little spooked,” said Tracey, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. After saying goodbye, St. Louis and his assistant took the waiting float plane back to Ambejejus Lake. Since the other plane had been called back to service some other customers, and the one that was already there was Keith’s, Charlotte and Tracey had to wait until St. Louis’ plane returned. This meant that they were temporarily stranded with Keith and his girlfriend, Didias. Charlotte wasn’t unhappy about the delay. She wanted more time to talk with Keith, who was back at the top of the suspect list now that the dead body had turned out to be a false alarm. After they had seen the plane off, Keith explained that he and Didias would have to excuse themselves: they had to get the sweat lodge ready for the vision questers who were due back later that afternoon.

Keith had expressed relief that the grave had contained only the mementoes of a vision quester past; a body wouldn’t have been good for business, he said. Charlotte was also glad there was no second body, except for the fact that it put them back where they had started, with Iris murdered and an unknown prankster prowling the park. Keith didn’t know anything about the former (or so he said), but Charlotte suspected he might know something about the latter, and she decided to take advantage of the wait by asking him about it.

“What do you have to do?” she asked him, in reference to the sweat lodge ceremony. “Maybe we can help.”

“We can use all the hands we can get,” Keith replied. “It’s up that path there.” He pointed to a wide swath that had been cut through the meadow grass to the right of the retreat center.

With that, they set out, Tracey walking with Keith and Charlotte with Didias. If Keith looked Japanese and St. Louis looked French, Didias looked like Pocahontas. She was a beautiful young woman, with long, shiny black hair held back by a porcupine quill ornament, and high, wide cheekbones.

Meeting her, Charlotte remembered that they still had to check out Keith’s alibi. But it would be better to wait until Keith wasn’t around, she decided. Also, it was more a matter of routine than anything else; all Didias could do was confirm that he hadn’t been with her, which didn’t mean much.

“Didias,” Charlotte repeated. She turned to her companion. “I’ve never heard that name before. Is it a Penobscot name?”

She smiled. She had small, perfect white teeth. “A nickname, really. It means blue jay. It’s a name that’s traditionally given to a young woman by her beloved.” She looked lovingly over at Keith, who was chatting with Tracey. “My real name is Mary. Keith is big on unearthing forgotten Penobscot traditions.”

“Isn’t that good?” asked Charlotte. Looking at Keith, she was struck again by the difference between the way he and Tracey walked.

“Very good,” Didias agreed. “If it weren’t for him, a lot of the old ways would have died out. He’s committed to Black Elk’s vision of the red road. He was a Sioux spiritual leader whose teachings are considered by many to be the Native American Bible,” she explained. “He believed in the unity of mankind.”

They had passed the retreat center, and were now entering the woods on the hillside behind it.

“Keith is always quoting him,” Didias continued. “‘And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.’”

“Then his belief in Black Elk’s vision is why he wants to perpetuate Native American traditions among whites?” said Charlotte.

Didias nodded. “A lot of Penobscots don’t approve. They want to keep our traditions to ourselves.”

They walked for a moment in silence; then Charlotte said, “It would seem to me that since a lot of Maine Indians have a fair amount of white blood, to deny their traditions to whites would be hypocritical.” As always, she wasn’t unwilling to put in her two cents.

“Exactly,” Didias concurred. “Nobody’s full-blooded anymore. Nobody was full-blooded a hundred years ago. Even Chief Orono, who died in 1801, was three-quarters French,” she said, naming the chief after whom the town was named.

They had arrived at a clearing, in the middle of which stood an enormous woodpile that had been stacked in a square, like a Lincoln log construction. On top of the woodpile was a pile of rocks. On the far side was a level area on which an altar had been laid out. This consisted of a pole from which hung streamers of various colors, and, at the foot of the pole, a large rock crystal. The sweat lodge skeleton stood beyond the altar. It was a wigwamlike structure, about six feet high at its peak and about ten feet in diameter, made of bent saplings that had been lashed together. These were supported around the middle by a girdle of more poles.

Keith had stopped at the woodpile and was explaining the ceremony to Tracey. “The grandfathers, as we call the rocks, are heated to red-hot in the fire, and then they’re brought into the lodge and put into the fire pit,” he said. “Then water is poured on them to make steam.”

“It’s the Indian equivalent of the Finnish sauna, but with a spiritual element,” Didias interjected.

“Each sweat lodge is consecrated to a particular purpose,” Keith went on to explain. “In the ceremony that will be held this evening, the vision questers will be calling on the spirits to help them interpret the meaning of the visions that came to them during their quests.”

“Very interesting,” said Tracey.

“What would you like us to do?” Charlotte asked.

“Lieutenant Tracey can take the wheelbarrow and gather some more rocks, and you can help me with the blankets,” he replied. “The rocks have to be a certain size,” he said to Tracey. “Didias will show you. She’s going to collect some more kindling.”

Tracey picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow. “Let’s go,” he said to Didias. Then they disappeared back down the path.

After Tracey and Didias had gone, Keith led Charlotte around the altar to a pile of Indian blankets on a pallet behind the sweat lodge, which was protected from the weather by a sheet of plastic.

“You never cross the spirit path,” Keith said, explaining the reason for their roundabout route. “It goes from the fire to the altar to the lodge.” Removing the plastic sheet, he took off the first blanket and opened it up. “You just drape them over the poles like this.”

Charlotte opened up another blanket and draped it over the lodge so that it lay flat on the wooden skeleton, and then smoothed it out. She was glad she was dressed in old clothes because the blankets were dirty and musty-smelling from being stored outdoors.

“I was surprised at how fast you got here,” said Keith as they worked. “And pleased. I was eager to find out what was going on.”

“We were here already,” said Charlotte, glad that he had provided the cue for steering the conversation to Pamola. “We set a trap for Pamola last night at Chimney Pond Campground, for which I was the decoy. All we caught was his rattle, which he dropped when he left.”

“His rattle?” said Keith, looking up from his work with interest.

She nodded. “It was made out of a gourd, and it had a drawing on it of a small animal. One of the rangers said it was an otter. Lieutenant Tracey’s going to have it tested for fingerprints along with the moose headdress, which one of the rangers found in the woods off the Saddle Slide.”

Keith stopped what he was doing and sat down on a nearby stump, with his hands clasped together and his head bent down in thought.

“Do you know who the rattle belongs to?” Charlotte asked.

He sat silently for a minute before replying. “As a matter of fact, I do. I wasn’t going to say anything. I figured the Pamola issue was a tribal matter. But if the police are testing the rattle and the moose headdress for fingerprints, they’re going to find out anyway.”

At last! A real lead, Charlotte thought, mentally congratulating herself for being correct in her suspicion that Keith knew who the Pamola prankster was. “Then this person has a police record?” she said.

He nodded. “He’s been arrested in connection with Indian protests out West.” Standing up, he resumed laying the blankets on the sweat lodge. “He used to be active in the American Indian Movement. His name is Lorne Coley. Coley is a corruption of the Indian word for otter.”

“Hence the drawing on the rattle,” said Charlotte. “Do all Indian names have meanings?” she asked, curious. “Like yours, for instance?”

“A lot of them, yes. Samusit means ‘one who walks along the edge of something, a line walker.’ I like to think that the line I walk is the line between Indian culture and white culture.”

Charlotte laid a blanket on the last uncovered space. The skeleton was beginning to look like a wigwam.

Keith continued. “Lorne’s grandfather was a carnival sideshow Indian. He’d dress up in Indian costumes and dance. One of his costumes was the Pamola costume. I saw him in it when I was a kid. By then, he wasn’t doing carnivals anymore. He was dancing for handouts downtown.”

“He was that poor?” said Charlotte.

He shook his head. “He was a drunk,” he said, “trying to squeeze drinking money out of the whites. It used to disgust me.”

“Why’s Coley dressing up as Pamola?” she asked as she smoothed out a moth-eaten trapper’s blanket. They were now on the second layer.

“Part spite, part craziness. He’s one of those people that Black Elk, the Sioux spiritual leader, called Blue Men. People who are motivated by jealousy and greed. He calls himself a Penobscot Indian
medeoulin
, or shaman.”

“What qualifies one to be a shaman?”

Keith shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Then he’s a self-proclaimed shaman.”

“You could say that. He leads his own vision quests, conducts healing ceremonies. He’s very jealous of all this.” He waved a slim-fingered hand at the retreat center, whose shallow-sloped roof could just be seen above the trees below. “It challenges his authority.”

“Another shaman on his turf,” Charlotte commented.

Keith bristled. “I would never call myself a shaman. To be a shaman, you have to have supernatural powers. I call myself a ceremonial leader.”

Charlotte apologized.

“That’s okay,” he said. “It’s just that it’s a touchy issue with me. Given all the phony shamans that are running around these days.”

Didias had reappeared, carrying an armload of kindling that she added to a stack next to the woodpile. “Who’re you talking about, the male shamanist pig?”

Keith smiled. “That’s what Didias calls him. One of the perquisites of being a spiritual leader is that women throw themselves at you.”

“I hope not,” Didias said, smiling at Keith.

He corrected himself. “At least, they throw themselves at Coley. Not all women. He specializes in old ladies. His amorous exploits have caused a lot of discord among the older members of the tribe.”

“Are you friendly with him?” Charlotte asked.

“I used to be. We were both Pure Men. The Pure Men are young male members of the tribe who are honored for their fleetness of foot; in the old days, they would run down and kill the deer or moose. They were called Pure Men because they had to stay pure in order to maintain their endurance.”

Which meant that Coley would be more capable than most of making the grueling hike over the mountain. But Keith also had been a Pure Man, she thought, reminded of how gracefully he had moved through the woods. And he had more of a motive, like a literary estate worth a million dollars. “And today?” she asked.

“Today, it’s strictly a social honor. The Pure Men lead the Sacred Run. As soon as a Pure Man is outstripped by a younger candidate, that person takes his place. I was the one who replaced Lome.”

Not only had Keith challenged Coley’s role as shaman, he had also replaced him as a Pure Man, Charlotte thought. No wonder Coley was jealous. “But you’re not friends anymore?”

He shook his head. “I stopped hanging around with him when he started drinking heavily.” He sighed. “It’s a problem with our people, as I’m sure you know. He stopped drinking some time ago, but sometimes alcoholics act crazier after they stop drinking than they did before.”

“Crazy enough to murder Iris?”

“I don’t know,” he said, opening up yet another blanket to spread on the lodge. “I’ve been thinking about little else since I spoke with you the other day. Didias, can you tell us if any light’s getting in?”

Didias crawled into the lodge and reported that the southeast side near the bottom needed more blankets. Then she crawled back out and went off into the woods again to fetch more kindling.

“Lieutenant Tracey and I were trying to figure out his route. How would he have gotten here, or to Chimney Pond?”

“I have a theory about that, too,” Keith said. “Our tribal lands used to be divided up into family hunting ranges; families would go year after year to the same area. The otter family’s range was northwest of Katahdin in an area called the Klondike. Lome’s great uncle used to hunt moose there.”

Charlotte remembered Mack talking about watching the fog roll in over the Klondike when he and Iris had been eating lunch at Thoreau Spring.

“He’s the one who named it because of its resemblance to the Canadian Klondike. Do you know anything about the Klondike?”

She shook her head.

“It’s a bowl of spruce that lies between Katahdin to the east and Barren, O-J-I, Coe and the Brothers to the west. It’s been called the most inaccessible area in the state. There are no trails into it. The only way in is over the surrounding ranges, or through a narrow defile to the north.”

“And you think he used the Klondike as his staging area?” She wondered if a former alcoholic—even one who had been a Pure Man—could have made such a grueling trek, and then dismissed her doubts, remembering all the times she had been astounded at the physical stamina of alcoholic co-stars.

He nodded. “His great uncle had a camp there.”

Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, Charlotte pulled out her trusty pocket map and opened it up against the side of the sweat lodge.