The Thunder Keeper

by Margaret Coel

  Even as the woman spoke, Vicky knew it wasn’t true. Something in the tone—the nonchalance, the note of dismissal—sounded forced and out of place. “You said you hadn’t spoken to Vince in three months,” she said, slipping into her courtroom tone, as if Jana Lewis were on the witness stand. “How do you know he wasn’t on the reservation recently?”

  “Because I know his every move.” Jana Lewis waved the goblet. “Every restaurant and bar and whore’s house. My private investigator will tell you he didn’t go to any reservation.”

  “Private investigator?” This was more than Vicky had hoped for—a PI following Vince Lewis, noting exactly whom he’d seen, whom he’d talked to. “You told Detective Clark?”

  “And why would I do that? I called off the private investigator when I had enough to file the divorce. Besides it’s not police business. The last thing I need is for the newspapers to hear about it.” She threw back her head and gave another forced laugh. “Oh, I can see the headlines. ‘Denver Socialite Hired PI to Watch Bastard Husband.’ ” Shifting sideways a little, she took another drink. “Daddy’s upset enough over the publicity about Vince’s death. Not exactly a respectable way to go—run down like a dog. Daddy would have much preferred a more appropriate hunting accident. But, I say, what the hell, he’s gone.”

  Vicky leaned toward her. “Mrs. Lewis,” she said, “I believe your husband was murdered.”

  The woman’s head snapped around, as if she’d caught an unexpected blow. The liqueur dribbled over her fingers. She was staring wide-eyed, a fixed expression of disbelief and outrage in the pale face. “That’s ridiculous! Vince’s death was an accident.”

  She looked away and started to get up—a shaky commandeering of the floor. She gripped a corner of the table to steady herself. The goblet tipped sideways, spilling liqueur down the front of the blue robe. “Please go,” she said.

  Vicky got to her feet and faced the woman. “Mrs. Lewis, if your husband had located a diamond deposit on the reservation, for your own safety, please tell me.”

  Jana Lewis gave a shout of laughter. “My safety? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “If you don’t want to talk to me,” Vicky went on, “then talk to Detective Clark.”

  “Detective Clark”—an expulsion of breath—“is looking for the drunk that ran Vince down. If he’s wasting time chasing some crazy murder theory, my father will see that he’s removed from the investigation. We are not without influence in this town, Ms. Holden. Daddy’ll have Detective Clark’s job.” She pushed away from the table, reclaiming her footing. “Get out,” she said.

  Vicky got to her feet and started for the door. She turned back. “Be careful,” she said. “Your husband was murdered, and your life may also be in danger.” She left Jana Lewis pouring another drink.

  The Bronco’s engine burst into life at the turn of the ignition. It had started to rain—a light misting that sparkled like diamonds in the headlights and pecked at the windshield as Vicky turned west onto Speer and worked her way into the fastest lane, making the lights as yellow switched to red, wondering if a wealthy woman with a powerful father would hire someone to kill her husband, even for a three-million-dollar insurance policy. It was possible. Except that Jana Lewis had seemed shocked at the mention of murder.

  And yet, the woman knew more than she’d admitted, Vicky was sure. Another picture was starting to emerge, like an image gradually taking shape in a developing tray: Nathan Baider following Jana Lewis down the hospital corridor.

  Nathan Baider and Jana Lewis.

  It would explain why the company’s law firm would represent Jana in the divorce. Why Vince Lewis had wanted to dig up dirt on a wife who intended to ruin him. It could even explain why Lewis had wanted to blow the whistle on Baider Industries.

  Vicky dug her cell phone out of her bag on the seat beside her and, at the next red light, tapped out Steve Clark’s number. His answering service picked up. She said she had a hunch that Jana Lewis knew why her husband had been killed. “Call me as soon as you can,” she said.

  In the distance, the shadows of the mountains merged into the rain-filled sky. She glanced at the dashboard clock. Almost six-fifteen. Marie Champlain would be in her office at the Indian Center, supervising the evening classes and meetings.

  She made a right, circled beneath the Speer Viaduct and merged with the southbound traffic on I-25. A sheet of water billowed over her windshield from the tires of the semi ahead. She changed lanes and sped past.

  20

  Vicky parked in the graveled lot of the tan brick elementary school that was now the Denver Indian Center. This was the Indian neighborhood: white bungalows with pickups in the driveways and sofas and chairs crammed onto the porches. Rain danced in the streetlights.

  Inside, the building retained the feel of a school, with bright fluorescent lights illuminating the notices tacked along the walls. Doors on either side led to classrooms that now served as offices and meeting halls. Through the glass in the doors, Vicky could see Indian people seated around tables: dark skin and black hair, like punctuation marks against the whitewashed walls.

  She knocked at the door with the black-lettered sign below the glass: DIRECTOR. A pickup basketball game was going on in the gym at the far end of the corridor. The grunts and shouts mingled with the thud of a dribbled basketball. From behind the office door, silence.

  She was about to retrace her steps when Marie Champlain came through another door. A stocky woman, not more than five feet tall, with the black hair and pinkish skin of a breed. She wore a loose-fitting blue dress that flapped around her thick legs.

  “Vicky? Was I expecting you?” She hurried forward, as if she were late for some forgotten appointment.

  Vicky shook her head. “Do you have a minute?”

  “For our own Indian lawyer, always.” The woman brushed past and opened the office door.

  Vicky followed her into a small space with a desk and a two-seat black vinyl couch pushed against one wall. Papers and folders spilled over the desk and trailed across the couch in haphazard stacks. The director swooped up a handful of papers from the couch. “No sense standing when we can sit, I always say.” She settled into the chair at the desk and tossed the papers onto a sloping pile.

  “How’ve you been?” Vicky began.

  “Oh, holdin’ up okay.” The other woman entered into the familiar pattern. Gloomy days. Not much sunshine. “Our people been living in the sun so long we start feeling depressed when it goes away.” She glanced about, as if another idea had taken hold. “We got more and more Indian people here every day lookin’ for help. Sick, out of work, don’t have any place to leave the kids. Don’t have anything, some of ’em. No household stuff, no food. We try to get them fixed up with social services till they get on their feet.”

  Vicky nodded. She’d heard the stories many times, and with them came the pain of unwanted memories. She, in a car with a hundred thousand miles on the odometer and a reverse gear that didn’t always work, driving to Denver to begin a new life, an old suitcase and a couple of boxes in the backseat holding everything she owned, the city sprawling ahead, stark and impersonal.

  She drew in a long breath and shifted toward the edge of the couch, the preliminaries now over. “I’m looking for a Pueblo Indian named Eddie. He hung around with Duncan Grover.”

  The director’s face froze. “That was one troublemaker, Grover,” she said. “Came around for a couple of powwows. You could smell the whiskey when he walked in the door. Beat up some Indian out in the parking lot about a month ago. Couple guys broke it up before I had to call the police.” She shrugged. “We’d just as soon not have the police coming out here too often. They get to think Indians are nothing but troublemakers. Anyway—” Another shrug. “Next thing I hear on the moccasin telegraph Grover’s jumped off a ledge at Bear Lake.”

  The director let her eyes trail toward the corridor beyond the opened door. “Couldn’t believe my ears. Grover might’ve been a troublemaker,
but I never heard of a warrior taking a flying leap off a ledge in a sacred place. Don’t make sense.”

  Vicky nodded. It hadn’t made sense to her either, or to John O’Malley.

  She said, “Father O’Malley thinks Eddie might know something about the death.”

  “Never met the good priest.” The director broke into a smile. “Heard lots about him. People from the res say he’s a white man they can trust.”

  True, Vicky thought. She had always trusted him, but now—the lawsuit . . . She went on: “If Grover was a troublemaker, somebody might have had a grudge against him.”

  The director sat back and regarded her a moment. “Lots of people, you ask me.”

  “What about the guy he got into a fight with?”

  “Yeah, him for sure. He was a bloody mess, but soon’s the other guys pulled Grover off, he got himself into a brown pickup and tore outta here.”

  “Who was he?” Vicky tried to keep the urgency out of her voice.

  “Never saw him before that night.” The woman gave a halfhearted shrug. “Never seen him since. I can’t say I’m sorry about that.”

  “Is there anyone else who knew Grover? Anyone who might know who Eddie is?”

  “Sorry.” Marie shook her head, then stared straight ahead a moment, as if she were contemplating an image on the wall. “You say Eddie is Pueblo. I can ask around, get back to you.”

  “Thanks, Marie.” Vicky stood up and started for the door. She had the same feeling that had come over her earlier, after talking with Jana Lewis: she was chasing phantoms. Rumors and shadows, like evil spirits, always ahead, around a corner, out of sight, laughing at her.

  “Hold on a minute.” Marie was on her feet, shouldering past into the corridor. The clack of her footsteps mingled with the thump, thump of a basketball. After a moment she was back, a tall, well-built Indian behind her. He looked about thirty, with the dark, round face and intent look of the Cheyenne and black hair smoothed back into a ponytail. He bunched his fists in the pockets of his blue jeans jacket.

  “This here’s Robert Yellow Wolf.” Marie tilted her head back. “He was one of the guys broke up the fight in the parking lot.” She glanced up and gave him an appreciative smile.

  “Did you know Grover?” Vicky asked.

  “Nah.” Yellow Wolf shook his head slowly. “That dude give Indians a bad name. Didn’t surprise me none he jumped off a cliff.”

  “What about somebody called Eddie?”

  He was still shaking his head. “Never had the pleasure. But he could’ve been the guy Grover beat hell out of. I heard him shouting something like, ‘Eddie, you sonovabitch, I’m gonna kill ya.’ ”

  So he did exist, Vicky thought. Eddie was real. Not an untrue image. Real, and possibly a murderer.

  “Eddie who?” Vicky persisted.

  “Eddie sonovabitch.” The Indian shrugged.

  Vicky drove north on Sheridan Boulevard through neighborhoods of white frame bungalows, brick ranches, and strip malls anchored by gas stations and fast-food restaurants. The rain had stopped, leaving the air heavy with the smell of wet leaves and grasses. The evening traffic was light: arrows of yellow headlights blurring over the asphalt, the sound of tires splashing through puddles in the intersections.

  She would call John O’Malley the minute she got home, she decided. She was ready now. The lawsuit had been in the back of her mind all day. She’d felt betrayed somehow. It was silly. Whatever had happened—it had nothing to do with her.

  He would be in the residence now—she could picture him—in the study, as crammed with papers and books as her own, the music from some opera blasting around him. She’d tell him what she’d learned. Eddie had reason to hold a grudge against Duncan Grover. And the promise Marie had made to keep asking around on the chance someone might know the man.

  She wondered what difference it would make if John O’Malley did find Eddie. It was all theory and shadows. Visions of what had happened. There was no physical evidence, or the coroner would have ruled the death a homicide and the police would be looking for Eddie.

  She turned right onto Twenty-ninth Avenue. Downtown lights rose in the distance. After a few blocks, she made a U-turn and parked behind another vehicle in front of the white house rising from the bluff. “Spirits dwell on the bluffs,” her grandmother had said.

  For a brief moment a sense of loneliness and disorientation hit her, and along with it, a dread of going into the house, wrapped in the quiet of its thick walls. Lucas was out to dinner with his new boss; he’d been out almost every evening since he’d arrived. He planned to move into his own apartment in a few days. She would be alone again. Hisei ci nihi. Woman alone. The grandmothers had given her an appropriate name, she thought.

  She started up the concrete steps, trying to shake off the odd feeling. The house loomed above, shadows falling off the steeply pitched roof and clinging to the oblong windows and the stucco. The gate at the top of the stairs squealed when she opened it. She closed it behind her, then stopped.

  Something wasn’t right, some slight disturbance in the atmosphere. An animal, she told herself, aware of the prickly feeling on her skin. She remained motionless, her eyes searching the shadows on the front porch until she saw the figure of a man rising from the bench inside the railing. He started down the sidewalk toward her.

  She clasped her keys tightly, the jagged metal cutting into her fingers. “Who’s there?” she called, moving back toward the gate, her other hand brushing the air, searching for the latch. She heard her own voice again, disembodied somewhere ahead of her. “What do you want?”

  21

  “Vicky, it’s me. Steve.”

  She held on to the latch a moment and made herself breathe slowly—in and out, in and out. In the dim light of a passing car, she could see the familiar slouch of his shoulders, the easy angle of his posture as he walked down the sidewalk. Hands in his slacks pockets, the fronts of the dark sport coat pushed back, tie loosened at the collar of a light shirt.

  “Sorry, Vicky,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I got your call, and since I was in the neighborhood . . .” He hesitated, and she knew it wasn’t true. “I took a chance on finding you home. Been sitting on the porch waiting. I just decided to give you another ten minutes, and here you are.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Vicky managed, not trusting herself to say more. Her throat felt as scratchy as sagebrush, as if she’d been riding all day on the plains. She moved past him, aware of his footsteps, soft and measured, behind her. She jabbed the key at the lock, her hand shaking.

  “Let me,” Steve said. The shadow of his arm reached around her, and his hand covered her own. “I’m good at this sort of thing.” In a half second the door swung open. She stepped inside and flipped on the wall switch, sending a flood of light over the entry, the living room on the left. She made her way through the shadows of the dining room ahead, dropping her bag on the table, and into the kitchen. Another wall switch. The fluorescent ceiling light stuttered into life as she opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of water.

  “Something to drink?” she asked. “Some coffee?” She turned back to the man leaning against the doorjamb, relaxed and watchful, hands still in his pockets.

  “Water’s fine for me.” He nodded at the bottle in her hand.

  Vicky found two glasses in the cupboard and filled them almost to the brim. She handed him one, then began gulping the water in the other glass, not stopping until it was empty. She refilled the glass, feeling calmer now, in control again.

  “You seem pretty jumpy.” He was still watching her. “What’s going on?”

  Vicky leaned back against the counter and locked eyes with the man. “You scared me, Steve. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be on my porch.”

  “That’s it?”

  Not all of it, she thought. It was the city, the jumble of noises and odors, the unnatural play of light and shadows around the buildings, and the odd feeling that some stranger, not herself, float
ed over the paved streets that glistened with wetness, past the houses and buildings that crowded the earth, while she—her own spirit—was on the reservation.

  She nodded, ignoring the perplexity in his expression. She could never explain.

  “How about we go get something to eat?” he said after a moment, the perplexity giving way to something that resembled hope.

  It was the hunger bothering her, that was all. She agreed.

  “I know just the place,” Steve said, relief in his tone, as if this were the easiest problem he’d faced all day. “Little restaurant couple blocks away.” He set his half-full glass on the counter. “You’d better follow me. I’m backup for another guy tonight.”

  Vicky followed the white Ford through the streets of north Denver. Bungalows and Victorians slid by outside, light glowing in the windows. The remnants of the earlier rain still shone on the asphalt. She turned onto Thirty-second Avenue and parked behind the Ford in front of a row of little shops and restaurants. Cars lumbered past, tires thrumming into the background of city noise.

  He took her arm and guided her inside, through a maze of tables with checkered cloths and candles blinking in the center. Only a few other diners were there.

  “So you’re finally having dinner with me,” he said after they’d sat down.

  “Just business, Steve.” She gave him a friendly smile and began studying the menu, a part of her wondering what it might have been like, how her life might have gone, had she ever felt something more than friendship for this man.

  After the waitress had taken their orders, he said, “Tell me about your hunch, Vicky.”

  It was a moment before she realized he was referring to the call she’d placed to him earlier. She sat back, folding and refolding the white cloth napkin in her lap, and explained that she’d gone to see Jana Lewis.

  “Now, why would you do that?” He made no effort to conceal his irritation. “I told you I’d get back to you the minute we had anything on Vince Lewis’s death. Why can’t you trust me to do my job, Vicky?”