Eye of the Wolf

by Margaret Coel

  “Just tell us . . .” Vicky had to stop herself from saying the rest of it: And skip the drama. Every bit of gossip that floated off the moccasin telegraph and down the telephone line into the office was a monumental, earthshaking bit of news that Annie felt her duty to pass on immediately.

  “They found three bodies,” the woman blurted.

  “What?” Adam tilted his head toward the young woman.

  “Three men were found out in the middle of nowhere at the site of some old battle. Gates, Lakes, something like that.”

  “The Bates Battlefield?” Vicky caught the flash of recognition in Adam’s eyes. He knew. The Bates Massacre had almost destroyed her people, sent the survivors scurrying around the plains to other tribes, willing to trade their customs and language, their very identity, for enough food to stay alive.

  “Murdered, Vicky,” Annie said. “Shot down just like warriors in the Old Time, like there was some kind of battle that went on again out there. Father John found them.”

  Vicky felt Adam’s gaze shift toward her, and she made her own expression unreadable. The face of a rock. The sound of grandmother’s voice in her head like the strain of a familiar melody. Nobody can see inside a rock, Vicky. You remember that when you don’t want anybody to know what you’re thinking.

  John O’Malley, she was thinking, aware of the little stab of pain, like a needle pricking her heart. Someone must have called him and sent him out to the battlefield. Someone worried or in trouble. Someone who knew that he would go. John O’Malley would always go. She closed her eyes a moment. God, let me forget the man.

  Then, another thought—the killer could have sent John O’Malley to find bodies that could have remained hidden in the snow for a week. The killer must have wanted the bodies found.

  “What else did you hear?” Adam turned his full attention to Annie, and Vicky realized that he had deliberately turned away from her own rock-hard face. It struck her that grandmother could have been wrong, that someone might see inside a rock.

  “They looked like warriors.” Annie stumbled on. “I mean, the bodies were staged so they looked like they fell in battle. Somebody arranged their arms and legs. I mean, how weird is that? One of the bodies was propped up against a tree stump. And Father John . . .”

  “What about him,” Vicky cut in, ignoring the glance Adam threw her way.

  “Somebody shot at him while he was out finding the bodies. He got hit.”

  Vicky gripped the edge of the desk. She felt as if the floor were moving beneath her, the walls of the office closing in, sucking out the air.

  Adam’s voice floated through the vacuum tightening around her. “Is he okay?”

  Annie’s voice “He’s fine. Just a nick on his face. Didn’t even go to the hospital. Too stubborn.”

  Oh, John O’Malley was a stubborn man, all right, Vicky was thinking, waves of relief washing over her. He knew who he was. A priest. He would never be other than who he was.

  “Three men shot to death,” Adam said, as if he were trying to wrap his mind around the immensity of the fact. “Who are they?”

  Vicky stared at Adam, scarcely able to get her own thoughts around the notion that had flashed into her mind.

  “If the sheriff’s office knows,” Annie went on, “they aren’t saying. Waiting to notify relatives, I guess, but everybody thinks the dead guys must’ve been doing drugs. I mean, why else were they out in the badlands? My girlfriend said they looked like Shoshones.”

  Adam took hold of the edge of the door. “Thanks, Annie,” he said, nodding toward the outer office. “Let us know if you hear anything else.”

  The secretary hesitated a moment, then, reluctance in the slope of her shoulders, she dodged past Adam and through the door.

  “Vicky,” he began, letting the door swing closed.

  She held up one hand. “Don’t say it. Frankie Montana might be a lot of things, but he’s not capable of murdering three men to keep them from testifying against him.”

  “This isn’t our battle, Vicky.”

  “It’s quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? What if the dead men turn out to be the Shoshones Frankie was accused of assaulting? Who do you think the sheriff’s investigator is going to go after?”

  “Frankie can always get another attorney, if he needs one.”

  “You expect me to leave him in the hands of a lawyer out of law school—how many years, Adam? Two, three?”

  Adam didn’t say anything, and for a long moment, silence hung between them like an invisible presence. Then he opened the door and went out, pulling the door shut behind him so slowly that Vicky could barely hear the lock click into place. She sank into her chair, her eyes glued to the door, a mute symbol of his contempt.

  This could be nothing, she told herself. The murdered men could be anybody, any Shoshones on the reservation. And yet . . .

  An indefinable dread, like an icy grip, had taken hold of her. If Lucille Montana called again and asked her to help Frankie, she knew that she would not turn the woman away.

  FATHER JOHN POURED the last of the coffee into a mug and carried it down the hall and into his study. He dropped into the old leather chair behind his desk and took a draw of the coffee, barely warm and sharp with bitterness, left over from dinner a good four hours ago. He’d missed dinner—hamburger and mashed potatoes, which Elena, who had kept the residence running since long before he’d come to St. Francis, had piled on a plate and set in the refrigerator. He wasn’t hungry. It was thirst that had taken hold of him somewhere in the darkness as he’d driven west on 26 and south on Highway 789, yellow headlights flickering over the snow, every cell in his body screaming for forgetfulness. A capful of whiskey was all he needed. There was courage in whiskey. He’d passed the bars in Riverton, the drive-in liquor stores, struggling not to notice them, and had kept going. Help me, help me, Lord.

  He drained the last of the coffee and set the mug on a stack of papers. Shadows crawled down the walls over the bookcases and side chairs and crept across the carpet. Light from the streetlamps around Circle Drive splashed on the black panes of the windows. The small clock at the corner of his desk glowed red in the semidarkness: 10:53. His cheek burned with pain, and the Band-Aid was moist and cold with blood. He ached with exhaustion, but there would be no sleep tonight, nothing but the images glued to the backs of his eyelids of the blood-crusted bodies, the angles of arms and legs, the gray frozen hands and faces.

  “God help us,” he said out loud, surprised at the sound of his own voice in the quiet. His mouth was dry. He felt as if he were breathing dust.

  He reached over and switched on the desk lamp. A puddle of yellow light spread across the piles of papers and envelopes—letters to answer, bills to pay, notes to himself about upcoming meetings, ideas for homilies. Swiveling sideways toward a bookcase, he glanced over the shelves until he spotted the title on the spine of the book he was looking for. He plucked the book out of its slot. The jacket was white, with a photograph of four warriors sitting on their ponies. It had been a black and white photo until someone had colored the ponies a golden bronze. The faces of the warriors, squinting into the sun, were also bronze, like their sinewy arms, the trousers and shirts were gray, the beaded vests, red and blue, and the eagle-feathered headdresses, white and brown against the blue sky. Emblazoned in red above the photograph was the title: War on the Plains. Below the photograph, also in red, was the name of the author: Charles Lambert, Ph.D.

  Father John opened the book and flipped through the pages, stopping to study the photographs. Warriors with naked chests and arms sat astride their ponies, both warriors and ponies painted for war. Warriors galloping out of the villages. Women, children, and old people herding horses packed with household goods, trying to escape an attack. Soldiers standing outside their tents on the plains. An army officer bent over papers on a collapsible desk, the gas lantern glowing on the canvas walls. Wooden structures at army forts facing one another across the parade grounds, American flags l
ofted on poles in the center. And the battlefields, pages of photographs from battles, as if, after the killing, soldiers had dug cameras out of their knapsacks, wanting to fix in time everything that had taken place.

  There was a sameness to the images, and for a moment Father John wondered if the soldiers had posed the bodies of fallen warriors before they’d snapped the pictures. He dismissed the idea. The bodies lay as they had fallen, arms and legs askew, heads wrenched sideways. He flipped to the back of the book and glanced down the index until he found Bates Battle. He turned to a page near the end of the book, just like the battle itself, which had come near the end of the plains war, and began reading through the double columns of text: One hundred and sixty Shoshone warriors and a company of cavalry under Captain Alfred E. Bates rode to the Arapaho village in the gorge near a creek. The attack began at dawn on July 4, 1874. Some Arapaho warriors managed to climb up the slopes, outflank the attackers, and drive them from the village. When the fighting ended, forty-seven Arapahos lay dead. Most of the tipis and household goods had been torched, and the horses had been stampeded. The Bates Battle became known as the day they killed the Arapahos.

  Father John leaned back in his chair. He could hear the mechanical voice in his head. The attack had occurred in the middle of the summer, the hottest time of the year. In the heat. Revenge is sweet.

  A large black and white photograph spread across the following two pages, a view of the canyon, the steep, rocky slopes rising on either side. It looked peaceful and quiet, wild grasses covering the canyon floor, the kind of place for a picnic, not a place of death. But on the following page, a photograph of death, the body of a man propped against the stump of a tree, arms flopped at his sides. He wore a canvas jacket, opened over a white shirt with the dark splotch of blood in the center. His right hand was stuffed into the jacket pocket.

  Father John closed the book and stared past the circle of light into the shadows. The killer had seen the photograph. The killer had shot the man, propped him against the tree stump, and put his right hand into his jacket pocket. Detective Burton was right. There was a maniac out there.

  7

  FATHER JOHN SPOTTED the woman as he headed across the mission grounds for the administration building. A small figure outlined in the dull morning light, standing outside the door on the concrete stoop, hunched forward, as if she weren’t sure whether to try the door or flee down the steps. Parked in front of the building was a blue Ford sedan with a dented passenger door and a side-view mirror suspended from a tangle of wires. The woman’s head jerked around as he approached. She backpedaled toward the railing, black boots skidding over the snowy concrete.

  “Can I help you?” Father John started up the steps. The first parishioner of the day, he was thinking, dropping by—Father, do you have a minute? I have to talk to somebody. Except that she wasn’t a parishioner. She wasn’t anyone he had ever met, and she was younger than he’d realized at first, probably no more than twenty. A girl more than a woman, her straw-colored hair brushing the collar of the gray coat that strained against the front buttons, as if it were a size too small for her slight frame. She squinted along the railing at him. A small circle of metal glinted in one nostril.

  “You the Indian priest?” she said.

  He felt a jolt of alarm. The mechanical voice clanged through the fog in his head. This is for the Indian priest.

  “Some people call me that,” he said, holding his place halfway up the steps. He was thinking that he spent more time with Indian people than with white people. His parishioners were Arapahos. Days passed when the only other white person he talked to was his assistant. But it was the whites in Lander, the town that abutted the reservation, and in Riverton—encircled by the reservation—who had given him the name. The girl probably came from one of the towns.

  “I’m Father O’Malley.” He nodded toward the door. “Would you like to come inside?”

  “Yeah.” The girl gulped at the word, watchful eyes still observing him—observing the Band-Aid on his cheek, he realized. She stood very still, arms dangling at her side. Her hands were bare and raw looking. The gray coat had a belt that looped in front, and for the first time, he noticed the little bulge below her waist.

  Father John took the last two stairs, opened the door, and led the girl across the wide corridor crisscrossed with shadows and arrows of light from outdoors. He pushed open the door to his office and motioned her inside. She hesitated for a couple of seconds, then hurried past him and planted herself in the center of the room, her gaze taking in the desk piled with papers and folders, the old leather chair with the gray tape that he’d plastered over a small tear in the middle, the side chairs that he kept for visitors, the file cabinets topped with books and papers, the bookcases with shelves bowing under the double stacks of books.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” The phone started ringing. He decided to let it go to the answering machine.

  “Water would be okay.” The girl shrugged.

  “Make yourself at home.” Father John hung his jacket over the coat tree, then took two Styrofoam cups from the little table that held a coffeepot and jars of coffee, sugar, and powdered cream and headed down the corridor for water. When he returned, the girl was sitting on a side chair, rubbing her hands together and staring into the center of the room. He handed her one of the cups, pulled the other side chair around, and sat down facing her.

  “Suppose you start by telling me your name,” he said.

  “Edie.” It was little more than a whisper. Then she added, “Bradbury.” She was very pretty: startling blue eyes and wide cheekbones, lips a slash of red against her pale skin. He could see the faintest line of blue veins in her temples as she sipped at the water.

  “Edie Bradbury,” he said, not meaning to sound surprised. He took a drink of his own water, then set the cup on the edge of the desk. Short for Edith, he supposed. A girl with an old-fashioned name and a silver ring in her pierced nostril, as if she’d found herself stranded in the twenty-first century and decided to acclimate herself.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble, Edie?” he asked, his thoughts already jumping ahead. A pregnant girl, alone, with no one to help her and no money. He could call the pastors at the churches in Riverton and Lander, get the names of families willing to take in a pregnant girl. He could put her in touch with an agency that would arrange for an adoption, if that was what she wanted.

  He realized she was starting to weep. She set her cup on the floor and began patting at the moisture on her cheeks with the back of one hand, and he got to his feet and pulled a tissue out of a box almost hidden in the clutter on his desk.

  “I can’t find my boyfriend,” she said finally.

  “When did you last see him?” He handed her the tissue and sat back down.

  “Last Friday when he left for work. He goes to work after we get out of class. We been going to Central Wyoming College.” She blotted her cheeks with the tissue, then began lacing it through her fingers. “Trent’s not like that. Just go off like that and not come home or call me or anything. Sometimes he has to work late, but he always calls me. That’s how he is. We’re really close. And he knows I get crazy with worry, with the baby coming. I get all scared if I don’t hear from him. That’s how I know something bad’s happened to him. He’s gotta be in some kind of trouble.”

  “Have you called his friends?” Father John began. Then he reeled off the rest of the logical sequence: Work? Family? There was a steadiness in logic, a way of plodding on that could keep fear at bay.

  She was nodding. Quick, spasmodic movements loosening a piece of the straw hair that fell over one eye. She pushed the hair back. “He showed up for work Friday night, ’cause I talked to his boss. But he didn’t go in on Saturday when he was supposed to get time and a half. Never showed up yesterday, either. All I know is, we went to class together Friday afternoon and everything was, you know, normal. Even if he was in trouble, no way was Trent gonna miss class. It’s all about the In
dian wars, and he really got into it, you know what I mean? The teacher is a big history guru I never heard of before Trent convinced me I oughtta sign up for the class. Professor Lambert’s the name, and he’s written lots of books. Trent says nobody knows more about the Indian wars.”

  Charles Lambert, Father John was thinking. Author of the book he’d pulled out last evening. He had no idea that the man was teaching at the local college.

  The girl had realigned herself in the chair. She swallowed hard and went on, “I called a couple of guys from class that Trent likes to hang out with, but nobody was home. Trent wouldn’t just take off, Father,” she said, her eyes flitting about the room. “He really loves me. I mean . . .” Flitting. Flitting. “Me and the baby, we mean everything to him.”

  Father John was quiet. He wasn’t the one that she was trying to convince, he realized.

  “What did his family say?” he said.

  The girl took a moment, squeezing her eyes against the tears beading at the corners. “I been calling and calling his folks, and the minute they hear my voice, they hang up. They don’t even wait for me to tell ’em that something bad’s happened to Trent. They told him, ‘Don’t ever bring that white trash on the rez, ’cause we don’t wanna see her.’ They don’t even know about the baby. God, if they knew!” She lifted one hand and started pulling at her hair. “I get so scared thinking about it, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m shaking and crying, like they’re gonna find some way to get my baby, maybe kill me, or something . . .”

  “Hold on, Edie.” Father John held up one hand. “Trent’s Arapaho?”

  “Why do you think that?” She gave a little laugh that sounded like a strangled cry. “Trent’s real proud he’s Shoshone. He says his people and the Arapahos are traditional enemies, even though they live on the same reservation now and they gotta get along. Only reason his family hates me is ’cause I’m white. So they think Trent’s gonna go off with me and they’ll never see him again. Well, soon’s he finishes school, we’re gonna get outta here all right. We been talking about where we’ll go.” She started tearing up again, tearing up and blotting the moisture with the tissue. “Maybe go to Denver so Trent can get a job and we can live in one of them suburbs, you know, and have a backyard for the baby. I always thought that’d be great, you know, if you was a kid and had a backyard.”