Wife of Moon

by Margaret Coel

  “All finished here?” The waitress appeared and began clearing the table. Another moment and she was setting down cups and saucers and pouring coffee.

  Vicky stared at the steam curling out of her cup and waited until the waitress had walked away. “You surprise me, Adam,” she said.

  Adam clasped his hands and leaned toward her. “Don’t get me wrong, Vicky. I’m attracted like hell to you. This would give us the chance to spend time together, get to know each other. Come on, aren’t you attracted to me? Just a little?”

  Vicky laughed and nodded toward the dining room. “Every woman in this restaurant is attracted to you, Adam.”

  “I don’t care about them. What do you say?”

  Vicky sipped at her coffee a moment. “I’ve worked alone now for most of the last five years.” Hi sei ci nihi, Woman Alone, the grandmothers called her. “I’m used to being alone.”

  “No you’re not.” Adam reached out and placed his hand over hers. “Think about it, Vicky, that’s all I’m asking.”

  She heard herself promising to give the matter some thought, then she sipped at the last of her coffee and waited while Adam paid the bill. “A business expense,” he said, winking at her and waving away her efforts to retrieve her wallet from her bag. They walked back through the restaurant, found their coats, and, pulling them on, stepped outside. The evening was silent in the cold. There was the faintest smell of moisture in the air, like the promise of snow banking over the mountains, preparing to sweep down over the reservation. The moon had broken through the clouds, casting a pearl-gray light over the parking lot and throwing long shadows around the vehicles.

  “I’ll follow you home.” Adam said.

  “No need to. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll call me soon?”

  “I’ll call you,” Vicky said, sliding behind the steering wheel of the Jeep.

  THE AA MEETING had let out at nine, but it was ten minutes later before Father John had helped Leonard finish locking up Eagle Hall and started for the residence. He looked forward to the meetings every week—the sense of purpose and resolve that permeated the atmosphere. He felt stronger afterward, the thirst weaker, receding into the past where it belonged.

  Three pickups were still parked in Circle Drive, and Leonard and several others who had been at the meeting huddled together close to the vehicles, their voices cutting through the moonlight that flooded the grounds. Father John gave them a wave as he walked past, then thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and dipped his chin into the folds of the collar. His boots scraped against the ice-hard ground.

  He was halfway across the field enclosed by Circle Drive, the frozen stalks of grass snapping under his boots, when he noticed the light glowing in the corner window of the museum. Catherine must have forgotten to turn off all the lights. And yet, he hadn’t noticed the light on his way over to the meeting earlier.

  He veered left toward the museum, ran up the porch steps, and tried the door. Locked. He fished the key ring out of his jeans pocket, moving sideways down the porch toward the glowing window as he did so. Everything looked normal in the entry, except for the light spilling from beneath the closed door to Christine Nelson’s office. His breath made a little smudge on the glass pane. Christine Loftus, he reminded himself.

  He walked back to the door, jiggled the key in the lock, and stepped inside. A rush of warm air came at him like wind out of a tunnel. In the gallery ahead, a residue of light played over the photographs of long-dead Arapahos. He started toward the office and stopped. A sound, almost imperceptible, like the sound of snow. He stood very still. The next sound, when it came, was the hard, definite thud of a drawer pushed shut.

  He moved closer, took hold of the knob, and threw the door open. Seated behind the desk was a large man who looked to be in his early fifties, with a squared-jaw; dark, bushy eyebrows; and reddish, short-cropped hair. He was thumbing through papers in one of the folders scattered over the desk.

  “What are you doing here?” Father John said.

  “Father O’Malley, the pastor, I presume.” The man flipped over a page, not looking up. “I’ve been expecting you.” He lifted his massive chin and stared across the desk with eyes as opaque and steady as stone. “Where’s my wife, pastor?”

  “Eric Loftus. How’d you get in here?”

  Loftus threw back his head and gave a loud guffaw. “Took about half a second to get through the lock on the front door. Could’ve cleaned out your precious artifacts and all those Curtis photos before anybody knew I was here. I want my wife, pastor, and you were the last man to see her.”

  “The FBI and police are looking for her.”

  A bushy eyebrow shot up. “A fed assigned to an Indian reservation, a detective in a two-bit town, a bunch of Indian policemen. Give me a break, pastor. They’re chasing their asses around. Some bastard took her and trashed her place. I figure you got a good idea who it was.”

  “You figure wrong, Loftus. If I had any idea of what happened to your wife, I’d take it to the fed.”

  “Think about it pastor. You know the people on the rez. A lot of them came to see the photographs, judging by what people here been telling me.” The man drummed his knuckles on the desk. “Maybe somebody started hanging around, getting interested in the curator. You understand what I’m saying? Some Arapaho having fantasies about my wife. Maybe he followed her out of here Monday evening. Anybody like that come to mind, pastor?”

  Father John didn’t take his eyes away, a new picture emerging in his head. The man who made people disappear had a face. “Maybe you followed her out of here,” he said. “Maybe you wanted her to come back to you and she refused.”

  Loftus broke into what passed for a smile. Only the right side of his face changed, as if the left half were paralyzed. Knuckles popped white out of the hand bunched into a fist on the desk. “You’re a brave man, pastor. You don’t know how brave. If I wanted my wife to disappear, she would have gone on a long trip. At least that’s how it would’ve looked. No apartment trashed. The work of an amateur!” He threw his head back and emitted a grunting noise. “I assure you I am not an amateur.”

  Loftus leaned back, set one elbow on the armrest, and began rubbing at his chin. The room was stuffy. From outside came the murmur of voices, brittle in the cold. “I’m going to let your remark pass,” he said. “What I want is my wife. I had her figured for Europe, traipsing around the museums. Maybe Mexico City. Sooner or later she’d come to her senses, or run out of whatever money she stole from me, whichever came first. Call me up and beg to come back, like she always does.” The half-smile returned. “Never figured she’d hole up in an Indian museum across the mountain, but Christine is full of surprises. Explains why I could never get her out of my system. So what do you say, pastor? Maybe somebody else couldn’t get her out of his system.”

  “It’s your theory,” Father John said. He was thinking that the man could be right. Christine could have attracted a stalker. She was a striking woman. But Loftus was a one-man vigilante committee, and he had no intention of encouraging the man.

  “Let’s consider other possibilities.” Another thump on the desk. “Maybe she went to meet somebody. Notice anybody hanging around that evening?”

  “Take your theories to the fed, Loftus. I want you out of here.”

  “So you’re not going to help me.” Loftus pushed himself to his feet. He was close to Father John’s height, about six foot four, and outweighed him by thirty pounds. A big man with pawlike hands and a neck like a tree stump. “I heard about you, the Indian priest. You’re gonna protect those Indians no matter what. But if one of them is responsible for hurting my wife . . .” He drew his mouth into a tight line a moment before going on. “I’m gonna hold you responsible.” He picked up the folder. “This here stuff about the exhibit is mine.”

  “Leave the folder and get out of here.”

  “You think you’re man enough to take it away from me?”

  “Don’t try me, Lof
tus,” Father John said, locking eyes with the man. God, it was like facing a stone wall. But this was a game of bluff, like the games on the streets of Boston when he was a kid and some bully blocked his way home from baseball practice in the half-light of dusk, traffic screaming by. Whoever blinked lost the game, and he’d learned not to blink. He had the sense that Loftus had learned the same lesson.

  There was the swoosh of the front door opening, the click of footsteps crossing the entry. Father John kept his eyes on the man a few feet away. He could sense the weight of bodies displacing the air behind him and hear the quick intakes of breath.

  “Everything all right, Father?” Leonard’s voice.

  “This man’s just leaving,” Father John said.

  Loftus shrugged and set the folder on the desk, his gaze on the four Arapahos in the doorway. “Next time I’ll remember that you have body guards,” he said. Then he swung around and, shouldering his way past, walked into the entry. The front door slammed shut, rattling the window.

  “You okay, Father?” Leonard patted Father John’s shoulder as if he were checking for some injury.

  “I’m fine,” he assured the Indian.

  “We seen you going to the museum and decided we’d better check, make sure everything was all right. Museum’s supposed to be closed this time of night. Who was he?”

  “Eric Loftus. He’s married to the curator.”

  The man’s eyes softened. “Poor sonnabitch. He’s gotta be worried sick.”

  “He’s looking for her.” Father John flipped off the light switch and walked the Indians across the entry and out onto the porch. They waited while he locked the door. “Thanks for coming in,” he said as they started across the grounds in a perfect V, Leonard and the others heading down Circle Drive for the pickups, Father John cutting through the field toward the residence. Through the cottonwoods across the grounds, he could see the lights of an SUV turning onto Seventeen-Mile Road.

  LIGHT FLICKERED FROM the living room into the dimness of the entry. The television was on, a low growl of voices talking over one another. Father John pitched his coat onto the bench and went into the room. Damien was slouched on the sofa, gripping the remote in one hand. On the television screen, Senator Jaime Evans flashed a smile from across the country, dodging down a corridor past a cordon of reporters who thrust out microphones and shouted questions: “Is it true you intend to announce your candidacy for the presidency, senator?” “Senator, senator, will you be making the announcement next week in Wyoming?” “What chance do you have of winning your party’s nomination?”

  “Gentlemen!” The senator stopped walking and slowly turned toward the crowd of reporters. He lifted one hand, palm outstretched, patience and exasperation mingling in the handsome face. His light-colored hair looked wind tossed, as if he’d just gotten in from riding across the pasture. But he looked comfortable in a dark suit and white shirt with a red tie knotted smartly at his throat. He waited until the medley of voices subsided. “I see we have ladies here.” He flashed another smile. “Gentlemen and ladies, all in good time, all in good time. I will announce my decision next Monday in my home state of Wyoming. As for my chances of winning my party’s nomination, let me say that should I seek the nomination, I would fully intend to win. Thank you!” He gave the crowd a wave and slipped inside a massive door that closed behind him.

  “And there you have it.” The scene switched to a reporter standing on the grounds of the capitol. “Senator Evans has refused to confirm the rumors that he already has a campaign staff in place and will formally launch his bid for the nomination next week. Back to you . . .”

  Damien clicked the mute button. “There goes the next president,” he said.

  19

  FATHER JOHN PARKED in front of the small house that might have erupted out of the plains, with siding the caramel color of the bare dirt yard. He left the engine running, the tape player on the seat beside him still playing the selection of Verdi arias he’d been listening to on the drive from the mission. The duet, Deh! la parola amara, was about to end when the front door opened. The bent figure of an old man stepped out of the shadows into the sunlight splashing over the stoop and motioned for him to come in. Father John turned off the engine and the tape player on the last haunting note.

  “Hungry, Father?” Max Oldman wanted to know as Father John walked past him into the living room.

  Father John laughed. Arapahos were always trying to feed him. “Elena made her usual delicious oatmeal this morning.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Father. Even when Josephine was alive, I didn’t get delicious oatmeal every morning.” The elder headed across the small room, dodging a coffee table covered with newspapers and Styrofoam cups. There was a jump in his walk, as if he were dragging his left hip. He was close to eighty, Father John guessed, frail and calloused looking, with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck between the frayed collar of his blue shirt and the uneven line of his gray hair.

  “Take a load off your feet.” Max flicked a bony hand at the sofa under the window before dropping into a recliner that still bore the imprint of his back and thighs.

  Father John sat down. He pulled off his jacket and cowboy hat and piled them on the cushion beside him. “How are you holding up, grandfather?” he asked, using the term of respect for an Arapaho elder, moving slowly into the reason for the visit.

  “Okay, I reckon.” The elder nodded, then he went on about the way fall was hanging on real pretty this year, the whole earth turning red and orange, with ripples of frost cutting across the open prairie. Then he was onto the wind storm a couple of weeks ago and the broken cottonwood branches. Had to get out the ladder and cut the branches off before they crashed down onto the roof.

  Father John winced at the image of the old man up on a ladder. “Call me next time,” he said. “I’ll come over and help you.” He waited a moment until the time seemed right, then he said, “I’m sorry about Denise.”

  A moist film glistened in the elder’s eyes. They were light colored for an Arapaho, hazel shading into green and lit with intelligence. They gave him a startling appearance, unexpected in the wrinkled brown face. “Sure tough to lose one of the younger generation. She was the granddaughter of my brother, you know.”

  Father John nodded. That also made her Max’s granddaughter, in the Arapaho Way.

  “Looks to me like you got your own problems, Father.” Max laid his arms over the armrest and tapped his fingers on the front edges. Long blue veins bulged on the top of his brown hands. “I hear that curator lady that was working for you went missing.”

  “She’s the reason I wanted to talk to you,” Father John said.

  “You think she got enough of Indian ways and took off?”

  Father John said that he didn’t think so. He started to explain that Christine’s apartment had been ransacked, then realized by the impatient way Max was bobbing his head that he’d already heard the gossip.

  “Don’t wish that white woman no harm,” Max said, head still bobbing. “But don’t surprise me that she ran herself into trouble. She was a pushy lady.”

  “She came to see you?”

  “That what you want to know about?”

  Father John smiled at the old man. It wasn’t polite to push and prod. He was asking for a gift.

  The elder shifted his frail body in the recliner, reached down along the side and pulled a handle. The footrest jumped up, and he crossed his legs and settled back. “The lady calls me last week and asks if she can come over and see me. Says she has respect for Chief Sharp Nose and being I come down from the chief, she’s got respect for me, too. Says she’s doing research and needs help. So I told her to come on out anytime she saw fit. Two hours later, she was sitting on that sofa, same place you’re sitting. Says she’s looking for old photographs. Called them vintage photographs. Says the photographs could be portraits of people in the photos at the Curtis exhibit.”

  Father John leaned forward and clasped his hands between
his knees. “Did she say she was trying to identify Sharp Nose’s daughter in one of the photographs?”

  An absorbed look came into the old man’s eyes, as if he were watching a movie inside his head. “Her name was Bashful Woman,” he said, a note of reverence sounding in his voice. “The curator lady said she wanted to give Bashful Woman proper recognition. She was gonna identify her so her story could be told, one way or another. Went on and on like that. I didn’t say nothing. Just sat here in my recliner and let her go on and nodded the way she’d think an old Indian like me oughtta nod.”

  Father John laughed and waited while Max recrossed his legs and cleared his throat. Finally, the old man said, “Lady wants to know if I got any of them vintage photographs. Maybe one of Bashful Woman? Said she’ll get me maybe a thousand dollars for one. A thousand dollars for an old photo? That’s right, she said, and I oughtta be ready to sell right now. She knew galleries that was lining up to pay. Maybe I could use the money, she said, and she gives my place the old eyeball, like maybe things wasn’t up to her fancy standards. All I had to do was get my old photos. Well, I got real tired of her pushing. I said, ‘That’s all very well and good, lady, but I don’t got any of them vintage photos, and if I did have images of my ancestors, I guess I wouldn’t be selling them to no galleries.’ She didn’t like that none.”

  Max cleared his throat again, and for a moment Father John thought that the story had ended. Then Max said, “That lady kept right on pushing. Wanted to know who else come down from Sharp Nose that might have old photos. I said, ‘Nobody, lady. Nobody’s gonna sell photos of the ancestors.’ I didn’t like getting impolite, but I figured she was gonna sit on my sofa all day. So I said, ‘That’s the end of the story, lady. That’s all I got to say.’ ”

  “Thank you, grandfather,” Father John said. Quiet settled around them a moment, except for the faint ticking of a clock somewhere in the house. “I’m worried about her,” he went on. “The police and the FBI are looking for her, but she seems to have vanished into thin air. I keep thinking that maybe Christine’s disappearance and Denise’s murder are connected somehow.” He shrugged. It was a hunch, that was all, the old urge to find a pattern in random events. “Is it possible that Christine went to Denise looking for old photos?”