The Thunder Keeper

by Margaret Coel

  Father John pushed on: “Duncan Grover was trying to start over, put the past behind, follow a different road. No Indian’s going to kill himself on a vision quest in a sacred place like Bear Lake. It would be a sacrilege, an offense to the spirits.”

  “I know all about Indian vision quests.” The detective plopped one hand onto a stack of papers. A couple of sheets slid across the desk. “Grover was up there on that high ledge for three days without food or water, smoking a pipe and breathing in that sage they like to burn. After a while he got up the courage to throw himself off the cliff.”

  “It didn’t happen.” Father John’s tone had a harder edge than he’d intended.

  Matt Slinger lifted his other hand and rubbed his fingers into his temple, as if to rub away a minor annoyance. “Okay, Father O’Malley. Have it your way. Maybe he was in some kind of altered state of consciousness and didn’t realize that he couldn’t fly like an eagle. Maybe that’s what happened. It comes down to the same thing. Duncan Grover was responsible for his own death, which makes it suicide.”

  Father John felt as if he were running into brick walls. There had to be another way. He drew in a long breath and began again: “What kind of injuries did he have?”

  “The lethal kind.” The detective’s gaze was steady. A half second passed before he reached for a file folder, flipped it open, and began shuffling through the official-looking forms.

  Father John realized the detective had been expecting the question. He’d already retrieved Grover’s file from a filing cabinet.

  “Multiple contusions, bruises.” Slinger spoke in a monotone of futility. “Broken ribs, femurs, arms. Spinal cord crushed.” He glanced up. “Shall I go on?”

  “What about his skull?”

  “Crushed left temporal.”

  That was it, the opening he’d been looking for. He said: “Isn’t it possible that Grover was struck in the head, then thrown off the ledge?”

  Slinger gave a sharp expulsion of breath that passed for a laugh. “Speculation’s cheap, Father O’Malley,” he said. “Fact is, Grover fell two hundred feet off a cliff, bounced through some sharp boulders, which accounts for his injuries. Take my word, he decided that dying on a vision quest was more honorable than rotting in prison.”

  The detective set both palms against the desk and pushed himself to his feet. “I suggest you forget about trying to turn Grover’s suicide into something it wasn’t. The guy was a loser. He decided to end his life. It’s as simple as that. Why don’t you just remember him in your prayers.”

  Father John picked up his hat and got to his feet. There was a loud clap of thunder, then the glow of lightning in the window. Outside the rain was beating on the asphalt parking lot. He said: “How do you know somebody else won’t be killed?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  He kept his eyes on the other man’s. He was talking about what he’d heard in the confessional—the sealed confessional. “If you’re wrong,” he said, “there’s a killer in the area. He could kill again.”

  Slinger glanced away. Rubbing at his temple again. Finally he looked back. “I need the girlfriend’s name, Father O’Malley. Give me a name. I’ll find her and have a talk with her.”

  A surge of hope, like lightning. For the first time since the man had come into the confessional, Father John felt there was a chance that Duncan Grover’s killer would be found. That nobody else would have to die. A name, and Detective Slinger would continue the investigation.

  Father John set his cowboy hat on his head and headed down the corridor. There was a girl somewhere in Lander who knew Duncan Grover. A girl who’d left a message for him to call her at the convenience store. Which could mean—he could almost taste the certainty of it—that she worked at one of the convenience stores.

  He let himself out through the glass-door entrance and, hunching his shoulders in the rain, ran across the lot to the Toyota. He’d start with the convenience stores on Main Street.

  15

  Father John waited for a semi to pass on Main Street before he took a left into the parking lot between a motel and convenience store. It was his second stop. The rain banged on the Toyota’s roof, nearly drowning out the sounds of Faust. He turned off the tape player and ran across the pavement to the double glass doors with posters plastered on the inside: CARTON CIGARETTE—$22.99; TODAY’S SPECIAL—SIX-PACK COKE, $1.29.

  He stepped inside and stopped. Behind the counter: a small, black-haired woman, about twenty, eyes like slate, golden-brown skin, sharp cheekbones, and the small bump in her nose—the nose of the Arapaho. Several customers waited in line, gripping packages of Twinkies, cans of pop, candy bars. He walked down the center aisle and selected an apple from the bin on the rear wall, a Coke from the cooler, and wandered back to the register. One customer now—an elderly woman with a pink plastic hat clamped over her head and a clear plastic coat hanging loosely over a dark sweatsuit.

  The young woman behind the counter handed the customer some coins and reached for the items he was holding. Her hair was pulled back, caught with a pink beaded barrette—the way Vicky sometimes wore her hair. An unimportant detail—a pink barrette, for God’s sake—and she was in his mind as though she’d never left.

  The young woman ran the Coke bottle over the scanner and tapped in some numbers on the register. “One-oh-seven,” she said.

  He fished some coins out of his blue jeans pocket and pushed them across the counter. “Are you a friend of Duncan Grover’s?” he said.

  She flinched, as if he’d struck her.

  She was the one he was looking for, he was certain. Her hand was suspended over the coins, her dark eyes darted about. “Who wants to know?” she said in a voice tight with fear and hostility.

  “I’m Father O’Malley. From the reservation.”

  She was staring at him. The cowboy hat, the rain slicker, the blue jeans.

  “Yeah, and I’m Annette Funuchio.”

  “Funicello.”

  “Whatever.” She punched open the cash register, scooped up the coins, and dropped them inside. Eyes still darting about the store. The cash register drawer slammed shut. The coolers hummed into the silence behind him, and a veil of rain covered the windows.

  “I’d like to talk to you about Duncan.” He picked up the apple and Coke.

  The woman swallowed twice, looking about frantically now, eyes bright with fear.

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I believe your friend was murdered.”

  She drew in her lower lip and crossed her arms over her white T-shirt, hugging herself, fingers plucking at her sleeves. “Can’t you see I’m working?”

  “When do you get off?”

  “You don’t look like a priest.” Her gaze traveled to the cowboy hat he’d pushed back on his head.

  He removed the wallet from his back pocket, took out his driver’s license, and slid it across the counter.

  She peered down over crossed arms. “John O’Malley, SJ.” She raised her eyes and stared at him with a mixture of curiosity and wariness. “SJ?”

  “Society of Jesus. I’m a Jesuit priest.”

  He replaced the license and jammed his wallet back into his pocket. “I can wait until you get off.”

  An argument was playing out behind the black eyes. “I’m supposed to take a break in ten minutes when the manager gets back,” she said finally. “There’s a picnic table out back. I’ll meet you outside.”

  It’s raining outside, he thought. He said, “I’ll be waiting.”

  He walked around the brick building, staying close to the wall. Water gushed off the overhang and splashed onto the sidewalk. The picnic table and two benches stood on a concrete slab in the rear, facing a solid wood fence that marked the backyards of adjoining houses. There was a scattering of pickups in the parking lot on the right, shallow rivers running around the tires. He straddled a bench, popped open the Coke, and bit into the
apple. The rain sounded like an army of small birds pecking the corrugated overhang. An engine backfired in the lot.

  He’d finished both the Coke and apple by the time she dodged around the corner. She was bundled in a puffy red jacket, which she hugged to herself, one front lapping the other. She sank onto the bench across from him and began tugging at a pocket in her jacket, finally extracting a package of cigarettes. She shook one out. Another tug for a lighter, which she flicked a couple of times, cupping the flame. The light danced in her dark eyes.

  Throwing her head back, she blew out a strand of smoke and held the package toward him.

  Father John shook his head. The smell of the smoke brought back a memory of whiskey and stuffy bars and the forced conviviality and mindless banter that, for a few hours, had once obscured the loneliness. He swallowed back the memory. It was not one he wanted.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  She hesitated, took a long drag on the cigarette. “Ali,” she said finally, smoke curling from her nostrils. “Ali Burris. Why should I tell you about Duncan?”

  “Because I’m trying to convince Detective Slinger to reopen the investigation.”

  She blew out a ring of smoke and watched it dissolve into the rain. “I don’t get it. A white man that gives a shit about some Indian? Slinger and the coroner already made up their minds that Duncan killed himself.”

  He leaned toward her. “I’m trying to change their minds.”

  “Yeah, you’d do that. You being a priest.” She took another drag from the cigarette and looked away.

  “Maybe,” he said. He liked to believe that even if he weren’t a priest, if he’d never come to St. Francis Mission, he would still care about justice. “A man doesn’t look for a job, go on a vision quest, then kill himself.”

  Slowly she brought her eyes back to his, and he realized that she did have the answers. He only had to ask the right questions. “Tell me about Duncan,” he said.

  “Paranoid. Crazy.” She threw her head back, her gaze following the smoke. “What else you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  “The beginning? My break’s only fifteen minutes.”

  “You met him in Denver?”

  “Yeah.” She flipped the ash at the end of the cigarette and gazed at the parking lot, summoning the memory. “Six months ago at a bar. We got together, you could say.”

  “Where did he work?”

  “Construction jobs, different places.” She looked back. “When he worked, that is. Duncan’s real work was ripping off the construction sites. Helped himself to a lot of power tools. Always after the big score, that was Duncan.” A half smile faded into a blank look of acceptance. “He’d make a couple hundred bucks, get drunk, go broke again. So he’d go back to the temp agency, and they’d find him another job. The thing was, Duncan was a damn good worker when he wanted to work.”

  She stared at the cigarette. “A real con man, Duncan. Sure as hell conned me. Lived at my apartment, took my money. God, what a fool I was.”

  “You said he was paranoid,” Father John prodded.

  “Yeah, well, I guess he had reason, didn’t he? Somebody offed him.”

  “Who do you think killed him?” Father John felt the sense of anticipation that often came over him during counseling sessions, in the confessional, in the archives, researching history—the sense that the truth was about to announce itself.

  Ali Burris tossed the cigarette butt into a puddle. It made a sizzling noise. “The guys he was stiffing got onto him,” she said. “Bunch of lowlifes, stealing stuff and cheating each other.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying somebody killed Duncan because he held out on them? What are we talking about? A few hundred dollars?”

  “You don’t know these guys, Father. They’d kill you for a pack of cigarettes. I said to Duncan, we gotta get outta Denver, but he didn’t want to leave. So I said, I’m gone.” She kept her eyes on his. “I was scared of those creeps.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “Did they threaten me?” Her voice rose in astonishment. “They didn’t have to threaten me. I knew they’d beat the hell outta me if I ever opened my mouth about ’em.” She threw a nervous glance at the parking lot. “I took off and came here. I got an aunt on the res. Figured I could lay low for a while.”

  “How’d Duncan find you?”

  She looked away, smoothed back the black hair, reclasped the beaded barrette. After a moment she said, “I called him after a couple weeks. I mean, it wasn’t exactly Duncan I was trying to get away from. It was the other guys. He said he was ready to get away, too, and start over. So he come up here.”

  “Did he come alone?”

  She nodded, then let her gaze roam over the parking lot. “I thought things was gonna be different . . .” she began, her voice quiet. “They was as bad as before.”

  “Why, Ali? Did someone follow him?” He was close now. The truth was here.

  She lifted her head. There was a smudge of mascara on her cheek. “Yeah, they came after him. I never should’ve let him stay with me. Crazy fuckhead. All the time keeping the shutters closed, living in the dark like some kinda animal. Peering through the slats. ‘There goes Eddie,’ he’d say. ‘There goes Jimmie.’ I’d run over to the window, but nobody was there. Just the empty street.”

  The rain was coming harder, and the wind blew sprays of water that carried the odors of wet asphalt and garbage. The girl went on: she’d told Duncan to get himself straightened out. Get a job. Go on a vision quest. The tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks in thin black lines. “One of them creeps got him up there at Bear Lake.”

  “Help me,” he said. “Give me the name.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know, Ali.” He reached out and laid a hand on the puffy jacket sleeve.

  “He killed Grover. He’s gonna kill me, too.” The words came in a long wail. She yanked her arm away, jumped to her feet, and ran around the corner of the building.

  He went after her, grabbed her arm, and swung her toward him. She was so light, it surprised him. A child trembling inside the puffy jacket. “Ali, I’m trying to help you. Who killed Grover?”

  She tried to pull away, but he held on, and she stared up at him for several seconds, a mixture of fear and resignation behind her eyes. Finally the words came, like water breaking over a dam. His name was Eddie. She didn’t know his last name. A Pueblo Indian from New Mexico. Duncan and him got together at the Denver Indian Center. He was crazier than Duncan, but Duncan was gonna make a big score off him. One last score. Then they were gonna come up here and start over, just her and Duncan.

  “I want you to tell this to Detective Slinger.” Father John kept his hand on her arm. He could sense the impulse to run, like an electric spark firing inside her.

  “Tell the police? You’re as whacked as Duncan. What d’ya think’s gonna happen to me if I blow the whistle on Eddie? He’s still hanging around. I know it! I seen his brown truck on Main Street last night. He could be waiting for the right time to get me, like he did Duncan. Oh, God. Why am I talking to you?” She tried to wrench herself free again.

  He let her go, but this time she didn’t take off running. “You shouldn’t be alone, Ali,” he said. “Go to the res and stay with your aunt. Take a few days off.” He nodded toward the brick wall.

  “A few days off?” Contempt and incredulity flowed into her expression. “And then I get fired and don’t have a job. And my auntie’s got enough problems without me showing up with no money and some Indian after me.” She glanced past the parking lot to the traffic flowing along Main Street.

  A chill ran through him. What had he done? Eddie could drive by, spot her talking to a white man in a cowboy hat—a cop, maybe. And she, the only one who could identify a murderer.

  “Listen, Ali,” he said. She had started walking, and he stayed with her. “Tell your boss you need time off for an emergency. There’s
a guest house at the mission. You can stay there until Detective Slinger picks up Eddie. You’ll be safe.”

  “Leave me alone.” She surged ahead and broke into a run, slipping on the wet pavement, weaving between the brick wall and the bumpers of the parked cars.

  By the time he reached the front, she was nowhere in sight, and he wondered if she’d ducked into the convenience store or kept running. Where? Where could she go that Eddie wouldn’t find her?

  He slid into the Toyota and turned the ignition. The engine choked into life. He drove onto Main Street and headed north. A few minutes later he was speeding down Highway 789, the wind driving the rain over the hood of the pickup, wipers swinging across the windshield.

  He replayed the conversation in his mind again and again. A man named Eddie staying in the area to kill anyone who could link him to Duncan Grover. Another man, Jimmie. The witness. The penitent.

  It didn’t add up. Something was missing, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. If Eddie intended to kill Ali Burris, why hadn’t he done so by now? The girl was easy to find—he’d found her right away. What was Eddie waiting for? He could have killed Grover, then disappeared into New Mexico, into the Pueblos. Why was he still here?

  Father John slowed past the flat storefronts and restaurants of Hudson, then sped up again on Rendezvous Road. There was no other traffic, only the rainswept plains stretching into the distances. A new idea began to form in his mind. What was it the man had said in the confessional? Something about the boss wanting to teach the Indian to mind his own business.

  Maybe Eddie hadn’t killed Grover for revenge after all. Maybe there was some other reason, something that Ali Burris didn’t know about.

  He turned east on Seventeen Mile Road, mentally ticking off his options. He could talk to Slinger again. He rejected the idea. What proof did he have? A confession that he couldn’t talk about. The stammered words of a girl scared out of her mind. Ali Burris would never tell the detective what she’d told him, and without her he had nothing.

  Except—the name of a murderer.