The Bluejay Shaman (Alix Thorssen Mystery Series)

by Lise McClendon

  "Not yet."

  "Anyway, there's all these women there. Camping at Tin-Tin's place. Tepees and tents. The old lady, Tin-Tin, she tells me these women are going up to the Medicine Wheel, the one in the Jocko Mountains. Well, that ticked me off, them going there. I've taken students up there and not found so much as an arrowhead because that place has been so picked over. It's a sacred place to the Indians. Just thinking about these white women and their crystals and mumbo-jumbo pseudospiritual crap." He shook his head angrily.

  "So you told Shiloh what?"

  He took a deep breath. "I wanted to do was to see their permit from the tribes. To make sure they had permission, you know? That's all."

  "Did you raise your voice?" I asked.

  Wade chuckled, a hollow sound. "Yeah, I guess you could say that."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Then about five or six of them jumped on me and sat on me until Tin•Tin came over. Orianna, she's the leader, she couldn't let Tin-Tin see her girls doing something so violent as sit on a man."

  I glanced at my sister. "They sat on you?"

  "They weren't featherweights either." He chuckled again, lighter. "Couple of them I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley."

  I rubbed the back of my neck. "Why did they sit on you, Wade?"

  He worked his mouth to one side, thinking. "I really don't know."

  "Did you say something to them? Something that they ... took issue with?"

  "I might have said something."

  "Such as?"

  He looked at his gray prison-issue pants, stained and wrinkled. "I might have called them a name. 1got to yelling, I guess."

  Melina looked sharply at him. "What name?"

  "I asked them about the permit," Wade said. "They said it was none of my damn business. Basically. Said men weren't welcome there, in their group."

  "It's an all-women group?" I asked.

  Melina nodded. "What's their name, Wade?"

  "Manitou Matrix." He curled his lip as he said it. Anger sparked again in his brown eyes with the memory. "Manitou, that means spirit or gods. As if they had some pipeline to the gods, the Indian spirits. They're a bunch of crazy housewives from New Jersey! I called them the Manitou Matrons or Motherfuckers or something."

  I glanced at Melina. "Or something?"

  "It was Motherfuckers. I got mad. And I guess I called them tribades, too. Bunch of dykes-that's what they are! Call a spade a spade, that's all. When Shiloh told them to get me and they knocked me down and sat on me I was so fucking pissed I could have ..."

  Melina and I exchanged looks in the silence. The color drained from Wade's face. He inhaled as if catching his breath and cast his eyes at the floor.

  "God, Wade," Melina gasped. "How could you say that?"

  "Then you did what?" I asked.

  "I walked away. Moody got me out of there, and Tin-Tin, too. Moody and I took a sweat in his new sweathouse and the anger got steamed out of me." Wade shut his eyes and sighed. "Tell her, Mel." His voice pleaded. He looked at his wife. "Tell her. Have I ever hit you? Even in anger?"

  "No, Wade," she whispered.

  "Never! Sure I get angry but I am not a violent person. They're the ones who attacked me! People feel threatened or something because of my size, but I am not violent, Alix. I'm a pacifist."

  "I believe you, Wade," I said, thinking about the words spoken in anger, wondering what lay behind them. Wade, gentle Wade, could be a beast. "I think we better go." Melina reached out her hand to Wade but drew it back.

  At the door I turned. "What about the knife?"

  He shook his head. "Last time I saw it it was in the trunk of my car. Weeks ago. Maybe months."

  In the morning sun the primed patches on the Saab Sister looked worse, like pockmarks from a malignant disease. The streets of the resort town of Polson, Montana, hummed with summer tourists wearing backpacks and cameras and porkpie hats. Some of them looked very familiar, like last week's Jackson rejects. Maybe it was just the white legs. We crossed the bridge over the Flathead River, where it runs out of the lake, a hollow sound under the tires. The lake shimmered, pale sapphire at the shallows then deepening as it stretched north for endless blue miles.

  "I'm sorry, Mel." She had pulled herself back together, the pink in her cheeks coming back as the redness around her eyes faded.

  "Nothing for you to be sorry about." She straightened up in the seat, looking over the steel blue lake with whitecaps where the wind whipped the waves. "We just have to get him out of there. You will help, won't you? I need you, Alix."

  She squeezed my hand as I nodded, my throat clogged with emotion. This request went over the very private line each of us drew to others in the family. But how natural it seemed that Melina would ask, and how natural, even imperative, that I would accept.

  I turned my thoughts back to Wade. So far the evidence was circumstantial. But if they found the woman's blood on the knife that would cut it-no pun intended. Enough evidence to make a charge stickwith an unsophisticated jury. What kind of person was Doris, aka Shiloh? Who was she? The cruel turns of fate. Yesterday, playing Indian with her girlfriends in the forest. Today, cold and dead, her throat slit, her blood spilled onto the grass. Wades hunting knife found at the scene, covered with blood. The gravity of it all--to Wade, to Melina, to Shiloh Merkin--was finally sinking in.

  "I think we should start with Moody," Melina said. "Since he was with Wade last night." She leaned back in the seat, tucking her blue plaid shirt into her jeans. She was rallying. After all, she had put Mom and me back together after Rollie, our father, had died. No mention of the nature of Wade's outburst, the potential for violence, and the very real hatred in his voice. Like true Norsewomen, we swept the bad stuff under the rug and looked forward.

  I smiled at her. "It's good to see you." Her returning smile was for an instant pure, full of the old strength, but as the edges drooped I caught a glimpse of sadness, of disappointment. There was more she kept from me; I felt it. But Wade was the priority now. Professor Wade Fraser, Indian expert, former hippie, anthropology teacher, passionate believer, gender bigot, and husband: his own worst enemy.

  3

  THE DAY WARMED as if full summer had come overnight. Everywhere I looked there was something better to occupy my mind than the problems of Wade Fraser, like the way the mountains are reborn by the golden rays of summer, the melting glaciers glistening. The flowers stretch their buds toward the sky and fields of grass turn green. And the highway crews come out of mothballs to start tearing up the roads.

  We were stopped by what you must now call a flag-person. You can't call a black-haired girl with a vivacious smile, no more then seventeen years old, a flagman. She wore a fluorescent orange vest over a T-shirt and jeans. I rolled down the window and smelled dust and hot asphalt. We were almost to Moody's cabin and I felt like I could nap anywhere, any time. But Melina looked ragged and frail after the visit with Wade so I summoned my strength to continue. I wasn't as young as I used to be, when I could stay up all night on caffeine and not feel like road kill in the morning. The night's coffee had crashed in on me, imploded. I ran my fingers through my almost-blond hair. I ignored the mess of it by hiding behind my dark Ray-Bans and trusty slouch hat.

  "You know what they say in Wyoming, don't you?" I smiled.

  "No, what do they say in Wyoming?"

  "There are two seasons: winter and road construction."

  Her smile faded quickly. "Moody's place is just around that hill, if I remember right."

  "You know Moody?"

  "He's a friend of Wade's. He moved back to the reservation about five years ago. He's got an ex-wife and some kids in Seattle. I don't think his wife was Salish."

  "But he is?" Melina nodded. "Salish and Flathead are the same ~ right?"

  "Yes, but don't let Wade hear you say Flathead. Remember that time he gave us that big lecture at Easter about the jerks that missed the tribe that flattened their foreheads by five hundred miles?"

  T
he flag-person spun her Stop sign to the Slow side. I steered the car down a pavement ledge onto a new dirt roadbed, giving the Indian girl a wave as we passed.

  "Wade mentioned someone named Tin-Tin," I said as we crept along the ravaged roadbed.

  "Tin-Tin Quamash. Her Christian name is Mary Virginia or something, She's a Salish elder. She's had a summer camp along the Little Bitterroot River for years. In the late sixties the University sponsored it, pan of the back-to-the-earth movement. Lots of India sentiment then. In fact someone in Wade's department was responsible for helping get the camp started."

  "A Marlon Brando type? Remember when he refused his Oscar and sent that Indian woman instead?"

  "And everybody booed her," she said. "That was only the beginning. The American Indian movement was big on campus then. They advocated a violent change though, to right old wrongs."

  Melina licked her lips, warming to the subject. "But after the shoot-out at Wounded Knee, remember those two federal officers were killed? After that, the movement lost a lot of its support."

  "So what does this have to do with the old woman?"

  "While all the political turmoil is raging, this one old woman is teaching people--reteaching people--the native ways. How to tan hides, how to bead moccasins, how to cook the native plants. She kept Salish culture alive in a time when her tribe was either rejecting it or had forgotten it."

  "She sounds fascinating."

  "First we talk to Moody." Her voice was deliberate and determined, strong again, I noticed with relief. She looked at the highway and yelled, "We just missed it. Back up."

  Atop a grassy hill dotted with flowers a small cabin squatted, a rustic, run-down place built generations ago of sturdy lodgepole pine logs with the bark left intact. Moss and lichens grew on the walls below the galvanized tin roof, dotting the cabin with lime and gray-green splotches, making it look like a living part of the forest. We had bumpeddown a narrow dirt road marked by a tiny sign high on a tree, then up a hill to the edge of the forest. The sign read Camas Prairie.

  An Indian man waited for us in the open doorway. Bees flew by him into the cabin. The tire marks in the tall grasses gave the place a feeling of foreboding. It made me feel the weight of the events that had taken place here.

  We walked the last hundred yards to the cabin. The man wore a greasy Stetson with a snakeskin band and a bear claw tied to the front. His dark eyes were framed by the broad planes of his cheeks. Black hair was gathered into a single braid down his back. He wore skintight jeans on wiry, bowed legs, dusty black cowboy boots, and a dirty yellow Crow Fair T-shirt.

  His smile was toothy. "Hey, company!" He laughed. "Come have a cup of coffee."

  Inside the dark one-room cabin furnished with a cot, a small, boxlike refrigerator, a hot plate on a dresser, and a transistor radio, he poured us coffee from a speckled blue tin kettle. I watched the grounds flow into my chipped china cup but smiled as he handed it to me. We took up positions on stumps outside, which served as patio furniture.

  "Moody Denzel, this is my sister, Alix Thorssen," Melina said, doing the honors. He grinned at me, showing his stained but straight teeth.

  "Melina. It's good to see you again."

  She smiled wanly. "We've just been up to Polson, to the county jail."

  Moody's face fell, making him look older. I guessed his age at mid•forties. "We want to know what happened yesterday, Moody," I said. "Start where you first saw Wade."

  "Up at Tin-Tin's camp?"

  "You were there?"

  He nodded. "I got a ride down the road with my sister. Sometimes my mother lets me use her car but she was playing bingo yesterday." He took a sip of coffee. "I guess I got over there in the late afternoon. My watch don't work so I never know exactly."

  He pointed to the watch on his arm. "People ask me what time it is 'cause I'm wearing this watch. I say, the watch says two-thirty. Then they get all excited, 'cause they're late or something. But the watch, it always says two-thirty!"

  He laughed by himself, collected his thoughts, and continued.

  "At Tin-Tin's camp Wade was running toward me, his face all red and arms swinging. His eyes were dark like storm clouds. He was mad about something. So we get in his car--"

  "The red Cadillac?"

  "Right. That boat. The Big Cherry Mojo. We get in--in a big hurry. I can tell he's riled up about something but I don't ask him what and he don't say."

  The sunshine warmed my back and shoulders. I took off my old hunting jacket. It was my father's, washed twenty times but with impenetrable stains from dying grouse and pheasants in the back pocket. Melina had been shocked to see me wearing it. She had checked the back pocket and shuddered. But to me it was comfortable and familiar. My faded gray T-shirt, a cast-off from Paolo, had an ugly coffee stain down the front.

  "Did Wade see you last week when he was up here?" said Melina. "He heard about the sweathouse burning down and wanted to know all about it."

  "Your sweathouse burned?" I asked.

  "Somebody burned it down. It was old. My grandfather and his brother built it. Had a couch and a chair under the shelter and some old antlers my uncle tacked up there. All burned."

  "You didn't see it happen?"

  "It sat over the hill, down by the creek. I took my sweat early that night, before the moon came up, or I might have burnt up too." Moody's eyes widened; his hand shook as he raised his cup to his lips.

  "How can you be sure it was arson?" I asked.

  Moody looked embarrassed at my doubt. "We know."

  Melina stood up and stretched her back. "That was one part of the vandalism Wade was talking about. Another sweathouse burned too. It was too coincidental to be anything but arson."

  I could buy that. "So the two of you came back here in Wade's car. Then what did you do?"

  "We finished the new sweathouse. We had the willow frame done. We had to cut some cedar branches for inside, stick them in the walls, throw a couple of old bedspreads over the top, anchor them down. Then we heated up the rocks and took a sweat. You want to see it?"

  "Maybe later," I said, sipping coffee and trying to place the events in order.

  "Whatever was making so much anger in him seemed to go away some," Moody said. "We had supper. My brother gave me half a deer that he shot last week so I made bitterroot stew."

  "Where did you eat?"

  "Out here. Right where you're sitting."

  "Then?"

  Moody shrugged. "Then the skeeters started getting bad so I went to bed. Wade said he wanted to drink and I don't do that no more." He glanced at Melina, then back to me. "My wife, back in Seattle, that's what we broke up over. She wanted to go party every night. So I started working double shifts so I wouldn't have to tell her I didn't want to go party no more. I worked in this pancake-flour place. I always came home white as a ghost." He made a face, widening his eyes and arching his shoulders menacingly, then laughing at his own playfulness. His face clouded then. "My wife, she goes out and drinks and who-knows-what with some other guy. I know about it. I hear things. So pretty soon I'm packing a bag."

  His voice was strong and animated, more like a storyteller's than someone seeking pity. "So anyway, Wade goes out to his car and I go inside to bed. Then it's night, the stars are out, the moon is bright as a lantern, and somebody's banging on my door."

  "The sheriff?"

  He shook his head. "Fred Lamareux. He's tribal police. We went to school with the nuns together. He tells me the sheriff's got a warrant for Wade. I look outside and see Wade is already in the back of the squad car. The doors of the Caddy are all wide open and the light's on. A couple of guys are searching around in the car."

  "What happened to the car?" I asked Melina.

  "They impounded it."

  "Then what?" I said to the Indian.

  "I pulled my boots on and tried to talk to Wade. Them cops wouldn't let me too close. They said Wade had given them a fight, said they were going to charge him with resisting arrest too. Didn't want
me letting him out of that squad car. I got close enough to hear the string of curse words he let loose. Would have given the old nuns

  apoplexy." Moody smiled. "I even learned a few new ones."

  Melina sat down again on the stump, throwing the dregs of her coffee into the grass. She covered her face with her hands for a minute. Moody turned on his stump to look down the valley, with the Mission Mountains outlined in the haze. Something about the long view, that faraway place that is still visible, calmed me. Maybe it was like believing in fairy tales, trusting that there was another world out there that you couldn't touch. A world where goodness reigned. Where the randomness of life was banished. Where every deed, every life had order and meaning. Where the good were good, and the bad wore black hats.

  Here in Camas Prairie Moody had almost everything he needed. No material wants conceived by ad-men, no gourmet water, no sushi or Haagen-Dazs. A life pared down of frills. Moody's faraway eyes were dark, peaceful.

  And then there was Wade, a man who embodied the peace-nik sixties generation more than anyone else I knew. He belonged here as much as Moody, didn't he? He was only protecting this place from marauders, from charlatans who came with their snake oil to sell a sip of karma to the gullible. Thedidn't belong here. Wade knew that. I could understand how he responded to Moody and his life, bonding to them.

  Even if you couldn't become one of them you could be sensitive. You could sit quietly and listen to the breathing of the land. You could respect the ancient ways of people whose culture we had pillaged. That was Wade's way. I was beginning to feel, to understand, that spirit, those bonds, myself.

  4

  "HER SPIRIT FLIES with us!"

  The voice boomed over the meadow. The meadow hugged the riverbank, with grandfather cottonwoods on one side and aspens and pines on the other. As the voice echoed away, an odd stillness hummed through the tall grass at the forest edge. Even the bees stopped their frenetic buzzing for an instant as if in homage to the murdered woman. I paid her an involuntary moment of silence even though we'd never met. Melina snapped a twig behind me and cursed.