The footsteps started again—tap, tap, tap—across the kitchen, into the dining area. Vicky squeezed her fingers around the keys and stepped out of the hallway.
The woman standing across the room whirled around and let out a strangled half scream. “Who are you?” she managed. She was pretty, with black hair that touched her shoulders, dark, almond eyes and the sculptured cheekbones and little bump in her nose of the Arapaho. Probably in her early thirties, Vicky guessed, about five foot seven and trim looking, dressed in a dark tee shirt, khaki capris, and sandals. A small purse dangled from her shoulder.
“Sorry to frighten you.” Vicky felt her hand relax around her keys. “I was interested in seeing the house,” she hurried on, “and the back door was open.”
Tension began to drain from the woman’s face and her entire body seemed to settle into what was probably her normal posture. “I was worried about that,” she said. “I showed the house this morning and couldn’t remember whether I’d locked the back door. Are you looking at the house for yourself or as an investment? It’s a good neighborhood.” She gave a little wave toward the front door. “Very friendly,” she said. “Mostly native people.”
“The sign said for sale by owner,” Vicky said. “Are you the owner?”
“No. No.” Another little wave, this time toward the space between them. “Just helping my mother sell the place. She lived here most of her life.”
“Your mother?” Vicky said. She couldn’t believe her luck. Standing before her was the daughter of the woman who had owned the house when Liz was here. Who could have opened the door, let Liz and the baby inside. “I came here to find your mother.” She rushed on, aware of the flush of excitement coming over her. She was close, so close to the truth. “My name is Vicky Holden. I’m from the Wind River Reservation.”
“Luna Norton.” The woman held out a slim, brown hand.
Vicky wasn’t aware of moving across the narrow room or of reaching for the outstretched hand, only that she was holding on to it, conscious of the warmth in the palm and the faint rhythm of Luna Norton’s pulse.
“Luna,” she heard herself say. Her voice seemed to come from far away.
“Do I know you?” The young woman withdrew her hand and took a step back, something new moving in her expression, questions and curiosity mingling with a hint of apprehension.
Vicky took a moment. She could feel her heart thudding. It sounded like the pounding of a drum, and she wondered if Luna could hear it. “I know your mother,” she said finally. It wasn’t exactly true, and yet, it seemed to be the truth.
“Who are you?” Luna said, still holding back.
“I’m a lawyer. I came here looking for your mother.”
“My mother!” Apprehension fixed on the woman’s face now. She took another step backward, clasped her hands, and held them in front of her. “I can’t imagine why she would want to talk to a lawyer,” she said. “My mother isn’t well.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I don’t think you know anything about us. My mother had a heart attack last month, so I moved her in with us—my husband and our baby girl. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being alone. She doesn’t want to sell this old place.” She was glancing about the vacant room. “There are so many memories.”
“Would it be possible to speak with her?” Vicky said quietly.
“About what?” A sharpness came into Luna’s voice.
“About AIM and the summer of 1973.” Vicky waited a moment before she added, “About Liz Plenty Horses.”
Luna Norton squeezed her lips together and narrowed her eyes. An almost imperceptible moisture appeared at the corners and glistened on her cheeks. “There’s no good that can come from stirring up all that trouble. What happened, happened. There’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve had a good life. My mother made sure that I had a good life. What right do you have to come here and disturb her?”
“Listen to me, Luna,” Vicky said. “Your mother…” Her mouth had gone dry. It tasted of dust. “Your mother could be in danger.”
“Danger! What are you talking about?”
“Someone on the reservation might want to harm her.” Vicky was aware of the keys still pressed against her left palm. She dropped them into her bag, took out the small leather container that held her business cards, and managed to pull out a card. Her hand was shaking as she held it out. “I have to see her right away,” she said.
Luna hesitated, some kind of battle playing out behind the dark, narrowed eyes. Finally she stepped forward, took the card, and held it between her hands, flexing it back and forth, but not taking her eyes from it. “I have to talk to her first,” she said. “I don’t know if she’s up to this.” She held the card steady a moment, then slid it inside the thin envelope of her purse. “You’d better go.”
“Will you tell me your mother’s name?”
“I thought you said you knew her.”
“I don’t know her name.”
“Inez. Inez Horn.”
Vicky walked across the vacant room, took hold of the knob, and pulled at the door swollen in the frame. It gave in pieces—the top edge first, then the bottom. Still holding the knob, she looked back. “You should stay away from the house for a while,” she said.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Please,” Vicky said. “Don’t come here for a while.” She watched Luna take this in—fingers pinching the edge of her bag, lips pulled into a tight line—then she stepped outside and closed the door behind her.
THE PHONE STARTED to ring, breaking through the afternoon quiet that had settled over the administration building. Father John reached across a pile of papers on his desk and picked up the receiver. “Father O’Malley,” he said.
“Hey, Father.” It was the voice of probably an eleven-year-old, and he matched the voice with the brown, smiling face and eager eyes of Mason Willow. “Hey, Mason,” he said.
“When’s practice?”
“Sorry, Mason. Not today.” He’d spent the last couple of hours calling parishioners, canceling meetings and carryin suppers—all the activities scheduled for the week. He’d called the homes of the kids on the Eagles team and left messages: no practice for a few days; he’d get back to them. He’d asked them to pass the word on to the kids who didn’t have phones. Mason was one of those kids. “We have to take a short break.”
“But we got the game with Riverton on Saturday.” And there was something else, Father John knew. The kids looked forward to baseball practice; it filled a few hours of the hot, summer days; it let them forget about everything except baseball. He was going to miss practice, too, as much as the kids.
“We’re better than Riverton,” he said.
“Yeah, I guess. But…” The kid’s voice crackled with disappointment.
“It’s only for a little while.” Father John hoped that would be true. Sooner or later, the killer was bound to make a mistake, and when that happened, Coughlin would have him in custody. Until then, whoever had shot Ruth Yellow Bull last night and had intended to kill Vicky was still walking around. There was no telling where he might strike next, and Father John couldn’t risk having the parishioners at the mission. He told Mason that he’d make sure he knew when practice would start again, then he set the receiver into place against the disappointment still flowing through the line.
He went back to the work on his desk—making his way through a pile of papers, paying a few more bills, filling out the bank deposit slip for an anonymous donation that had floated out of a white envelope with no return address and a blurred postmark. Finally he switched off the desk lamp and headed for the front door. Strips of sunlight and shadow fell over the photographs of past Jesuits on the walls. Sunlight glistened on the wood floor that creaked under his boots. Father Ian had left sometime in the afternoon to make the rounds at Riverton Memorial. Six Arapahos hospitalized this week. He hadn’t gotten back yet.
Father John let himself outside and was
about to start down the steps of the concrete stoop when he turned back, fished the ring of keys out of his jeans pocket, and locked the door. He didn’t usually lock the door until evening, after the meetings had ended, after the pickups and cars had carved their way around Circle Drive and out toward Seventeen-Mile Road. But there were no meetings tonight. If Father Ian wanted to go to his office, he had a key.
He started across the mission grounds, the great silence of the plains pressing around him, except for the almost-imperceptible sounds of the breeze in the dried grass, the faraway whir of tires on Seventeen-Mile Road and his own footsteps on the earth. He tried to shake off the odd feeling that had come over him. He wasn’t used to such quiet in the early evening; there were always people coming and going, pickups crunching the gravel, children shouting and laughing. The mission was alive! But now it seemed like a relic, a dead thing of the past. He pushed the thought away. The people would be gone only for a while; it was temporary. Besides, Elena was still here. It would be another thirty minutes before her grandson came to pick her up, and in the residence, there would be the odors of fried hamburger or chicken or tacos or whatever she had made for dinner tonight. Things were normal, he told himself, normal.
He was halfway up the sidewalk to the residence when he knew someone was watching. He stopped walking and glanced about. And that was stupid, he realized. Whoever was watching now knew that he knew someone was there. But where? The church glowed in the late afternoon sun, the alley running toward the guesthouse was deserted—a ribbon of gravel that disappeared behind the corner of the church—and the administration building looked quiet and vacant. There was the Arapaho Museum in the gray stone school building, but he’d sent the volunteers home and tacked a white piece of paper onto the door that said, “Temporarily Closed.”
There was no one about.
Still, he couldn’t shake the sense that he was being tracked, like a wild animal in the sites of a rifleman. The killer was here, somewhere.
He sprinted up the sidewalk, threw himself at the front door, and fumbled at the knob. It was like a piece of stone in his hand, and he remembered that he’d told Elena to keep the doors locked. He was extracting the keys from his pocket when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the brown pickup bouncing past the cottonwoods, heading into the mission. The front bumper jiggled as the pickup started around Circle Drive. Jeffrey, Elena’s grandson, coming to pick her up, now that he’d gone back on the wagon.
“Go back!” Father John shouted, waving at the dark head hunched over the steering wheel. But the pickup kept coming. The noise of spitting gravel burst through the quiet. The pickup slid to a stop in front of the residence, and the driver’s door flew open.
“Don’t get out!”
“What?” The young man pulled himself upright by the opened door.
“There’s someone who could have a gun. Get back inside. Stay down.”
In an instant, the young man had taken this in, thrown himself back inside, and pulled the door shut behind him.
Father John jammed his key into the lock and started to open the door. From somewhere behind the house, he heard an engine kick over and roar into life. He turned around, flung himself down the steps, and ran to the corner of the house where he had a view of the back road—scarcely a road, a two-track cut through the wild grass and brush—that ran past the baseball field and out toward Rendezvous Road. A silver sedan sped down the road, turning through the bends, back tires skidding sideways. In a moment, it was out of sight.
When he turned back, he saw Elena and her grandson standing on the stoop together, and in the set of the woman’s face, Father John saw that she understood.
“He come here, didn’t he?” she said.
Father John walked back along the front of the house and up the steps. “You’d better stay home for a few days,” he said.
“Yeah, Grandma,” Jeffrey said. “You got a shooter around here, it’s no place you want to be.”
“I tol’ you, that killer’s not runnin’ me off.”
Father John caught Jeffrey’s eye. “Let’s go on home, Grandma,” the young man said. “We can talk about it later.”
There were a few moments while Elena bustled about the house gathering her things and her grandson walked back and forth on the stoop, a sentinel watching for the enemy. The front door hung open, and the hot breeze swept through the house as Father John picked up the phone on the hall table and dialed Coughlin’s office.
“The killer was here,” he told the detective as soon as he’d made his way past the blond receptionist and listened to a line that seemed to have gone dead. “He drove out of here two minutes ago in the silver sedan, heading toward Rendezvous Road.”
29
EXCEPT FOR THE faint pull of the elevator on its downward plunge, Vicky felt as if she were in a small room with bodies jammed around her, briefcases and bags poking into her back and ribs. Her cell phone started vibrating through her bag, but it was impossible to dig it out. It had vibrated twice during the interview in the glass-enclosed conference room of Owens and Lattimore, and she’d ignored it while she told what had happened the night in the alley. Then she’d answered the questions Lucas had warned her about, all of which were meant to test her sense of reality, her grasp of her own life. Could she really be certain that she’d seen what she’d seen?
She was certain, she said over and over, holding fast to the image of the girl folding under the blows of Theo Gosman’s fists, legs sprawled on the cement, jerking in spasms of violence. And that other image that hovered in the shadows of her mind, the girl in the Gas Hills.
The elevator bumped to a stop. Vicky was carried along with the crowd that spilled through the sliding doors out into the glass and marble lobby of the Seventeenth Street skyscraper. There was a hush of conversation from groups standing about, and the clack, clack sound of heels on the hard floor. Vicky stepped out of the way of people coming and going and checked the readout on her cell. Three calls, all from Luna Norton. She hurried outside and pressed the callback key. People in dark suits and serious, dark dresses, briefcases swinging at their sides or hanging from their shoulders, hurried along the sidewalk. Familiar, she thought. A few years ago, she’d been one of them, hurrying to court hearings and interviews and depositions, marching along. The buzzing sound in her ear stopped.
“I’ve been trying to call you.” Luna’s voice sounded hurried and strained.
“I know. I was in a meeting. Will your mother see me?”
“If you still insist upon this, you’d better come right away.” The words were rushed, notes of reluctance ringing through them. “She’s better in the mornings.” Then she gave Vicky the address.
THE HOUSE WAS in the Highland neighborhood, only a few blocks from where she and Lucas had eaten dinner last evening. She rolled to a stop at the curb, double-checked the address, and started up the sidewalk in front of a redbrick bungalow with gables and paned-glass windows and humps of trimmed evergreen bushes on either side of the door. Sloans Lake was a block away, and through the trees she caught glimpses of the blue water shimmering in the sunshine. The faintest hint of humidity hung in the air. She could hear a duck quacking in the distance.
She stepped onto a small porch with a black iron railing and a pot of red petunias pushed against the brick wall. The door opened just as she started to lift the iron knocker. Luna stood in the doorway, dressed much the same as yesterday, except that the tee shirt was white, the capris black. There was an anxious look in her eyes.
“You’d better come in,” she said.
Vicky followed her into a living room that was all leather, chrome, and glass arranged around a polished wood floor that ran across the front of the house. Wallboard had been pulled from the side walls, exposing an expanse of brick behind large framed posters of orange and red poppies and purple chrysanthemums. In one corner were chrome shelves stacked with the brightly colored rattles, toys, and padded books of a young child. The hot, moist odor of chocola
te chip cookies drifted from the kitchen. There was no sign of anything Arapaho, no prints of horses or buffaloes, no star quilts draped over the brown leather sofa. It might have been the home of any young couple in an old, trendy neighborhood. Except that Luna was Arapaho, the same generation as Lucas and Susan, Indians who knew they had rights and lived in gentrified neighborhoods and worked in software and purchased leather and chrome furniture.
“Mom’ll be out in a minute,” Luna said, but a woman who looked about sixty, with short gray hair and deep lines cut into her round, dark face, had already appeared in the kitchen doorway. Luna must have sensed her presence, because she swung around. “Here’s the lawyer I told you about,” she said.
Without saying anything, Inez Horn walked into the room and dropped onto the end cushion of the sofa. She wore a blue blouse and a darker blue skirt with tiny smudges of what might have been flour across the front.
Luna nudged a sling-back leather chair in Vicky’s direction before she started for the closed door to the right of the kitchen doorway. “I’d better check on the baby.” This was thrown over one shoulder in the direction of the sofa.
Vicky sat down, conscious of Inez Horn watching her out of narrowed eyes. Finally the woman said, “What took you so long?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve been waiting a long time.” Inez sat very still, shoulders slumped a little, hands clasped in her lap. “Every day, ever since Luna was a baby, I’ve been expecting somebody to come or call me. But nobody ever came. Nobody ever called. Oh, I called a lot of people, everybody I could think of, and they told me the same thing. Nobody’d seen her. Probably ran away, they said, took off, left her baby girl. Maybe she was over on Colfax, working the streets, drinkin’ and druggin’. Did I ever think of that? Maybe I should just forget her and go on. Luna was doing okay with me, wasn’t she? So don’t worry about it. But I knew that no way did Liz leave her baby. She loved Luna more than anything. Now you’ve come here finally to tell me what became of her.”
The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 27
