The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (28 page)

“But we got the game with Riverton on Saturday.” And there was something else, Father John knew. The kids looked forward to baseball practice; it filled a few hours of the hot, summer days; it let them forget about everything except baseball. He was going to miss practice, too, as much as the kids.

“We’re better than Riverton,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess. But…” The kid’s voice crackled with disappointment.

“It’s only for a little while.” Father John hoped that would be true. Sooner or later, the killer was bound to make a mistake, and when that happened, Coughlin would have him in custody. Until then, whoever had shot Ruth Yellow Bull last night and had intended to kill Vicky was still walking around. There was no telling where he might strike next, and Father John couldn’t risk having the parishioners at the mission. He told Mason that he’d make sure he knew when practice would start again, then he set the receiver into place against the disappointment still flowing through the line.

He went back to the work on his desk—making his way through a pile of papers, paying a few more bills, filling out the bank deposit slip for an anonymous donation that had floated out of a white envelope with no return address and a blurred postmark. Finally he switched off the desk lamp and headed for the front door. Strips of sunlight and shadow fell over the photographs of past Jesuits on the walls. Sunlight glistened on the wood floor that creaked under his boots. Father Ian had left sometime in the afternoon to make the rounds at Riverton Memorial. Six Arapahos hospitalized this week. He hadn’t gotten back yet.

Father John let himself outside and was about to start down the steps of the concrete stoop when he turned back, fished the ring of keys out of his jeans pocket, and locked the door. He didn’t usually lock the door until evening, after the meetings had ended, after the pickups and cars had carved their way around Circle Drive and out toward Seventeen-Mile Road. But there were no meetings tonight. If Father Ian wanted to go to his office, he had a key.

He started across the mission grounds, the great silence of the plains pressing around him, except for the almost-imperceptible sounds of the breeze in the dried grass, the faraway whir of tires on Seventeen-Mile Road and his own footsteps on the earth. He tried to shake off the odd feeling that had come over him. He wasn’t used to such quiet in the early evening; there were always people coming and going, pickups crunching the gravel, children shouting and laughing. The mission was alive! But now it seemed like a relic, a dead thing of the past. He pushed the thought away. The people would be gone only for a while; it was temporary. Besides, Elena was still here. It would be another thirty minutes before her grandson came to pick her up, and in the residence, there would be the odors of fried hamburger or chicken or tacos or whatever she had made for dinner tonight. Things were normal, he told himself, normal.

He was halfway up the sidewalk to the residence when he knew someone was watching. He stopped walking and glanced about. And that was stupid, he realized. Whoever was watching now knew that he knew someone was there. But where? The church glowed in the late afternoon sun, the alley running toward the guesthouse was deserted—a ribbon of gravel that disappeared behind the corner of the church—and the administration building looked quiet and vacant. There was the Arapaho Museum in the gray stone school building, but he’d sent the volunteers home and tacked a white piece of paper onto the door that said, “Temporarily Closed.”

There was no one about.

Still, he couldn’t shake the sense that he was being tracked, like a wild animal in the sites of a rifleman. The killer was here, somewhere.

He sprinted up the sidewalk, threw himself at the front door, and fumbled at the knob. It was like a piece of stone in his hand, and he remembered that he’d told Elena to keep the doors locked. He was extracting the keys from his pocket when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the brown pickup bouncing past the cottonwoods, heading into the mission. The front bumper jiggled as the pickup started around Circle Drive. Jeffrey, Elena’s grandson, coming to pick her up, now that he’d gone back on the wagon.

“Go back!” Father John shouted, waving at the dark head hunched over the steering wheel. But the pickup kept coming. The noise of spitting gravel burst through the quiet. The pickup slid to a stop in front of the residence, and the driver’s door flew open.

“Don’t get out!”

“What?” The young man pulled himself upright by the opened door.

“There’s someone who could have a gun. Get back inside. Stay down.”

In an instant, the young man had taken this in, thrown himself back inside, and pulled the door shut behind him.

Father John jammed his key into the lock and started to open the door. From somewhere behind the house, he heard an engine kick over and roar into life. He turned around, flung himself down the steps, and ran to the corner of the house where he had a view of the back road—scarcely a road, a two-track cut through the wild grass and brush—that ran past the baseball field and out toward Rendezvous Road. A silver sedan sped down the road, turning through the bends, back tires skidding sideways. In a moment, it was out of sight.

When he turned back, he saw Elena and her grandson standing on the stoop together, and in the set of the woman’s face, Father John saw that she understood.

“He come here, didn’t he?” she said.

Father John walked back along the front of the house and up the steps. “You’d better stay home for a few days,” he said.

“Yeah, Grandma,” Jeffrey said. “You got a shooter around here, it’s no place you want to be.”

“I tol’ you, that killer’s not runnin’ me off.”

Father John caught Jeffrey’s eye. “Let’s go on home, Grandma,” the young man said. “We can talk about it later.”

There were a few moments while Elena bustled about the house gathering her things and her grandson walked back and forth on the stoop, a sentinel watching for the enemy. The front door hung open, and the hot breeze swept through the house as Father John picked up the phone on the hall table and dialed Coughlin’s office.

“The killer was here,” he told the detective as soon as he’d made his way past the blond receptionist and listened to a line that seemed to have gone dead. “He drove out of here two minutes ago in the silver sedan, heading toward Rendezvous Road.”

EXCEPT FOR THE
faint pull of the elevator on its downward plunge, Vicky felt as if she were in a small room with bodies jammed around her, briefcases and bags poking into her back and ribs. Her cell phone started vibrating through her bag, but it was impossible to dig it out. It had vibrated twice during the interview in the glass-enclosed conference room of Owens and Lattimore, and she’d ignored it while she told what had happened the night in the alley. Then she’d answered the questions Lucas had warned her about, all of which were meant to test her sense of reality, her grasp of her own life. Could she really be certain that she’d seen what she’d seen?

She was certain, she said over and over, holding fast to the image of the girl folding under the blows of Theo Gosman’s fists, legs sprawled on the cement, jerking in spasms of violence. And that other image that hovered in the shadows of her mind, the girl in the Gas Hills.

The elevator bumped to a stop. Vicky was carried along with the crowd that spilled through the sliding doors out into the glass and marble lobby of the Seventeenth Street skyscraper. There was a hush of conversation from groups standing about, and the clack, clack sound of heels on the hard floor. Vicky stepped out of the way of people coming and going and checked the readout on her cell. Three calls, all from Luna Norton. She hurried outside and pressed the callback key. People in dark suits and serious, dark dresses, briefcases swinging at their sides or hanging from their shoulders, hurried along the sidewalk. Familiar, she thought. A few years ago, she’d been one of them, hurrying to court hearings and interviews and depositions, marching along. The buzzing sound in her ear stopped.

“I’ve been trying to call you.” Luna’s voice sounded hurried and strained.

“I know. I was in a meeting. Will your mother see me?”

“If you still insist upon this, you’d better come right away.” The words were rushed, notes of reluctance ringing through them. “She’s better in the mornings.” Then she gave Vicky the address.

THE HOUSE WAS
in the Highland neighborhood, only a few blocks from where she and Lucas had eaten dinner last evening. She rolled to a stop at the curb, double-checked the address, and started up the sidewalk in front of a redbrick bungalow with gables and paned-glass windows and humps of trimmed evergreen bushes on either side of the door. Sloans Lake was a block away, and through the trees she caught glimpses of the blue water shimmering in the sunshine. The faintest hint of humidity hung in the air. She could hear a duck quacking in the distance.

She stepped onto a small porch with a black iron railing and a pot of red petunias pushed against the brick wall. The door opened just as she started to lift the iron knocker. Luna stood in the doorway, dressed much the same as yesterday, except that the tee shirt was white, the capris black. There was an anxious look in her eyes.

“You’d better come in,” she said.

Vicky followed her into a living room that was all leather, chrome, and glass arranged around a polished wood floor that ran across the front of the house. Wallboard had been pulled from the side walls, exposing an expanse of brick behind large framed posters of orange and red poppies and purple chrysanthemums. In one corner were chrome shelves stacked with the brightly colored rattles, toys, and padded books of a young child. The hot, moist odor of chocolate chip cookies drifted from the kitchen. There was no sign of anything Arapaho, no prints of horses or buffaloes, no star quilts draped over the brown leather sofa. It might have been the home of any young couple in an old, trendy neighborhood. Except that Luna was Arapaho, the same generation as Lucas and Susan, Indians who knew they had rights and lived in gentrified neighborhoods and worked in software and purchased leather and chrome furniture.

“Mom’ll be out in a minute,” Luna said, but a woman who looked about sixty, with short gray hair and deep lines cut into her round, dark face, had already appeared in the kitchen doorway. Luna must have sensed her presence, because she swung around. “Here’s the lawyer I told you about,” she said.

Without saying anything, Inez Horn walked into the room and dropped onto the end cushion of the sofa. She wore a blue blouse and a darker blue skirt with tiny smudges of what might have been flour across the front.

Luna nudged a sling-back leather chair in Vicky’s direction before she started for the closed door to the right of the kitchen doorway. “I’d better check on the baby.” This was thrown over one shoulder in the direction of the sofa.

Vicky sat down, conscious of Inez Horn watching her out of narrowed eyes. Finally the woman said, “What took you so long?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ve been waiting a long time.” Inez sat very still, shoulders slumped a little, hands clasped in her lap. “Every day, ever since Luna was a baby, I’ve been expecting somebody to come or call me. But nobody ever came. Nobody ever called. Oh, I called a lot of people, everybody I could think of, and they told me the same thing. Nobody’d seen her. Probably ran away, they said, took off, left her baby girl. Maybe she was over on Colfax, working the streets, drinkin’ and druggin’. Did I ever think of that? Maybe I should just forget her and go on. Luna was doing okay with me, wasn’t she? So don’t worry about it. But I knew that no way did Liz leave her baby. She loved Luna more than anything. Now you’ve come here finally to tell me what became of her.”

Vicky took her eyes away. She waited a couple of seconds before she looked at the woman again. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said. “Liz is dead. She was murdered, and her…” She hesitated. “…body was discovered last month in a gulley east of the reservation. The man who killed her is still on the reservation. I want to see him charged with her murder. I want to see him convicted.”

Inez was staring past Vicky now, seeing something beyond the living room and the interior of a tidy house on a tree-lined street. “I knew it was true, but I never wanted to believe it. I told Luna her Mommy had to go away for a while. I told her she’d be coming back just as soon as she could, because she loved her. ’Til she got back, I told her, I’d be her Mommy and I’d take good care of her. So that’s what happened. I became her mother.”

Vicky leaned forward. “Help me, Inez. Please. Tell me what happened after Liz came to your house.”

“The house,” Inez said, still staring at the point in space. “It was supposed to be a safe house. Nobody was supposed to know where it was. Well, that was funny. Turned out lots of people knew where my house was. Wasn’t supposed to be that way. Nobody’d think a Cheyenne like me, twenty-three is all I was, working nights in a diner trying to pay the mortgage and keep some food in the fridge, was gonna run a house where AIM people running from the Feds could hide. That’s what they told me, a couple of the leaders that used to come into the diner. ‘You got the perfect place,’ they said. They’d pay me a hundred bucks a month. It was a lot of money, and Fred was in Vietnam. I never told him what I was doing, ’cause I knew he wouldn’t want me mixed up with AIM.”

She took a moment, working through the memories. “Tell you the truth,” she said finally, “I guess I was what they call a sympathizer. I saw how they were going to bat for Indians that got beat up by the police, thrown into jail just for being Indian, fired from their jobs. I almost got fired myself, ’cause the boss wanted to hire his girlfriend, so the AIM guys paid him a visit, asked him how he’d like a bunch of Indians protesting every day in front of the diner. Well, he backed down and kept me on. Then, when Fred got killed, they took up a collection for me. So I owed ’em, you know. I said, they could use my house. It could be the safe house.”

THE STREETS WERE
dark except for the light splashed under the streetlamps here and there. Liz gripped the steering wheel and drove around one block, then another. The safe house had to be here somewhere, but she wasn’t sure. It could be miles away. She didn’t know Denver. She’d been here only once before, and her mother was driving—driving and driving, looking for the guy she’d met at the bar in Riverton, some salesman that had been coming through. He was gonna save them. They’d gone around block after block then, too. They never found the guy.

She’d had to pull off I-25 when she got to Denver. The stream of headlights coming at her, blinding her, and Luna crying in the backseat and the needle flicking on empty. She’d found a 24-hour convenience store and used the rest of Ardyth’s money for a couple of cans of baby formula and six gallons of gas. She’d asked the clerk—a white woman, and she seemed nice, the way she smiled and cooed at Luna—how to get to the address that Robert had given her. The woman had started explaining, then had pulled a map out of the rack by the cash register, opened it on the counter and traced the route with a pencil. Highway south to Alameda. West on Alameda toward Sheridan. Couple of blocks before Sheridan, turn here. She’d tapped the pencil on two blue lines that intersected. Can’t miss it, she’d said, then she’d handed Liz the map.

She’d fed Luna a bottle in front of the store, thinking about what Robert had said when he’d finally answered the phone, after she’d been calling most the night. “Best you go to Denver,” he’d said.

Denver? She’d been surprised. “You can fix it, Robert. Tell Jake to back off. I’m not the snitch. Somebody else told the cops.” He’d ignored what she’d said, and that surprised her again, but he’d insisted on the safe house in Denver. She should stay there until he straightened everything out.

She got back on the highway and followed the directions. Now she was in a maze of houses that all looked the same, white frame houses with flat fronts and dark windows, pickups in the dirt driveways, other pickups parked on the streets. She squinted at the numbers on the black mailboxes at the curbs.

Luna had started crying again by the time she spotted the numbers she was looking for. She parked between two pickups, lifted Luna out of the cardboard box, and, struggling to hold on to the baby and fit the strap of the diaper bag over her shoulder, made her way up a sidewalk ragged with cracks. The night was warm, but she was shivering. She felt her legs shaking beneath her and she had to lean against the door frame to steady herself as she knocked. A cat was meowing in the bushes next to the house.

There was no sound from inside. She waited a moment, then knocked again. Luna whimpered in her arms and she tried to shush her. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay.” But nothing was okay. She wondered if she was at the right house, on the right street. Had she copied down the right numbers?

Then, the sound of footsteps padding toward the door and a woman’s voice: “Who’s there?”

“It’s Liz,” she managed. She was afraid she might burst into tears.

The door opened. The woman wasn’t a lot older than she was, only a few years maybe. She had long black hair and she was Indian. Cheyenne, she guessed. She had on a blue robe that she held closed with one hand. The other was waving her inside. “Been expecting you,” she said. Then, “Robert didn’t tell me you had a baby.”

Liz stopped, one foot on the doorstep. “Her name’s Luna.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m Inez. Come on in.”

And then she was showing her through the little house. Kitchen here, make yourself at home. Food’s meant to eat. Liz followed her into a bedroom in back, then into what looked like a sleeping porch with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and a kitchen chair with chrome frame and a green plastic seat. “It’s nice and cool here. You can open the windows,” Inez said, glancing around the room. “Now, where’ll we put the baby?”

“I have a cardboard box in the backseat,” Liz said.

“Good. That’ll work.” Inez swept out of the porch and came back carrying a matching chair. She arranged the chairs facing each other. “You can put the box here.” Then she turned, and Liz felt herself being scrutinized, examined the way she used to look at insects in the mud down by the creek when she was little. “What did you do,” Inez said, “that you got the Feds after you?”

No, it wasn’t like that. She tried to explain. It was a misunderstanding with some of the AIM people on the rez—but Robert would straighten it out. It might take a couple of weeks to convince…

“Well, never mind.” Inez waved away the explanation. “You’ll be safe here.”

“
I RAN THE
house about two years,” Inez said. “There was a lot of trouble. AIM was in the newspapers all the time. Protests in D.C. You know, they took over the BIA building! Imagine that! Then they took over Wounded Knee. A lot of them were wanted by the FBI. Mostly it was Lakotas that came to the house, but there were Cheyennes and Crows, a couple of Blackfeet. Liz was the last one that came. After that, I told them I couldn’t do it anymore. Liz and the baby only stayed for four days, and we got on like sisters. She was like the sister I always wanted. She used to walk around the house singing her songs, singing to her baby all the time. ‘Baby, baby, you’re the sun rising in the sky, the moon riding high. Beautiful baby of mine.’ Songs like that.”

Inez dipped her head. She lifted one hand and ran her forefinger and thumb over her forehead, then squeezed the small of her nose for a moment. When she looked up again, Vicky saw the moisture shining in her eyes. “They broke down the door,” she said. “They didn’t even knock, just came bursting in here like they were some kind of SWAT team and we’d been holding hostages or some damn thing. Liz and I, we were sitting in the living room watching TV. I remember we were watching
Get Smart
. Funny what you remember. Liz jumped up and she clamped her hand over her mouth, ’cause she didn’t want to scream, I could tell. She didn’t want to wake Luna. The baby was sleeping on the porch. I think she knew they were going to drag her away and she didn’t want them to take the baby. They must’ve forgotten about Luna, or most likely they would’ve taken her, too.