Eye of the Tiger Lily

by Ann Yost

  “Can it wait?”

  “Oh, of course. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  Guilt crashed in on him. It was one thing to encourage Molly to find her own way. It was quite another to turn his back on her for a relationship that was all wrong. And this was important.

  “You didn’t bother me, Nizwia.”

  “Nevertheless, this can keep. In fact, I want to think about it a bit more. Sleep tight, Daniel. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  When he hung up Sharon was standing in the same spot a few feet away from him but she might have well have been on the moon. He felt the change. Whatever they’d had between them was well and truly broken. He knew it was because she believed he still loved Molly. He did not correct the mistake.

  It was better this way.

  ****

  After her call to Daniel, Molly dropped in at Cully’s Market to pick up a few groceries. She drifted over to the pharmacy aisle and eyed the pregnancy tests. She knew she could buy one here without risking any gossip. After all, she was the tribe’s midwife. She reached for the lone box on the shelf but changed her mind.

  It was still too early to tell and, besides, she didn’t really want to know. She paid for her toothpaste and bread then drove to a narrow, aluminum trailer to check on one of her new mothers. The family invited her to stay for a meal. Most of her patients had little cash but they were proud and insisted upon paying with hospitality and Molly always accepted.

  Tonight, though, despite the delicious venison stew, she ate little. Her theory about the murder depressed her. She had heard nothing of a break up between Cam and Sharon Johnson, which meant he had cheated with Molly on his wife-to-be. And, perversely, she felt depressed because she hadn’t seen or heard from Cam. She told herself she hadn’t expected anything from him but her feelings were hurt.

  Her heart was hurt.

  Apparently that slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am stuff on the butterscotch sofa had been just a passing ship to him.

  She felt so low on the way home she decided to stop at the home of her foster parents. It always cheered her to see Muriel and James. Her father teased her a bit then busied himself with chores while she sat in the bright yellow kitchen with her mother.

  “Something’s bothering you,” Muriel said. “Is it the you-know-what?”

  Molly knew her mother meant the insemination attempt but she didn’t want to talk about that now. She needed to focus on the murder. She shook her head.

  “Then what, nizwia?”

  “What do you know about Sandra Tall Tree?”

  “Probably no more than you know. She thinks she’s too good for Blackbird Reservation. Davey’s a fool.”

  “Have you seen her around lately?”

  “No. But then no one sees her except for in that red sports car she drives. What makes you ask about her?”

  “Just a feeling. If you hear anything about her, can you let me know?”

  “Anything like what?”

  “I don’t know. Davey said she’d gone back to Canada for awhile. I’d like to talk to her if anyone sees her around.”

  Muriel nodded and asked no more questions. She could be discreet when necessary. It was one of her best qualities, Molly thought.

  “And what about the other?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “If it didn’t work, if you’re not, will you try again?”

  “No.” No. She still wanted Cam’s baby but she was finished with her own selfish games. She would not betray him again. Whatever else happened, she would let go of her obsession. She’d devote herself to the People and she’d be happy.

  “I heard he was with you at the casino.”

  Muriel’s blunt statement startled Molly. Of course her mother would have heard about Cam’s presence at the casino. The grapevine never failed.

  “Yes.”

  “So did you go to bed?”

  “Mother!”

  “It’s a good question. I know you love him.”

  There was no judgment behind the statement. They both knew it was true.

  “He’s marrying someone else, n’onon. He loves someone else.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  Molly thought about Cam’s hands on her, his urgent breath against her neck, the deep groan of relief when he’d found his satisfaction with her. She nodded. “He has a woman he can trust. I’m happy for him.”

  Muriel murmured a soothing, clucking sound and took Molly’s hand in hers. “It will all work out, nizwia. You’ll see.”

  Molly hugged the woman who was her family. “I love you, Mother.”

  “Your father and I thank the Creator every day for sending you to us.”

  ****

  Shadows stretched across the fields as late afternoon hurried off the stage to make room for early evening. Dusk was arriving earlier and earlier these days. Winter was not far off. The Moon of Freezing Rivers. She breathed in the scent of Fall for a moment before she went inside. This was the time of year the Penobscots had traditionally returned home after a nomadic summer of camping and socializing. It was the time to prepare for the long winter months ahead.

  Wearily she pushed open her front door and turned on the recessed lights. She’d decorated her great room to look like the outdoors with unvarnished wooden floor and the sky blue walls and subtle, low-wattage lamps. She flicked them on and they blended with the magical twilight outside the large window that was a door to her garden. Usually she felt warm and calm when she returned home, but not tonight. Tonight her heart was troubled. The message light on her phone blinked at Molly. She punched the button hoping no one was in labor. She felt tired to the bone.

  Hallie Scott Outlaw’s cheery voice greeted her. Molly smiled at the extended message.

  “Hey, Mol, you can start bringing crafts to the co-op anytime. We’ve got everything set up now. Let me know if you need help transporting them. Robert’s been fussy today and Daisy was over for awhile. She may have been poking him. That reminds me, Daisy says ‘hi’ and she told me to make sure you join us for the Harvest Festival. There’s gonna be tons of food and fun and you’ve got to be there. Oh, and Daniel should come, too. Take care now.”

  Nothing new there. Molly listened to the next message.

  The voice was low and mysterious and Molly couldn’t identify it. She couldn’t even tell whether the caller was male or female, but the husky voice sent shivers dancing down her spine. The message itself was eerie, too. The caller told Molly to look on her bed.

  Molly’s heart jerked. Someone had been in her home? Someone had invaded the sanctity of her bedroom? What would she find in there? A coiled snake? A horse’s head? A pink-and-white early pregnancy test kit? She paced across the heart-of-pine floor in her living room. Her imagination was out of control. She just needed to calm down and refuse to be intimidated by the androgynous caller’s message. She sucked in a breath, marched into her room, snapped on the light and darted a glance at the half-made bed. She felt an incongruous stab of self-consciousness. The intruder knew her guilty secret. Well, he knew one of her guilty secrets. She almost never made her bed. She inched toward the piece of furniture, her arms around her waist, her heart slamming against her chest. What was it? What was there?

  Molly’s heartbeat didn’t calm when she saw it was a slip of paper. She used only the tip of her forefinger and her thumb to lift it high enough for her to read the message written there.

  “M.Y.O.B.” Mind your own business?

  Molly’s fear morphed into excitement. Had her visit to Davey prompted this? Was this from Sandra? Had she returned from her bogus trip to Canada and heard Molly had been snooping around? Did this mean she was on the right track?

  What should she do next? Call the sheriff? Daniel? Cam? Molly glanced at the cheery teddy bear in the center of her wristwatch. His right paw pointed to the “nine” his left paw to “twelve.” It was too late to call anybody. A wave of exhaustion hit her hard. What she needed, more than anything, was a good night’s sl
eep. The note was merely a warning. Whoever wrote it expected her to back off the investigation and it would look as if she had and, anyway, she didn’t feel threatened. The style of the note told her the unhappy truth. It was sophomoric, the product of a teenager or someone who thought like one.

  Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll tell Jake what I know about Sandra Tall Tree.

  Despite her fatigue Molly didn’t fall asleep immediately. She couldn’t banish the contrast of Davey’s hopeful face and her certainty that his marriage was doomed. In her tired mind, the disappointments of Davey and the tribe fused with her own blighted hopes from years ago. The images mixed and mingled like the shifting bits of glass in a kaleidoscope and when the sunlight poured across her face announcing the dawn of a new day she barely felt rested. She felt something else though. Her stomach lurched and she flew into the bathroom.

  Was it morning sickness or the summer flu? Molly bent over the bowl again. Time to figure it out after she’d emptied her stomach.

  But there wasn’t time. She’d barely finished when Lenaya’s mother called with another report of cramps.

  Molly wolfed down some soda crackers as she threw on her clothes. This was the second alarm. It seemed as if the teenager’s body was doing everything it could to expel the fetus. Molly knew that one in four pregnancies aborted naturally but she always intervened if she could in case there was a way to save the baby. The statistics didn’t mitigate the sadness at losing even the prospect of another precious life.

  Half an hour later Lenaya’s bleeding appeared to have stopped. Molly knew the respite might be temporary and she conveyed her thoughts to Lenaya’s mom, Nancy. A miscarriage was still a distinct possibility and she could tell from the flash in Nancy’s dark eyes that she, too, would have mixed emotions about such an outcome.

  Molly left the Dove’s trailer with a fresh loaf of poppy seed bread under her arm. She made the rounds of her postpartum patients to check on their health, state of mind and whether they had any questions about breastfeeding. By the time she returned to her cottage, twilight had arrived. She felt a jolt of apprehension and was surprised at herself. She’d never before been reluctant to enter her darkened house. Maybe the M.Y.O.B. note had upset her more than she’d realized. Her home was isolated on its small back road that led to nowhere and there was no moon. She had to squint to see the front stoop. She didn’t see the obstacle until she stubbed her toes against it.

  Molly’s heart caught in her throat and she reached for the object with shaking hands. A sigh of relief escaped her when she realized it was just a box. A shoebox. She smiled. Someone, probably her mother, had sent over some baked goods.

  Inside, Molly snapped on the lights. The stylized writing on the box surprised her. She knew something about shoes and she knew there was no one on the rez, least of all her mother, who would have shoes that cost hundreds of dollars. She stared at the logo.

  Papagallo

  Suddenly Molly went very still. She was wrong. There was a woman who might wear the expensive footwear, a woman whose Jimmy Chus had set off a crown fire of gossip several months earlier.

  Molly’s hands shook as she set the box down on the gray Formica top of her kitchen table.

  She punched in her mother’s number just to be sure.

  “You didn’t leave me a Papagallo shoebox, did you?”

  “A papa-what?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “What is happening?”

  “Someone left me a shoebox, that’s all.”

  “Cookies?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll call you back after I open it.”

  Muriel must have sensed some tension in her words.

  “Open it now, baby. While I’m on the line.”

  Molly knew she’d made a mistake. She shouldn’t have involved Muriel in this but it was too late now. She lifted the lid and peeked inside. She had no time to control her reaction. No chance to stifle her shriek at sight of the feathered carcass.

  “What is it? What’s wrong, nizwia?”

  Molly pulled herself together for her mother’s sake. “It’s just a joke,” she faltered. “A silly joke. Looks like the work of Bobby Black Bear and Len Whitetail. Those kids just don’t have enough to do.”

  “What’s the joke?”

  “Let me call you later, Ma. I need to take care of this.”

  She disconnected her phone and gazed at the shiny black feathers. She understood nature and the food chain and, generally speaking, she wasn’t squeamish but death always saddened her. She wondered where the crow had been obtained and hoped it had died of natural causes. Molly examined the narrow head and the long, heavy black beak. This crow seemed larger than the ones she saw habitually around the rez and there was something weird about its tail. It was unusually long with very distinct graduations. The feathers around the bird’s throat were shaggy, too. She went very still as she realized what she was looking at. This was not a crow’s carcass but that of a raven.

  Chills skittered up and down Molly’s spine sending shafts of real fear through her body. The sender of the M.Y.O.B. message had just upped the ante. Made it more personal.

  Someone had taken the trouble to search Molly’s background, to discover that in a previous lifetime she had been the child of John Wind, a Wisconsin Mohawk who’d spent his last months in prison after accidentally killing his non-native lover.

  Snapshots of the past clicked through her mind like the reel on an old-fashioned projector. Her father, proud and tall, reduced to a mind-numbing loneliness after the death of Molly’s mother. His love of liquor that turned a quiet, gentle man into a brawling, boozing, ultimately violent, womanizer. His ravaged face during their last father-daughter visit in prison when he’d told her he was sorry. Her fresh start at the Blackbird Reservation when she’d changed her name to Molly Whitecloud, erasing, forever, her former identity.

  Raven Wind.

  Was the sender threatening to expose her background if she didn’t stop investigating the murder? But how would that hurt her? Not many on the rez knew the details of her background but they were a forgiving people. Was this meant to discourage her relationship with Cam Outlaw? People in Eden might be less accepting of a half-Indian woman whose father had been a felon. But there was no question of a relationship between her and Cam.

  What did the raven mean?

  She felt certain she knew who had left the dead bird. She’d made it clear that she wanted to talk with Sandra Tall Tree. The official word was that Sandra was still away but she could have returned and hidden out in Davey’s farmhouse, which, like Molly’s house, was isolated. Molly shook her head. Didn’t the foolish woman realize that these amateurish attempts to frighten Molly away just pointed more and more to her guilt? If only she’d come forward to speak with Jake Langley on her own. Sandra was young and had been influenced by the obvious arch villain of this case, Dwight Winston.

  Molly stared at the shiny feathers. She knew she’d waited too long to tell what she knew. She should pick up the phone, this minute, and call Jake Langley but she hesitated, still reluctant to bring shame upon the tribe.

  She put on a pair of the gloves she carried in her backpack then slid her hands underneath the carcass. Afterwards she didn’t know whether she’d done so because she was stalling or because she’d felt some sixth sense that there was more to the message. There was more. Underneath the dead raven, tucked into a nest of tissue paper, was a pile of petals and a stamen.

  A mutilated flower. A Daisy.

  Molly’s blood turned to ice.

  The raven was just to get her attention. The real threat was to Daisy Outlaw.

  Fear, intense and blinding, exploded inside Molly. Her fingers shook so badly she could barely grab the phone. It took three tries but finally she was able to punch in the phone number for Cam’s sister-in-law, Hallie Scott Outlaw.

  “Where,” she said, in a voice pitched so she could hear it over the thundering of her heart, “is Daisy?”

&
nbsp; ****

  They’d run into each other at a chamber of commerce meeting and, along with others, had stopped by Little Joe’s for a beer. Afterwards Sharon asked Cam to stop by the inn.

  He didn’t ask her why. She was, after all, a friend and, until recently, a close friend. He followed her into the pleasant sitting room that served as her suite.

  “Wait here,” she said. She disappeared down the short hallway then reappeared a moment later carrying a stuffed Piglet and a copy of The House at Pooh Corner.

  “What’s all this?”

  “I found these online and couldn’t resist. I thought they might help Daisy adjust to the Robert-invasion.” She grinned.

  “You didn’t have to do this.”

  He knew, instantly, it was the wrong thing to say. The gifts were no doubt intended to help his daughter but they were also a peace offering. She didn’t want their failure to affect any of the other relationships between herself and the Outlaws who had become like family just as they had to Hallie before her.

  “Daisy will love this,” he said, with a grin. “I only hope the pig doesn’t upset Wilbur.”

  “Oh, I think he’ll be okay as long as Piglet doesn’t commandeer any of his food.”

  Cam laughed. “Thanks.” He lifted the pig. “Looks like you understand both animals and the hearts of jealous little girls. You’ll make a great mother someday.”

  He’d meant the words as a compliment but he could have ripped his tongue out when he saw Sharon’s peachy complexion pale. Dammit. He hadn’t meant to hurt her again. He reminded himself that she’d easily agreed to their break up. This was about her desire for a family, not about him. He pondered the strength of the maternal instinct and, because his thoughts always roamed toward Molly, he wondered that he hadn’t observed it in her.

  Why not? Had her tumultuous childhood turned her against parenthood? If she’d wanted a child she wouldn’t have divorced Grey Wolf.

  “My late wife was desperate to have a child,” he said, quietly. There was no reason to keep the details from Sharon. They might help her come to grips with her own childless state. They might also reassure her that she was well rid of him. He wasn’t exactly a fertility god. “I think I mentioned that we had problems conceiving. Apparently I’m one of those low-motility guys. Lazy sperm.” He grinned so she’d know he wasn’t self-conscious about the affliction. “Elise arranged to mix my, admittedly sluggish sample with more vigorous swimmers. That way the resulting child—Daisy—might or might not belong to me biologically.”