The Silent Spirit (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Margaret Coel

  “Beaten,” Andrew said, as if the sound and the taste of the word might make it comprehensible. “Here. They followed him here and killed him.”

  “Who? Grandfather, who do you think could have done this?”

  “They did it. Hollywood people. Same kind that killed my father. How long’s he been back?”

  “A few days, his girlfriend said.”

  Mamie lifted her face and dabbed at her eyes with her knuckles. “I don’t believe her. Kiki would’ve come see us if he was back. We left messages on her phone. If he was back, he would’ve called us. He was always worrying over how we was doin’.” She leaned over toward Andrew. “Wasn’t that so? Wasn’t he always worrying about us?”

  “She said she gave him the messages,” Father John said.

  “She’s a liar.”

  Andrew slumped like a rag doll against the recliner, chin tilted down. His voice was muffled against his chest. “They come here after him. He must’ve found out the truth.”

  Father John sat back. He’d seen this type of reaction before, the wild lunge for an explanation, the need to make sense out of the senseless in order to keep from being swept away in a river of grief. He gave the old couple a minute before he said, “The FBI agent, Ted Gianelli, will be handling the investigation. He’s a good man. He’ll find whoever did this and see that he’s charged.”

  He had meant to try to reassure them that in the midst of loss and grief there would be justice. He knew he’d made a mistake by the slow way in which Andrew lifted his head and stared at him out of black, watery eyes. “Won’t bring Kiki back, will it?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Father John said again.

  “Need to give the boy a proper burial. You’ll take care of it, Father?”

  Father John assured them that he would make the arrangements. And everything would have to be done in the next three days, so that Kiki’s spirit could go to the ancestors and they would recognize him and take him into the spirit world. That was the Arapaho Way.

  It was mid-afternoon before Father John left the old couple, and by then, the moccasin telegraph had done its work. Relatives and neighbors and friends had filled up the house, piled plates of food on the kitchen counter and started the coffee brewing. He could still smell the odor of fresh coffee clinging to his jacket as he drove down Seventeen-Mile Road to the mission. He hadn’t told the old couple all of the truth, and it weighed on him, like a task that he’d put off, yet knew he would have to take care of. But it had seemed cruel—after telling them their grandson was dead—to tell them Gianelli believed Kiki had gone to LA to buy drugs.

  And yet—here was the irony—Gianelli and Andrew had arrived at the same theory, but for different reasons. He could hear their voices in his head: Gianelli saying that the drug dealers could have come after Kiki. And Andrew saying, “They must’ve come after him.”

  8

  ROGER HURST SPRAWLED on the chair and drummed his fingers on the yellow legal notepad balanced on one thigh. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Vicky leaned back. He was talking about Troy Tallfeathers, one of her former clients, always in trouble of one sort or another. On parole from the state prison after being convicted of dealing drugs. And now he had assaulted the tribal police officer who pulled him over for drunk driving.

  “How have you advised him?” she said.

  “Plead guilty, throw himself on the mercy of the court, ask for rehab.”

  Vicky nodded. These were the types of cases that she and Adam no longer handled. All the DUIs, domestic disturbances, accidents, assaults, all the desperate, pleading brown faces that she had once interviewed and tried to advise and console—their cases went to Roger. And Roger was doing a great job. Rarely did he knock on her door, plop down on a chair, and ask advice. But even the few times that occurred were too often for Adam. “Let him figure it out,” he’d told her. “The clients are putting pressure on him to confer with you. They want to know you’re handling their case. They have to learn to trust Roger.”

  Adam was probably right. They had enough on their plates, as he put it. Major cases, like tribal water rights. The consortium that had been supplying water to Riverton wouldn’t sit still for competition from the reservation. Roger had knocked on her door while she was drafting a response to the civil suit filed by the consortium’s lawyers.

  Roger blew out a puff of air. His skin was so light, it looked pink, and that made his short-cropped sandy hair look darker. Annie thought he was handsome, and Vicky supposed that he was—in a quiet way. Not the black hair and dark eyes and strong chin of Adam, but handsome enough.

  “The federal judge is going to throw the book at him,” Roger said. “The tribal cop pulled him over on Plunkett Road. Weaving all over the road. Failed the sobriety test, threw a couple punches at the cop. Eventually the cop got him up against the truck, handcuffed him, and hauled him to the county jail. His parole will be revoked for sure, and he’s looking at federal charges.”

  “Why does he want to see me?” Vicky said.

  “He won’t tell me.”

  Vicky glanced at the black text on the monitor. She had planned to spend the next hour or so finishing the response, then going over it with Adam. It should be filed with the court first thing tomorrow morning. Roger was an excellent lawyer; there was no reason for her to get involved in Troy’s case. Except that Troy had asked for her. “I’ll try to get away later,” she heard herself saying. She wasn’t sure how she would manage it.

  She expected Roger to get to his feet, but he remained seated, working his jaw sideways a moment, as if he were gathering together more words. Finally he said, “We have somewhat of a problem. Most of the clients I see aren’t happy to see me. They call the office expecting to see you. They hear my voice, and I hear the disappointment in theirs. Like the guy that hung up yesterday.”

  “He hung up on me, too,” Vicky said. She folded her arms on the desk and leaned forward. “Don’t take it personally, Roger. My practice used to be the kind of cases you handle. Change is hard, but eventually people get used to it.” God, she had become a recording of Adam’s words. “You’re part of this firm, and you’re doing a good job for the clients.”

  “Okay.” Roger spread both hands, then got up and headed across the office. The door had just closed behind him when the phone rang. “It’s that man again,” Annie said, and in the cautious tone of her voice, Vicky knew who she was referring to.

  “Put him through.” She pressed a button and said, “This is Vicky Holden.”

  The breathing was quick and uneven, as if the man on the other end were jogging. He didn’t say anything.

  “You’re the man in the tan truck, aren’t you,” Vicky said. “Talk to me. If you killed someone by accident, I can try to help you.”

  Something changed. She could sense the change at the other end of the line, the quick breaths becoming long and jagged. He was crying.

  “Talk to me,” she said again. There was a small clicking noise, and she knew that he was gone.

  Vicky set the receiver in its cradle and went into the outer office where Roger was leaning over Annie’s desk. Whatever he was saying, Annie gazed up at him with all the rapt attention she might have given some new and wonderful phenomenon that had sailed across her horizon. Roger gave a little nod in Vicky’s direction, then disappeared behind the closed door of his own office.

  “What did the caller say?” Vicky said.

  Annie bit at her lower lip a moment, as if she were trying to reconnect with the office. Her hair had that just-brushed look, shining under the fluorescent light. Her eyes were shining, too, and that was nice, Vicky thought. Whatever Roger had brought into her life, it had made her happy.

  “Same thing,” Annie said. “Let me talk to Vicky Holden. Only this time he said, ‘Don’t put on that other lawyer. I’m not talking to anybody else.’ ”

  Vicky glanced at the closed door to Adam’s office. Adam would be at his desk, drafting an explanation for the tr
ibes about the civil suit that had been filed. In thirty minutes or so, he would expect her to walk in and sit down with her response. They would go over both, make additions and subtractions, make sure they were in agreement. They were a team. Except that there was a man in a tan pickup who needed a lawyer and was too upset or scared or angry to talk to her.

  She started for her office, then turned back. “What’s new on the moccasin telegraph, Annie?” It was amazing how the telegraph ran into the office. News of anything that happened on the rez sped like lightning to Annie’s desk. “What have you heard? Is there anything going on?”

  Annie lifted her chin and gave her a blank stare of incredulity. “You mean you haven’t heard about Kiki Wallowingbull?”

  “What about him?” She was thinking that trouble stalked Kiki Wallowingbull like a bobcat, ready to pounce at the slightest invitation.

  “He’s dead.” Annie gave a series of rapid blinks, as if the news was so obvious she had assumed everyone already knew. “They found his body yesterday down along the Little Wind River.”

  “What was it, a drug deal?”

  “That’s what everybody’s saying, except for Kiki’s grandparents. Moccasin telegraph says they claim Kiki’s been straight ever since he got out of prison.” Annie shrugged. “Shows how much they loved him. They’re never gonna say anything else. You could probably show them a video of Kiki shooting up and they’d say it must be somebody that looked like Kiki, ’cause Kiki didn’t do that anymore.”

  “How sad for them,” Vicky said, standing still, staring at the blue-and-gold photo of the plains and mountains on the wall behind Annie’s desk. Flashing through her mind were images of her own kids: Lucas at ten years old, all brown skin and black hair racing past on the Appaloosa pony that her father kept for him, and Susan at eight, soft-eyed and fragile-looking, cross-legged on the sofa with the Indian doll in doeskins and beads cradled on her lap. She had worried over what would become of them, how they would make it—parents divorced, mother in Denver most of the time working her way through undergrad and law, grandparents getting older and more frail every year, doing their best to raise them. Even after they were grown, the worry never left her. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would sit up in bed, drenched in sweat, shaking. How easily they might have drifted down the same road that Kiki Wallowingbull had taken.

  “When was Kiki killed?” Vicky said, the caller’s voice pushing into her mind: I didn’t mean to kill him.

  Annie gave another shrug. “Night before last, looks like.”

  And yesterday, the man in the tan truck had followed her into the Wal-Mart lot. The same man, she was certain, had been calling the office. “Does the fed have any leads?”

  “You know the gossip on the telegraph,” Annie said. “People are talking about all kinds of leads. Anybody that’s been arrested for drugs is gonna be questioned, that’s what I heard.”

  “Who found the body?” Drug user or dealer, Vicky was thinking. Drug deals went down at the river.

  “Father John.”

  Vicky kept her eyes fastened on the secretary longer than she meant to. She had to pull her gaze away. “What was he doing there?” she said, trying for a casual tone, the same tone she might have used no matter who had found the body.

  “I heard he was looking for Kiki,” Annie said. “The grandparents were worried. You know Father John. He’s always trying to help the people.”

  Vicky gave a little nod. Then she went into her office, shut the door, and leaned against it. Yes, she knew John O’Malley. Back on the rez now how many days? Twenty? And already back in place, helping the people. Oh, how she had missed him. That was what made his coming back so hard to accept, just when she had started to accept the fact that he was gone. She went over to her desk, printed out the draft she had been working on, and took it into Adam’s office. An hour later she was in the Jeep, driving through the snow that swept across the wide streets of Lander.

  The Fremont County jail was located in a beige brick building that resembled a fortress behind the snow-packed parking lot. Vicky parked between a truck and an SUV and let herself through the glass door into a concrete entry the size of a closet. Behind the window on the left, an officer in a tan uniform was curled over the papers on a desk. “Help you?” He spoke into a microphone without looking up. He sounded as if he were underwater.

  She leaned into the metal communicator that protruded from the glass. “Vicky Holden, here to see Troy Tallfeathers.”

  The officer nodded. He had black hair trimmed short around big ears that stuck out, prominent, ruddy cheeks, and slits of black eyes that were now trained on her. Moon was typed in black letters on the badge clipped to his tan shirt. “Hold on,” he said.

  Vicky stepped back and waited.

  After several minutes, the door next to the window swung open. “Ms. Holden?” Another officer—wide shoulders and the kind of physique that came from hours in a gym—stood in the opening. Behind him, she could see the concrete corridor of the jail. “Follow me,” he said.

  Down the corridor, through a series of doors that clanged shut, the sound reverberating around the concrete walls, and into the jail itself. The visiting rooms were on the right, and Vicky could see the bony outlines of Troy Tallfeathers’s orange-clad knees sticking out beyond one of the doorways.

  “In there.” The officer waved her into the visiting room. “I’ll be right outside, if he gives you any trouble.”

  Troy was stumbling to his feet as Vicky stepped inside. The door slammed behind her. “Don’t get up,” she said, taking the chair on the other side of the small table that divided the room.

  “ ’Bout time you come to see me.” Troy sank back onto his chair. He was tall and rangy-looking, with shoulders that rose above the back of the chair and elbows that jutted to the sides. He had the light complexion of a white ancestor, but the dark eyes and sculptured face were Arapaho.

  “Roger said you wanted to see me,” Vicky said.

  “Roger.” He spit out the name. Specks of saliva lit on the metal table. “I thought you were my lawyer.” He leaned close, lacing the long knobby fingers on the table. His breath was like a blast of garlic and hot peppers coming toward her. “How come you sent him over? I don’t want to talk to him. All he says is throw myself on the mercy of the court, ask for rehab. You know what they do in rehab? Talk you to death. Shoot you up with drugs that are supposed to get you off drugs. No, thank you.”

  “You’re looking at time in a federal prison,” Vicky said.

  Troy turned his head away and scratched at his ear. “Maybe not. Might be something I know that the fed don’t.”

  Vicky sat back and studied the young man across from her a moment. Close to Lucas’s age, most likely. And Lucas was sitting in a cubicle in some skyscraper in the Denver Tech Center, thank God.

  “Are you looking for some kind of a deal?” she said. “You have information about a crime?”

  There was no hesitation, no half beat of consideration. “Oh, yeah. I got what you might call information, all right.”

  “What do you have? Is it about drugs? You know something about who’s dealing drugs?”

  “What are you? One of them therapists, asking dumb questions? It’s just what I said, okay? I got information. Tell the fed that. Tell him I can make a lot of his troubles go away if he gets me outta here.”

  Vicky took a moment before she said, “The fed is not going to make any sweetheart deal with you. You assaulted a federal officer. It’s a serious offense. If you cooperate by giving information on another crime, maybe the judge will give you a lighter sentence. There are no guarantees.”

  “So you’re not goin’ to the fed and get me a deal?”

  “I just told you . . .”

  “So what do I need you and that white lawyer for?” Troy pushed himself to his feet. He loomed over her like a flagpole, and Vicky stood up. “I’m looking out for number one, you got it? I’m firing both of you.”

  The door
swung open. “Everything okay?” the officer said.

  “We’re finished here,” Vicky said, brushing past him and starting back down the corridor. A waste of time, she was thinking, and maybe that was why she and Adam no longer practiced this kind of law. Clients who didn’t want advice and wouldn’t listen. Troy would find another lawyer. What difference did it make who the lawyer was? But a law firm that helped Arapahos and Shoshones use their natural resources, including water, to build better roads and schools and health clinics made all the difference.

  She walked out of the building, steered the Jeep through the lot, and out onto the street. Oh, yes, she and Adam had made the right decision.

  9

  A LOUD CLANGING noise sounded somewhere. Vicky pulled herself upward out of a black well and tried to register whether the clanging came from the doorbell or the phone. Adam, she thought. Standing downstairs in the late-night dimness of the entry to the apartment building, pressing the buzzer next to her name on the metal plate. This afternoon, Adam had told her that he planned to spend the evening researching the development of coal on Indian reservations in the West. She had things to do, too, she had told him, and he hadn’t asked what they might be. She had picked up a turkey sandwich on the way home and eaten in front of the TV, barely registering what she was watching.

  And now Adam was here, wanting to talk, close the distance lengthening between them.

  Except that it wasn’t the buzzer ringing. Vicky fought her way out of a tangle of sheets and comforter and walked her fingers across the bedside table to the phone. Green iridescent numbers glowed on the clock: 1:32.

  “Hello,” she said.

  She knew immediately by the silence on the other end that it wasn’t Adam. He had found her home number. Was there anything unavailable on the moccasin telegraph? “Who are you?” She could hear the sharpness in her voice. “What do you want?”

  “You gotta help me.” The same voice as before, thick with alcohol or drugs or sleep. Or grief. For an instant she thought he would burst into tears.