White Shell Woman

by James D. Doss

  The French-Canadian woman sighed. “I wish I had a nephew like Charlie.”

  “How are you getting along?”

  “Well, I’m miserable.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sorry I asked.

  “I got this terrible, throbbing headache. And my feet are all swole up.”

  “Seems like you got troubles at both ends.” Daisy cackled with rude laughter.

  “And in the middle too,” Louise-Marie whined.

  “Don’t tell me.”

  But she did. “I got the bleeding hemorrhoids.”

  Daisy recognized the opportunity, and immediately seized it by the neck. “Sounds like you need some medical attention.”

  “Doctors cost big money.” A thoughtful pause. “You got any homemade medicines that’d help me?”

  Artfully, the shaman hesitated. “Maybe.”

  “I’m suffering something awful.”

  “I could brew you some tea for the headache. And your swollen feet.”

  There was a hint of anxiety in Louise-Marie’s tone. “What would you put in it?”

  “Oh, a strip of birch bark. And just a tiny tad of clematis leaf.” With some aspirin.

  The sick woman brightened. “Could you do something about my hemorrhoids?”

  “I could make you something special.”

  The patient seemed doubtful. “Special how?”

  The Ute elder glanced at a row of jars and tins on a pine shelf over her kitchen table. “I could roll up some dried yerba de la negrita leaves with a little bit of tobacco. I generally paste it together with cow spit. When I can find a cow.”

  “Ugh—I don’t think I could get something that awful past my lips.”

  “You can put it in your mouth if you want to.” Daisy chuckled. “But you ought to do that first.”

  “First before what?”

  This was too easy. “It’s a suppository. So if you’re determined to taste it, you should do that before you—”

  “Please don’t be so graphic,” the patient said to her physician, “you’re making me ill.”

  It was always fun talking to Louise-Marie. “I could cure you in no time at all.” Now for the good part. “Of course I generally get paid for my services.”

  Louise-Marie’s voice took on a pitiful tone. “You know I’m a poor old widda-woman, Daisy. I don’t have much left from my Social Security after I pay the rent. And buy me a few things to eat.”

  “Don’t worry about money. We’ll barter. I fix you up some medicines, you do a little favor for me.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Last time I let you talk me into helping you I almost got arrested.”

  “This won’t be nothing like that,” Daisy snapped at the ingrate.

  “What would I have to do?”

  “Just bring that old car of yours out here and I’ll explain it.”

  Louise-Marie smiled into the telephone. “I’d rather you told me now.”

  “It’s nothing much—I need you to drive me somewhere.”

  “You’ll pay for the gas?”

  “Sure. You come out to my place early tomorrow morning. First, we’ll go to your place. I’ll doctor you up real good, then I’ll tell you where we’re going. We’ll have a real good time.”

  Louise-Marie’s hands began to tremble. Every time I let this old Indian woman talk me into doing something, I get into trouble.

  Daisy had set the hook. Now to reel in her catch. She took a deep breath. “So. Can I count on you?”

  The French-Canadian woman’s head ached. Her swollen feet hurt. Worst of all, it was painful to sit, even on a feather pillow. She desperately needed the shaman’s medications.

  Daisy shouted into the telephone. “Louise-Marie—are you coming out here or not?”

  She hesitated. It was a full half second before her brain turned to jelly and her mouth took charge. “I’ll be there.”

  9

  The Sun explained to the Twins that it was not safe for the people on the earth to possess this weapon they asked for. He said that the boys could use the weapon for a little while, but that he would have to reclaim it….

  —Sandoval, Hastin Tlo’tsi hee

  STOOD UP

  IT WAS TO be a glorious day. The dawning sun paused to kiss the mountains; the bald peaks blushed crimson.

  Though Charlie Moon had missed breakfast, he had stopped for coffee in Bayfield. The tribal investigator was feeling good about this Sunday morning’s business. He was driving the freshly washed Expedition with “Columbine Ranch” emblazoned on the driver’s door. The Ute was also freshly washed. And outfitted in his gray suit. With a new dove-gray Stetson to match. He pulled to a stop in front of Daisy’s trailer, mounted the unpainted pine porch, rapped his knuckles on the door.

  On a nearby ponderosa snag, a scruffy-looking raven ruffled her feathers and squawked an invective at the noisy intruder.

  But there was no response from inside Daisy Perika’s trailer home.

  He knocked again. Harder this time. “I’m here to take you to church. Let’s shake a leg.”

  The annoyed raven departed in a huff for the peaceful solitude of Cañon del Espíritu.

  All was quiet inside Daisy’s home. But it wasn’t a tense silence, like she was hiding inside. It was a hollow, empty quiet. He tried the door handle. Locked. Moon stepped off the porch. For a long moment, he stood among the thirsty junipers and stared at the trailer. All the shades were drawn. She isn’t here. He examined the ground and found her footprints. Maybe a couple of hours old. There were also fresh tire tracks, three of them with little tread left. And all four with different tread designs. Who would be driving a jalopy with an assortment of worn-out tires? Daisy’s cousin Gorman Sweetwater might have come to get the old woman in his Dodge pickup. But these tire marks looked a bit narrow for a full-sized pickup. And Gorman had heavy mud tires on the rear. Why do I care who it was? Any way you sliced it, Daisy had left with someone early this Sunday morning. Has she forgotten I was driving all the way down here to take her to church? This duty had gotten him up very early on this fine morning. And I missed my breakfast.

  But maybe Aunt Daisy had gotten sick, and used her new cell phone to summon a kindly neighbor to haul her to the clinic in Ignacio. Staring at the assorted tire tracks didn’t make things any clearer. Moon cranked up the Expedition and departed. After church, I’ll stop in Granite Creek. Have some breakfast with Scott Parris. April Tavishuts had been a student at the university there. Maybe the chief of police would know something about the murdered Ute woman. And about her university friends. Scott might even know something about someone who wasn’t April’s friend.

  DRIVING MISS DAISY

  The black Oldsmobile was much like its occupants. It had seen far better days. And it had a hard time getting started on cold mornings. As the vehicle moved along a narrow ribbon of Colorado blacktop, the tailpipe spewed a trail of noxious blue fumes in its wake.

  Daisy Perika—who had never learned to drive an automobile—was hunched forward nervously in the passenger seat. Louise-Marie, whose skills as an operator of lethal machinery were just sufficient to make her dangerous, sat placidly behind the steering wheel. And because she was the very opposite of a tall person, also somewhat under it. Her view of the road was a narrow arch between the rusting hood and the black plastic circle she gripped with frail, liver-spotted hands. Her brow was knitted into a worried frown. “What if Charlie Moon is there?”

  Daisy smiled. “He won’t be.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  Louise-Marie rolled her eyes.

  The Ute woman cast a wary glance at her dwarfish chauffeur. “I don’t know how you ever got a driver’s license.”

  The French-Canadian woman turned up her nose. “I never asked for one.”

  “Thanks for telling me that. Now I feel better.”

  The driver squinted. “What’s that up there by the road—a horse?”

  “It’s a sign.”
/>   “What’s it say?”

  Daisy squinted. “‘Speed Limit—Sixty.’”

  “Sixty?” Louise-Marie frowned at her speedometer needle, which had been stuck at a point slightly below fifteen miles per hour since Mr. Nixon had occupied the Oval Office. “We’re all right then.” She looked merrily at Daisy and attempted a joke. “Wouldn’t want to break the law, would we? Ha-ha.” The old automobile veered well across the center line.

  “Watch where you’re going,” the Ute woman yelled.

  Louise-Marie overcorrected, bringing the right wheels onto the shoulder to scatter a small colony of terrified prairie dogs. “This is a terrible rough road. They ought to fix it.”

  “You’re driving on the dirt!” Silly old fool.

  “You know,” the elderly driver said, “when you asked me to help you with this business, I almost said no.”

  “You can still back out,” the Ute woman muttered.

  The driver sighed. “You’re always getting me into some kinda trouble. Like that time when we almost got put in jail. But then I said to myself: ‘Louise-Marie—what are you so worried about? You’re almost ninety, so you’re not going to live much longer anyway.’” She chuckled. “So I said: ‘Don’t always be thinking of playing it safe. Take a chance. Help your friend Daisy and have some fun at the same time.’”

  “Next time,” Daisy grumbled, “play it safe.”

  As they headed up a long grade, the aged auto gasped. Coughed. Strangled. In a fruitless effort to get more gas to the engine, the driver pumped up and down on the accelerator pedal. The resultant lurching made the Ute elder nauseous.

  Again, the Olds gradually drifted over the yellow stripe.

  Daisy gave up worrying. If I die, I die. Better than ten years in a nursing home.

  They topped the ridge, straddling the center line. And encountered a massive Shamrock gas tanker. The chromeplated behemoth swerved with a sickening screech of tires, missing the Oldsmobile by a mere hand’s breadth. There was an angry blatt from the diesel.

  In response, Louise-Marie jammed the heel of her palm onto the Oldsmobile’s horn button. “Road hog,” she muttered in righteous indignation. “They shouldn’t let people like that out on the road.” She looked anxiously to her passenger, who had accepted this latest encounter with Death as a just reward for trusting her life to a madwoman. “We could’ve been killed!” Louise-Marie wailed.

  Daisy clenched her jaw. Yes. But at least it would’ve been over.

  THE FOREMAN’S WIFE

  The hairy-faced straw boss of the Columbine Ranch was off somewhere attending to his employer’s business. Which is to say that Pete Bushman was replacing the alternator on a John Deere tractor. In Pete’s absence, it was up to his good wife, Dolly, to look after business at home.

  Having lived on the Columbine spread for much of her life, Mrs. Bushman was accustomed to the quiet of this vast space between the towering ranges of granite mountains. It was therefore not surprising that she heard the vehicle coming long before it was near the foreman’s house, which served as a checkpoint for those who claimed to have business at the ranch headquarters farther down the graveled road. When the aged black Oldsmobile approached, Dolly was already stepping off the front porch. She waited under the gaunt limbs of a century-old cottonwood. The ranch foreman’s wife could see only one person in this dilapidated Detroit rattler. And the woman she saw in the Oldsmobile was in the passenger seat. Who was driving this black bucket of bolts—was it guided by some sort of perverse witchcraft? Dolly stood as one quick-frozen by the icy touch of a witch’s finger. As she backed away two steps, the seemingly pilotless vehicle eased to a wheezing halt under the cottonwood. Dark fumes stuttered from the puckered mouth of a dangling exhaust pipe. When the aged woman rolled down the passenger-side window, Dolly was relieved to spot the still smaller woman, her gray head barely high enough to see above the rim of the steering wheel.

  The ranch woman moved cautiously forward. “Can I help you?”

  The dark woman in the passenger seat responded. “I’m Daisy Perika.” This was offered as if it were sufficient explanation.

  Dolly leaned over to take a hard look at this odd pair of tourists, who had presumably taken a wrong turn. “Do you have business at the Columbine?”

  The passenger nodded. “Sure. I’m Charlie Moon’s aunt.”

  Dolly smiled. “Oh. Of course—you’re his aunt Daisy.”

  This white woman is a little slow on the pickup. “We’ve come to see Charlie.”

  Louise-Marie LaForte blushed at her companion’s blatant lie.

  The ranch woman was warily apologetic. “Mr. Moon isn’t here just now. He left before daylight. I think he’s gone to Ignacio.” She hesitated. “In fact, I believe he was headed down there to take you to church.”

  Daisy Perika waved this off. “That’s what he said, did he?”

  “Why yes, he—”

  “These young men,” Daisy said with a knowing smirk. “Always claiming they’re going to do some favor for a poor old relative. But I bet you can imagine what he’s up to.”

  Dolly could not imagine. “You’re welcome to wait, of course. I’ll put on a pot of fresh coffee and—”

  Daisy shook her head. “Don’t bother yourself. We’ll go up to Charlie’s house and wait there till he gets back.”

  The ranch foreman’s wife looked uncertainly up the road. “Well, I suppose that’ll be all right—seeing as how you’re his aunt and everything. The place isn’t locked.” Maybe it should be.

  “Charlie’s been trying to get me to move up here and live with him,” the Ute elder said. “He’s fixed up a little shack for me—across the lake from the big house.”

  Dolly backed a step away from the Oldsmobile. “Mr. Moon prepared the guest cabin for you. It’s really very nice—I cleaned it up myself.” She pointed up the road. “Once you’re at the ranch headquarters, you could drive around the lake and have a look—”

  Daisy snorted. “Not me. I don’t intend to live in no cowboy’s shack. Prob’ly full of ticks and lice and bedbugs.” She turned to her driver. “Let’s go, Frenchy.”

  And off they went.

  Dolly stood under the cottonwood, staring at the trail of yellow dust kicked up by the Oldsmobile’s worn tires. “Poor Charlie Moon,” she whispered.

  Pete Bushman was seated at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee. He listened to his wife’s account without interrupting. When she had run out of breath, he shook his head.

  “You don’t think I did wrong, do you?”

  Still he said nothing. Knowing this would unsettle the missus.

  Dolly’s hands twisted her apron into a rope. “I mean, she is his aunt. It’s not like I let some strange woman go up to the ranch headquarters.”

  “Charlie don’t say a lot about his aunt.” He grinned through the grizzled beard. “But from what little he does say, she is kind of a strange woman. Always gettin’ herself into scrapes.” Pete looked up at his wife. “And you say there was two of ’em?”

  Dolly nodded. “The other one was driving that old car. She never said a word.”

  “Welllll,” he drawled, “I wouldn’t worry.”

  Mrs. Bushman was immensely relieved. “You wouldn’t?”

  “Nope. Wasn’t me who let them two old biddies go up to the ranch headquarters.”

  She slapped at him with a dish towel.

  Pete was on a roll. “Maybe this one who says she’s his kin ain’t his aunt atall. Maybe the pair of ’em went up there to steal the boss blind.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “But me, I ain’t worried. It’ll be up to you to do the explainin’ to Charlie Moon.”

  “Oh hush, Peter. You’re such an awful tease.” But Dolly had a hard time keeping the wan smile from slipping off her face.

  BAD NEWS

  Charlie Moon—having attended mass at St. Ignatius—was at the Sugar Bowl Cafe in Granite Creek. Despite the wasted trip to his aunt’s home, this Sabbath day was turning out well
enough. The Ute rancher-policeman was enjoying a late breakfast with his best friend.

  “I’m glad you called,” the chief of police said.

  “I’m surprised you were able to get away from your fiancée.”

  A small shadow passed over Scott Parris’s face. “Anne’s off to British Columbia. Chasing some kind of story about lumber and tariffs.”

  “These journalists lead complicated lives.”

  “I hear your life is getting complicated.”

  Moon thought this remark was about the love of his life. Meaning Camilla Willow. “Meaning what?”

  “Word’s out you’re doing investigative work for the tribe. And after all that talk about being done with police work for good.”

  “It’s not regular police work,” Moon said.

  “How so?”

  “For one thing, I won’t be hauling in drunks or breaking up bar fights. Or pulling broken bodies out of car wrecks.”

  “That’s three things. What will you be doing?”

  Moon shrugged. “Not sure. I’m reporting to the tribal chairman. When Oscar Sweetwater wants something looked into, I’ll look into it.”

  “Sounds like regular police work to me,” Parris smirked. “You got a boss and everything. Next thing I hear, you’ll be punching a time clock.”

  Moon was reminded that he was required to list his hours on an official time sheet. But, as Oscar Sweetwater had said, this was just for the auditors. “I’ve got some choice in the work I do.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Sure. If I’m too busy with ranch work, I can turn down an assignment. But if I’m interested in something that involves the tribe, I can spend some time working on it. Without asking Oscar’s permission.”

  “So what are you interested in right now?” As if I didn’t know.

  “A killing.” As if you didn’t know.

  “Any particular killing?”

  “April Tavishuts.”

  Parris spread low-fat margarine on a slab of whole-wheat toast. “The young Ute woman they found down at Chimney Rock?”

  Moon nodded.

  “I know about her.”