The Silent Spirit (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Margaret Coel

  “You looking for Dede?” Pinned to the woman’s blouse was an orange badge with Babs scribbled in thick black ink. “Haven’t seen her in three days. Leaves me with just two girls. No thank-you, no see-you-around, just doesn’t show up. Like she dropped off the face of the earth. Who are you? A bill collector?”

  “I’m an attorney,” Vicky said. She pulled a business card out of her bag and pushed it across the glass countertop. “Vicky Holden.”

  “Jesus.” The woman stared at the card a moment. “So she is in trouble. What happened to her? Is she dead?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” the woman hurried on. “Kind of jerks she hangs around with. Boyfriend got himself killed. A prize jerk, you ask me. Somebody had it in for him.” She gave a halfhearted shrug at the inevitability of it all. “You hang around with guys like that and you could end up dead, too. That’s my opinion.”

  “You try calling her?”

  “Oh, yeah. Left four or five messages. Basically, I said, ‘Dede, where are you? Got appointments waiting here.’ Never heard from her. Thanks I get for taking her on when we opened up. I should’ve known by the looks of her that she was gonna be trouble.”

  “What’s her number?” Vicky said.

  The woman pulled a long face and stared at Vicky a moment through narrowed eyes. “I don’t know about giving out numbers to anybody that walks through the door.”

  “I understand,” Vicky said, “but if Dede’s in trouble, I might be able to help her.”

  Babs turned sideways and ran her glance over the bottles of polish sitting in the wall cabinet. Long orange fingernails tapped out a nervous rhythm on the glass countertop. “Hold on,” she said finally.

  She walked back to one of the vacant desks, picked up a cell, and tapped a couple of keys. Then she jotted something on a notepad, tore off the page and walked back. “Don’t tell her where you got this, okay?”

  VICKY PRESSED THE keys on her own cell, her fingers stiffening in the frigid air trapped inside the Jeep. The buzzing noise sounded far away. She held her breath. There was a chance the girl would answer, and Vicky would introduce herself, say she was trying to find someone who knew Kiki. The man who killed him. Could she meet her someplace?

  The girl’s voice was at the other end, high-pitched and rapid: “Hi. Sorry I can’t talk right now. It’s partying time! Leave your name if you want and stay cool.”

  “This is Vicky Holden,” Vicky said. “You don’t know me.” Then she launched into the rest of it and left her cell number and the office address. She doubted Dede would find her at the top of the steel-and-glass staircase on the second floor of the modern building in Lander.

  She turned on the ignition and glanced at the clock: 4:12 blinked red on the dashboard. The manager didn’t say she had gone to Dede’s place to look for her. A few phone calls had been all. If Dede were home, she would have answered the phone. But that wasn’t necessarily true. There were evenings and weekends in the apartment when she tried to let the calls go to the answering machine, wanting time away from the voices on the other end, pleading for help. My boy got arrested last night. He’s in the Fremont County jail. DUI. Can you help us? But it never worked, because she always found herself listening to the messages, calling Roger and passing them on. Those were the clients he handled now.

  She backed out of the spot and drove across the parking lot onto Federal. The snow made a crunching noise under the tires. A half dozen blocks, and she turned right into a residential neighborhood and headed toward Adams Street and the address that Father John had written down for her.

  She spotted the small white house as she came down the block, tucked in close to a two-story frame house with a flat front and sloping porch and blinds slantwise in the windows. A farmhouse, most likely, left over from the early 1900s when white people moved onto plots of land surrounded by the reservation and proclaimed the new town of Riverton. The plots were larger then, little farms with barns and outbuildings. The house looked like one of the outbuildings.

  There was a cut in the curb that, she supposed, led to some kind of driveway, but it was hard to tell. The snow was undisturbed, as if it had been painted on. There were no signs of tire marks or footprints, no sign of life.

  Vicky parked the Jeep close to the curb and made her own trail through the snow, hard and crusted like concrete starting to set up. Little mounds of snow and ridges of ice covered the small stoop at the front door that was painted blue. She was about to knock when she realized that the door was open a half inch. She pushed it in a little further and leaned close. “Dede?” she called. “Are you here? It’s Vicky Holden.”

  There were no sounds, nothing but the kind of echoing silence of a vacuum. “Dede?” she called again, her own voice coming back to her, strange and muffled sounding. She felt herself shivering involuntarily against the cold air that worked its way past her coat. Who would leave the door ajar in the winter? Unless the girl had left in a hurry, packed up and moved on somewhere after Kiki was killed, running out without bothering to pull the door tightly shut behind her.

  Vicky turned around and surveyed the neighborhood, the vacant-looking farmhouse and, behind the pickups and sedans parked at the curb across the street, a row of small frame houses painted in fading pastels. She started back through the snow, stomping her boots into the depressions she had just made. Someone who might know Dede’s whereabouts could be inside the farmhouse or one of the other houses.

  She stopped halfway across the yard, another thought pounding in her head. If Gianelli was right and Kiki had been killed over drugs, then Dede could have gotten caught up in the same trouble. You hang around with guys like that—Babs’s words jammed her thoughts—you could end up dead, too.

  She swung around and retraced her steps. Across the yard and onto the stoop, stomping her boots to knock off the snow before she pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Dede?” she called again, but there was no answer. There was something about a house that was bereft of any living presence, the air totally still without any disturbance of breath. From somewhere deep inside came the faintest sound of water dripping. Dark curtains had been pulled across the window, but the faint gray light from outside floated past and ran through the shadows in the small, boxlike living room. She gripped the doorknob hard, keeping the door open while she patted the wall with her other hand. Her fingers found a protruding lever that she pushed. A lamp across the room sputtered into life.

  The place had been ransacked. Sofa overturned, chairs tossed about, cushions ripped open, and trails of white cotton stuffing littering the floor. Posters had been pulled from the walls—strips of heavy paper dangled like curled ribbons. Half the face of a cowboy in a white hat and black shirt, flashing half of a smile, like a gargoyle. The name McCoy stood out in white letters over the hat. Winners of the Wilderness appeared below broken words: Metro Goldw present.

  Vicky picked her way across the room to a doorway that led to the narrow kitchen in the back. Drawers had been pulled out and tossed about the floor among a scattering of utensils and broken dishes, a couple of dented-looking pans. Still no sign of life. In the hallway on the left, she found another light switch, but nothing happened when she clicked it. The hallway stretched ahead into shadows, a faint gray light coming through the pair of doors opened across from one another. She made herself walk toward the doors. She pushed in the door on the right and glanced about the bathroom. Drawers on the floor, broken bottles and jars thrown about, a black razor standing upright on the counter. Water dripped in a steady pulse out of the sink faucet.

  She stepped backward and looked past the door across the hallway. A bedroom that might have been smashed by a truck. The dresser lay facedown, nails popping out of the back, shiny in the wave of gray light from the window. Curtains that had been torn from the rod lay on the floor in a heap. Everywhere jeans, tee shirts, high heels and cowboy boots, broken bottles, and papers. The bed sank sideways; the mattress had be
en stripped. A mound of blankets and pillows on top.

  Then she saw it. The small silver and turquoise ring that looked as if it had slipped off a finger. It lay beside the mound of clothes, and the mound, she realized, was the shape of a body.

  God. God. God. She backed out of the room and started running . . . down the hallway, across the living room, stumbling over a cushion, righting herself against a toppled chair, and lurching through the door. She slipped in the snow and went down on her hands and knees. Snow stung her hands inside her gloves and gathered in her boots. She pushed herself to her feet, wincing at the pain in her knees, and ran for the Jeep. She had to clamp her jaws together to stifle the scream erupting in her throat.

  Then she was behind the steering wheel, unsure of how she had gotten there—when had she found the key in her bag, pressed the unlock button? She locked the doors and fumbled in her bag for her cell. Shivering now, her teeth chattering in the quiet, she managed to press 911.

  “What is your emergency?” The operator’s voice sounded calm and experienced. “Hello? Are you there?”

  “I think a woman is dead,” Vicky managed.

  “Where? Where are you?”

  “The white house at the corner of Adams. She’s dead inside.”

  “Your name?”

  “My name?” God, what did it matter? A girl named Dede was dead! “Vicky Holden,” she said.

  “Wait where you are. Officers are on the way.”

  She managed to tell the operator that she would wait.

  VICKY WATCHED THE Riverton police car framed in the side-view mirror as it pulled into the curb behind her. She had started the engine after she’d hung up, and the wipers cleared half-moons through the snow piling on the windshield. Warmth poured out of the vents. Still she felt chilled to the bone and disoriented. The occasional vehicle that had driven past, thrashing through the snow, the sound of engines whining on a side street, the smoke curling past the gray-tiled roof down the block—all of it seemed unreal, disconnected to the terrible reality of a dead girl inside the house.

  She rolled down her window and waited for two officers—bulky blue jackets zipped to their chins, holstered guns and clubs and mace attached to the black belts on their trousers—to walk up. “You made the call about a dead woman?” One of the officers leaned toward the opened window. Thick gloved hands wrapped over the edge. Vicky was aware of the other officer stationing himself outside the passenger door.

  “Inside,” she said. “I think she’s on the bed.”

  “Your name?”

  “Vicky Holden. I’m an attorney.”

  The officer nodded, as if he had placed her. “You saw the body?”

  Vicky tightened her hands over the steering wheel and tried to still the tremors moving through her. “No,” she said. “The house is ransacked and it looks as if . . .” She stopped herself, struggling to place the thoughts in a logical order. “I think there might be a body under the piles of clothes and blankets on the bed.”

  “Wait here,” the officer said. He walked around the back of the Jeep, then both officers stomped through the snow toward the front door still flung wide open, the way she had left it.

  She rolled up the window and made herself look straight ahead past the wipers. She didn’t know the girl named Dede; she had never met her. Just a girl mixed up with the wrong kind of guys, and now she could be dead. The man who had killed Kiki—oh, God, her client—could have come for the girl. She pressed her gloved fist against her mouth to stop herself from crying. Her own daughter, Susan, was like that—just a girl who might meet anyone, might get into a crowd that included drug addicts and dealers. Not knowing, not realizing the dangers. She made up her mind that she would call Susan tonight. She would go to visit her soon, just as soon as she could get away.

  She realized both officers were looming outside her window, and she rolled it down, wondering when they had come out of the house. “What made you think there was a body on the bed?” The first officer leaned in close. She could see black stubble on his thick chin.

  Vicky shifted around, but before she could say anything, he went on: “Whatever you thought, there’s no one inside, dead or alive. We checked everywhere. It’s a small house, no place to hide.”

  Vicky felt herself begin to breathe, and she realized her breath had been stopped like a plug in her chest. “It looked like a body,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Buried under the blankets and clothes on the bed.” None of this was making sense. She could hear the inadequacy of it in her own voice. What she had seen was the ransacked house and the body-shaped mound and the turquoise ring and she had panicked. A lawyer, trained not to panic. Trained to look at the facts in a dispassionate, considered manner and arrive at logical conclusions. At the least, she might have lifted a corner of a blanket to verify her suspicions.

  She heard herself explaining—stumbling on—about how she had feared the worst when she’d seen the ring, as if it had slipped off a finger. “Her boyfriend was killed four nights ago,” she said.

  “You talking about the Arapaho found at the Little Wind River?”

  Vicky nodded. “All I know is that the girl’s name is Dede,” she said, answering the questions in the officer’s eyes. “I’ve never met her. I came here to ask her about Kiki.” A thick black eyebrow shot up, the only disturbance in the officer’s face, and she hurried on, “I’m doing some investigating on behalf of someone.”

  He stared at her a moment, then threw a sideways glance at his partner. She might as well have thrust an end-of-the-road sign in front of him—No Outlet, or Don’t Proceed from Here. In the masks they pulled over their faces, she understood they had understood the rest of it, the part she hadn’t said: “. . . investigating on behalf of someone who could be involved in the death of Kiki Wallowingbull.”

  “How’d you know where she lived?” the officer said, stepping onto neutral ground.

  Vicky told him she had talked to the manager at Star Nails where Dede worked. “She hasn’t shown up in three days.”

  The officer lifted himself upright and stared back at the house. “The girl could be in trouble, judging by the look of the house. Drug dealers like to mess up places when they’re looking for somebody. People they go after usually end up dead. We’re gonna want to find her fast.”

  The other officer hadn’t taken his eyes from her. “Call us if you hear anything about her. Seems to me you lawyers . . .” He shook his head a moment. “. . . oughtta be able to find a way to keep a girl from ending up dead without compromising any clients.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Vicky told him. She was free to go, she knew. There was nothing else she could say, nothing else she knew. God. She didn’t even know the name of the client the officers assumed she was protecting.

  She moved the gear stick into drive and pulled away from the curb, watching the officers receding in the side-view mirror until, by the time she had reached the next block, they were gone.

  16

  THE WINTER DUSK must have been gathering for the last hour, Vicky realized, because darkness had fallen like a blanket when she pulled into the spot in front of Star Nails where she had parked earlier. The Jeep’s headlights floated in the plate-glass window. Past the window, the salon was enveloped in end-of-the-day shadows broken by the globes of light that hung over two stations. Chewing-gum girl, still seated at the nearest station, looked up from the outstretched hands of a client and blinked at the headlights. Then she was on her feet, dodging the front counter, lurching for the front door. She took hold of the sign with black letters that said Open and turned it around so that it read Closed. Then she retraced her steps and sank into the chair across from the customer. She was shaking her head.

  There was no sign of Babs or the other technician, but a pencil of light stood at the base of the door where Babs had emerged earlier. Chances were the manager was still in the salon, and the globe shining over the vacant station meant that the other technician might also be there
.

  Vicky switched off the headlights. She left the engine running, the warm air purring in the vents. There had been light, intermittent snow all day, and now the snow was getting heavier, just like the forecast she had heard on the radio this morning. There would be blizzard conditions tonight.

  She clapped her gloved hands together, making a series of muffled thuds in the quiet. She still felt on edge, as if she had found herself on the top of a steep precipice with nothing to hold on to. Waves of relief that a girl named Dede was still alive alternated with waves of dread that someone had come looking for her. And whoever it was had trashed her house. A sign of what he would do to her.

  Inside, the door to Babs’s office opened and the other technician stepped out. Gripping the doorknob, leaning back a moment, her other hand waving away some kind of objection. She wore a red coat that fell to her knees. A slice of white stockings showed between the edge of the coat and the top of long black boots. Hanging off one shoulder was a large black bag the size of a shopping bag. She smiled, pulled the door shut, and gave the finger to the door.

  Then she headed toward the front, saying something to the other technician, who nodded without looking up. Slowing down a little—blond hair sprayed over the shoulders of the red coat—she leaned sideways as she passed her station and flipped off the dangling light. Another few steps and she was past the counter and letting herself outside. Vicky could hear the tinkling noise of the bell as the door opened and closed.

  She got out of the Jeep, which seemed to startle the girl, who stepped backward. For an instant, Vicky thought she might dart back inside, but instead she pulled the black bag around in front and began digging for something. “Salon’s closed,” she said.