The Thunder Keeper

by Margaret Coel

  “He was a potential client. It was an initial meeting.” She heard herself parroting what Wes Nelson had said earlier, struggling to make it sound convincing. “Where are they taking him?”

  “Denver Health.” The officer was writing again, flipping over a page, starting another. “Like I said.” He raised his eyes to hers, “We’re gonna want a complete statement tomorrow.”

  Vicky nodded and turned toward the entrance of the Brown Palace. The ambulance was sliding away from the curb, its siren bouncing off the hotel’s brown stone walls.

  “Taxi, please,” Vicky told the doorman standing limp-armed under the awning, eyes on the ambulance receding down the street.

  He seemed to snap to attention. Stepping off the curb, he jammed the whistle between his lips and sent out a long, shrill noise that blended into the wail of the siren.

  Vicky held the lapels of her raincoat closed against the chill passing through her and waited until a Yellow Cab pulled into the curb. Then she tipped the doorman and got into the rear seat. “Denver Health,” she said.

  Ten minutes later she was hurrying along the covered walkway that connected the redbrick hospital buildings on the outskirts of downtown Denver. The rain beat on the roof, and the cold wind swirled through the walkway, bending the stalks of tulips that poked out of the pots on both sides. Inside the glass entrance, a middle-aged black woman was leafing through a stack of papers at the information desk. Vicky asked for the emergency room, and the woman nodded toward the escalator in the building’s atrium.

  Vicky gripped the arm hold as the escalator rose to the second-story balcony. Nurses and doctors in green scrubs hurried past the groups of people standing along the railing, staring down into the atrium, dejection and hope etched in their expressions. She followed the signs down a corridor to another desk, where another middle-aged receptionist sat hunched over an opened newspaper. Beyond the desk was a double-steel door with an intercom panel on the adjacent wall.

  “Excuse me,” Vicky said.

  The woman barely lifted her eyes. Vicky could see traces of pink scalp beneath the gray curls.

  “Has Vince Lewis been brought in?”

  “One moment,” the woman said, pulling a clipboard out from the newspaper and running a finger down a column of names. “Vincent R. Lewis,” she said without looking up. “He was just brought in.”

  “How is he?”

  “You family?” Eyes still on the clipboard, as if the response was bound to be positive, but the question had to be asked. Regulations had to be followed.

  “No.”

  The gray head snapped back, and the woman peered up at her. “I can only give information to a family member.”

  “You don’t understand. I saw what happened.”

  The woman seemed to study her a moment, making up her mind. Finally she reached across the opened newspaper and picked up a phone. “Your name?”

  Vicky gave her name.

  “You can wait over there.” She nodded toward an area across the hall from the steel doors while simultaneously pressing some keys on the phone.

  Vicky walked over to the waiting area, the woman’s voice trailing behind: “Someone named Vicky Holden’s here about the hit-and-run victim. Says she saw the accident.”

  There was a stale odor of hopelessness in the waiting room that permeated the gray carpet, the worn chairs, the tables with thumbed-through magazines scattered across the top. A pop machine and ice maker hummed in the far corner. Vicky sank into the chair inside the entrance, ignoring the young couple seated side by side across the room, the look of relief and expectancy in their faces, as if news of another tragedy might lighten the burden of their own. She didn’t want to trade stories. She wanted to think. On the other side of the steel doors, a man who had been on his way to see her could be dying.

  And it was no coincidence. She knew it with the cold certainty that gripped her when a witness was lying on the stand. She had never tried to explain the knowing, never tried to fix a name—sixth sense, intuition—the way white people did. She accepted that she knew.

  “I demand to see Vince Lewis.” The sound of a man’s voice, angry and insistent, came from around the corner. Vicky stood up and walked back into the corridor. A short, broad-backed man in a gray suit, gray raincoat bundled under one arm, pounded a fist on the desk.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but if you’re not family—” The receptionist was gripping the newspaper. She looked as if she might burst into tears.

  “I’m his employer. Tell your superior I have the right to see him.”

  “Are you Nathan Baider?” Vicky walked over.

  The man whirled about, the blue eyes sizing her up, she felt, then dismissing her: Indian woman. He looked younger than she’d thought at first, despite the red puffiness in his cheeks and the two vertical creases between his eyes. “Do I know you?” he barked.

  “Vicky Holden. I had an appointment with Mr. Lewis this afternoon.”

  The man continued staring. “Yes, I’m Nathan Baider,” he said finally. “You saw Vince this afternoon?”

  Vicky shook her head. “I was on my way to meet him when he was hit.”

  “You a friend of his?” Still trying to place her, Vicky thought.

  She began explaining: she was an attorney at Howard and Fergus; Lewis had called—

  He held up a fleshy hand. “We have a law firm that handles company legal business.” As he started to turn back to the desk, something behind her caught his attention.

  “Jana,” he called, stepping past her.

  Vicky glanced around. A woman with stylishly cut auburn hair pushed behind her ears and a determined control in the perfectly made-up face was coming down the corridor, her long black raincoat hanging open over a black dress.

  “Dastardly thing to happen,” Baider said, taking her hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll see that the doctors do everything possible.”

  “Where is he?” The woman withdrew her hand and walked over to the receptionist. “Where is my husband?” she said in a tone accustomed to being obeyed.

  Baider was at her side again. “This is Lewis’s wife,” he said. “I demand that you take us in.”

  The gray-haired woman hesitated, then got to her feet, maintaining a space between herself and the stocky man as she came around the desk. She walked over to the steel doors and leaned into the intercom panel, throwing nervous glances over one shoulder. A buzzing noise sounded, and she pushed the doors open. Without waiting for the couple, who fell in behind, she headed down a corridor lit like an aquarium and lined with gurneys and steel poles that dangled plastic bottles. Slowly the steel doors closed.

  Vicky checked her watch. Twenty to five. It would take forty minutes to get to DIA, longer in the rush hour. She’d never make it before Lucas’s plane arrived. She found her cell phone in her bag and dialed information. In a few seconds she was connected to the airport, arranging to leave a message for her son, the old feeling of failure nudging its way into her consciousness. She could imagine the expectant look on Lucas’s face when he arrived at the gate, the dark eyes darting about, the ready smile dissolving into disappointment and, finally, into acceptance.

  There would be a page: “Lucas Holden. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.” And the message: Sorry. See you at the house.

  Vicky walked back to the waiting area and sat down. The young couple stared into the center of the room with the absorbed resignation that, she knew, mirrored her own.

  She would wait. She was the attorney Vincent R. Lewis had risked his life to talk to. She would not leave until someone came through the steel doors and told her whether or not he was alive.

  “Vicky?”

  She glanced around at the tall, sandy-haired man standing in the entrance. Steve Clark, an old friend from undergraduate days in Denver, now a police detective, dressed in tan slacks and navy-blue sport coat and white shirt, with the knot of his red tie slightly loosened at the collar. Still handsome, in a more mature way, still the co
nfident smile and intense brown eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” Walking around in front of her chair, he reached down and took her hand. The warmth of his palm against hers made her realize how chilled she was.

  “I could ask you the same question.” She withdrew her hand slowly.

  “I’m working on a hit-and-run case.”

  “So am I.”

  She drew in a breath and heard herself giving the same explanation she’d given Nathan Baider ten minutes before. When she finished, Steve took her hand again. “I didn’t know you were back. Why didn’t you call me?”

  She stared at him. Had he heard anything she’d said? It had been six years, a lifetime ago, since they’d meant anything to each other.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. In the look that he bestowed on her, she saw that he understood that she was sorry things had not turned out the way he’d hoped all those years ago.

  “Can we talk about Vince Lewis?” she hurried on. “Is he going to make it?”

  Steve gave a little shrug. “Let’s hope so,” he said. “They just wheeled him into surgery. No sense in you hanging around. Could be several hours.”

  She repeated what she’d told the officer earlier, then found a business card in her bag, scribbled her home number on the back, and handed it to him. “Call me as soon as you know anything,” she said.

  8

  The cab crawled through the rain along Speer Boulevard, wipers slashing at the windshield, water from other cars running over the hood. The driver let Vicky out at the downtown garage where she kept the Bronco. Within ten minutes she was heading west on Speer again. Lights from the skyscrapers winked in the rearview mirror. Ahead, the mountains were lost in banks of descending gray clouds.

  She crossed the viaduct into north Denver, swung onto Twenty-ninth Avenue, and continued west, finally stopping in front of the 1890s farmhouse she’d rented. The white stucco house occupied a little bluff surrounded by the Victorians and cubelike bungalows of later decades that lined both sides of the block. A remnant of another time, the farmhouse, like her people.

  She ducked out into rain-blurred headlights from the taxi drawing in behind. Her pumps sank into the soggy grass while she waited for Lucas to pay the driver and emerge from the backseat. He was as tall and as handsome as his father. More so, she thought: the black hair glistening in the rain, the still-innocent look in the narrow, sculptured face. He shrugged into the straps of a bulky red backpack and came toward her.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said.

  She threw her arms around him, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him. His cheeks felt warm beneath the cool slick of rain. She could hardly believe he’d taken a job in Denver. For the first time in years she would be in the same town as one of her kids.

  “Come inside. You’re drenched.” She took his hand and led him up the concrete steps to the porch, her other hand fumbling for the key in the bag dangling from her shoulder. She let him in first and reached around to flip on the light in the entry. “Let me put your jacket on the coattree,” she said. “I can set your backpack in the living room.”

  “Mom, what’s next?” He was smiling. “Some hot cocoa?”

  “Would you like some?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, a low, relaxed sound that rebounded off the stucco walls. Pinpricks of light danced in his dark eyes.

  She followed him through the archway into the living room on the left and turned on a table lamp. The light lapped over the gray sofa and chair, the tiled coffee table, and the TV cabinet that she’d brought from Lander.

  “Looks like home.” Lucas stood in the center of the room, glancing about.

  She felt a sharp stab of pain. By the time she’d moved back to Lander, after undergrad and law school and three years at Howard and Fergus, Lucas and Susan were grown, on their own in Los Angeles. They’d never lived in the rented bungalow in Lander. In her mind, their childhood was forever compressed into the image of two small faces distorted behind the screen door of her mother’s house as she’d driven away fifteen years ago, telling herself that she’d be back, and knowing, just as Susan and Lucas had known, that it wasn’t true.

  The memory always left her weak-kneed. Lucas was twenty-four years old now. She’d been nineteen when he was born. He was at least six feet tall, at least six inches taller than she was, with a lanky, muscular build, the dark complexion and neatly trimmed black hair, still shiny wet, and the handsome face with the little crook in the long nose—the mark of her people.

  “You look like your father,” she blurted.

  He gave a nonchalant shrug, walked over to the window, and pushed back the edge of the lace curtain. Lights from the passing cars elongated into red-and-white smears across the glass.

  “Sorry about the airport,” she said. She was thinking: the lost years.

  “No problem, Mom.” He threw a little smile over one shoulder, then turned back to the window. “Something must’ve come up.”

  Vicky sat down in the middle of the sofa. She stopped herself from blurting out that Ben’s drinking and beatings had come up. She said, “A man I was supposed to meet was hit by a car this afternoon.”

  “Jeez, Mom. I’m sorry,” Lucas said. Then, a hint of impatience in his tone: “How do you get involved in this stuff, Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Dad worries about you, you know. Susan and I worry, too. You’re always putting yourself in danger. We thought you’d change after you had to shoot that guy.”

  Vicky drew in her breath at the sting of the reminder. Less than six months before—a world ago—she had shot a man. Justifiable homicide in defense of another was the official ruling, but the legal explanations, the justifications, could never diminish the horror of it. It was one of the reasons she had left Lander.

  “The man this afternoon was a potential client.” She stopped herself from saying that Vince Lewis had wanted to tell her something about the reservation. “It was a hit-and-run,” she went on. “I saw it happen.”

  Lucas crossed the room and sat down beside her, his eyes clouded in concern. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed it lightly. “Promise me you won’t get involved.”

  “I’m a witness, Lucas. The police expect me to give a formal statement tomorrow.”

  “So tell them what you saw and let them find the driver. Promise you’ll leave it at that, Mom.”

  Vicky set her hand over his. “I promise that I won’t be in any danger.” She hurried on, before he could object: “Tell me about your new job.”

  He shrugged and gave her the same mischievous grin he used to give her when he was a kid. “Information specialist, keep all the systems up and running. How much do you really want to know?” He took his hand from hers and waved away the question. “I’ve been thinking about leaving L.A. for some time. Now that you’re here, well, Denver looked pretty good. I can look after you. Dad thinks it’s a great idea.” He seemed to be studying her for a reaction. “Dad’s not drinking anymore,” he said.

  Vicky nodded. She’d gotten the news on the moccasin telegraph: Ben out of rehab, back at his old job as foreman on the Arapaho Ranch. She smiled at the irony. Ben always landed on his feet, while the ground beneath her was always slipping away.

  She tried to focus on what Lucas was saying, something about an Arapaho from Oklahoma jumping off a cliff, about Ben making the arrangements to send the body back to Oklahoma for burial.

  “Dad says everybody on the res is pretty upset the sheriff called it suicide. The sheriff jumped to conclusions, Dad says, so they could close the case. The guy was on a vision quest at Bear Lake.”

  “Bear Lake!” It was preposterous. The spirits were in the cliffs at Bear Lake, their images carved into the sandstone. It was a sacred place. A man on a vision quest would have been waiting for the spirits to speak to him. He wouldn’t kill himself! He wouldn’t defile a holy place like Bear Lake.

  Vicky stood up, walked over to the window, and pushed back the lace curtain, the
way Lucas had done. Rain washed down the other side of the black glass. A wavy stream of headlights moved along the street below. Ben was probably right. The sheriff was eager to close the case. White authorities didn’t want to hear about holy places and vision quests. Again she felt an old sense of failure moving over her skin like a fever. She should be with her people. She could talk to the sheriff, explain the Arapaho Way.

  “You okay, Mom?” Lucas’s voice broke through her thoughts.

  “Come on,” she said, walking back to him. “I’ll show you to your room.” She waited while he grabbed his backpack, then led him through the dining room, up the narrow steps, and into the rear sleeping porch with a twin bed and the dresser she’d cleaned out for him. The warm air from the floor vents rustled the white curtains she’d had cleaned and rehung on the windows.

  A few moments later, when Lucas had returned to the living room, she said, “What sounds good for dinner? Mexican; Italian?”

  “Flat bread,” he said, “and Indian stew and maybe a buffalo burger.”

  She was about to tell him that she knew just the restaurant when the phone rang. She hurried through the shadows of the dining room to the phone on the small table beneath the window. Even before she picked up the receiver, before she heard the familiar voice—“Vicky?”—she felt her muscles tense.

  “Vince Lewis is dead,” Steve told her.

  The truth hit her like a clap of thunder. Vince Lewis had worked for a diamond mining company. There were no diamond deposits on Arapaho lands, as far as she knew, but he’d had information about the reservation, she was certain. A matter of life and death, he’d said. His death. Somebody had killed him to prevent him from talking to her, and she was going to have to find out why.

  9

  It was almost noon before Father John got away from the ringing phones, the parishioners stopping by to visit, the correspondence he’d been trying to catch up on, and started for Gus Iron Bear’s place. He’d been driving for most of an hour—Tosca playing beside him—when he turned north on Maverick Springs Road. North again through the open spaces cut with arroyos and filled with scrub brush and wild grasses. Crowheart Butte lifted into the sky ahead. The butte was sacred, a place of the spirits. This was an area of sacred places.