The Spirit Woman (7 page)

“And now?” Vicky persisted. He might have been a defendant and she the prosecutor.

Now, he thought, now there were the stories, passed down among both the Shoshones and the Arapahos, stories told by a woman buried in the Shoshone cemetery. He said, “The woman here knew things about the expedition that only someone who'd been part of it could have known.”

“Exactly.” Laura seemed to jump in her chair. Her hands fluttered in the air. “My colleagues—our colleagues”—she lifted her chin—“refuse to give oral histories the same importance as documentary evidence. Well, I intend to present them with a document they can't ignore. Sacajawea's own memoirs.” The words seemed to hang in the silence a moment. “The memoirs are on the reservation somewhere,” she said.

Lindy spoke up: “If it's true, it would be an incredible find.”

An incredible find indeed, Father John thought. One of the most important in American history—an Indian woman's own account of the great American expedition. “What makes you think they're here?”

Laura's expression dissolved into what passed for a smile. She sat back, drew in a breath, then began explaining. Another historian—Charlotte Allen—had discovered the memoirs twenty years ago. Someone named Toussaint knows where they are.

“Toussaint?” he said. “I've never met anyone by that name.”

“Theresa Redwing may know who he is,” Vicky said. “Her mother was one of the elders who gave Charlotte Allen permission to publish the memoirs. Laura's hoping the Shoshones will extend her the same courtesy.” She leaned toward him. “Would you ask Theresa to talk to her? You can explain the importance of writing the truth about the past.”

“You sound like a historian,” Father John said.

Vicky laughed, a soft, rippling sound. A relaxed look of familiarity came into her eyes. “Maybe I've been around historians too long.”

“I don't know Theresa Redwing very well.” He'd met the woman at celebrations and powwows. She was a respected Shoshone elder, but she wasn't one of his parishioners.

“The elders trust you,” Vicky persisted.

Father John glanced at the blond woman. A friend, Vicky had said. She didn't have many friends, it seemed. Woman Alone, the grandmothers called her.
He sei ci nihi.
A few relatives scattered about the res, two kids in Los Angeles, an ex-husband . . . He pushed the thought away. Laura Simmons was her friend, and Vicky had asked him to help. He had always found it difficult to turn her down.

“I'll stop by and have a talk with Theresa,” he said to Laura.

The woman gave him a thin smile, a crack in the pale face. Then she began rummaging in the folder. She plucked out a legal-size notepad and pen, scribbled something, and tore off three triangles of paper. She handed them around. “You can reach me at this number,” she said. “The Mountain House in Lander.”

Then she was on her feet, pulling on the white coat, fingering the buttons, nodding at the curator. “You'll call me the minute you locate the letters?” she asked, gripping the folder and fixing her tan bag over one shoulder.

Lindy promised. A day or two, and she should have them.

“Still some time to visit the Shoshone cultural center,” Laura said, inspecting the gold watch on her wrist. “You never know, Sacajawea's memoirs could be on a shelf somewhere.”

The remark brought another jolt of memory. There was always hope—Father John knew it well—that other historians had missed something important, something in plain view on a shelf somewhere.

“I'll call you, Vicky.” Laura was at the door now, and in a moment she was gone, leaving only the shush of her footsteps fading in the hallway, the whack of the front door trembling through the floorboards.

Vicky turned to him. “There's something I'd like to talk to you about.”

“I can put on a pot of coffee in the office,” he said.

“W
hat about the skeleton?” Vicky glanced up at him as they walked along Circle Drive, cutting fresh tracks in the membrane of snow on the asphalt. The wind sprinkled white flecks in her hair. She was wearing a long, black coat that she held closed with one hand. Her briefcase swung from the other, and the strap of the familiar black bag was fixed over one shoulder. She moved with an easy naturalness into the space ahead, displacing the emptiness. “Any chance it's ancient?”

“The elders think so,” Father John said. “They asked me to check with Gianelli.” This wasn't what she wanted to talk to him about. She could have brought up the skeleton back at the museum.

Vicky stopped and threw her head back. She gave a little shiver of cold. “The elders asked you?” Then, as if she would have liked to recall the words, she said, “See how they respect you, John? You're the one they trust to find the truth.” She started walking again, and he stayed in step, not knowing what to say. The elders had turned to him, a white man. They should have asked her.

Vicky linked her arm in his. “Of course they'd call you. They trust you, John, and you and Gianelli are friends.” She was quiet as they passed the church, the alley leading to Eagle Hall and the guest house. “I wish they'd called me,” she said finally.

“I'm sorry, Vicky.” He could feel the light pressure of her hand through the sleeve of his wool jacket.

“It's not your fault you're the one they trust,” she said as they walked up the icy steps in front of the administration building. He held the heavy wooden door and waited for her to step inside, acutely aware of the place on his arm where her hand had rested.

He followed her into his office on the right and flipped the switch, displacing the gray afternoon with a tungsten-bright light that flooded over the desk and the two chairs arranged along one wall. Vicky sank into one of the chairs. He could feel her eyes on him as he picked up the glass coffeepot from the little metal stand next to the door. He went in search of water from the sink down the hall.

“I came back home to help my people,” she said when he returned. Her coat was arranged around the chair behind her. “How naive and stupid it sounds. Indian lawyer wants to help her people! I'm just a woman who had the temerity to put herself forward. Divorce her husband and become a lawyer, like a man. My people don't know which category to put me in—wife, mother, lawyer. I don't really belong anywhere.”

Father John took off his jacket, hooked it on the coat tree, and sat at the edge of the desk, facing her. “It takes time, Vicky. Old traditions are slow to change.”

She lifted one hand and brushed back a small strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead. “What does Gianelli say?” she asked, bringing the subject back to the skeleton. A kind of uncertainty showed in her eyes.

He said, “A Caucasian woman, somewhere between the mid-twenties and mid-thirties. She was buried twenty to twenty-five years ago.”

Vicky stared at him, eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Charlotte Allen disappeared on the reservation twenty years ago.”

In the quiet, the sound of dripping coffee. “What happened to her?” Father John said after a moment.

“She was hiking in the mountains. Her body was never found. Maybe she wasn't lost in the mountains after all. Maybe she'd gone walking along the river, fell down, knocked herself unconscious—”

“The woman was murdered, Vicky. Her skull was fractured. She had a broken jaw and cheekbone, broken ribs and arms, consistent with a—”

“Beating.” Vicky finished the sentence. Some of the color had drained from her face.

“What does Laura know about Charlotte Allen?”

“Not much.” Vicky was shaking her head. “Charlotte's mother gave her the unfinished manuscript, as well as the journal Charlotte kept while she was here.”

Father John reached back and picked up the phone. “We'd better let Gianelli know,” he said, tapping out the number.

An answering machine clicked on at the other end. “You have reached the Central Wyoming offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He told the machine that he had some information on the identity of the skeleton, then replaced the receiver.

Vicky had poured two mugs of coffee, set one beside him on the desk, and was cradling the other in both hands as she dropped back into her chair. “What about Laura?” she asked. “She's here to do the same research that Charlotte Allen was doing. She could be in danger.”

Father John leaned over and laid a hand lightly on her arm a moment. He could feel the tenseness in her muscles beneath the silky fabric of her blouse. “Look, Vicky, let's not jump to conclusions. We don't even know that Charlotte Allen was buried in that grave.” He heard his own voice, calm, logical. “Even if it turns out to be her, there's no reason to suppose that whatever happened twenty years ago had anything to do with the research.”

“You don't understand, John,” Vicky said. “Indian people believe the real Sacajawea is buried here, but historians have argued the matter for decades. Some of them have probably staked their professional reputations on the theory that Sacajawea died years earlier. What if someone killed Charlotte Allen to stop her from publishing the truth?”

“A lot of what-ifs, Vicky.” An image of the slight, pale woman in the museum flashed in his mind: the joy in her expression at the possibility of finding something no one else knew, like the joy of an explorer coming into a place no one else had ever seen. “Gianelli will follow up on this,” he said. “As soon as I hear anything, I'll call you. There's no sense in alarming Laura.”

“You're probably right.” Vicky shifted in her chair. “I'm worried about Alva Running Bull,” she said after a moment. “I'd already drawn up the divorce papers when she and Lester started coming to you for counseling. Now she's told me to tear up the papers.”

This was what she'd wanted to talk to him about. Father John picked up his mug, walked around the desk, and sat down, aware of a distance opening between them. Usually they were on the same team. He didn't like playing on opposing teams. “Alva and Lester want to make their marriage work,” he began. “Divorce court isn't exactly the place where that can happen.”

“He beats her. She has to leave him. Even Sacajawea left.”

“Alva and Lester are both in counseling, and Lester's agreed to go to an anger management group. There's a good program in Riverton. People can change, Vicky. The grace of God can work in all of us, if we give it a chance.”

“Can you imagine what it's like?” Vicky went on, as if she hadn't heard. “The man you live with every day, sleep with every night? The man you love? Can you imagine what it's like?”

“You took Ben back.” It startled him, the way he'd flung the words at her, like an accusation erupting out of his own uncertainty.

Immediately he regretted stepping across the invisible line drawn around her personal life. He waited for her to rise from the chair, take her coat, and walk out of the office. If she did, he knew he would never see her again.

She remained seated, sipping thoughtfully at the coffee, her gaze somewhere on the bookshelves behind him. Silence filled the space between them. He had the feeling that often came to him in a counseling session, in the confessional, when someone was about to reveal something they had never revealed before. The moment passed. She gave him a familiar, determined look. “We're not talking about Ben and me. We're talking about Alva. Lester will kill her one day.”

Father John squeezed the bridge of his nose. Dear God. Don't let it be.

“I've given Alva the telephone number of the Eagle Shelter,” Vicky said. “If Lester goes on another rampage, she could be too scared or too ashamed to call. Will you encourage her to call the shelter if anything happens?”

“Of course.”

Vicky set her mug on the desk and pulled her coat around her shoulders as she got to her feet, a hint of reluctance in the motion, he thought. And then he thought he was only imagining it because he didn't want their time together to end. He didn't want her to leave.

“Will you talk to Alva before you leave?” she asked. He had to readjust his thoughts to bring the reality into focus.
He
was the one leaving. “You are going away, aren't you?”

“So they tell me,” he said, a steady, matter-of-fact tone. He had to look away from the regret in her eyes. It was good he was going, he told himself. It would be good to teach and study again, to fill his mind with other things, he told himself.

“When do you leave?”

He brought his gaze back to hers. “Next Tuesday. The new pastor has already arrived.”

“You mean the Harley?” The hint of amusement flashed in Vicky's eyes.

“The Harley,” he said.

She glanced away. “So that's it, then.”

Her words gave him a sense of uneasiness. Had she been holding on to some vague hope that things might be different? He dismissed the notion. She was back with Ben. “My boss has decreed it so.” He got up and walked her across the office and into the corridor. Then he remembered she'd parked in front of the museum. “I'll walk you to the Bronco,” he said, turning back for his jacket.

“No,” she called after him, her tone almost cheerful. “I can find my way.” The sound of the door opening and closing reverberated through the thick walls.

He stepped over to the window. She was hurrying along Circle Drive, a slim figure in black, a shadow moving through the snow. He sat back at the desk and dialed Howard Elkman's number.

“Hello?” The gravelly voice on the other end.

He told the elder about the report on the skeleton.