The Dream Stalker

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky glanced at the closed door with the frosted glass panel and the dark letters marching backward that, from the outside corridor, spelled VICKY HOLDEN, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. A few feet down the corridor was the flight of stairs leading to the sidewalk on Main Street in Lander. Someone had climbed the stairs between 8:00 last night, when she had finally packed her briefcase and left for home, and 8:30 this morning, when Mrs. Peters had arrived. Or someone had come up the stairway from the parking lot and entered her office through the back hall. Either way, whoever had left the threat had come through a locked door. A chill ran across her shoulders: Someone had a key to her office.

  “Please call the locksmith, Mrs. Peters, and have the locks changed immediately,” Vicky said before turning back into her private office. She opened the top drawer of the gray file cabinet and extracted the brown envelope in front. Lifting the latest threat from her desk with two fingers, as if it carried some type of fungus, she slipped it into the envelope. Now there were four. Variations on a theme: If she wanted to stay alive, she should mind her own business; she should stay out of matters that didn’t concern her.

  Of course the threats were about the nuclear waste facility. She opposed the plan to store radioactive materials on the reservation. It didn’t matter that it would only be for forty years—forty years was a generation, a lifetime. She would do everything in her power to make her people realize the dangers. Speak out. Write articles. Just as she’d been doing.

  The day after her first article had appeared in the Wind River Gazette, she got the first threat—wedged between her front door and the frame. The second threat showed up on her windshield in the parking lot at Safeway. The third on her windshield again, four days ago, in the parking lot behind her office.

  She had meant to report the threats. Why hadn’t she reported them? Why had she put it off, told herself it was just some crank getting his kicks trying to scare her? The world was full of cranks, and something like a nuclear storage facility was bound to smoke them out. She had convinced herself not to take the threats seriously. But now a fourth one had joined the others inside the envelope. It was as if her grandmother had grabbed her by the shoulders and begun shaking her. Four. There are four of everything important in the world. Four winds. Four directions. Four seasons. Four hills of life. Four quarters of creation. You must pay attention.

  Vicky grabbed her purse and slung the strap over one shoulder. Tucking the brown envelope under her arm, she walked through the office. The secretary had gathered herself toward the monitor, as if to seek some kind of shelter from a storm that had suddenly burst around her.

  “Call Detective Eberhart. Tell him I’m on the way over.” Vicky slammed out the door, not waiting for any confirmation, and ran along the corridor and down the stairs. The clack of her heels echoed off the brick walls. From somewhere came the languorous sound of a ringing phone.

  Sunshine washed over the sidewalk, but the coolness of early spring still hung in the air, with its ever-present hint of rain. A gust of wind whipped her gray wool skirt around her legs and flattened her suit jacket against her back. Pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles lined the curb and streamed down the wide street. Two men came along the sidewalk—businessmen in cowboy boots and cowboy hats and suits, suit coats blown back in the wind. Vicky started around the building toward the parking lot where she had left the Bronco fifteen minutes ago, then hesitated. The police department was only a few blocks away.

  The moment the light turned green, she struck out across the street behind the businessmen, clutching the brown envelope against her chest, annoyed at having to take the time to admit this intrusion into her life. She had a full day of appointments. Molly Red Cloud would be in this morning to see about adopting her granddaughter, Little Molly, the child she’d raised from the moment Little Molly had opened her eyes on the world six years ago. Jane Latter needed help with the new lease on her beauty shop in Fort Washakie. And this evening was the public hearing on the nuclear storage facility. Vicky wanted to reread the environmental report before she finished writing the speech she intended to give.

  She heard the roar of an engine and the squeal of brakes in the same instant that she glimpsed the truck out of the corner of her eye—a blurred mass of black and silver metal bearing down on her, threatening to engulf her. She leapt sideways, stumbling over the curb, the draft sucking at her as the rear wheels screeched past. One of the businessmen gripped her arm; she realized he had stopped her from falling. The strap of her purse had slipped off her shoulder, wrenching her other arm. The brown envelope scuttled along the gutter in the wind.

  The other man ran to retrieve it as a crowd began to gather: a couple of gray-haired women; a young woman with a baby stroller; a teenaged boy, the knees torn in his jeans; a man in work clothes with a tool belt slung around his waist. Was she okay? That fool in the truck, he could’ve killed her.

  One of the businessmen handed her the brown envelope, while the other kept his hand on her elbow, steadying her, asking if she were hurt. She was aware of the red blur of his tie, the outsized blue eyes behind thick glasses, the smell of coffee on his breath.

  “I think I’m okay,” she managed, pulling herself upright and away from his grasp, stamping her feet to stop her legs from quivering.

  “Anybody get the license?” the man asked, glancing around the crowd. Heads shook in unison.

  “Oughtta lock that bastard up,” somebody said.

  “Probably a drunk Indian,” someone else said. The words were met with silence. Vicky felt as if she could have sliced through the embarrassment, it was so thick, as the crowd realized she was an Indian.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said, anxious to be free of them. She started walking fast along the sidewalk, staying close to the shop windows. It had been an accident, that was all. Had she been killed, that’s what they would’ve called it. An accident. The driver had taken the corner too fast and hadn’t seen her. Still, it seemed as though the truck had been waiting for her, had come out of nowhere after her. She gripped the brown envelope. YOU WANT TO LIVE?

  She stopped at the end of each block, making sure no cars or trucks were approaching before she stepped into the street. By the time she reached the squat, gray stone building that housed the Lander Police Department, her skin felt prickly and flushed from the brisk walk. An icy feeling crept inside her. She tried to assure herself the threats and the truck were a dreadful coincidence. But all of her instincts protested. She kept hearing her grandmother’s words: Now there are four. Pay attention. Pay attention.

  She swung open the glass door and stepped inside a lobby of whitewashed walls, tile floor the color of spring leaves, and dull red plastic chairs. Warm air wafted from a metal vent lodged below the ceiling. A policewoman sat in a small cubicle on the right behind a counter and a half wall of glass, staring at a blue computer monitor. The phone next to the monitor started to ring. She picked up the receiver and pointed it toward a side door. Her eyes on Vicky, she mouthed the word “office.” Vicky felt a pinprick of relief; something was going right. Her new secretary had followed instructions.

  A buzzing noise sounded just before she turned the handle on the door. She stepped into a narrow corridor, fighting back the claustrophobia that always caught up with her in confined spaces. She preferred the outdoors, the far distances, the wind on her skin. A bluish light from the fluorescent bulbs along the ceiling bounced off the white walls. The faint smell of detergent mingled with that of stale cigarette smoke. Her heels clicked against the tile as she walked past several glass-paneled doors. She stopped at the door bearing a plastic sign that read: DETECTIVE EBERHART.

  Before she could rap, the door swung open, and Bob Eberhart stood in front of her. He was a couple of inches taller than she was, with a thin wiry build, rounded shoulders, and a sunken chest. He was dressed in dark slacks and a gray oxford shirt that seemed to match his skin and hair, which was cropped short, military style. His eyes were blue, his lips a deep pink colo
r. Vicky recalled he had caught a bullet in the chest a few years back. She’d heard other lawyers say he wasn’t the same after that, but the police department was keeping him on until he reached retirement. It gave her a measure of comfort. Eberhart was a white policeman in a white town whom the Indian people could trust.

  “What brings you, Vicky?” He motioned her into a small office even more crowded than her own. Stacks of papers and folders tumbled across the desk. More stacks slumped precariously toward the edges on top of two filing cabinets that flanked a rectangular window in the opposite wall. He lifted a handful of papers from a side chair and gestured for her to sit down.

  She sank onto the cushion, a sense of doom pressing around her. Pieces of dust floated in the column of sunshine that lay over the desk. Eberhart settled into his chair, and she handed him the brown envelope.

  The detective shook out the four sheets of paper and laid them over his cluttered desk like playing cards. He peered from one to the other, as if pondering the next move in a game.

  “I think somebody just tried to kill me,” Vicky blurted out, surprising herself. It sounded crazy.

  The detective’s head jerked upward. His eyes leveled on hers. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “I was nearly run down by a truck a few minutes ago.”

  “Somebody tried to run you down?”

  Vicky began shaking her head. “I don’t want to think so. It’s probably just a coincidence.” She explained what had happened, how the truck had suddenly appeared, how a crowd had gathered, how no one had gotten the license. She couldn’t even identify the make of the truck.

  “You got the names of your good Samaritans?”

  “No,” she admitted, letting out a long breath. She was an attorney; she should have thought of that.

  Eberhart looked back at the four sheets of paper, his eyes narrowed, as if he might have missed something the first time. “Where’d you get these?”

  Vicky explained they had been arriving over the last three weeks. But this morning’s threat had shaken her. It was on her desk. Whoever had left it must have used a key to get into her office.

  The white man leaned back, rocking side to side in his chair. “It’s been my experience that when somebody gets mad enough to start sendin’ threats and mad enough to try runnin’ somebody down, the victim has a fair idea where all that madness is comin’ from. You think about it, Vicky, you’ll probably come up with somebody you pissed off real bad. Maybe some ex-husband that got saddled with a whole lot of alimony and can’t see his kids anymore.”

  Vicky regarded this officer of the law a moment. “I know what this is about, Bob. This is about turning Wind River Reservation into a radioactive dump, which just happens to mean jobs and a boost to the economy in the whole area. I’m on the wrong side, and somebody doesn’t want me to warn people about the dangers.” She stopped. The realization hit her, like a door slamming in her face. The public hearing was tonight. She was on the agenda. Someone didn’t want her to speak, and whoever it was had tried to kill her. The fear she’d felt on the street corner coiled inside her, like a rattle-snake about to strike. She felt as if she were choking.

  Eberhart was staring at her. “You okay?”

  She swallowed hard and started to explain. The other speakers at the public hearing tonight were all in favor of the facility: Lionel Redbull, the project director; Matthew Bosse, the tribal council member who had first proposed the plan; Alexander and Lily Legeau, who owned the ranch where the facility would be built; and someone named Paul Bryant, the president of the company whose sole purpose was to find a site where utility companies could dump their nuclear waste. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to dump it on the reservation—except for her.

  “Nothin’ in these threats says anything about nuclear waste.” The detective’s gaze shifted among the four pieces of paper. “On the other hand . . .” He set both elbows on the desk, made a tent of his hands, and peered at her over the tops of long fingers. “I read those articles you wrote for the Gazette. You got yourself involved in some real controversial stuff. Everybody on the rez could use the money from this facility, and lots of Indians want steady jobs. One of ’em could be warnin’ you off.”

  “How about one of the white people?” Vicky locked eyes with the white man across the desk. “A lot of people in Lander and Riverton would like to see the facility built, especially if it’s stuck out on the Legeau ranch in the middle of the reservation, far from their homes and water supply. They could have the economic benefits without the hazards.”

  Eberhart leaned back and drew in his lower lip. After a moment he said, “Maybe you got somethin’. We’ll see if we can lift some fingerprints. In the meantime, I want you to make up a list of folks on the other side of this nuclear waste business. Anybody, white or Indian, who might be wantin’ you to back off. And while you’re at it, put down anybody you might’ve pissed off for any other reason.” The detective stood up and leaned over the desk. “While we’re checkin’ this out, I don’t want you goin’ anywhere by yourself.” The detective’s tone had become fatherly; concern shone in his eyes.

  Vicky rose to her feet. “That’s crazy, Bob. I can’t lock myself up. Whoever’s trying to scare me off will have succeeded.”

  “You own a gun, Vicky?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I can get a permit processed.”

  “I’m not going to carry a gun.” Vicky stepped over to the door and pulled it open.

  “Hold up there.” Eberhart laid one hand on her arm, a friendly gesture, yet firm. “I’m gonna send a report on this over to Chief Banner. And I’ll have a talk with folks around your office. Somebody might’ve gotten a good look at that truck, and somebody might’ve seen somethin’ unusual last night. We’ll keep an eye on your office and house, Vicky, but you gotta take responsibility for your own safety. There’s people out there capable of murder, you know. A cowboy got murdered on the rez last night.”

  “What?” Vicky backed against the doorjamb, freeing herself from the man’s grip. She hadn’t heard about any murder. If she lived on the reservation, she would have gotten the news on the moccasin telegraph first thing this morning. But she lived and worked in Lander. Lately she had begun to feel even more isolated. Her own people didn’t trust what she was trying to tell them. Didn’t trust her, because she wasn’t among them. When they needed her services, they had to come to the white world to find her. And now this news from the reservation—filtered through a white man.

  “Some drifter,” the detective was saying. “Male. Indian. No ID yet. Found shot to death out in an abandoned cabin on Johnstown Road.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Priest from St. Francis Mission. Got a call late last night and drove out to a deserted cabin owned by a family named Hooshie. You know Father O’Malley, don’t you? Somebody’s in trouble, he’s gonna try and help ’em.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s a good priest.”

  Eberhart stepped back behind the desk, picked up the phone, and pushed in some numbers. “I’m gonna have an officer drive you back to your office. You’re not gonna fight me on that, are ya?”

  Vicky glanced down the empty hallway, her thoughts a jumble: the nuclear waste proposal, the black truck roaring down on her, the threats, the murdered Indian on Johnstown Road. None of it would make her crawl into a shell, frighten her away from what she believed in. She would not allow it. She had faced tougher things thirteen years ago—a lifetime ago—when she’d realized she had to leave her husband Ben before he went on another drunk and killed her. When she’d had to leave their two kids, Susan and Lucas, with her mother and drive down the road without her children. When she’d driven all the way to Denver to go to school although she didn’t know anyone in the white world and didn’t know how she would make it.

  She locked eyes again with the detective. “Thanks, Bob, for taking this seriously, but—”

  “Oh, I take it seriously, all right,” he interrupt
ed.

  “I intend to walk back to my office.”

  “Yeah.” He set the receiver in its cradle, a grim look in his eyes. “I was afraid of that.”

  She was partway down the hall when he called out: “Be careful, Vicky.”

  5

  Father John followed the narrow path across the center of St. Francis Mission. Sunlight filtered through the branches of the old cottonwoods and glistened on the buffalo grass. He drew in a deep breath of air thick with the smells of sage and wet grass. His head was beginning to clear, the ache a half-remembered dream. The sun felt warm on his back, but a breeze plucked at his shirt, and black-lined clouds hovered below the peaks of the Wind River Mountains in the distance. It was one of those moments he’d come to love about spring on the plains—when the earth and the sky seemed to flow together, almost to exchange places, so that it appeared as if the mountains rose out of the clouds themselves.

  Walks-on bounded across Circle Drive, a red Frisbee in his mouth, and Father John shifted the stack he was carrying into the crook of one arm: two books on the Plains Indians that he’d borrowed from the Riverton library, a folder of letters he meant to answer, and the environmental report on the waste facility. The report was the only thing he’d gotten to last night. He managed to grab the Frisbee without dropping everything else and sailed it through the air. The dog bounded across the grass, spun on his back leg, and grabbed the spinning disk. He trotted back, and Father John threw the Frisbee again before starting up the cement steps in front of the administration building. He let himself in through the heavy wooden door.

  The corridor had the high, stuccoed ceilings of the nineteenth century. It felt stale and cool, like a museum. Light from the glass ceiling fixtures cast a pinkish glow over the framed portraits above the oak wainscoting. The Jesuits of St. Francis Mission, his predecessors, stared at him through their little, round, metal-framed glasses. From farther along the corridor came the tap-tap sound of Father Geoff at his keyboard.