The Bluejay Shaman (Alix Thorssen Mystery Series)

by Lise McClendon

  A hundred or so women sat with their backs to us on the trampled, yellowing grass. On the far side of them, a row of twelve or fifteen conical white tepees marched in the bright sun. A woman-the one attached to the voice-paced in front of the crowd waving a brilliant purple and green scarf over her head. Her dark red skirt and black blouse framed a glittering pendant on her chest that caught the sun as she moved. She stopped and the women strained toward her. She gathered them in as if they were attached to strings.

  The stillness swelled and burst. Whispers rose from the seated women. The speaker held the ends of the scarf in each hand raised above her head and shouted: "She had the power and that power does not die! It is returned and renewed by those who loved her. By you, and you, and you!"

  Moody, Melina, and I tiptoed slowly along the ring of trees that surrounded the meadow. The Indian had explained that this was Tin-Tin's camp. Moody had a way of taking you under his wing. Making you feel like a treasured relative in just minutes. It seemed natural to trust him to lead us skulking through the woods, prying into a private funeral service. Even skulking felt pretty natural.

  Watching the dynamic woman with the booming voice, her graying hair in neat braids above her powerful figure, I assumed she was Tin-Tin. I found myself drawn to her words, fascinated as I was by Melina's description of the old woman. I strained to feel Shiloh's presence in the crowd, flying around them, entering a new body perhaps. But all I could hear in the moment of stillness was my heartbeat in my ears. I frowned and flicked a fly off my arm. The meadow rippled with heat.

  Wails undulated through the crowd. Apparently the women didn't feel reassured by the speaker's words. They were dressed in prairie skirts, suede leggings, and peasant blouses, some in black, some not. Sitting cross-legged in groups, holding each other in grief, or sitting alone with heads bowed. Never had I seen so much beadwork and frizzy hair in one place.

  "Shiloh had lived before! She could feel the spirits of her ancestors as clearly as the sun shines on us today, our day of sorrow and loss." The woman stood motionless now, arms outstretched at her sides, palms up in a Christlike pose. She was not tall but an imposing presence, her long-sleeved black blouse fluttering in the breeze. I could see the pendant better now; it was mirrored, the shape of a flower hanging on a beaded rope on her full bosom. Her round face was accented by the gray braids looped in circles below her ears. "She will live again!"

  Moody nudged me. "That's Orianna Gold Flicker. She's the head woman." I blinked in surprise. He looked solemnly at the women and pressed into a tree, trying to make himself less visible.

  "Where is Tin-Tin?" I whispered.

  Moody scanned the crowd for a minute. "Maybe in her tepee."

  We listened to the eulogy for Shiloh for a few more minutes, then moved back to approach the tepees on the other side. When Moody and I started out into the open to cross the meadow, Melina caught my arm.

  "I'm going back to the car," she whispered, though we were well away from the women. "I feel very uncomfortable here."

  I put my hand on her arm. "You go back. Moody and I will talk to Tin-Tin."

  Melina backed away for a few steps, then turned and ran through the trees toward the car. The air was charged with emotion as Orianna Gold Flicker continued the requiem, talking of reincarnated spirits and "the good red road," mixing Native American and Hindu religions in a slick, easy way. As we trod softly toward the groups of tepees she launched into a rousing climax.

  "To behold the spirit of death, open your heart into the body of life. Because life and death are one, like the river and the sea are one. Deep inside you lies your silent knowledge of the beyond. Like seeds dreaming beneath the snow, your heart dreams of spring. Trust these dreams, for in them is hidden the secrets of eternity."

  She moved across the front of the group, her skirt flowing behind her. "When you drink from the river of silence you will sing. When you reach the mountaintop," she intoned, stretching both arms toward the peaks behind us, "then you will begin to climb. And when the earth claims your limbs, then you will truly begin to dance." She paused for effect, turning suddenly to face the women. "The time has come for Shiloh to dance. Dance, Shiloh, dance!"

  The women shouted Shiloh's name, standing together, hugging one another, crying. A few danced wildly in circles like dervishes. A group rushed to Orianna, her arms outstretched to embrace and comfort them. Something about her finale rang familiar to me and I made a mental note to look it up later.

  Moody pulled at my sleeve. I had stopped to listen, curious about the control the woman had over her flock. Moody nodded toward a tepee ahead. Ancient designs had been painted on the old hide tepee, of buffalo and the sun and the moon. The other tepees were plain, canvas, and ordinary.

  We entered a ring of rocks near the closed flap of the tepee. Moody approached the flap, cleared his throat, and scuffed his boots in the dirt. In a moment the flap flipped open from the inside. The bent frame of an old woman emerged. She wore a gauzy lavender peasant blouse, with a yellow vest and red calico skirt that reached her ankles. Around her neck was a white beaded choker and a small leather bag on a thong. A red bandanna covered her white hair, plaited in two long braids on either side of her head. Her soft, lined face brightened at the sight of Moody.

  "Little Cricket," she purred, holding his face in her hands for a moment. "My day is brighter now."

  "Tin-Tin, I have someone I want you to meet." Moody turned toward me, pulling me closer. "This is Alix. She is Melina's sister."

  Tin-Tin was thin and taut as a lariat. "Yes, I see some of Melina in your face." Then her face clouded. She dropped my hands, adjusting one of the bobby pins that held her hair in place. "You've come about Wade." She held up her hand. "First we eat."

  With the bowl of soup and a hunk of homemade bread slathered with butter in front of me, I realized I was ravenous. Tin-Tin looked pleased with my appetite and refilled my bowl. As we finished she seemed to ready herself for telling the story.

  The old woman's black eyes looked up at the blue sky dotted with white puffs of clouds. "It was a day just like this one. Only yesterday. Yet so much ..." She shook her head, braids swinging, and stared at me intensely.

  "You are here to help Wade Fraser?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Then you want to know the truth."

  "Yes."

  She stood up and set her jaw. "I call him Buffalo Tears, for he cries for the spirits of the old ones. He made many women very angry. He called them indecent names. He acted poorly."

  "He told me," I said.

  "Did he? Good. Maybe he will learn to let other people live the way they want. I was ashamed to call Buffalo Tears my friend." In her voice was hurt.

  I ate the soup, trying to recover from my embarrassment for my brother-in-law. It's a terrible thing to let down those who love you. Even if he was found innocent, Wade would never find relations on the reservation what they were before. "Why did he come here?"

  Tin-Tin set our bowls by a kettle near her campfire. "He came here to talk to me. About the Medicine Tree. You have heard what happened to the Medicine Tree?"

  I shook my head. From Tin-Tin's circle I watched the women from the memorial service file by to their tepees in twos and threes, faces flushed and streaked with tears. "What happened to it?"

  The old woman sat on a rock, her back straight, the sun on her walnut-colored face. "A person--" She swung her bony fingers around as if the humanity of this being was in question. "Some person removed all the prayer ribbons on it, took all the coins stuck in the bark. Then this person cut off limbs of the tree." Tin-Tin closed her eyes, the pain of saying these ugly facts on her face.

  Moody stared at his boot tips.

  "This tree is special to you? Sacred?" I said.

  "The Medicine Tree is a big old yellow pine, about three or five or eight hundred years old," Moody said. "Nobody knows for sure. It's in the Bitterroot Valley. That's where we lived before the government sent us to the reservation. Our
home."

  "Home." Tin-Tin seemed to sing the word, her lips soft and wrinkled but not chapped by the sun like mine. "Have you seen the Medicine Tree, Alix?" I shook my head. "Then let me tell you why it is sacred to us."

  "Long ago," she began, "a ram lived in the Bitterroot Mountains. This ram was vicious and cruel. He wouldn't let anyone pass through his land. He ate them if they tried.

  "One day Coyote tried to pass through the ram's land. 'What are you doing here?' asked the ram. 'Just traveling through,' said Coyote. 'I let no one pass,' said the ram. 'I must eat you.'" Tin-Tin grinned, her teeth strong but yellow with age. "Now Coyote was too smart to be eaten. He thought about the ram, how proud he was of his beautiful horns, how strong and grand he thought he was.

  Then he said to the ram: 'I will make you a bet. I bet you can't knock down that tree. If you succeed, you can eat me. If not, you must let me pass.'

  "Now the ram loved to gamble, just like Coyote. So he quickly agreed. He moved back and ran as fast as he could at the tree, butting it with his horns. It didn't budge. He tried it again. Still no luck. The third time he moved way back, got to running so fast that when his horns hit the tree they dug deep into the trunk.

  "The ram was stuck. Coyote had tricked him. Coyote knew he had to free the mountain pass of the cruel ram so he cut off his head, leaving the horns embedded in the tree." Tin-Tin frowned, looking at me. "When I was a girl you could still see the horns in the trunk. But now they are gone."

  "Someone took them?"

  She shrugged. "They are gone."

  Moody spoke up in her pause. "Our people honor the grandfather tree by making gifts to it. Ribbons on the branches that twirl in the wind, money in the bark or on the roots if they can afford it. You make a prayer there, for your family, for your tribe."

  "Cutting limbs off the Medicine nee is like cutting off the arms of your grandfather," Tin-Tin said.

  I thought about the story and wondered what Wade had been doing. Why was he so intent on finding the vandals? Did he know who was behind it?

  Suddenly Tin-Tin stood, shading her eyes to look down the line of tepees. A brown sheriff's car was parked at the far end. Several uniformed officers stood talking to Orianna and a cluster of women who surrounded her. The leader nodded her head, listening intently to what the officers said. Anxiety seemed to ripple through the women as they watched the policemen.

  "Did you tell Wade anything about the Medicine Tree? About the vandalizing of it?" I asked, sensing our discussion would soon come to a close.

  Tin-Tin shook her head sadly. "I know nothing about who did this terrible thing. Wade went off to argue with Orianna and Shiloh. The next time I saw him some women were holding him down on the ground and he was cursing. They let him up because he is my friend."

  She sighed, looking at the clouds again. When she spoke her voice was a whisper. "Buffalo Tears. What have you done?"

  I examined the toes of my running shoes for a minute, not wanting to speculate, hoping this feeling of mine was wrong. "Did he hate Shiloh, do you think?"

  "I don't know. Wade can be so loving, so generous. But I see bitterness in him too. Hatred that I do not know." She looked at me. "Do you love him like a brother?"

  "I do."

  "Then I tell you that he did not kill her, that he could not kill a living thing. But there was bad blood between those two, somewhere, sometime." Tin-Tin's eyes darted away from mine. I shivered involuntarily. Her words were not comforting. I was glad Melina was not here to hear them. I turned as Orianna and her entourage swept into the circle.

  "Tin-Tin, excuse me. The sheriff's deputies want to question everyone who was here yesterday. I hope you don't mind." The leader's demeanor was surprisingly humble. At close range her round face was freckled and lined but not unattractive. She was as tall as I was, with a mountainous chest that swelled like an opera singer's as she spoke.

  Tin-Tin gave her a slim smile. "I will cooperate."

  "Fine." Orianna turned to go then looked at Moody and me.

  "Who are you?"

  "Moody Denzel. Pleased to meet you." Moody stuck out his hand. "Shiloh asked me to conduct sweats for you women. She said you wanted 'em starting day after tomorrow." Orianna just looked at his hand, then glared up at me.

  "And you?"

  "Alix Thorssen." I offered no hand or explanation.

  Orianna waited a beat, then yielded to Tin-Tin's obvious authority. "Well. We've got work to do." She turned, her skirt swishing behind her, and led her women away.

  I watched her a minute, then turned back to the old woman. "What do you know about her?"

  "Orianna?" Tin-Tin asked, busying herself with getting the dishpan ready to wash the bowls. "Interesting woman. A powerfulstoryteller."

  "Does Wade know her?"

  Tin-Tin picked up a dishtowel and dried her hands. "I don't know. Maybe some. He knew Shiloh from somewhere, like I said. But Orianna? She likes to keep to herself, like her power is stronger if she guards it."

  Tin-Tin was the antithesis of that idea, I thought as we said good-bye and walked to the car. Her power was strengthened by giving it away, like a potlatch or giveaway ceremony. The more you give, the greater you become. The world, in fact, could be divided into two kinds of people, those who hoard and those who give. And it wasn't the material things necessarily that a person had to give. Some of my clients, thick with the odor of money, seemed so pitiful to me. Withered by their money somehow. By the sheer energy involved in keeping every penny safe.

  Maybe they never gave it away.

  5

  IN THE WEST, time is measured by mile markers on the highway. Mile 3, mile 35, mile 135. You don't know where they start or where they stop but you drive, on and on into the sunrise.

  It was morning. In the backseat of a late-model Toyota littered with gum wrappers, belonging to Hondo O'Brian, whose real first name was Taylor, I lay back and tried to make my mind work. Yesterday afternoon, late, we had climbed the worn marble stairs in a renovated brick office building to Sachs and O'Brian, Esq.

  The light bulbs gave off a scorched tin smell. Across the street sat the Missoula County Courthouse, an ornate, lordly castle built around the turn of the century. Despite my objections to a lawyer named Hondo, the man turned out to be a skinny, red-haired garden patch of a man: a string bean with a carrot top. I had expected a Hulk Hogan and was pleasantly surprised.

  We discussed Wade's case for half an hour or so, then went out to dinner, where Hondo looked serious behind his horn-rimmed glasses and Melina drank too much wine and started to get weepy. The designated driver (yours truly) got us home early, tucked in bed, where we both slept like the dead. Well, almost.

  Now, three cups of coffee into the morning, we were headed to Polson for Wade's hearing. Melina and Hondo talked softly in the front seat, over the radio news.

  "So the judge sets bond?" Melina said.

  "Right. That's how much bail money is necessary," Hondo said.

  "You pay the bondsman 10 percent of the amount the judge sets."

  My mind raced ahead. The money didn't concern me. It would be found, somewhere. Wade had no alibi. That bothered me. I had brought along yesterday's edition of the Missoulian, which blared the headline: PROF CHARGED IN FLATHEAD MURDER. There was a picture of Shiloh, the first I'd seen. She appeared to be giving a lecture, with both hands on a wooden lectern. Her hair was shoulder length and darkly wavy, pushed behind rather large ears; her nose bordered on hooked. Her earlobes sparkled with jewelry. The photographer had caught her mid-sentence, her mouth open, small, sharp teeth, deep-seeyes fiercely serious, eyebrows taut, nostrils flaring.

  I stared at the half-tone dots, trying to read her. If anything could be read into the photo it was her intensity, her sense of purpose. I found myself looking for something to dislike, to justify Wade's quarrel with Shiloh. Had she fought with her attacker? Had she wounded him?

  The article described the "grisly slaying of the local woman" in scant detail, simply that sh
e bled to death. A knife found at the scene had allegedly been traced to the accused. How did Wade's knife get there? Did someone hate Wade enough to frame him for murder?

  It all seemed farfetched to me. In investigating art forgery I rarely had to look for a motive past money, but I enjoyed probing the psyches of failed, bitter artists who got their kicks out of bilking people. Why they chose the low road-forgery-when they were often accomplished artists in their own right was sometimes a mystery.

  But usually the reason hit you over the head: the game, the chase. Finding the old canvases, the old pigments, using the same techniques, the same brushes and strokes as the masters. These were parts of the puzzle constructed to show how much smarter the forger was than his prey. But subconsciously the forger wanted the recognition for his masterpiece and slipped up somewhere, put in thalittle imperfection like a Navajo weaver does to prove she isn't as

  perfect as the Great Spirit. That imperfection was the key to the puzzle you had to find.

  The odds were that whoever murdered Shiloh Merkin didn't really want to be found out. There was no artistry in slashing a woman's jugular. Someone hated Shiloh. Someone wanted her dead.

  Something else in the newspaper article grated on my morning grogginess. I picked up the paper again as we pulled into the parking lot at the Lake County Courthouse. Where was that sentence? I drew my finger down the printing. "Professor Fraser had been arrested previously for assault in 1984. Charges were subsequently dropped."

  The hallway outside the courtroom was jammed. Not big-city jammed, wall-to-wall without elbowroom, but a western jam. That means four reporters trying to talk to the same person. We have our own perspective on these things out here.