Wife of Moon

by Margaret Coel

  He threw another glance over his shoulder. Still coming on. Not more than thirty yards away now, the headlights sweeping the ground between them. He caught up to Christine again, and this time he threw both arms around her shoulders, pulling her to him. “Listen to me,” he said. “Go to the cabin and lock yourself in. I’m going to get the cell and try to call the police. Do you understand?”

  “Eric’s here.” It came in a quick expulsion of breath. “He’ll make me come with him.” In the moonlight splashing across her face, he could see the raw, animal terror. She was breaking into pieces in his hands. “I’ll kill myself first,” she said.

  “Try to hold yourself together.” He gripped her shoulders hard and shook her a little in an effort to bring her back into one piece. “Run through the trees. I’ll meet you at the cabin. We can bolt the door. We’ll be safe there.”

  He had to move her sideways to steer her into the direction of the cabin. “Go,” he shouted, nudging her forward. He followed her with his eyes for a second to make sure she was on course. Something must have snapped together in her, because she started running full out, dodging through the trees, until she was nothing more than a dark, moving shadow.

  The headlights splaying around him were brighter, the engine revving up as the SUV plunged forward. The gap between them was closing. He started zigzagging toward the pickup’s taillights shining red through the trees, the headlights still behind, tracking his shadow. Left. Right. He yanked open the door and swept his hand over the dashboard for the hard plastic of the cell, then spotted the glint of metal on the floor. The SUV’s headlights swept over the pickup again as he grabbed the phone and pushed it into his jacket pocket.

  He could hear the vehicle grind to a halt behind him as he headed into the trees, picking his way by the moonlight falling through the branches. A car door slammed, then another. Sharp cracks in the brittle air. As he veered left, he caught sight of the waving light of a flashlight skimming across the ground and, behind the light, two dark shadows.

  God! Whoever they were, they would follow his tracks straight to the cabin.

  He kept moving, his eyes searching for a fallen branch. There was nothing except the little mounds of underbrush. Then, blue-tinged in the moonlight ahead, a broken branch dipping to the ground, sprays of smaller branches on the end. He plunged forward, grabbed the branch and started twisting. The bark tore into his hands. He kept twisting until, finally, the stalk broke free, almost throwing him off balance. He turned and ran back the way he’d come, a good twenty feet, then started forward again, dragging the branch behind until his tracks disappeared into a smooth carpet of pine needles, twigs, and brush.

  The flashlight was bobbing to his left now but it would turn right any minute, following his own back-and-forth trail until it ended. But the smoke—God, the smoke wafted like a cloud through the trees. They would follow the smoke.

  The gunshot, when it came, was like a burst of thunder, echoing through the trees, shaking the earth.

  Father John dropped the branch. There was a rifle in the cabin. A rifle and Christine. He sprinted for the cabin, his heart beating in his ears. No. No. No. Dear Lord, no. Don’t let it be.

  He burst into the small clearing, mounted the step to the porch, and grabbed for the latch. It held fast. “Christine,” he shouted. Then he was pounding the door with both fists, muffled thuds that reverberated around him. “Christine. Christine.”

  Another gunshot cracked the air, and this time he realized that it came from the trees. Father John started moving across the porch toward the sound, staying close to the wall, the logs scraping the sleeve of his jacket. He reached the corner and stopped, straining to hear the sound of footsteps, the snap of a branch under boots.

  Silence.

  He leaned out a couple of inches and peered around the stone chimney. Nothing but gray layers of moonlight on the ground, and beyond, the black line of the trees positioned like guards.

  “Turn around, Father O’Malley.”

  They were behind him. They’d come around the far side of the cabin while he’d been inching toward the chimney. He gripped the porch railing.

  “It looks like I was correct in assuming that the sound of gunshots would bring you to us.” The voice was closer.

  Father John pushed himself off the railing and turned around. Planted in front of the porch step, in black overcoats, were two men: Martin Quinn, with the short, narrow build of a boy; and Paul Russell, tall and beefy, looming over his boss. It was Russell who held the gun, and in Quinn’s hands, a flashlight the size of a truncheon.

  “Haven’t you done enough for the senator?” Father John said, surprised by the calm confidence in his voice. His muscles were tense, his hands curled into fists.

  “There is one more task that must be completed,” Quinn said. “And you, Father O’Malley, have lent your assistance and led us to the woman.”

  “You followed me here?”

  “One might say that.” A laugh gurgled out of the man. “Your assistant insisted we go to the museum and have another look at the Curtis exhibit. The woman whom you’d placed in charge after Christine Loftus made her unfortunate disappearance informed us that we had just missed you. She said you’d gone to an old log cabin looking for Christine. Naturally, we said we would like to be of help, and she was kind enough to give us the directions.”

  “Christine doesn’t have the photographs.” Father John didn’t move.

  “Is that what she tells you?” Quinn shook his head, as if he were sadly disappointed. “I suspect the photographs and negatives are hidden here—in a log cabin in no man’s land.” Now the man emitted a shout of laughter, and the bulky man behind him laughed, too, mimicking his boss. The gun jumped in his hand.

  “Very clever, I must admit. No one would think to look here. I’m sure that T.J. Painted Horse and Christine Loftus”—another laugh, like a grunt—“an unlikely pair of criminals, wouldn’t you agree? I’m sure they convinced themselves they had found the perfect hiding place.”

  “How many people are you willing to kill, Quinn?”

  “The saga ends here,” the man said. “Senator Evans has lived long enough with this Damocles sword hanging over his head, never knowing when some crazy Indian will try to blackmail him and threaten to publish photographs that would do nothing except damage the name of a very fine family and stop a good man from becoming the next president.”

  “You killed Denise, didn’t you? Then you waited for T.J. and killed him.”

  The man shrugged and jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “Regrettable incidences, I’m afraid. There’s no end of fools on the reservation. Whenever Jaime Evans decides to run for another office, Indians start thinking the Evans family owes them.” He pulled his lips back into a sneer. “Now this white woman sticks her nose into this, and we have a new equation, do we not? Now we have a white woman with connections. If the senator refuses to pay her, she would know how to do the maximum amount of damage. We can’t let that happen, can we? Tell the woman inside to let you in.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Merely delaying the inevitable.” Quinn motioned to the man behind him, waving him forward. “Shoot the latch,” he said.

  Russell stepped onto the porch, moved close to the door, and pointed the gun at the latch. The shock of the bullet slamming into metal and wood ran along the floorboards. The door seemed to come unhinged, swinging inward, like a gate blowing in the wind.

  “Ah . . .” Quinn began, the look of satisfaction moving across the thin face.

  The blast sounded like a cannon. It burst through the swinging door, splintering the wood that dropped in shards onto the floor. Then another blast, and another. Everything was moving in slow motion—an old black-and-white film reeling itself out at half speed. The bulky man lifted off his feet, blown back across the step, his head pushed into the ground. And Quinn, behind him, staring down at the other man’s prone body, shock and horror replacing the satisfaction on his face. />
  Still another blast, this one lifting the small man into the air where he seemed to hang a moment before crumpling backward. Blood, pooling around the bodies, ran black on the ground.

  It was a moment before Christine appeared, still gripping the rifle, caressing it almost, like something that made her safe and secure.

  “Eric?” She pivoted toward Father John.

  “He’s not here, Christine.” He had to force his gaze away from the barrel pointing at him and meet the woman’s eyes. “There’s no one else here.”

  It took a moment for this to register, for the frozen fear in her eyes to begin to melt into comprehension. She turned toward the men at her feet, lined up one after the other, like a path leading from the porch toward the trees. “They shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

  Father John started toward her, his eyes riveted to the gun. His muscles felt glued together. “They were the ones in the SUV,” he said. The voice of a priest, a counselor. “Eric isn’t here. You’re okay.” Calm. Calm. “I’m going to take the rifle now, because you don’t need it anymore.”

  She seemed to tighten her grasp on the barrel, pulling it into her chest.

  “You don’t need the gun anymore,” he repeated. “Not anymore.” A mantra that he hoped would sound in her head. Not anymore. Not anymore.

  Was the muzzle dipping toward the floor, or was he only imagining that it was true? He waited another moment, then reached out and grabbed hold of the barrel. A second passed, two seconds—a lifetime—before he felt the barrel start to give.

  He lifted the gun out of her hands. “Let’s go inside.”

  She stared at him a moment, then turned and walked into the cabin. He stayed behind her. Dropping onto the bench across from the door, she said, “Are they dead?”

  “I think so.” Past the shattered door, across the porch, he could see the black holes gaping in the men’s chests, the pools of blood widening on the ground.

  “I’ll be right back,” he told her. Then he went back out and walked across the porch. He leaned around and set the rifle in the dark corner between the log wall and the stone chimney.

  He pulled his cell out of his jacket pocket as he came back inside. Christine was bent over, arms crossed, hugging herself and bobbing up and down. “What have I done, Father. God, what have I done?”

  He straddled the bench he’d pulled out into the center of the room earlier and punched in 911, keeping his gaze on the bobbing woman. The operator—a female voice—picked up on the second ring, and he told her that he was Father O’Malley, from St. Francis Mission. Two men named Martin Quinn and Paul Russell had been shot at the old log cabin near Black Mountain. They should send cars right away.

  “There’s a car in the vicinity. Do you need an ambulance?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes still on Christine. Then he told the operator to notify Gianelli.

  Before he’d hit the off key, he heard the scratching noise outside. Christine had heard it, too, because she shrank backward and stiffened against the walls, as if she could disappear into the logs.

  The noise stopped. The quiet seemed more intense, a noise unto itself. Then the scratching again, footsteps coming closer.

  An animal, Father John thought, then dismissed the idea. The footsteps of an animal lacked the purpose, the willed deliberation, of the noise outside. He got up, leaned toward the woman, and whispered: “Wait here. I’ll see who it is.” Then he stepped over to the shattered door and peered out into the moonlight streaming like a banner across the porch and over the prone bodies. At the end of the light, a bulky shadow bent over the lifeless head of Martin Quinn, then, coming closer, stooped to look into the face of Paul Russell.

  “Well, what do we have here, Father O’Malley?” Eric Loftus stepped around the bodies and came up onto the porch.

  33

  VICKY LOOKED DOWN at the headlights streaming through the gray light of Main Street, struggling to rein in the surge of impatience as Gianelli, stationed at his desk behind her, delivered a summation of what she’d spent the last thirty minutes laying out. Photographs of a hundred-year-old murder committed by Senator Evans’s grandfather, which proved how the Evans family had obtained a ranch floating on a lake of oil.

  Vicky heard the skepticism running through the summation and steeled herself for what was bound to come next: Granted, Senator Evans wouldn’t like the scandal if the photos became public. It would be embarrassing, but it would hardly derail his career. Face it, Vicky, nobody cares about a hundred-year-old murder.

  She turned and faced the man leaning back in a swivel chair, gaze fastened at the stacks of papers covering his desk, feet propped between the stacks. “What about the murder of Denise’s cousin twelve years ago?” she said.

  “Okay. Okay.” Gianelli swung his feet to the floor, lifted his bulky frame out of the chair, and walked over to the file cabinets. After thumbing through the files in the top drawer, he yanked one free, then sat back down. He opened the folder and stared at the top page. “October twenty-three, nineteen-ninety-two, the body of Lester Brave Wolf was found on the banks of the Little Wind River. Homicide victim. Shot in the head . . .”

  “He was executed,” Vicky said. The moccasin telegraph had reached all the way to the Denver law firm where she had just started working, and with the gossip had come the current of fear pulsating through the reservation. “The murder was never solved.”

  “Not for lack of trying.” The fed studied another page, then snapped the folder shut. “We just didn’t have the evidence, Vicky.”

  “Lester was part of the Sharp Nose family,” Vicky said, fighting back another surge of impatience. “Evans was elected to the Senate that November. If the photographs had been made public, Indians in Wyoming would have turned out to vote against him. He would have been defeated.”

  “Photographs,” Gianelli said, tapping the folder. “Where the hell are these photographs? All you’re giving me is a grandiose theory.”

  Vicky turned back to the window a moment. For an instant, headlights refracted in the black glass like a burst of fireworks.

  “I don’t know where they are,” she said, locking eyes again with Gianelli.

  “Maybe they don’t exist, Vicky. Maybe they’re just figments of the imagination, black-and-white pictures in your head. Maybe they’re part of an Arapaho legend about how the Evans family got the ranch.”

  The fed leaned forward and thumped the folder with his fist. “I have to see the photographs. Otherwise they aren’t real. None of this is real. Do you know what would happen if I involved Senator Evans in a murder investigation? In five minutes, I’d be packing my bag for a new assignment on the Bering Strait, and you know how long the nights are up there?”

  “The photographs exist, Ted. They belonged to Denise.” She could feel the truth of it. She could almost see the black-and-white images of Carston Evans, rifle lowered, and Bashful Woman crumpled onto the ground. She walked over and sat down on the other side of the desk. “Christine Loftus must have taken them. It would explain why she disappeared, wouldn’t it?”

  The phone had started ringing, but the fed kept his eyes on hers a long moment, as if he were allowing for the possibility. Finally he stretched his hand across the stacks of papers and picked up the receiver.

  “Special Agent Ted Gianelli,” he said, turning his gaze toward the window.

  There was a long pause before he blurted out, “I’m leaving now.” He hung up and got to his feet. “Seems that Father John found Christine at Black Mountain. Police just got a call that two people were shot . . .”

  “Shot!” Vicky jumped up. She clasped the edge of the desk, trying to stop the room from closing around her, choking off the air.

  “Take it easy, Vicky,” Gianelli came around the desk and took her arm. She felt a wave of gratitude for the strength in his hand. “John reported the shootings,” he said.

  She heard the sharp exhalation of her own breath, like the sound of air escaping from a punct
ured tire. God, what was wrong with her?

  She made herself turn toward the man beside her. He knew, she thought. Everyone knew. “Who, then?” she asked, summoning the most lawyerly tone she could manage.

  “The coroner hasn’t identified . . .”

  “Tell me, Ted.”

  “Martin Quinn and Paul Russell.”

  Vicky swallowed hard against the shout of triumph erupting inside her. “There’s an old cabin at Black Mountain. Christine must have been hiding there, and Evans’s men came after the photographs.”

  “I have to go,” Gianelli said.

  “I’m going, too.”

  The agent was already pulling on the leather jacket that had been draped over a hanger on the back of the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow and give you an update.”

  “T.J. was my client, Ted. He was killed for the photographs. I want to know what happened out there.” Vicky grabbed her coat from the back of the chair and followed the agent through the door and across the dimly lit entry to the stairway down to the street.

  “THIS ISN’T YOUR business, Loftus.” Father John stepped out onto the porch. “The police are on the way. Unless you want to be part of an investigation into a double shooting, I’d suggest you leave.”

  “Who pulled the trigger, Padre? You or my wife?” The man tossed his head forward like a bronco coming out of a chute, and for an instant, Father John thought that the man intended to crash past him into the cabin.

  Father John didn’t move, and this seemed to cause the other man to reconsider. He glanced around at the bodies. “Who are they?”

  “They worked for Senator Evans.”

  Loftus threw his head back and let out a shout of glee. “Ah,” he said. “The picture is clear. My wife got herself mixed up with the Indian councilman who didn’t like the idea of the senator and his good buddies drilling for methane gas on the rez. T.J. Painted Horse threatened to make trouble when the senator paid his visit, so the senator invoked the old code of the West: Shoot your enemy and ask questions later.” He stopped, his gaze still running over the prone bodies. “What was Christine? A witness when they shot the councilman’s wife? Oh, it’s making sense now. She’s been hiding out, just like I taught her. ‘Go to ground when things get hot,’ I said. ‘Get yourself supplies and hole up where nobody’s gonna come looking for you.’ I got it right, don’t I, Padre,” he said, looking back.