Wife of Moon

by Margaret Coel

26

  THE WIND RIVER agency building was a gray, cinder block affair off a side street in Fort Washakie. A jumble of pickups and cars straddled the parking lot next to the building, and other vehicles hugged the curbs in front. Vicky waited for a white SUV pulling away, then maneuvered the Jeep into the spot and walked up the sidewalk to the glass-front door. Broad, flat clouds floated close to the tops of the cottonwoods sheltering the building. The temperature was falling. It was colder on the reservation than in Lander, sixteen miles to the south. The warm valley the Arapahos had called Lander.

  Vicky let herself into a lobby with offices behind the glass cubicles on either side. There was the dissonant clang of ringing phones, the murmur of voices. Aromas of stale coffee and half-eaten lunches drifted toward her. At the far end, rows of plastic chairs faced each other across the tiled floor. Beyond the chair, windows framed a view of the stone dormitory that had housed soldiers at Fort Washakie a century ago. Charged with protecting the Arapahos and Shoshones from the white ranchers in the surrounding area, Vicky thought. Charged with keeping the Indians on the rez.

  She rapped on the opened door of the first cubicle on the left. LOUIS FOXWORTHY, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT, was stamped in black letters on the pebbled glass. Inside, a slim, muscular Indian with short-cropped black hair leaned back in a chair, phone glued to one ear. He was nodding and waving her inside at the same time. “The FBI is handling the investigation,” he said. “We believe this is an isolated incident. There’s no cause for alarm.” Nodding. Nodding. “Yes, of course. We’ll keep you posted of any developments.”

  He slammed the phone into the cradle and leaned over the desk. “T.J.’s murder’s got everybody’s attention,” he said. “Phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Newspaper, radio, television reporters wanting to know if a councilman’s murder has anything to do with the senator’s upcoming visit.” Foxworthy wiped his flattened hand across his forehead. “That was the BIA,” he said, nodding toward the phone. “Even they’re in on the act. Want to make sure we don’t have anybody out here who might assassinate a senator like they assassinated the councilman. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to Evans while he was on BIA turf.”

  “Assassinate?” Vicky dropped onto the edge of the plastic chair pushed into the corner and ignored the impatience that crossed the superintendent’s face.

  He said, “T.J. was shot in the head. What would you call it?”

  “He was tortured.”

  “Yeah, I heard. So we got crazy people running around. It’s Gianelli’s job to find whoever did it, then we can all relax and get back to normal. BIA aren’t the only ones worried. The senator’s people are making noises like they don’t want to send their man to the rez after all. What message will that send to the national media? Home of Arapahos and Shoshones unsafe? I hear you were the one who found T.J.”

  Vicky nodded.

  “Pretty bad, was it?”

  “T.J. didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  “That’s the truth.” He was quiet a moment, sucking in his lower lip. “Lots of people don’t deserve what they get, right? What can I do for you?” The phone started ringing. “Hang on.” He reached over and picked up the receiver. “This is Foxworthy.”

  A couple of seconds passed before he said, “No comment. There’s nothing new. The investigation is in the hands of the FBI.” He paused. A phone was ringing somewhere down the hall, and red lights were flashing on the phone on the desk. “That’s right,” the man said. “Ted Gianelli. Call him.” He slammed down the phone. “Okay, so where were we?”

  Vicky sat back in the chair. “I need your help, Louis.”

  “Hey, Vicky.” The man planted his elbows on the desk and folded both hands back. “We’re here to serve, you know that. I’m always happy to help you, but today is not the best of times, as you can see. T.J.’s murder has the whole office upset. We’re not getting any work done around here today. How about you come back next week?”

  “It’s about the murder.”

  “You should talk to Gianelli,” he said.

  Vicky pulled a small notepad and a pen from her bag. “First I need some information.”

  Foxworthy let out a long sigh and leaned back. He swiveled to the right, then to the left. “Okay, provided it’s quick and easy.”

  Vicky scribbled down the name Bashful Woman. Then she wrote: daughter of Chief Sharp Nose. She tore off the sheet of paper and handed it across the desk. “I need to know if Bashful Woman had an allotment, and if she did, where it was located.”

  The superintendent crumbled the paper into a tight ball and rolled it across the desk. “Of course she had an allotment. All of the chief’s children received one-hundred-and-sixty-acre allotments soon’s they turned twenty-one. They were considered good Indians, trustworthy. They learned to speak English and read and write over at the mission school.”

  “Where was the allotment?”

  “Not quick and easy, Vicky.” Foxworthy threw a glance at the bank of file cabinets lining the wall behind his chair. “Current records are here,” he said, “but we keep the old records in the probate files. Take a while to dig them out.”

  “It’s important, Louis. T.J. and Denise were murdered. There could be more murders, unless the killer is stopped.”

  “Jesus, Vicky. You’re really making my day here. All we need are some more murders and the senator and everybody else in Washington will write us off as hopeless. Not like appropriations haven’t been cut enough. We don’t need any more cuts.”

  “There has to be somebody here who can get me the records,” Vicky pushed on.

  The phone started ringing again. Once, twice. Foxworthy reached over and jabbed a button. The ringing stopped, and a little yellow light lit up. The answering machine, Vicky guessed.

  It was a moment before Foxworthy said, “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see what I can do. You want to come back later?”

  Vicky got to her feet and started for the door. “I’ll be waiting in the hall,” she said.

  She walked toward the blue plastic chairs. The sound of the man’s voice on the telephone behind her mingled with the ringing phones, the clack of keyboards, and the low undertow of conversations. Through the glass walls, she could see dark heads bobbing toward computer monitors. A woman raised her eyes and smiled.

  Vicky stopped at the window. The wind was blowing, speckling the glass with dust. The dormitory looked still and frozen, almost ghostlike, in the wind. Across from the dormitory was a two-story white frame house where the government agents assigned to the reservation had once lived. Between the two buildings was an open space with brush and grasses pushing up from the earth, tipped with the faintest trace of frost. The scaffold had been there, she thought. She could imagine the scene: three men swinging from their necks, heads bent forward, the toes of their boots dropped toward the plank floor, and groups of people standing about, staring, waiting for the last twitch of a muscle, the final stillness of death.

  God. She wondered if Carston Evans had been in the crowd. Was there no one else who knew the three men were innocent? No one else who knew the truth?

  Vicky sank down on one of the chairs and dragged a news magazine off the nearby table. She began leafing through the pages, trying to focus on first one article, then another, wondering if the murder of a tribal councilman would attract the national media, as Foxworthy feared.

  She stopped. Senator Evans was grinning at her from the glossy page. Grinning and waving his hat overhead, like a rodeo cowboy swinging a rope. “Tossing a Cowboy Hat into the Ring,” the headline read. She glanced through the article below the photograph. “Will the cowboy senator from Wyoming announce that he intends to run for president? When asked about his intentions, the maverick senator said, ‘Stay tuned. You’ll be the first to hear.’ Insiders are betting that the announcement will come during the senator’s trip home next week. Since the senator entered Congress as Wyoming’s sole representative fourteen years ago, he has announced his po
litical intentions from the steps of the Wyoming state capitol in Cheyenne. Twelve years ago, he went to the state capitol to toss his hat into the ring for the U.S. Senate.

  “Despite the senator’s record as a friend of oil and gas corporations, Senator Evans has maintained a strong following throughout the western states. Polls place his approval rating at seventy percent. Part of the senator’s appeal, analysts say, is his outgoing personality and down-to-earth manner. ‘When the senator talks to you,’ one woman said, ‘you think you’re the only person he cares about.’ Fifty-eight years old and trim, the senator is an early morning fixture jogging in Rock Creek Park before he puts in a twelve-hour day on capitol hill. ‘He works for us,’ the woman stated, although Robert Burnhart, a Washington bus driver, disagreed. ‘You ask me, big corporations are the senator’s best friends.’ ”

  “Vicky?”

  Vicky looked around. Foxworthy was leaning outside the door to his office. She tossed the magazine onto the table and walked back down the hall. “You’re in luck,” he said, leading the way back into the office. “One of my old Army buddies agreed to take the time to pull the records. I owe him, he says, so he’ll be expecting me to return the favor one of these days.” He thrust two sheets of paper at her.

  At the top of one, in thick black letters, were the words Sharp Nose Family. Below that was Bashful Woman, twenty-one years of age. The next lines gave the legal description of the allotment.

  Vicky glanced at the second page. The name on top was Sharp Nose, and the text detailed the description of the chief’s allotment.

  “See there.” The superintendent stood next to her and tapped at the sheet with Bashful Woman’s allotment. “She had one hundred and sixty acres, not bad for a young woman. When the chief died, his lands were divided among his children and she received another forty acres adjacent to her own allotment.”

  Vicky was still reading through the legal description—even more obtuse than the descriptions she was accustomed to. “Where exactly were the allotments?” she asked.

  “Vicky . . .” There was a pleading note in the man’s tone. “I’ve had to turn off my phones. You know how many calls I have to return already?” He exhaled and, pushing the side chair out of the way, threw open a filing drawer. In a moment he’d flopped a large folder on top of the papers on his desk. “Maybe we can pin down the sites by this map,” he said, pulling a map of the reservation free from other maps in the folder. “Read off the description,” he said.

  He was bent over the map, both index fingers on fixed points. As she read, his fingers began to move toward each other until they stopped at two points near the top of the map. Keeping one finger on the map, he rummaged under the folder and brought out a pencil. He made a small mark on both points.

  “Read on,” he said, and they went through the same motions: She, calling out the descriptions, he, bringing his index fingers together, except that now he was working from the top and bottom of the map. Again the fingers halted at two points about an inch apart, and holding the places with thumb and finger, Foxworthy placed the pencil marks on the map.

  Vicky read off the descriptions on the second sheet, and four other pencil marks appeared next to the first marks. “Take a look,” Foxworthy said, glancing up from the map. “The lady ran a decent ranch.”

  Vicky went around the desk and peered down at the map, trying to get her bearings. The ranch was southwest of Thermopolis in the Owl Creek mountains. The Evans Ranch was in the vicinity. “One more question,” she said.

  “Come on, Vicky.” The man’s voice was so tight that, for a moment, she feared he would announce he’d run out of time.

  She hurried on: “Where exactly is the Evans Ranch?”

  “You know the ranch is in the same area.”

  “I want to know if it’s the same land. Bashful Woman was Carston Evans’s wife.”

  Foxworthy flinched backward, as if she’d slapped him. “We don’t need this, Vicky. We can’t go around accusing the senator’s ancestors of taking ownership of Arapaho land.”

  Vicky cut in: “Two people have been murdered, Louis. A white woman is missing. It could all be tied to the Evans Ranch. We have to know the truth.”

  “Boy, this just isn’t my day.” The man was shaking his head. After a moment, he shouldered past her and went back to the filing cabinet. He pulled out another brown file and flopped it on top of the map. He was breathing hard, gasping, she thought, as he rifled through another stack of maps before he pulled one free. “Without the legal description of the Evans Ranch,” he said, studying the map, “no way can we be definite. You’ll have to get the description at the county clerk’s office. All we can do is compare the locations based on the number of miles per inch on each map. Let’s see . . .” He’d found a ruler somewhere and was measuring from the margins. “The northern line of the reservation is here.” He pointed to a dot. “It looks like the Evans Ranch starts about here, thirty or forty miles west of Boysen Reservoir, then south another fifteen, twenty miles, probably make a five mile adjustment to the east.”

  Vicky was jotting down the miles as he worked. After a moment, he jerked the first map out from beneath the other file and went back to sliding the ruler around and calling out the miles. Vicky kept taking notes. The miles were almost exactly the same. It would take a legal description of the Evans Ranch to verify that Carston Evans had inherited his wife’s lands. What she had was close enough, though. Close enough to know the truth.

  “What’s this prove?” Foxworthy asked. “There’s any number of ways that Evans could have accumulated the land. He could have purchased land from the Sharp Nose family,” he went on, his voice growing fainter, as if he realized the weakness of his own argument.

  “He could have killed his wife,” Vicky said. “Tell me, Louis. How many other Arapaho women were killed for their land? You have the records.”

  “What difference would it make? Nobody’s going to be getting any lands back after a century. Nobody cares, Vicky.”

  “I think Senator Evans cares.”

  The superintendent dipped his head into one hand and rubbed at his eyes. “Jesus, Vicky. You know what kind of dynamite you could be setting off here? Evans is a powerful man. There’s no telling what he might do if he thought you were going to expose something like this.”

  “There’s no telling what the man has done already,” she said.

  27

  HE WAS RUNNING, chasing after the figure that ran ahead, disappearing as soon as he caught up. A specter dissolving away from him, like an image dissolving from a photograph.

  Father John sat up in bed. Startled, only half awake. It must be mid-morning. Sunlight streamed past the curtains, and the bedroom felt warm and stuffy. He was a man obsessed, he thought. Obsessed by a woman in shock and grief—alone outside the house of a murdered man, a woman he couldn’t comfort.

  He’d driven over to Vera’s and stayed with her until daylight had begun to glow in the windows and the sky beyond had turned pink and gold. Vera, sobbing on the sofa, and he, trying to find words of comfort, finally letting the stillness settle in, more comforting than words. Gradually relatives and friends had arrived until the living room was crowded with people standing about, occupying every chair. He’d driven back to the mission, the moon still faintly visible in a sky that had changed into milky blue, and fallen into an exhausted half-sleep, the unwanted dreams crashing over him.

  He got out of bed, showered, and shaved. In the kitchen, he made himself a couple of pieces of toast, aware of the washing machine rumbling in the basement and Elena scurrying about with a dust mop. She’d make him some oatmeal, she said, reminding him that breakfast was three hours earlier. He waved away the offer, and washed the toast down with strong, lukewarm coffee.

  Ten minutes later, he was in the administration building, passing the door to his own office, on his way down the corridor to Father Damien’s office. The other priest was at the desk, head bent sideways into a phone call. Father John s
wung a wood chair around and straddled it backward. He waited until the call ended and Damien hung up.

  “You’ve heard about T.J.?” Father John nodded at the phone. The moccasin telegraph had probably been working for hours.

  Damien raked his fingers across his thinning hair—a gesture of discouragement. “First his wife. Now the poor man himself. It’s terrible, John. T.J. was a dedicated councilman. He struck me as someone with a far-reaching vision, and he had the courage to stand up against his own people, not to mention a powerful man like Senator Evans, over the methane controversy. The senator’s campaign people are making noises about canceling the senator’s visit.” The other priest had the pained look of a man watching the barn he’d been constructing start to collapse.

  “What do they say?” Father John gestured with his head toward the phone.

  “A lot of mumbo jumbo about the senator’s busy schedule and pressing demands. A fool can read between the lines. Quinn is convinced that the senator could be in danger. Did I think that the murders of a councilman and his wife were coincidence when the councilman had been helping to plan the senator’s visit? I explained that the murders, as tragic as they are, don’t have anything to do with the mission. I told him that even if he decides that the senator shouldn’t go to Fort Washakie, there’s no reason to cancel the visit here. Catherine’s already lined up dozens of people. The TV cameras will be here. Finally Quinn agreed to stop by this afternoon and take another look. Okay, I admit . . .” Damien shrugged. “It took another phone call from Dad. Frankly, the murders aren’t the only thing Quinn’s worried about. He keeps asking me if we’ve had any word on Christine. What have you heard?”

  Father John shook his head. Then he said, “Tell me, Damien. Did Christine go to any of the meetings with T.J. at the tribal offices?”

  “You think there’s a connection?” The other priest jerked backward, as if he’d gotten an electrical shock. “Look, John,” he said, patting the side of his head now. “We had two meetings, both unsuccessful. T.J. and the other councilman, Savi Crowthorpe, kept insisting there wouldn’t be enough time for the senator to visit schools and tribal offices and still get over to St. Francis. So I asked Christine to come along for another meeting. You know how excited she was . . . is.” He corrected himself. “. . . about the Curtis exhibit. I figured she could convince the councilmen that the senator would enjoy the photographs.”