The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Coel, Margaret

  Adam stood on top of a boulder and looked out across the chasm of space. He seemed preoccupied, weighted down with something. Vicky lifted herself from one boulder to the next until she was beside him. The wind gusted around them. Below were the rooftops of Lander, lights flickering on in the shadows. “What is it?” she said.

  He was quiet a moment before he said, “I got a call this afternoon. My uncle died in Pine Ridge.”

  “I’m sorry, Adam,” Vicky said.

  “The funeral’s in three days. I have to go.”

  “Yes, of course.” Adam’s relatives would all be there, she knew.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. He took hold of her hand and pulled her close. His lips were warm on hers. “We should head back,” he said after a moment. Still he waited a little longer before starting down through the boulders. Vicky started after him, then veered off on another path that looked less steep.

  Adam was waiting when she got down, and they started walking along the trail to the picnic area. He was talking about tomorrow’s meeting with Charles Crow at the tribal offices, how the director of economic development on the rez had insisted on a meeting as soon as possible. They’d already discussed this on the drive to Sinks Canyon, and she realized now that all the time he’d been talking about Charles Crow, he’d probably been thinking about his uncle, waiting for the time to tell her, to speak the words that would make his uncle’s death real and irrevocable.

  Instead, he’d told her that Crow had mentioned a civil lawsuit, something about Indian rights. It was important. Were they interested?

  Naturally they were interested, Adam had told him. They’d formed the law firm—Holden and Lone Eagle—to handle the kind of cases that protected the rights of Indian people. They were getting busier all the time, more and more cases coming their way from both the Arapahos and the Shoshones on the reservation. Tribes from other reservations had started to call. Adam had spent last week in Montana talking with Crows about a lawsuit against the state over a large tract of disputed land. The cases—the DUIs and divorces and wills—went to Roger. They were practicing the kind of law they both wanted to practice, Vicky reminded herself, although there were times, when a grandmother or an elder had shuffled into Roger’s office, that she’d felt a pang of guilt that she wasn’t the one to help them.

  “Meeting at nine o’clock,” Adam said. “That work for you?”

  They came out into the flat, grassy meadow that ran into the bare dirt of the picnic area. Adam had turned around and was waiting for her to catch up. “There’s a woman I have to talk to tomorrow morning,” Vicky said. She was thinking that she could get to the café early enough to talk to Donita and still get to Ethete by nine.

  Adam didn’t move. He stood at the edge of the dark blue shadows falling over the meadow, his eyes lit with annoyance in the half light. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “We’d better eat before it gets dark.” Vicky walked past him. She opened the cooler, pulled out a checkered cloth and spread it over the end of the picnic table. Then she laid out the paper plates, the soda and sandwiches they’d picked up at the grocery store.

  Adam threw one leg over the bench and dropped down, still waiting, she knew, for a response. Finally she sat down across from him and told him about her talk with Detective Coughlin. When he didn’t say anything, she pushed on: Coughlin was bound to run into blank walls; sooner or later, the thirty-five-year-old case of a murdered Indian girl would be forgotten.

  “Why didn’t the women take it up with Coughlin?” Adam said. “They didn’t have to drag you into it.” He seemed to realize that wasn’t true—the women wouldn’t go to the sheriff’s office by themselves—because he started unwrapping a sandwich, giving the task his full attention. Then he reached into the cooler, extracted a bag of chips and tore it open. Finally he said, “Roger can follow up with Coughlin, apply a little pressure, make sure he understands the Indian people expect a full investigation.”

  “He needs something to go on.”

  “Roger can explain to the women.”

  “I mean, Coughlin needs names of people who were on the rez then. Somebody might remember the girl.”

  “Look, Vicky…” Adam laid his hands flat on either side of the paper plate.

  She cut in. “He beat her up before he shot her.” God, why was she telling him this? Shadows had crept across the picnic area, and the sky was thick with dark clouds. It would be pitch dark soon, the kind of darkness that fell in the mountains on overcast nights. “He knocked out some of her teeth.”

  Adam was staring at her. He’d set the rest of his sandwich onto the plate, popped the tab on the soda and left it in place. Behind his eyes, she could see that he was putting it together. “You’re assuming the killer was native,” he said. “Not all Indian men beat up women, Vicky.”

  She took a bite of her sandwich. After a moment, she said, “He could still be around. There was no reason for him to leave. He committed the perfect murder. The skeleton was buried for more than thirty years. It never would have been found if animals hadn’t dug it up.”

  “Did you hear me, Vicky?” he said. “Not all Indian men beat up women.”

  “I know,” she said. Adam had never lifted a hand to her, and she knew—it had taken a long time, she realized now—before she had allowed herself to know that he never would.

  Adam took a moment before he said, “What if they weren’t from here? The killer or the victim? They could have been passing through. Lots of AIM people were moving around reservations back then. We had a couple hundred come to Pine Ridge.”

  “What was it like at Wounded Knee?”

  “I was twelve years old, Vicky.”

  “You were there.”

  “We lived fifty miles away.” Adam took a drink of soda, drew his fingers across his mouth and looked up at the sky. “My cousin Jerry was there,” he said finally. “Took a bullet in the leg. He still walks with a limp.” He shook his head—a slow moving back and forth. “They wanted justice, that was all. An Indian had been stabbed to death. The white man responsible bragged about bagging himself another Indian, but nothing was done about it, so the family turned to AIM for justice. When the authorities refused to arrest the killer, AIM decided to go to Wounded Knee. It was where the soldiers had slaughtered Big Bear’s band in 1890. It was a symbolic gesture, Vicky, a way of saying to the government, give us justice or kill us the way you killed us back then. They nearly did get killed. FBI agents and federal marshals surrounded the town. I mean, they brought in armored vehicles, automatic weapons. My cousin said there was an army general there. It was like Vietnam. They were shooting day and night at Indians holed up inside town, living on canned food from the trading post. Went on for more than two months. When it was all over, after they thought they’d negotiated some kind of agreement, the Indians came walking out with their hands up, and you know what the Feds did? Slapped on handcuffs, took them to jail, charged a lot of Indians with assault, arson, theft, interfering with federal officers, trespassing, and everything else they could throw at them. People were indicted. Some went to prison.”

  “What about those who got away and went into hiding? They could have come here. Maybe the girl came with them.” Vicky paused. “You’ll be in Pine Ridge this week. You could ask your cousin…”

  “Ask him what? Were you indicted, Jerry? Been lying low ever since? Hoping everybody’s forgotten about the whole mess?”

  “He might know of a girl who came to the Wind River Reservation.”

  Adam finished the last of his sandwich and started rolling up the paper it had been wrapped in. He creased the package of paper with his fist, then tossed it into the cooler. “You don’t understand, Vicky. Wounded Knee isn’t something people talk about. They don’t want to remember because, you know what? It was all for nothing. There wasn’t any justice that came out of it, just more of the same. Same discrimination, same signs up in the store windows in Rapid City—No Indians Wanted. People just want
ed to go home to their families and go on, you know. Just live.”

  It was almost dark. Another ten minutes, and they’d have a hard time making their way the short distance to Adam’s truck. And Vicky had the strong urge to leave this place, as if the gathering darkness itself were pushing her away. “We’d better go,” she said. She picked up the plates and soda cans and put them in the cooler.

  Adam hoisted the cooler into the truck bed, then walked over to her. She felt his arms wrap around her and pull her close. She could hear the steady, certain beating of his heart. “Let it go,” he said. “Let Coughlin handle the investigation.”

  “It’s still about justice,” she said. “Aren’t we still looking for justice?”

  “We have to pick our battles, Vicky. We have to win the battles we pick. Getting the sheriff to conduct a major investigation into a thirty-five-year-old murder? That isn’t a battle we’re going to win.”

  “What will I tell Diana Morningstar and the others?”

  “The truth.”

  Vicky pulled away. She opened the passenger door, slid onto the seat, and pulled the door shut behind her. Adam was right, of course. So what if she came up with the name of someone who might have been a member of AIM back in the seventies? Coughlin would pay that person a visit, ask a few questions, get a lot of evasive answers. Nobody wanted to talk about that time. Coughlin would file the homicide in what was probably a big drawer crammed with a lot of other cold cases that would never be solved. She could tell Diana and the others that she’d spoken to the detective. She’d done all she could. It was enough.

  VICKY SAT UP in bed. The sheets clinging against her skin were warm and moist. Her hair felt matted. She blinked into the darkness and tried to get her bearings. Faint pencils of light from outside glowed around the edges of the curtains. She was aware of the steady in and out of Adam’s breathing and the warmth of his body beside her. She was in her own bedroom, she told herself. She was safe. Her heart was crashing against her ribs.

  She’d heard a soft crying. She realized she’d been dreaming of the girl. She’d been following her through a labyrinth of some kind, the girl’s long, black braid swinging across her back like a rope as she moved ahead. Vicky ran after her, struggling to keep her in sight, afraid she would dissolve into the shadows. Then the labyrinth had started changing shape. It was a dark alley hemmed in by fences and garages, black shadows falling down brick walls. Then a narrow gulley with dark slopes rising on either side. The girl disappeared into the shadows, and Vicky had cried out. “Who are you?” She was frantic; her heart was thumping. “Tell me who you are, so I can find you.” The only sound had been the crying.

  Vicky felt her leg brush against Adam’s. He started moving about. He flung out an arm, as if he were searching for her, and patted her hand. He was still asleep. The rhythm of his breathing hadn’t changed. Outside, a car was idling, and she realized that it wasn’t only a dream that had awakened her. It was the sound of an idling car in the middle of the night. She folded back the sheet, slipped out of bed and walked over to the window. She fingered the edge of the curtain and pushed it aside. The street lamp flared in her eyes a moment. Then she saw the silver sedan parked at the curb across the street. It looked like a man behind the wheel—the short, dark hair, the big shoulders. She moved to the side of the window, waited a couple of seconds, then looked back. The engine growled, as if he’d stomped on the gas pedal with the gears in neutral. Then the sedan pulled away from the curb and shot down the street, two red taillights blurring in the darkness.

  “Vicky? What is it?” Adam’s voice was filled with sleep.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Come back to bed.”

  Vicky crawled in beside him, grateful for the warmth of his body and the strength of his arms around her. After they made love again and Adam had fallen back asleep, she lay still, staring into the darkness. She would have to find the girl, she knew. No matter what Coughlin did, no matter how hopeless the idea of searching for a girl murdered a long time ago seemed, she was going to have to find her.

  10

  ELENA LIFTED HERSELF into the passenger seat and settled her large woven bag onto her lap. “Sorry to put you out, Father,” she said.

  “No problem.” Father John closed the door and hurried around the pickup, giving a little wave to Elena’s husband, Gus, as he went. The old man stood in the door of the small brown house, shifting between the door frame and the walking stick gripped in his hand.

  Elena was saying something as he got in behind the steering wheel, as if she’d begun talking to him through the windshield and was continuing. He started the engine and backed out of the yard, trying to catch up. “I think he’s gone back to drinking,” she said.

  It was a beat before Father John realized she was talking about her grandson, Jeffrey, who drove her to the mission every morning. She’d given up driving herself after a drunken sixteen-year-old had sideswiped her car out on Seventeen-Mile Road. She had no intention, she’d informed him, of going out of this world mangled and crushed. Gus had stopped driving sometime before the accident, when diabetes dimmed his eyesight. Which left them dependent—two old people, although Elena had never told him her age; old enough, was all she’d say—on the kids and grandkids. Twenty minutes ago, the phone had rung in the residence. Jeffrey hadn’t shown up this morning. Would he mind…

  Father John had told her he’d be right over. He’d wanted a moment to talk to her alone, anyway. It was hard at the residence; she was always busy—cooking, dusting, doing the laundry. He’d given up urging her to rest, take a little time for herself, sit down. She seemed to take it as an insult, as if he thought she wasn’t up to the job anymore, which wasn’t the case. He couldn’t imagine the residence without her.

  “Is Jeffrey still going to work?” he asked. He drove south on Left Hand Ditch Road, the early morning sunshine splintering in the window, already hot on his arm. Jeffrey had a college degree. He was an accountant at the Riverton office of the state highway department.

  “Far as I know.”

  That was a good sign, he told her. He was thinking how things hadn’t really gotten bad for him until he’d started missing classes at the prep school where he’d taught American history, because, the truth was, he was unable to get out of the chair where he’d drunk himself into a stupor the night before. It was then that his superior had given him the choice: a back office in which to drink himself to death, if that was what he wanted, or rehab. He’d chosen rehab, but not right away. A substitute teacher had taken over his classes, while he’d stayed drunk for days in the overstuffed chair—both comfortable and familiar, the chair and the whiskey. He remembered trying to pray, the prayers knotted in his throat. Then, by the grace of the God he couldn’t even pray to anymore, he’d managed to lift himself out of the chair, stumble down the corridor to the superior’s office, and say he was ready.

  “Sooner or later, they’re gonna let him go,” Elena said.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Father John could see the frozen look of defeat in her face. “We’ll be hearing all about Indian rights and how white people hate us and are always looking to fire us, ’cause that’ll be easier than stopping the drinking. Could you talk to him, Father?”

  “Of course.” Maybe he could persuade Jeffrey to come to the AA meetings at the mission—he’d come before, and he’d stayed sober for a while. “There’s always hope,” he said.

  A long moment passed. Finally he brought up the subject of the skeleton. They were heading down Seventeen-Mile Road, the sun bursting through the rear window now and the blue, printed words, St. Francis Mission, blinking on the white sign ahead. He told her about the autopsy report. “She was murdered in 1973,” he said.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elena shaking her head. White strands glistened in the gray hair curled around her face. The frozen expression started to crack as her thoughts shifted from Jeffrey to the skeleton. It was like watching the slow shifting of tectonic
plates.

  “Everybody figured that was when she got killed.”

  Father John glanced over at her. This place was full of surprises. The moccasin telegraph had probably been busy with different theories and had hit on the right one.

  Elena sat straight backed, staring through the windshield. Finally she said, “Nothing left of that poor girl but bones. Didn’t take a lot of tests to figure it must’ve happened a long time ago. There was lots of trouble back in the seventies. Seventy-three was the worst. She was probably one of them AIM people. They were violent.”

  “Some of them could still be on the rez,” he said. “Somebody might know who she was.”

  “Well, nobody’s gonna talk, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “It’s the only way Detective Coughlin can solve the case.”

  She seemed to consider this a moment. Then she said, “You can take a rope and throw it down the middle of the rez. Half the people on one side didn’t want anything to do with AIM. Tried to ignore all the goings-on, didn’t want trouble for their families. Other half was what I’d call interested, maybe even liked what AIM was saying, all that talk about how the government oughtta treat us like sovereign nations, ’cause that’s what the old treaties said. Demanding Indian rights.” She gave a little laugh, as if she were clearing her throat. “Thirty years ago, we didn’t know we had rights. Just did what white people said, ’cause they were in charge. Maybe we started looking at things different, after AIM was here.”