The Thirteenth Skull

by Bonnie Ramthun

  “Not where you come from,” Tracy said, squatting beside Eileen and taking the washed plates from her daughter. She nodded at an empty packsack and Joe took the hint. As she dried, he stacked the plastic dishes away. “Sheriff King is – was more than you saw, Eileen. He was a good sheriff and a good man, and he died trying to protect us.” Tracy’s voice thickened and Joe saw with distressed surprise that she was weeping.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Eileen said. “I didn’t mean it that—”

  “You never saw him as anything but what he was in high school. But he was more than that. Do you remember the Martinez family?”

  “Sure, they worked for you when you started the business.”

  “They weren’t really named Martinez. They were packed in a station wagon that broke down on I-24. They were illegals from Guatemala, Eileen, and Sheriff King brought them to us. They’d broken down in a snowstorm after spending all their money to buy a horrid ancient car and if they’d been returned to Guatemala they’d have surely been killed. Rick brought them to us because they were hungry, and cold, and the littlest one was sick.”

  “I remember her,” Eileen whispered. “Elena. Like my name in Spanish.”

  “So by the time we got everything straightened out we were part of what is pretty much an underground railroad,” Tracy said. “And Sheriff King was a part of it. We found the church that had sheltered them in Texas and now we help people who can’t become citizens the normal way. He did it – Rick King.”

  “You never told me,” Eileen said, her face stunned, her hands rewashing the same plate over and over again.

  “Hiding illegal immigrants is illegal. I don’t want to go to jail,” Tracy said. “I certainly don’t want you to go to jail. But you have to know now, Eileen, because of Rick King. We’ll get a new family, get them fake green cards and start over, but I don’t know how we’re going to do it without Rick. He was a man in every sense of the word. He just didn’t show it on the outside.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eileen said in a low, miserable voice. “I don’t know what else to say. I wish I could say it to him.”

  “Maybe you will,” Joe said. Both women looked at him in surprise. “He seemed like a darned hard guy to kill, to me. Just because Doug got blood on his shirt doesn’t mean King didn’t get away.”

  “That’s a good thought,” Eileen said with a smile that meant she thought it wasn’t a particularly bright one.

  “On that note, let’s go sit by the fire, kitchen workers,” Tracy said with a sigh. She wiped at her face with her hands. “We’re done here.”

  They walked together to the fire and Joe took Eileen’s hand as they walked. She let him hold her hand but she was obviously buried in thoughts, and they weren’t good ones.

  “This is perfect,” Ted said to them as they joined the group by the fire. Ted was leaning back and looking at the sky. Joe saw Jorie’s expression as he and Eileen sat down and, for the first time, felt sorry for her. She’d finished her crumbly energy bar and was sitting cross-legged, her hands in her lap, staring into the fire, her face lost and bewildered and tired. Tracy, who took her seat next to Jorie, patted the girl’s knee gently. Joe saw Howie looking at Jorie and wondered what he was going to say.

  “I’ve never been the prey, before,” Howie commented, rummaging in his carry pack. He pulled a substantial bottle of Scotch from the pack and carefully carved away the lead seal with his pocketknife. “Adds a bit of spice, doesn’t it?”

  “We were tracked by that grizzly in Alaska, once,” Jimmy said. He accepted the bottle from Howie, who’d taken a swallow, and took a mouthful. He passed it to Paul, who took a drink and passed it to Tracy.

  “Yeah, we hunted that bear until we realized he was hunting us,” Howie said. “That was tense. This is – more interesting. I’m damn sorry about the sheriff.”

  Jorie, who had been handed the bottle, looked at it without expression. Joe understood how Jorie could be in such shock over Beryl Penrose. Beryl was the last person he’d expected to be Jon McBride’s murderer. He had, in fact, thought that Jorie was most probably the killer.

  “No meat in that bottle,” Howie said in a surprisingly gentle tone. “Just grain.”

  Jorie put her chin in the air and took an enormous mouthful of Scotch. She choked and wheezed, then said hoarsely: “I’ve never had Scotch before. Sorry.”

  “You didn’t spit it out,” Howie said. The firelight lit his grinning face like a carved pumpkin and he stretched his legs to the fire. “Our guide in Alaska, his name was Dave, and Dave told us all about grizzlies and black bears. With black bears, you wear bells on your clothing and you carry pepper spray to discourage them if they get too close to you. You try to avoid grizzlies altogether, and the best way is to recognize their droppings.”

  “A bear must leave a big pile,” Joe said.

  “They do, and Dave taught us how to recognize the scat from grizzly and from black bear. Black bear scat is always full of berries, because that’s what they like to eat most. And grizzly bear scat, well,” Howie paused and looked around the campfire.

  “Well?” Doug demanded.

  “Grizzly bear scat is full of little bells and it smells real strongly of pepper spray.” Howie concluded his joke to general laughter and grinned. “So, speaking of bears, who’s going to tell us the real story of the Mateo Tepee?”

  “The what?” Ted said, taking the bottle from Jorie. He’d vacated a canvas chair for a sleeping pad, set lengthwise. Lucy slipped back into the firelight and settled on the pad with Ted. Lucy fitted her shoulder against his chest and sighed deeply. She, too, took a healthy swig of Howie’s Scotch after Ted had taken a drink.

  “Mateo Tepee,” Eileen said. “Bad House, or Black Place, if you will. Named the Devils Tower by Colonel Richard Dodge. He was the commander of the military escort for the U.S. Geological expedition in charge of mapping the Black Hills in 1875. I think Mom should tell the story. She’s the best.”

  The bottle came to Joe. It was the MacAllan Scotch, he saw, a fine brand. Joe was a beer drinker by nature, and that not often. But the Scotch tasted absolutely perfect after the seared beef and the hot sweet corn. He gave the bottle to Eileen, who took a small mouthful. She was sitting next to him on one of the sleeping pads. The diamond he’d given her glittered fabulously in the firelight, like a star set on her hand instead of the sky. She swallowed and handed the bottle to Nolan.

  “Tracy?” Paul asked. Joe understood that Howie’s set-up had been both kind and generous. A retelling of an ancient legend was much better than talking about Beryl Penrose and whether or not she, a murderer, was already a victim of the other killers who walked the Wyoming night. Or Richard King, the sheriff who hadn’t listened to them and who was now dead forever. Stories were better right now. Stories, like sleep and food, were a way to deal with what had gone so terribly wrong.

  “All right,” Tracy said. “Doug, when you’re done with that you can pass the bottle right back down the line.” Doug, who was at the end of the semicircle of people around the fire, nodded and raised the Scotch, the level of which was dropping rapidly in the bottle. The bulk of the rock outcropping jutted over the fire, protecting it but also preventing Doug from passing the bottle back to Howie. Doug returned the bottle to Nolan and Mark, both of whom floated like disembodied faces in the dark. They’d cleaned their faces and hands for supper but the rest of their bodies were still camouflaged.

  “Here’s my story of Mateo Tepee, or Bad Place. I can tell this true story because my grandmother was a native. She was Lakota Sioux and Kiowa and she told it to me.”

  “Really?” Joe whispered into Eileen’s hair.

  “Really,” Eileen whispered back. She was not Tracy’s blood daughter but she looked every inch her mother’s child, cross-legged and slender and strong as a strung bow. She reached out and put her hand on his calf. Her hand was warm and gentle, and he felt like pulling her into the darkness and making love to her immediately. He put his hand over hers, ins
tead, and listened to Tracy’s story.

  “Many thousands of years ago a group of seven maidens were gathering summer berries here. You may have heard that they were attacked by a bear, but no, this is not so. This place has been a bad place since the earth was born. Some places are like this, always dark and evil. Some places are strong and good. This place, even before the Tepee appeared, was bad.”

  Tracy looked around the fire. She was cross-legged like her daughter, and the light smoothed the planes and lines of her face and made her look ageless. Her dark eyes sparkled but her mouth was straight and firm. Joe’s elbow was nudged and he accepted the bottle from Nolan. A second mouthful of Scotch would be enough, he decided. He passed the bottle to Eileen, who passed it without drinking again.

  “The story that Richard Dodge heard was a legend of seven maidens and an enormous bear. He understood and repeated only part of the story. The seven maidens were not alone, you see. Their brother, who was gathering berries with them, fell down and began to growl and foam and grow long hair.”

  “A werewolf?” Mark asked.

  “Le Loup Garou?” Tracy asked. “The French called the werewolf Le Loup Garou. But the Europeans only knew a tiny fraction of what we call the manitou.”

  “Manitou,” Howie said dreamily, stretched out in his armchair. “What’s a manitou?”

  “Some say it is a shape-changer,” Tracy said. “A manitou can take a shape; a bear, a wolf, a mountain lion. The wind. The rocks. Or a man. Some manitou are always evil, always searching, always killing.”

  “Their brother was a manitou?” Jorie asked. Her eyes had lost their dulled, shocked look. Tracy’s story had captured her, too.

  “Perhaps,” Tracy said with a raised eyebrow. “Perhaps not. Perhaps the manitou had been captured, bound to the rocks or the trees, and the brother was somehow – open. A portal that the manitou could use. So the boy became more than a bear.”

  “A were bear,” Ted said. Joe saw that Ted’s arm was around Lucy. Beyond them he could see the tiny lump that was Hank, asleep in a camping bag. Two glowing green eyes by Hank’s sleeping bag was Zilla, alert and on guard, sitting by Hank’s side. Zilla’s eyes blinked at Joe; she knew he was looking at her.

  “A manitou,” Tracy said. “More terrible than we can imagine. The seven maidens ran through the bushes, the thorns catching at their clothes and tearing their skin, and the manitou came after them. They knew they wouldn’t escape and they refused to scatter. Some might survive if they separated, but certainly the manitou would get one or more. The sisters wouldn’t leave each other. So they scrambled to the top of an enormous tree stump, the remnant of a forest giant that had fallen at last to the ground. There they stopped, exhausted, bleeding, with no more running left in them. They prayed for a quick death, these girls. They didn’t pray for help, because that is not our way. They prayed that they would all be taken, and that it would be over soon. And behind them, crashing through the brush, came the manitou, the gigantic thing that used to be their brother but was now much more than a bear.”

  “Oh, no,” Lucy whispered.

  “And then the Great Spirit touched the trunk of this giant tree. My grandmother said that the tree was good, as good things can grow in bad places. That the only goodness in the entire forest was the remnant of this gigantic oak, a place where the manitou could not reach with his blank face and hungry claws. And the tree trunk began to grow, and turned into stone, and continued to grow until it was a great monolith in the sky.”

  “Devils Tower,” Mark said.

  “Mateo Tepee,” Tracy corrected. “The American scout, Richard Dodge, got it all wrong. The evil isn’t the Tower; the evil is what surrounds the Tower. If they’d understood the legend they would have called it God’s Tower, not the Devils Tower. But they understood what they felt when they were here, when they saw the Tower in the sky.”

  “They felt uneasy,” Lucy said. “Very strange.”

  “Yes,” Tracy said with a sly smile. “But do you feel strange looking at the Tower, or do you feel strange because of where you are standing?”

  There was a long silence, broken only by the crackling of the fire.

  “Oh, that’s terrific!” Howie laughed. He held the bottle again, diminished to an inch at the bottom. He upended the bottle and finished it off, then carefully replaced the cork seal and put the bottle back in his pack. “Now we know the real story, don’t we? So were the maidens saved?”

  “The story you’ll hear says that the maidens were taken into the sky, to become the Pleiades constellation,” Tracy said. “A group of seven stars. That, too, is not the real truth as we know it to be. Their tribespeople rescued the maidens when the manitou had gone back into the earth again. Or how else would their story be known? The truth is, after the girls were back with their tribe they saw the stars appear above the Tower, and realized the Great Spirit had set them there to remind them of His greatness and His mercy.”

  “The Great Spirit sounds a lot like God to me,” Lucy said.

  “To me, too,” Tracy replied. “And considering where we are, I think a prayer to our God sounds just right.” She smiled at Lucy and held her hands out. Paul took her hand immediately. Jorie took a moment to figure out what Tracy wanted, but then she took Tracy’s hand. They joined hands, not a circle but a semi-circle, and Tracy bowed her head. Joe bowed his head, his left hand holding Lucy Giometti’s hand and his right holding Eileen’s.

  “Great Spirit,” Tracy said, “God the father, as you are to every people on earth, protect us from the evil that walks the earth this night. Help us to safety. Take our brother, Richard King, into your heavenly embrace. Help our friend and sister, Beryl, see a way back to your light and salvation. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Joe said, and heard the whisper from all sides. Tracy’s switch from Lakota wise woman to Christian was so abrupt his head spun. There was something in her words that reminded him of Sully in the clouds, Sully with her laser-spear and her laugh. His vision, or dream, of Sully seemed to fit into Tracy’s world more than the one he thought he lived in. A God who would make an enormous stone Tower to save a group of frightened girls seemed more like the God that Sully fought for than the vague, white-haired old guy image that he’d imagined in Sunday school.

  “So what happened to the brother, Bre’r Were-bear?” Howie asked, after they’d dropped hands. Jorie’s head was still bowed. She was obviously struggling with tears.

  “That’s the unhappy part of the story,” Tracy said. “A manitou never leaves a victim alive. The manitou had to go back to earth because it destroys its victim unless it feeds. That’s the legend. That’s the way we look at the Mateo Tepee.”

  “What a story,” Lucy said.

  “Yeah, but the three-quarters of me that’s Minnesota Swede says, well, I’m not sure about that, dontcha know,” Tracy said, adopting a perfect singsong Minnesota accent. “But we Swedes don’t have great ghost stories, so I have to use my Lakota grandmother when we’re telling stories around the fire.”

  “A ghost Lutefisk?” Nolan suggested. “An evil Swedish meatball?”

  “Off to bed, everyone,” Paul said. “I’m going to put out the fire after everyone brushes his teeth and washes up. Sleep in your clothes, I’m afraid. We’ll get fresh things tomorrow after this is trip is over.”

  “I’m being sent to bed,” grumped Howie, as relaxed as a cat in his canvas chair. “I want to stay up and listen to ghost stories.”

  “We need to be well-rested and ready tomorrow,” Paul said. His face was quietly stern as he looked around the campfire. “We don’t know what we’ll be called upon to do.”

  Joe felt a shiver at the words. Would Rene go home, now that he’d been thwarted not once or twice, but three times? Joe had escaped from Rene’s killing jar in the ditches outside Schriever Air Force Base. He’d taken Ted Giometti from under Rene’s nose, and Ted had taken Rene’s wallet with him. Finally, Sheriff Richard King had disrupted Rene’s plans to use Doug, the Schwan’s del
iveryman, and given his own life in Doug’s escape. Somehow Joe didn’t think Rene was going to give up. He didn’t think so at all.

  “We’ll take the three o’clock watch, is that okay?” Eileen murmured to him.

  “Of course,” Joe said. “I was hoping Paul would set watches.”

  “Then we’ll sit up together,” Eileen said. “Thanks for taking the worst watch with me.”

  “For better or worse,” Joe said, and he meant the words to be light and teasing and they were not. There was a meaning in there that he hadn’t intended, something far too complex for a camp full of people brushing by them on their way to settle down for sleep. Eileen nodded, understanding what Joe was not trying to say.

  “For better or worse,” she whispered so quietly only he could hear.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  First Watch, Devils Tower, Wyoming

  “This is absolutely crazy, you know,” Jimmy said quietly to Howie. Howie had propped his bow next to the rocky outcropping. He’d removed the top from his quiver and the razor-edged arrows glimmered in the firelight. He was checking the arrows one by one, examining the feather fletching that made the arrow fly straight and true. The tips, equipped with four angled razor blades, were sharp enough to cut paper. Howie could put an arrow through a whitetail deer at thirty yards. He was better with arrows than firearms, though he’d accepted Paul’s .45 revolver.

  “Worse than that uprising in Zimbabwe?” Howie said idly, turning the arrow in his hands. He kept an eye on Zilla, who’d been led to his side by Paul. Now Zilla sat quietly at his feet, eyes closed, nose twitching occasionally. Howie had great respect for Zilla’s ability after seeing her detect the blood splashed on Doug’s uniform shirt. She’d smelled the blood at a distance, and with the bloody shirt inside of Doug’s Schwan’s truck, no less.

  “They weren’t after us in Zimbabwe,” Jimmy noted. “They were happy to see us get the hell out. We were just sportsmen in the middle of an uprising. They didn’t care about us. These two guys are wiping out everyone in their path. They mean business.”