Pyramid Lake (18 page)

Cassie’s aunt paused to consider the question for a moment. “Well, he’s a powerful deity—brother to Esa the Wolf, creator of the world,” she said. “But Coyote’s a mischief maker, a socially inappropriate character who uses his powers irresponsibly, often causing great trouble for everyone—himself included. He’s prideful, cunning, and a consummate liar, but he’s not really evil. He has a noble aspect to him as well, and his actions often benefit mankind either directly or indirectly. Most of the Paiute stories about Coyote end with him either narrowly avoiding death, or getting himself killed and then returning to life. The mortals around him usually don’t end up that lucky, however.”

She looked at Cassie’s brother. “You have something to add, Billy?”

Billy crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “We Paiute have a lot of stories about the Trickster, it’s true. But we’re also thoroughly modern folk, and sometimes a coyote is just a coyote. When I find one sniffing around our backyard or getting
too
close to one of our chickens…” He winked at me. “I shoot it.”

A
fter dinner, Cassie stood at the kitchen sink and washed dishes. I picked up a towel. She looked at me in surprise when I took a dish from her to dry, but then she relaxed and we fell into a wordless rhythm.

“I have to admit, when you promised to behave I didn’t really believe you,” she said afterward, drying her hands. “You’re full of surprises.”

Through the doorway into the family room, I could see James sitting in an easy chair next to a sideboard displaying colorfully beaded wicker baskets. He was wearing rimless half-glasses and answering e-mails on an iPad. Christina sat on the couch with her knees tucked under her, a glass of wine in one hand and a pen in the other, circling things in a cooking magazine. Billy knelt in front of the fireplace, laying a fire.

“I like your family,” I said to Cassie. “It must have been tough to leave.”

She gave me a penetrating look, and then slid her cool, long fingers into mine and tugged me toward the hallway. “Come here,” she said. “I have something I want to show you. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you then.”

Old sepia-toned photographs, framed in dark wood and matted with white, hung against the sage-colored wall. The oldest clearly dated back well over a century. I saw somber native faces: groups in formal seated poses or men and women standing alone, wearing heavy-looking suit coats or traditional beaded, fringed buckskin attire. Nobody was smiling in any of the pictures. Judging from the condition of the photos and styles of non-Native clothing, they seemed to be organized in roughly chronological order.

Cassie stopped in front of the oldest image, which wasn’t a photo at all, but a small relief carving in wood under the frame’s glass.

“Chief Truckee—Old Wuna Mucca, or One Moccasin,” she said. “My great-five-times maternal grandfather. According to Paiute legend, Esa the Wolf created mankind as two brothers and two sisters—a dark pair and a light pair—but they couldn’t get along. As punishment for their constant fighting, he separated them, banishing the lighter siblings and sending them away across the ocean. So when Chief Truckee laid eyes on the first white explorers—”

“My ancestors the Florentines, no doubt.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Try to be serious, Trevor. I’m talking Lewis and Clark here. Chief Truckee embraced them with open arms, believing his long-lost white brothers had finally returned from across the sea. Later, he befriended General John Frémont, the military governor of California and future U.S. senator, and fought alongside him in the Mexican-American War. Old Chief Truckee stayed friendly toward whites all his life, even after an ill-prepared expedition of westbound settlers passed by Pyramid Lake in the fall of 1846 and not only stole most of the tribe’s winter food supply but also burned the rest for some bizarre reason. Without that food, a lot of our people starved that year. But the settlers of that ill-fated expedition ended up doing even worse damage to themselves. They got snowbound in a mountain pass for the entire winter, and half of the eighty-seven people died. The rumors about the survivors—and what they had done to survive—were worse…”

“Cannibalism,” I said. “You’re talking about the Donner party.”

She nodded. “Indians
never
ate each other. My people were horrified by what they heard. Stories spread that all white people ate human flesh, that they liked eating Indian children the most. Despite Chief Truckee’s best efforts, mistrust took root, and his son-in-law…”—she moved on to the next photograph—”…Poito, who succeeded Truckee to become Chief Winnemucca, generally held a dimmer view of his white neighbors’ intentions. He was a war chief more often than not.”

I inspected the picture. Even in his double-breasted, large-buttoned greatcoat, Chief Winnemucca looked like a hard-ass. There was a grim, iron-jawed majesty in the set of his impassive features.

“He looks tough,” I said.

“He
was
tough. Winnemucca was always in favor of war with the whites, and in 1860 he got his wish. The Pyramid Lake wars were the last, bloodiest large-scale battles between Indians and whites in Nevada Territory.”

“What set it off?” I asked.

“The usual thing. Some men from Williams Station, a nearby stop on the Pony Express, kidnapped two twelve-year-old Paiute girls who were out digging roots. They kept them tied up in the station cellar for days, raping them, until their father found out where they were. Winnemucca’s son Natchez accompanied the father on a war party to free the girls. They killed five whites.”

I couldn’t help but picture Amy, hurt and terrified, and myself in that father’s shoes. My jaw clenched with anger.

“I’m surprised they stopped at five,” I said. “I would have kept going, scorched the whole fucking state clean.”

Cassie glanced sideways at me and slid her hand free from mine.

“It’s not so simple as that,” she said. “These things never are.”

I took a breath, staring at the pictures. “Sounds simple enough to me.”

“You think so? To punish the Paiute for the raid, a militia of a hundred men, under the command of a Major William Ormsby. rode to Pyramid Lake. But the Paiute knew that war was inevitable, so they were prepared. Chief Winnemucca, along with his son Natchez and his nephew Numaga, led a group of warriors who lured the hundred vigilantes into an ambush in a narrow pass, killing eighty of them and wounding the rest before they fled.”

The framed photo of Numaga was in traditional attire: furs and bead-fringed fabric. He held a bow and a single arrow, with more in a quiver slung across his back. He looked just as imposing as his uncle, but more contemplative, almost melancholy.

“Ormsby took an arrow through the face in the fighting,” Cassie said. “Natchez Winnemucca tried to save his life, telling him to pretend to fall while he fired another arrow over Ormsby’s head. But it was too late; the first arrow had been poisoned, and Ormsby died anyway. The Paiute left the mutilated bodies of the white vigilantes and their horses lying scattered about—a horrifying display that the militia’s reinforcements stumbled across the next day.”

“But why would Natchez try to save Ormsby, an enemy coming to kill his people?” I asked.

“Like I said, it’s complicated. At the time, Natchez’s sister—Chief Winnemucca’s sixteen-year-old daughter—lived in Carson City
with the Ormsbys
. Her grandfather, Chief Truckee, had encouraged her to do it so she could learn English, and for years the Ormsby family had treated her just like their very own daughter.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was starting to understand what Cassie meant about things not being so simple. She eased us farther along the wall, and stopped in front of a picture of a regal woman in a tasseled native outfit.

“That sixteen-year-old girl, Natchez’s sister, was my great-great-great grandmother Sarah Winnemucca. She watched volunteers from three states accompany the U.S. Army to take revenge on her tribe and her family, slaughtering, breaking, and scattering her people. Five years later, Army troops came across more of her relatives in a camp of old men, women, and children, including her father, Chief Winnemucca’s, other daughter and his infant son. They killed them all, throwing his baby son into the fire.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said.

“Many Paiutes saw Sarah as a collaborator with the Army and an apologist for the whites. Each of her three marriages—all to white men—ended in heartbreak and divorce. But she didn’t let any of it embitter her. She assumed the leadership of the Northern Paiute people and worked tirelessly for Indian rights, even traveling to Washington, D.C., and meeting with President Hayes to petition for reform of the corrupt agency system. She was the first Native American woman to publish a book in English.”

Cassie smiled. “Sarah’s real passion was always education. She felt it was the only way to truly improve things for our people in the long term. She opened a school for Indian children, to try to preserve our culture while giving them the literacy and skills they needed to succeed in the new world they found themselves in. With no government support or funding, her school didn’t stay open long, but she never stopped trying.”

“She seems like an amazing person,” I said.

Cassie nodded, and pain crossed her face. “I think about all this, and I can’t breathe sometimes, like it’s a weight on my chest. Like everyone expects me to live up to it somehow.” She gazed at Sarah’s picture again, then shook herself and looked away. “She casts a long shadow, Trevor. Maybe I just needed to get out from under it for a while.”

I followed Cassie down the hallway, past more contemporary photographs, but she didn’t pause until she reached the end, near the doorway that led into the family room. Then she suddenly turned and leaned her back against the wall, cushioning her tailbone with both hands and looking up at me, like a high-school girl lounging against her locker and chatting with a boy between classes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I hope I didn’t bore you too much with stuff that’s all ancient history now.”

I grinned. “Okay. Let’s see it.”

She shook her head, looking nervous. “Go on in. By now, my aunt and uncle are probably wondering what we’re up to.”

I beckoned her away from the wall, curious to see the picture she was concealing from me. A boyfriend, maybe?

“
Tre-vor,
” she said in an exasperated whisper. “Just
go
.”

Still grinning, I shook my head and leaned over her, craning my neck to peek at the wall behind her.

She planted a palm against my chest to shove me away, but I wrapped my fingers around her wrist and gently pulled her off balance toward me, revealing the picture behind her back: a high-school graduation photo.

Cassie stumbled into me, but I was looking at the picture over her shoulder: a younger Cassie in cap and gown, face innocent and earnest, with long, straight black hair, braided into two thick pigtail pleats that were draped over her shoulders. No emo haircut, no streak of color, and no piercings in her ears back then. But her eyes, behind thick-framed rectangular glasses, were just as big and dark as those of the remarkable woman leaning against my chest now, wobbling on her high heels as she tried to regain her balance.

“Don’t you dare laugh,” she said. “That’s a terrible picture.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “But I can kind of see how the ‘Pocahontas’ thing got started.”

“Go to hell,” she said, angrily drawing away. “You’ve already proved you know how to act like a decent person, so now there’s really no excuse.”

“Sorry.” I was surprised by her vehemence. “Billy said it was your high-school nickname, so I didn’t think it bothered you.”

“Yeah? Well, when Billy wasn’t around, Ray and his asshole buddies would leave out the ‘N.’”

“N
ow
you’re
the one being quiet,” Cassie said as we drove away from the Barrys’ place.

“Just thinking,” I said, and it was true. I was thinking that one-way-only video could be explained away as technical difficulties in the phone connection, or the videoconferencing software, but there was also the issue of Dr. Frank’s voice. My wife—I mean,
ex-
wife—wasn’t stupid. Our Dr. Frank couldn’t sound like a metal-voiced machine without immediately clueing Jen in and, even worse, scaring Amy. Frankenstein and I would have to craft a convincing phone voice that sounded like an older psychiatrist.

But for some reason, Cassie was heading south, into Wadsworth proper, rather than north toward the lake and Flanigan beyond.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “I need to get home.”

“This won’t take long. It’s the rest of the story.”

Cassie drove us across a bridge and then turned right. Her headlights lit up a white clapboard church with a black witch’s-hat steeple, in good condition but probably a relic from the 1800s. A mangy rez dog barked at us, running alongside the car for a few paces before dropping back into the darkness.

McNulty, too, was on my mind. The Dante thing meant the killer was telling the world McNulty was a sell-out. He had accepted money—a bribe?—to grant somebody a “holy” position, or to ease somebody out of one, maybe both. With Cassie and me being obvious candidates for those two somebodies, the real question was, who might that make angry enough to kill McNulty over it? The seemingly-obvious answer pointed in an awkward direction.

We passed a green RV trailer with dozens of rusting junkers scattered outside, then several single-wide mobile homes with sagging chain-link fencing around them, giving way to a broken picket fence. I heard the rattle and whoosh of a train passing close by, unseen in the night.

Cassie’s threat to quit if they sacked me had thrown a kink into somebody’s plans. Maybe I was now being framed for McNulty’s murder to remove me in a less direct fashion. Were my keys wedged somewhere inside the geyser, still waiting to be discovered?

And I was very curious about Linebaugh’s role in it all. Why was it so important to get me out of the way?