Winter's Child (22 page)

Vince White Hawk
stood beside her, sleepy-eyed, drugged, bent forward, as if he were leaning into the wind, but he wore a suit, a snappy blue tie, and a white shirt with the collar jutting out from around his skinny neck, all of it the work of his mother. She had wanted her son presentable for the court hearing.

“Mr. White Hawk, you are charged with attempted robbery.” A routine matter for the district court judge who shuffled through a pile of papers in front of him before looking up. “Mr. Peters?”

Jim Peters got to his feet. He took a moment to marshal his thoughts, then he said, “Your honor, prosecution and defense have reached a disposition of this case. We have agreed to ask the court to release Mr. White Hawk on a personal recognizance bond to be cosigned by him and by his mother, Betty White Hawk. As a condition, Mr. White Hawk will enter a sixty-day program of addiction recovery and rehabilitation. He will be taken to the rehab facility immediately.

“After he has successfully completed rehab, we have agreed to reduce the attempted robbery charge to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace with a stipulated sentence of one-year probation, on the condition that he remain sober during that time. We have reached this disposition in view of the fact that Mr. White Hawk voluntarily came forward and provided the Lander Police Department with essential information that enabled them to clear up the murder last week of Clint Hopkins. In addition, Mr. White Hawk's mother has also provided information that enabled the FBI to solve a five-year-old abduction and murder case in Denver.”

The judge worked his lips around silent words for a moment. “Ms. Holden?”

Vicky got to her feet. She could hear her heart pounding. In the meeting this morning, she hadn't been sure whether Peters would accept her request to ask the court for bond and rehab. After every argument she had made, he had reminded her that Vince could not be trusted. Finally Peters had agreed.

“Your honor, we agree with the prosecuting attorney.”

The judge took his time before he said, “I'm also inclined to agree.” He looked up and fastened his gaze on Vince for a moment. “The attempted robbery charge will stand until Mr. White Hawk successfully completes rehab and remains sober for thirty days. I am going to set a return court date for that time. If your client has met the conditions, I will grant the prosecution's motion to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor. He will enter a guilty plea, and I will accept the probation sentence. However, if he violates probation by substance use, he will be sentenced for such violation. Is that clear?”

“Yes, your honor,” Vicky said.

“Mr. White Hawk, you will now be transported to the treatment facility in Rock Springs. Good luck, and don't let me hear of you in trouble again. This court is adjourned.” The judge banged his gavel
and swept through the doorway behind the bench, black robe swaying.

Vicky turned to her client. The sheriff's deputies were already approaching to whisk him to a van waiting outside the courthouse. “You have a second chance,” she said.

Betty pushed past the deputies, grabbed her son, and started hugging him. “Thank you,” Vince said, mouthing the words over his mother's shoulder, and Betty jerked around. “Yes. Yes. Oh, Vicky, thank you for giving me my son back.” She let him go then, and kept her eyes on the deputies escorting him down the aisle and out the door.

Jim Peters stepped over. “Let's hope your client can stay sober and out of trouble.” He shook his head at the improbability.

“He's going to be just fine.” Betty threw her shoulders back and lifted her head, on sure ground now. “All my son needs is a chance.”

Peters gave a mock salute and stepped back to the table. He gathered up the papers, slipped them inside a briefcase and left the courtroom.

Vicky walked out with Betty, who seemed calm, wrapped in a new reality she could accept. Vince off to treatment, sure to recover, come home, live a good life, be her son.

*   *   *

Vicky drove north
on Highway 287, through the bright noon sunshine, a feeling of spring in the air. Snow glistening in the fields. She lowered the window a few inches and breathed in the faintest smells of spring: wet soil, sagebrush stirring into life, the freshness of the wind.

The sedan was turning into the yard when she crossed the barrow ditch. A light-blue, sporty-looking car with green and white
Colorado license plates. Jason Becket had called two days ago. The FBI had concluded the investigation into the murder of his wife and the abduction of his child. The witness—a mother herself out shopping for a few things for her own children—had gotten a good look at the carjackers. She would never forget their faces, she said. They still appeared in her nightmares. She had positively identified photos of Lou and Debbie Bearing. Without paternity tests, there was no proof that Mary Ann Little Shields was Elizabeth Becket, but there was a preponderance of evidence.

Vicky had not been involved. Everything was confidential that Eldon had told her and Father John—a lawyer and a priest. The whole story—the human story that Eldon had blurted out—would probably never be told: his wife, suicidal; his desperation to replace a lost child; a scavenger and carjacker coming around the shop. Not anyone he
knew
, not a relative or connection that could be traced to him.

It had taken several phone calls and meetings to persuade Betty White Hawk that it could help her son if she told what she knew about the Bearings. Vicky had arranged a meeting with Ted Gianelli, the local fed. She had gone along, reassuring Betty every step of he way.

Vince had been eager to tell the truth, hoping for a deal that would keep him out of prison. He had talked to both Gianelli and the police in Lander, filling in the gaps. Vicky had held her breath when he admitted to taking money to kill Clint Hopkins, then going into hiding, but the prosecuting attorney had declined to file any further charges. Vince had come forth willingly; he had helped to solve Clint Hopkins's murder as well as a five-year-old crime, and he was already facing charges for his own clumsy attempt at robbery.

Vicky slammed the door behind her and started across the yard through the piles of snow and rivulets of water. Jason Becket got out of the car and came toward her, a dark shadow silhouetted against the grayish house. He held on to her hand a moment as if she were a connection to his child, then tossed his head back at the house. “So this is where Elizabeth lived,” he said.

“I'm sorry.” She left the rest unsaid:
They're gone
. She had told him when he called that the Little Shields had fled the reservation. The FBI had already notified him.

“When?”

“A week ago,” she said. “I told them what I had found. I told them there would have to be tests. I believe they left that night.”

“Before I could get to her.” Jason looked about, taking in the wide, snow-stippled yard, the great empty spaces. Then he stepped over to the blocks of snow melting in the sun. “What's this?”

“A snow fort. The day I came, Eldon and”—she hesitated—“the child were building a snow fort.”

He drew in his lower lip, eyes sunken in thought. “She could have everything. A big house with a swimming pool. All kinds of lessons—music, tennis, horseback riding. Does she like horses?”

Vicky said she didn't know, but there had been a pony in the corral out back, and she didn't know an Arapaho child who didn't love horses.

“She would be a beautiful debutante, like her mother.” He tossed his head toward the house. “Can I see inside?”

Vicky walked over to the front stoop, wet from melting snow. The house belonged to Myra's aunt, according to the moccasin telegraph, a piece of information wedged among the speculations about why the family had abruptly fled the reservation. Myra's aunt threw them out? They moved to Denver? Oklahoma? L.A.?

Vicky tried the knob. Of course Jason would want to see the inside, and it had crossed her mind to call the aunt, but what would she have said? Mary Ann's natural father wanted to see the house his child had lived in? That would have sent a rush down the telegraph. Besides, no one locked their doors on the rez. Anyone should be able to find shelter in a storm.

The knob turned in her hand and she stepped into the living room, Jason Becket behind her, so still that she turned around to check if he had come in.

The furniture was still there: sofa against the wall, a couple of chairs and small tables, a deep-backed TV that jutted into the middle of the room, but no signs anyone had lived here. A vacant place on the table where the photo of Mary Ann had stood.

“She watched TV in here.” Jason sounded distant, lost in thought. He crossed the room and leaned into the kitchen. For the first time, Vicky saw the vinyl flooring, popped at the edges; the worn tablecloth hanging around the thin legs of the table; the countertop, scarred and stained.

She heard herself saying that the child had an iPad and she liked to play games at the kitchen table.

Jason turned and started down the hallway. A glance into the first bedroom: double bed, washed-out chenille bed cover. He walked to the second bedroom at the end of the hall and stepped inside. Pink everywhere: pink bedspread and pink canopy with blue and yellow flowers that looked hand-embroidered, white dresser and small vanity, lamps with frilly pink shades. Everything else was gone. No stuffed animals or dolls or toys. The sliding door on the closet was open, the closet empty.

Jason was quiet for a long moment, taking it in. “They love her,” he said as if he were talking to himself.

“They love her very much.” The rest of the story, Vicky was thinking, would never be told: the man who loved her had arranged for her abduction.

“Then she's lucky. She has two families who love her.” Jason backed out of the room, and Vicky followed: down the hall, across the living room, and into the warmth of the sunshine.

“I'll never stop looking for her.” He swung about, as if he could preempt any questions she might ask. “The FBI is on their trail. They are looking in every state, watching flight and train reservations. I've hired my own investigators. I've found her now—God, it's been so long. I've come so close, so many times, but I've finally found her. I know who she is and I know who
they
are. Eventually . . . eventually I will bring her home to her real home with her own family. I will never stop.”

“She's Arapaho,” Vicky heard herself say.

“I know. She'll have to spend time with them. They love her and . . . she loves them. We'll work something out. Summers on the reservation.” He threw out a hand and waved to the great, vacant spaces; the immense blue sky. Then he gave a little wave, walked over to the sedan, and got in.

The engine gunned and stuttered in the patches of snow, then the sedan bounced across the barrow ditch. Vicky watched it speed down the road spitting out rocks and ice until it was a tiny dot in the distance, a black fleck in the sun.

The front door
flew open, followed by the thump of footsteps. Father John glimpsed the brown van outside the window as he got up from his desk. He turned into the corridor as Shannon swept past.

“My things!” In an instant, she took hold of the clipboard the deliveryman held out and scribbled on the page. “They're here,” she said, swinging around as the man in the brown trousers and jacket let himself out. “I told you, Uncle John, I travel light. Two boxes. Hardly enough stuff to notice.”

He offered to take the cartons to the guesthouse, but she gave a little wave and shook her head. “James is coming by in a little while. Another counseling session, not that it's doing much good.” She shrugged her shoulders in the direction of the bishop's office down the corridor. “All that talking about what James really wants. I can tell you what he wants. He wants us to be together!”

“Then I'd say James and the Bishop are making progress.”
Father John smiled. Who wouldn't love her? So open and disaffected, yet more settled than when she had arrived, deep into writing her dissertation, consumed with the stories of two sisters—one white, one Arapaho—and in love with James Two Horses.

Yes, James would take her cartons to the guesthouse. He would help her. He would look after her.

“I'm beginning to understand Lizzie.” Shannon walked beside him along the corridor; they might have been strolling through the cottonwoods to the river on a sunny day. “It just came to me. You know how it is. You spend days and weeks and months living with someone in history, and you begin to understand what must have happened, how the person must have felt. You
know
the truth, even though it isn't spelled out in any historical record. But you know it.”

They had passed the door to his office and were standing outside the storage closet he had set up for her. He could see the small desk wedged against the wall, layered with papers and folders, a scattering of pencils, pens, and paper clips, a coffee mug, the detritus of a dissertation. “Tell me about Lizzie,” he said.

“Here's the thing, Uncle John. She wanted to go with her sister. She wanted to visit her own beginnings, see the home where she had lived, sit at the fireside where her parents had sat, walk the same grounds, gaze at the same stars. She wanted to touch that part of herself, but she was frightened.”

“Frightened? Of Brokenhorn?”

“Oh no.” Shannon shook her head, as if the idea were absurd. “Brokenhorn loved her. He was devoted to her, and from what the descendants have said, he never mistreated her. He was proud of her, and yes, he worried the whites would take her away. He vowed never to let that happen. He even moved his family into the mountains at one time where no one would find them. Yet Lizzie met with
Amanda Mary, and I believe Brokenhorn approved, because he knew Lizzie was frightened. He knew she wouldn't leave him and the children, not even for a short visit.”

Father John could feel the excitement rolling off the young, red-haired woman beside him. It took him back to his own days as a graduate student, such excitement at finding something new, something no one else had ever realized, at comprehending. “You're saying Lizzie feared that if she went with her sister, she wouldn't be able to return.”

“She wouldn't know how to return. Think of it: an Arapaho woman, living on the plains, riding a stage coach to Casper and taking the train all the way to the Midwest. She wouldn't know how to get back. There wouldn't be any horse tracks on the plains for her to follow.”

“Nevertheless, you believe she wanted to go?”

Shannon shrugged and pushed on, full of the wonder of it, the contradictions and pain in a woman dead more than a hundred years. “She was changed after meeting Amanda. The descendants say so. She insisted everyone call her by her white name, Lizzie, not Kellsto Time. She bragged to the other women that she had a home somewhere else, other people who loved her. When she went to Hollywood, she went with Brokenhorn and a trainload of Arapahos and Shoshones. She got to see the white world, but Hollywood wasn't where she had come from. She wouldn't have been frightened. She knew Brokenhorn would bring her home.”

“Interesting theory.” He felt like a teacher again, discussing a student's paper. “You'll need evidence.”

“You know how it is. Truth has a way of coming out. You discover it first because you
know
it, and eventually the evidence catches up, proves you were right all along.” She looked up a
moment, studying the ceiling. “Daisy Blue Water has agreed to meet with me again. I think she likes remembering her grandmother. Who knows? Maybe she'll remember how her grandmother had wanted to go with Amanda, but had been too scared.” She gave him a wide smile. “Let's hope she remembers before I finish writing,” she said.

Father John retraced his steps into his own office. The click-click of Shannon's computer started before he sat down at his desk. Another white girl, his own niece, falling in love with an Arapaho, living on the reservation, becoming Arapaho. He smiled at the idea. And James, who had thought he wanted to be a priest, wanted a life with her. James would conclude his counseling sessions, which would leave the bishop without a project. Yesterday, when he'd stopped in the office, he'd found the bishop reading a recipe book. The old man had glanced up, excitement in the watery blue eyes, and asked what Father John would think of pork ribs with plum chutney and roasted potatoes.

He had gotten a call later from a young couple thinking about getting married, circling around the pluses and minuses. He suggested they talk to the bishop, an expert at helping young people choose the path forward.

From outside came the thrum of tires on gravel and the steady roar of an engine. He swung around, went over to the window and watched the tan SUV pull in beside his pickup—the car Vicky had rented while the Ford was being repaired. She was out in a flash, shoulders forward, making her way to the front steps. He met her in the corridor.

“I heard the good news a little while ago.” He was ushering her into his study, taking her coat. He hung it on the back of the coat tree and told her that Betty had called. He could still hear the voice at the other end of the line, thick with relief and joy.

“Vince is in a treatment center in Rock Springs. He has a chance.”

Father John nodded her to the chair, but he knew she wouldn't alight. She would travel around his office, pacing out her thoughts. They were traveling people, she had once told him, the Arapahos.

“Coffee?” The coffee he'd made this morning had gone stale; it would take only a few minutes to brew a fresh pot.

“Thank you.” She gave him a smile. It surprised him, her acquiescence. It meant she would stay awhile; something else was on her mind.

He retrieved the glass pot from the table behind the door and carried it into the miniature kitchen off the corridor. On automatic, the same routine every morning and again during the day, depending upon his visitors. By the time he perched on the edge of the desk, watching Vicky stroll about, the smell of fresh coffee filled the office.

“Let me,” Vicky said. And she was behind the door, pouring two mugs, stirring powdered milk into one, which she brought over to him. “I just met with Jason Becket.”

He sipped at the hot liquid and waited. She had told him earlier about the FBI investigation and the preponderance of evidence that a man in Denver named Jason Becket was the father of Mary Ann Little Shield. He remembered the cascade of emotions that had washed over him: a father about to find his child; a couple about to lose theirs. It hadn't surprised him that the Little Shields had disappeared; wasn't that what Brokenhorn had done when he thought the whites might take Lizzie? Disappeared into the mountains? The moccasin telegraph had the news before Vicky had called to tell him it was true.

“How is he?”

“Devastated.” Vicky stopped at the window, looked out, and
sipped her own coffee. “To come so close! It must be like losing her all over again.”

So close. In his mind was the image of Daisy Blue Water recounting an old sorrow. Amanda had come so close to finding her sister only to lose her.

“He'll never stop looking.” Vicky turned toward him. “The world is a small place today. So much media. It's difficult to hide. Still, it could take time. Mary Ann may be grown up before he finds her.”

“She may find him.”

Vicky smiled at him again, and he knew she'd had the same thought. “One day she'll look into the mirror and see blond hair and light eyes and say,
Who am I? Where did I come from?
And Jason Becket will be waiting.”

She started pacing again—the door, the chairs, the window, and back again—something else on her mind, working out the best way to bring it up. He waited, and after another tour about the office, she stopped. “Is it true, John?”

He knew exactly what she meant. “It's a rumor.” He tried to shrug it off, a nuisance. “There are always rumors.” He dipped his head toward the corridor lined with framed photos of the earliest Jesuits at St. Francis Mission, his predecessors, strong and courageous and faithful men he had tried to emulate. “I suspect they heard the same rumors in their time. The Jesuits are always worried about having enough priests, enough money for its missions.”

“Is it true?”

Vicky would not be put off; he could not cajole her, pretend it was nothing to worry about, the way he had been pretending to himself. He pushed off the desk and went to the window. The afternoon sun flared over the mission grounds, a spring sun, pale yellow,
not yet in full control of its powers. Walks-On was asleep in front of the residence.

He turned around, facing her. “I believe, this time, it's true.”

“Which means, you will leave.” The words hung like a heavy weight between them. “The people need you here. I need you. How can you leave?”

Father John looked back out the window. It was the question he had been wrestling with in the middle of the night. How could he leave? Oh, the actual leaving, the physical part, would be easy. Packing up—a couple of cartons, smaller than those that contained Shannon's belongings; the O'Malley's traveled light—mostly books and CDs, his old CD player, a change of clothes, an extra pair of boots, Walks-On's bed. He could pack in thirty minutes, drive around Circle Drive and through the cottonwood tunnel the last time, Walks-On seated beside him, staring out the window, never dreaming they wouldn't be home by dark. The easy part he could do. He wasn't sure how he could do the hard part, and he knew, when he looked around at Vicky, that she understood.

He perched again on the desk. “You know,” he said, trying to make sense of it in his own mind, the story he had told himself in the middle of the night, “Whatever time we get with the people we love is precious, no matter how long it is. Fifty years, twenty-five, ten.” He had been at St. Francis a little over ten years now. “A slice of precious time that belongs to us for a while, and then is gone. We are always going. All of us.”

Vicky took her time finishing her coffee, then she set the mug on the table behind her and turned toward him. Pinpricks of light danced in her eyes. “I'm not one of your parishioners you can cajole with your logic and your philosophy. I don't care about slices of
time. I don't care how precious it is. When it's over, it's over. What is important is now. It's all we have.”

“Then we have what matters, Vicky. We have the present. Nothing will happen overnight. Closing a mission takes time, and this is a bureaucracy we're talking about. Bureaucracies move at glacial speed. I've learned not to worry—I've told myself: wait until you know whether you have something to worry about. We're here now, in the present.”

“Waiting,” she said.

“Yes, in the present.”