The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (25 page)

“Thank you,” she said. He could feel the warmth of her face against his chest. He ran one hand over the silk of her hair.

She pulled away then and stepped back. He felt an immense gratitude wash over him, because he wasn’t sure he could have let her go. “I plan to get an early start tomorrow,” she said, and he heard himself saying that breakfast was at seven. She might want to eat something before she set out. Banalities, he was thinking, normal, polite conversation, as if a moment ago, he hadn’t been holding her.

He closed the door behind him as he left and started back down the alley, breaking into a run near the back of the church. He ran across Circle Drive and through the grass and brush in the center, past the pickup parked in front of the residence, up the sidewalk to the front door. There would be no going back to sleep tonight. He crossed the entry to his study, sank into the cracked leather chair at his desk, and turned on the hook-shaped lamp. Then he opened the old laptop computer Ian had lent him. It usually stuttered and spurted into life, balking at having to work, but now—thank God, he thought—it seemed willing. He tried to force his thoughts back into the logical, comfortable order of what he wanted to think about.

He typed in the name Robert Running Wolf and waited while the lines of black type assembled themselves across the screen. The first ten of hundreds of entries appeared. It was impossible. He typed quotation marks around the name, and this time five websites appeared, not even taking up the entire screen. He checked the first site, then made his way through all of them. Robert Running Wolf, who had lived ninety years in Georgia; Robert Running Wolf, born in 1913; Robert Running Wolf publishing house; a Blackfeet chief in the nineteenth century; the name of a book. None of the sites about a man who had belonged to AIM and would be in his sixties now.

He typed in Jake Tallfeathers. An article from the
Gazette
came up under the headline: “Man Killed on Highway.” He read through the lines of black text:
The body of a man was found yesterday morning south of Rapid City. Police say the dead man was Jake Tallfeathers, 39, a Lakota who also went by the name of Jake Walker. Police believe Tallfeathers was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Police are searching for any vehicle with a bashed-in bumper or headlight. They ask anyone who witnessed the accident to come forward.

Father John sat back, staring at the words strung across the screen that related the story of Jake Tallfeathers’s death, yet left out so much. He wondered how he’d actually been killed and where—before his body had been dumped on the highway.

“GO IN PEACE.”
Father John raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross over the congregation—nine people scattered about the pews, the brown, wrinkled faces of the grandmothers and elders who rose at dawn, as if they were still running ranches with a few head of cattle and some horses, climbed into battered pickups and drove into the fiery red sun for early Mass.

The people seemed quieter this morning. But maybe he was the quiet one, moving through the prayers on automatic, and they were only following his lead. The shepherd, he thought, leading his flock—where? He struggled to focus his thoughts. This was who he was, a priest, and this was his place. He waited for the sense of peace and belonging that always came over him when he said Mass. They were there, he knew, waiting to break through the invisible wall that had risen inside him.

He’d spent the rest of the early morning hours at his desk, paying a few bills, trying to bring the budget into something that resembled reconciliation, which Ian would no doubt dispute. He knew the arguments; he could hear Ian’s voice in his head: We don’t have the donations yet; maybe they’ll come in, who knows? We can’t commit to programs and expenses…

It was always the same, and maybe his assistant was right. St. Francis would be on a sensible budget, with Ian in charge. Still, his heart felt like a heavy weight in his chest whenever he allowed himself to think about leaving.

HE COULD HEAR
the scrape of footsteps filing out of the church as he placed the Mass book and the chalice in the cabinets in the sacristy. He hung his chasuble in the closet, then walked back across the altar and down the aisle. The elders and grandmothers had left—he could see the pickups moving past the opened doors—yet a sense of them remained, as if they had left their own home for a short time, but the imprint of their personalities stayed behind.

Walks-On ran across the grounds, a red ball that he must have found over by the school yard clutched in his jaws. He dropped the ball at Father John’s feet and looked up at him out of brown, pleading eyes, his tail wagging so hard he seemed to be shaking inside his golden coat. Father John picked up the ball and threw it toward the baseball field. He watched the dog lope after it on three legs, head down, focused on the ball rolling ahead, making do, determined, he thought, to forget that something was missing, that he didn’t have everything he might have wanted.

He threw the ball again after Walks-On brought it back, dropped it at his feet, and nosed it forward. This time, he threw as far as he could to give the dog a good run. It was the running that made it worthwhile, the journey.

“
JOHN, HAVE A
minute?”

Ian came down the stairs as Father John let himself into the residence. He nodded and turned into his study on the other side of the entry, conscious of Ian’s steps behind him. He could hear Elena bustling about the kitchen, the clanking pans and running faucet. He propped himself against the edge of the desk and waited while Ian closed the door. This would be a private conversation, out of the housekeeper’s hearing and not yet ready for the moccasin telegraph, and Father John knew what it was about.

“How’s Vicky?” Ian said.

Father John smiled. They both knew this was only the polite preliminary to what was really on Ian’s mind. And yet, Ian had heard their voices; he knew who had rung the bell before dawn.

“Frightened,” he said. “A man broke into her apartment last night. He would have killed her if she hadn’t gotten out.”

Ian stuffed his hands into the pockets of his khakis and stared absently across the room, as if he were trying to puzzle out a new thought. “Elena says you and Vicky have both been asking questions about the skeleton,” he said finally, taking a longer detour around the real subject. “Looks like Vicky’s put herself into real danger.”

“She’s going to Denver for a couple of days.” Father John reached around, pushed away a stack of papers, and perched on the edge of the desk. “What are you suggesting?” he said. “That we should back off? Let a murderer continue on with his life, as if the girl he murdered didn’t count?”

Ian was still tracking something, Father John realized, following the invisible target moving inside his head. “What would prevent the murderer from coming after you?” Ian said. “If he thinks you and Vicky are onto him…”

“We have no idea who he might be.”

“But he doesn’t know that, does he? He thinks you’re getting close. That would explain why he wanted to kill Vicky before she could tell the authorities whatever she’s learned. He’ll think you know what she knows. You see where I’m going with this?”

Father John nodded. Ian was right. He should have realized it, but he’d been worried about Vicky, that she’d get off the reservation and go to Denver where she’d be safe. And then a new thought: the killer had found Liz Plenty Horses in Denver.

He pushed the thought away; it was more than thirty years ago.

“I’ll watch my back,” he said, but this new realization was taking hold of him. Whoever had shot out Vicky’s window and broken into her apartment might come
here.
He was vaguely aware of Ian clearing his throat, shifting his thoughts, moving on to what he’d really wanted to talk about.

“Have you gotten back to the provincial?”

“I told him you’d like to take the sabbatical,” Father John said. He’d finally spoken to Father Rutherford yesterday. “I said you were interested in spending time in Rome.” There were other people at the mission, he was thinking. Father Ian, Elena, kids playing baseball, people coming for classes, volunteers, committee members. It was the people he had to protect. He’d have to cancel the classes and meetings for a while.

He was aware of Ian’s voice droning on, background noise to his own thoughts, incessant and blurred. Reiterating about how he’d been giving Rome a lot of thought, how he could contribute to the dialogue on indigenous peoples…

St. Francis was their mission, their place; they wouldn’t want everything canceled. They’d come anyway. He had to have an escape plan. Not by the road. He’d have to tell people not to run out onto Circle Drive. Not to run through the cottonwoods in the direction of Seventeen-Mile Road—the killer would expect them to go that way. Everyone should know to run through the brush and trees toward the river. They could hide in the willows, make their way along the riverbank…

“John!” The sharpness in Ian’s voice made a clean slice through his thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re the one the provincial wants in Rome, right?” Ian was shaking his head. “I figured as much.”

“Listen, if there’s any trouble…”

“In Rome?”

“I’m talking about the mission. If the killer should come here looking for me,” Father John said, “everyone should run for the river. That would be the safest route out of the mission.” The escape route Father Leary had mapped out in 1973.

“What! What are you saying? Some madman could start shooting up the mission? My God, John. The cops have to stop him.”

“We have to cancel everything for a few days, give Elena some time off.”

“You’re serious.” The stunned look of incredulity flashed in Ian’s expression, as if the truth—the enormity of what he’d brought up—had hit him with full force.

A series of raps sounded on the door, followed by Elena’s voice: “Breakfast!”

Father John stood up. “I don’t want to alarm her.”

“Alarm her? Tell her to go home because a crazy man might come around and shoot at the pastor and everybody else? Why would that alarm her?”

“I’ll just say that I’d like her to take some time off.” Father John walked past his assistant and pulled the door open. Warm, moist odors of oatmeal and fresh coffee floated down the hallway. He followed the odors into the kitchen where Elena stood over the table, dishing heaps of oatmeal into two bowls.

“Whatever you two are talkin’ about, seems to me it can wait until after breakfast,” she said, scraping the pan and dropping a last spoonful of oatmeal onto the top of a steaming heap.

“Looks good,” Father John told her, as Ian walked around the table and sat down. She gave Father John an appreciative smile, then set the pan on the stove and opened the refrigerator. “I’d like you to take a little time off,” he said.

She flung her arm around first, milk slopping out of the container in her hand, then brought herself about, finally facing him. “You worried about the shooting in Ethete last night?”

“What shooting?”

“Nothing to do with the mission. It was a drug deal, you ask me. That’s why she got killed. Cops think so, too. Said so on the radio this morning.”

“Elena, who was killed?”

“One of that Yellow Bull family. Never much good, that bunch. Don’t surprise me they come to a bad end. Ruth Yellow Bull.”

Father John shoved the chair against the table and headed back down the hall. He was running when he reached the sidewalk in front of the residence, Walks-On a blur that started alongside him, then fell back. Running full out across the grounds, past the church, and down the alley, the sound of his boots on the gravel thudding around him. He stopped on the other side of Eagle Hall. The guesthouse was vacant; he could sense the hollowness of it, like a false-fronted structure with nothing behind. Vicky’s Jeep was gone.

VICKY PULLED INTO
the curb in front of the small café on Main Street in Rawlins and turned off the ignition. The sound of the engine died into the morning quiet. She took hold of the steering wheel again and gripped hard, trying to stop the trembling that threatened to take her over. She’d just reached Rawlins, tapping on the brake to ease the Jeep into the city’s speed limit, when the news had come on the radio—all the news you need to know—the announcer, a man with a deep voice meant to be comforting, she supposed, while he related that a two-year-old had been run over in a Riverton driveway, and three cars had crashed on 287, and the sixty-eight-year-old Arapaho woman, grandmother of two boys that she looked after, had been found shot to death this morning when her daughter dropped off the boys.
Wind River Police say the victim was Ruth Yellow Bull, a long-time resident of Ethete. Mrs. Yellow Bull had a record of two arrests for possession of marijuana. Police believe her murder was drug related.

Vicky had hit the off button. She hadn’t wanted to hear any more. It wasn’t a drug dealer or buyer who had come after Ruth Yellow Bull; it was the man who drove the silver sedan parked in the alley, the man with the black knit face mask pulled over his head who had knelt at her door, picked her lock, and let himself inside. The man with the gun handle jutting from the pocket of his dark jacket.

Now she stared at the window of the café, Breakfast All Day painted in white letters across the plate glass, and wondered how she’d gotten here. When had she turned off the highway that ran through town and detoured to the business district, as if the café was where she’d been heading all along, as if it were her usual stop? This was where they’d stopped for breakfast, she and Ben, at the oddest hours, she remembered, sometimes in the middle of the night or in the middle of the afternoon, on their way back to the rez from a rodeo in Cheyenne or the big powwow in Denver. They would stop here. And now, this was where she was, as if the little café were still a part of her life after all these years. It wasn’t possible to jettison everything, she thought. Parts of the past just hung on.

Hung on for Ruth Yellow Bull who had talked to her—twice—and had paid with her life. And—here was what was ridiculous, when you thought about—she’d kept her secrets. She hadn’t given up any of the leaders. If Ardyth LeConte hadn’t called Diana, they never would have found her. They never would have found a woman now going by the name of Mary Hennings.

And yet the killer must have thought that Ruth was a snitch, and snitches had to die.

She glanced at her watch. Five minutes had passed since she’d nosed into the curb and turned off the engine, and the man in the white shirt behind the counter inside the café had been tossing glances outside at the Jeep. She got out, went into the café, and found a small, vacant table across from the counter. She sat down facing the door. It was absurd, this sense that the door might open and he would step inside. He had no way of knowing she was on her way to Denver. And yet, he intended to kill her. He would find her.

She felt her muscles tense against the fear kindling inside her like a flame that might consume everything, her ability to think, make decisions, save herself. When the man from behind the counter walked over, she told him she wanted a cup of black coffee. She’d planned to stop somewhere along the highway for something to eat, but the thought of food made her stomach lurch. She sipped at the coffee when it came, drawing down the warmth and the comfort. She left some change on the table.

Back in the Jeep, she flipped open her cell and pushed in the number for the mission. Across the empty stretches through which she’d driven, the golden-brown expanse of plains with arroyos running like faults in the earth and antelope leaping past clumps of dried brush, the phone in John O’Malley’s office was ringing.