The Spider's Web

by Coel, Margaret

  “I already told you. I didn’t think about them until I saw the photos. Then I knew who they were, and I remembered that Roseanne was with them. Ned said she wouldn’t leave him alone, like she was obsessed with him. He couldn’t get away from her. He had to go to Jackson Hole to get away. No way was he ever going back to her...”

  “He had a relationship with her?”

  “It was over.” Marcy scoffed, as if she were clearing her throat. “He met me, and he never wanted to see her again. She just wouldn’t get the message.”

  “What was inside Ned’s van?”

  “What?” The girl blinked as if she were trying to shift her thoughts away from Roseanne Birdwoman.

  “Drugs? Is that what this is all about? Ned was killed over drugs?”

  “No! I told you, he didn’t do drugs.”

  “Listen, Marcy,” Vicky said, leaning forward. “If Ned was involved in drugs, if he had possession, if was dealing and you knew about it and helped him in any way, you could be charged as an accomplice. You could be in serious trouble.”

  Such a blank look came on the girl’s face that Vicky wanted to shout at her. God, no wonder Larry Morrison had hired a lawyer. The man knew his daughter.

  “It wasn’t drugs,” Marcy said, the little girl voice again. “I think they might’ve been, you know . . .”

  “I’m not clairvoyant,” Vicky said.

  “Stealing stuff. Breaking into houses. But Ned wasn’t doing that anymore. I told you, he was gonna dance in the Sun Dance.”

  Vicky sat back and studied the girl on the other side of the desk. A white girl with a televangelist father who had said, ‘Send me your bill. I don’t care what it is. Just take care of my little girl.’ A white girl with a condo in Jackson and a pickup and no doubt an annual allowance that was more than Vicky had seen in the first twenty-five years of her life. And she had no inkling that if Ned was involved in a burglary ring, she could also be implicated. She wondered how long it would take before Gianelli had Hawk and Lookingglass in custody. A day or two. The minute they told him what was going on, he would want to talk to Marcy Morrison again.

  “Did Ned tell you what he had been doing?”

  Marcy was shaking her head. “I figured it out. He never wanted me to know, ’cause he didn’t want me to get into trouble.” She started panting, as if she were having trouble getting her breath.

  Vicky stood up. “Are you all right?”

  “He’s dead now,” she said. “Doesn’t anybody get it? Ned is gone forever, and what am I gonna do?”

  “Maybe you should go home.” Vicky sat back down. “Stay with your father for a while.”

  The girl’s lips began moving silently. The blue vein pulsed in her forehead. Then she started speaking, enunciating carefully, letting each word hang in the air before she uttered the next one: “I will never go back there.”

  “Then think about going back to Jackson Hole,” Vicky said. “You’ve identified the two men. There’s no reason you can’t go home.”

  “They killed him,” she said. “I’m not leaving here ’til they’re arrested. All of them. That girl, too.”

  12

  ROSEANNE DARTED PAST the automatic glass doors and across the Walmart entrance, the day’s heat trapped with the rows of metal carts. “Have a nice evening.” The greeter, the old man with the sunken chest, waved a bony hand in her direction. She kept going. Out the glass door that swung toward her, across the sidewalk and down the rows of parked vehicles to the far lot where employees parked. The sun was dropping behind the mountains, and red, orange, and magenta shot across the pale gray sky. At some point, she realized, she had stopped thinking and become a robot. Going through the motions—bending, gripping, smiling. All of it a blur—the shelves and the fluorescent lights that glowed through the flat white panels overhead.

  She stayed close to the parked vehicles, sunlight sparkling in the bumpers and dancing on the hoods. Swinging her backpack around, she pulled out her keys, robot eyes straight ahead, feet moving toward the blue sedan. The hot asphalt burned through her sneakers. A dry breeze snatched up pieces of trash and tossed them in the air. She inched sideways between the sedan and a pickup, letting the backpack drag over the asphalt, and jammed the key into the lock.

  He grabbed her from behind, an arm like an iron bar pressing against her neck, a fist dug into her stomach. “Shut up,” he said. Dwayne’s voice in her ear, the sour breath flowing across her cheek. Then she was spinning about like a puppet and jammed against the door, her vertebrae pressed into the window frame. The scream erupted in her throat, but he had placed a hand over her mouth and dug his fingers into her cheeks.

  “You gonna scream?” He leaned over her. The black eyes were wide with the joke of it. “You think them fat white tourists are gonna come running and save you from a big, bad Indian?”

  She tried to push down the terror rising inside her. No one could see them. They were at the far end of the parking lot scrunched down between her car and a pickup. She could scream her lungs out, but in the heat and wind, with the traffic grinding along Federal Boulevard and vehicles belching in the lot, no one would hear.

  “You snitch on us?” he said, and she felt the pressure of his hand giving way.

  “No,” she managed.

  “Come on, Roseanne. Word’s out the fed’s looking for me and Lionel. How did he freaking hear about us? I told you to keep your mouth shut.”

  She could feel herself slipping downward, her legs folding beneath her. “I don’t know,” she said. Her mouth had gone dry, her tongue was a piece of sandpaper grating her teeth. She could picture herself in the front room at Berta’s, spilling out her guts when all she had to do was keep quiet. Except that Berta had blurted out the truth.

  “The fed already knew,” she managed. She could hear the hollowness in the lie, and she pushed on. “All I told him was that you and Lionel found Ned’s body. I told him that Ned was already dead when we got to the house. It’ll help you. Don’t you see?”

  He made a grunting noise under his breath and looked away, and for the first time, Roseanne glimpsed the fear running through his eyes. “How did the fed know we went to the house? Nobody could’ve told him but you.”

  “Somebody must’ve seen us,” she said.

  He stared at her for a long moment, but she could see that he was beginning to accept the possibility. “What if the fed thinks we killed Ned and went back to the house afterward? He’ll pin it on us. Lionel and me will rot in prison.”

  “There’s no reason for him to think that.” She was shivering, arms shaking. There was reason. She could feel the truth of it. Something between them and Ned. He had warned her to stay away from them. Oh God. Why didn’t she listen? All she had been thinking about was getting back at him, doing what he had told her not to do.

  “What else did you open your mouth about?” he said.

  “I told you all of it.”

  “What else, Roseanne?” The tips of his fingers plunged into her shoulders like darts.

  “I told him you came running out of the house like you’d seen a ghost.”

  “What about the business?”

  Roseanne stared at the brown face a few inches from her own, the missing curve of his left ear, the narrow, black eyes as opaque as stones, the purple lips and the pores cratered in the hooked nose. “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “The way Lionel and me got it figured”—the fingers loosened; he took a half step back—“you snitched to the fed about the business, so he figures we had reason to take out Ned. Some business problem, like maybe he was cheating on us. Is that a fact? Was he cheating on us?”

  “You’re crazy,” she said. The dark eyes pulled into slits, and she put up one hand. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know anything about any business. I haven’t seen Ned since he got back from Jackson Hole.” Except for that one time, she was thinking, but no one else had been there. “He broke up with me. He was with the white girl. Maybe she said som
ething to the fed.” God, she was going to cry. She could feel the moisture gathering behind her eyeballs.

  “The white bitch that was in the house.” He seemed to consider this. “Where is she?”

  She was aware that he had let go, and she had to grab on to the door handle to keep from crumbling onto the pavement. “The fed might have her in hiding,” she said. “’Cause she saw Ned’s killer.”

  “Yeah? Well, she didn’t see me or Lionel.” His muscles seemed to relax; he ran the palm of his hand over his forehead, pushing the sweat into the edges of his black hair. “She keeps her mouth shut about the business, we’ll be okay. Unless...” He straightened up and looked past her across the roof of the sedan. “Who else would he have shot off his mouth to?”

  “I told you, I didn’t see him.”

  “That priest at the mission? Talked to him, didn’t he? Used to go over there, hang around, confess his sins, whatever.” He shrugged. “He knows what’ll happen if he says anything to the fed.”

  Roseanne could feel her breath stopped in her throat.

  “You hear where the white girl is, you call my cell.” He dropped the slit-eyes to her and smiled out of the corner of his mouth. She had called him yesterday. Going crazy, locked up in the house that reeked with whiskey, Aunt Martha on a tear, ordering her about—clean the kitchen, take out the trash, wash the freaking clothes. The house, the job six hours a day, and the image never leaving her mind of Ned and the beautiful white girl he wanted more than her. “Anything going on tonight, Dwayne?” she had said when he answered. “I need to get outta here.”

  “You hear me?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “The fed comes around again, you stick to your story. About how we was shocked at finding Ned.” He swung around and started for the back of the pickup, then glanced around. “No hard feelings,” he said.

  Roseanne stayed against the door, watching the white truck damaged on the left side back up and jerk forward. It shot past the rear of her car. She listened to the engine roaring across the asphalt until the sound blended into the low hum of traffic out on Federal.

  SHE DROVE ACROSS Riverton, south on Highway 789, right onto the reservation, all of her senses on alert, as if a thousand needles had pricked her skin, replaying in her mind everything Ned had said that last time. Maybe he had told her about the business, and she hadn’t realized what he was talking about. She pushed away the idea. He would never have told her anything that would cause her trouble. She felt a brief tingle of something she remembered as happiness: maybe Ned had still loved her after all.

  She kept coming back to this: If Dwayne found out that she had seen Ned even once, he would think she was lying about the business. He would find her again—anyone could find her. The same hours at Walmart, the stupid, reeking house. She had to find someplace else to stay. Talk the supervisor into giving her another shift. Everything had to be different.

  She took another right and fishtailed onto a dirt road. The plains floated outside the windows, rising and falling with their own rhythm. The miles clicked on the odometer. She tapped the brake pedal, swung into a dirt yard, and stopped at the corner of the gray house. She jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and raced up the wooden steps. The door was unlocked, as usual. She pushed it open and went inside. Aunt Martha was sprawled on the sofa, starring at the flashing images on the TV. Cartons crusted with days-old takeout lay scattered over the coffee table and linoleum floor, and odors of burned coffee, mustard, and old hamburger mingled with the smells of whiskey.

  “About time you got home.” Aunt Martha lifted one eye in her direction. She wore a baby blue robe, and her breasts hung over the tie that had worked its way up from her waist. Her gray hair was matted, sweat-pressed to her head. “Some guy was here to see you.”

  “Some guy?” Roseanne stopped next to the sofa and looked down at the woman who had gone back to staring at the TV. A rerun of Beevis and Butt-Head jumping around. “Who was it?”

  “When did I get to be your secretary, Miss High and Mighty?” The pink spot wiggled at the top of the old woman’s scalp. Roseanne felt disconnected, floating in space. How had she come to be living in a gray house with an old woman she called Auntie, when Martha wasn’t her auntie at all. She was no relation, except she had married Roseanne’s uncle, and somehow, after accidents and diabetes and alcoholism had run their course, they were all the family left on the rez. The survivors.

  “I need to know who it was.” Roseanne felt her muscles stiffen.

  “Dwayne somebody.” Martha fumbled for the remote in a stack of cartons and turned up the volume. Cartoon voices rose over the laughter and tinny music.

  “You told him where I was!” Roseanne screamed at the woman. It took all of her strength not to pick up an empty whiskey bottle and hurl it at the woman’s head.

  Aunt Martha turned sideways and stared up at her, daring her, Roseanne thought. Begging her, even. Make it easy for her, put her out of her misery. “Some big secret, you working at Walmart?”

  Roseanne spun around and hurried down the hall. She went into Aunt Martha’s bedroom and shut the door. The room smelled of the old woman, the unwashed hair and dirty nails, the dry, flaking skin, the whiskey odors rising off the tangle of blankets on the bed. She pulled open the top drawer in the dresser and rummaged through scraps of underwear, nothing more than rags. Then the second drawer, a jumble of tee shirts and shorts, a wadded up black skirt. Inside the bottom drawer were the same kind of torn and soiled shirts and slacks. Her fingers ran over the surface of a box in the corner, and she yanked it past the clothes and flipped back the lid. An assortment of necklaces and bracelets, chains broken, glass stones missing. She closed the lid, put the box back, and kicked the drawer shut. God, it was pathetic the sum of the old woman’s possessions.

  She bent forward, resting her forehead on the edge of the dresser. She had wanted so much more. How they had talked, she and Ned, about the ranch he would buy: their own house, fine horses in the corral, a small herd of cattle, bales of hay in the pasture. He was saving most of his salary, he had told her, and she was saving, too, a little bit out of each paycheck after she had bought food and given money to Aunt Martha. “We’ll get it,” Ned had said. “Trust me, Roseanne. Someday, we’re gonna have our own place.” They had hiked up in Sinks Canyon and were sitting on rocks, boots propped against the rocks down slope, listening to the sounds of the Popo Agie rushing by below. She pressed her eyes shut. She could see them now up on the mountain. Wearing blue jeans torn at the knees, Ned in his red plaid shirt, she in a pink tee shirt. Last summer, another lifetime. “It won’t be long now.” She could almost hear his voice.

  She pushed herself off the dresser, flung open the closet door, and started slamming the hangers aside, kicking at the mismatched shoes and boots strewn over the floor. Then she lifted herself on her tiptoes and rummaged through the piles of faded blankets and towels until her fingers hit a hard surface. This was it—she knew by the weight as she pulled the cigar box off the top shelf, the sound of metal knocking inside. She sank to the floor, lifted the lid, and took out the black M1911 Colt .45 automatic pistol that her uncle had brought home from Vietnam. She jammed the gun inside the waistband of her blue jeans and picked up the loaded magazine.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Aunt Martha swayed in the doorway, blinking down at her. “Get out of my closet!”

  Roseanne pushed the cigar box into the debris of shoes and got to her feet. “None of your business,” she said, pushing past the old woman, the magazine tight in her grip. She ran back down the hall, grabbed her backpack off the floor where she had dropped it, and flung herself past the door out onto the stoop. In a moment, she was backing across the yard. Then she put the gear into forward and drove out onto the road, the image of Aunt Martha in the side-view mirror, gray hair straggling over her shoulders, leaning out the front door.

  13

  VICKY READ THROUGH the corrected pages of the logging contract
with Martinson Corporation of Dover, Delaware, as if the largest logging and timber company in the West were actually run from Delaware. A soft nighttime quiet had settled over the bungalow, broken by the intermittent sound of a dog barking outside, a car crawling down the street. Evening was a good time to work, after Roger and Annie had left and the phones had stopped ringing. She told herself it had nothing to do with the empty apartment, now that Adam wasn’t around, or that he hadn’t called in a week. She was used to being alone. Hi sei ci nihi, the grandmothers called her. Woman Alone.

  She forced her thoughts back to the contract. Similar to the previous contracts, except for the section titled “Revenues.” The Wind River tribes would collect a higher percentage of revenues, a change that the company lawyers had hardly blinked at, as if they had been expecting it for years. Well, it had taken years—she could hear Adam’s voice in her head—before Indian people had their own lawyers to look out for their interests. She hit another key and sent the document to Annie’s computer. Tomorrow Annie would clean up the spacings and titles, check the spelling, and print out two copies. One for the Joint Business Council of the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes and one for the law firm in the modern brick building on Main Street that, not long ago, had been the offices of Holden and Lone Eagle.

  Then she hit another key and typed in a search for burglaries, Lander, Wyoming. Lines of black type filled the screen, most about burglaries in Cheyenne or Sheridan or Cody. A few with Lander in bold type. She clicked on the first site: a rash of burglaries in Lander in the 1930s, executed by an outlaw gang that broke into houses, stole everything they could carry off, and vanished into the Wyoming wilderness. White men, she guessed, by the tone of barely suppressed admiration for the gang’s audacity and success.

  She moved to the next site, a small article about burglaries in the spring of 1955. Police had been called to the break-ins at two houses in the western part of town. There was a follow-up article under the headline “Arapahos Guilty.” She skimmed down the text: three Arapaho men in their twenties charged, convicted and sent to prison. Witnesses swore they had seen them loitering in the neighborhood of recent house burglaries, and one witness placed them near the late-night burglary of a shoe repair shop.