The Story Teller

by Margaret Coel

  “Can you come over?” The thud of drums echoed in the background.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the powwow. Denver Indian Center.”

  Vicky glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand: 9:45. She’d dozed off for more than hour. “I’ll be there,” she said.

  In five minutes she had splashed cold water on her face, touched up her lipstick, and was back in the car, sipping on the Coke—it was lukewarm now. Another twenty minutes and she parked in the last vacant space in front of the white, low-slung building—an elementary school at one time—that housed the Denver Indian Center.

  Spreading from the center, like spokes from a wheel, were streets clogged with old pickups and trucks in front of small, frame houses—the Indian neighborhood in the river bottoms of the long-dried-up tributaries of the South Platte. Doyal and Mary lived only a few blocks away.

  The muffled thump, thump, thump of drums floated into the night air. Vicky followed the sound around the building to what had once been the gymnasium. Inside, the drumming reverberated off the cement-block walls, filling the cavernlike space. Indian families sat on folding chairs arranged in a wide circle around the dancers: a group of men and boys swirling and dipping, bare feet pounding the tiled floor.

  Vicky stood inside the door a moment, transported into another time and place. The dancers wore buffalo headdresses covered with matted brown fur, horns curving upward. They danced as her people had always danced, to ask the buffalo to share his qualities with the people: strength, courage, endurance, and generosity.

  “You wanna stay? Three dollars.” The voice startled her, brought her back to herself. An old man sat at a small table next to the door. In front of him was an open cigar box with dollar bills and coins stacked neatly inside.

  “Yes, Grandfather,” Vicky said. She removed three dollar-bills from her handbag and handed them to the old man, then started past the circle of folding chairs, her eyes searching the brown faces for Tisha Runner. She didn’t see the girl anywhere.

  She walked down a wide hallway, fluorescent lights casting shiny circles over the green-tiled floor. Smells of hot grease and charred meat drifted toward her. At the end of the hallway, a scattering of people lined up in front of a counter stacked with bowls of potato chips and buns, plates of hamburgers. On the other side several grandmothers scurried about the kitchen.

  Vicky let herself through the door next to the counter, aware of the grandmothers’ eyes on her—the stranger. A Native American by the black hair, brown skin, and almond-shaped eyes, but not one of them. Not someone they knew. She stopped next to the old woman scooping coffee grounds into an oversized metal coffeepot. “Excuse me, Grandmother.” she began, “I see you’re very busy, and I’m sorry to interrupt you.” The dance of politeness must always be observed. “I’m supposed to meet someone here. Her name is Tisha Runner.”

  The old woman shook her head and went back to scooping the coffee. Out of the corner of her eye, Vicky saw another woman set a bowl of potato salad on the counter and start toward her. “Come with me,” the second grandmother said.

  The sound of drums faded behind them as they walked down another corridor past doors that had once led into classrooms. Small signs read: LITTLE EAGLE PRESCHOOL, CIRCLE DAY CARE, HEALTH CENTER. The old woman stopped at a door with the sign OFFICE. “You wait in here,” she directed.

  The office was narrow and small, probably carved out of an adjoining classroom. Shoved against one wall were two desks cluttered with papers and notebooks. A couple of metal chairs were propped against the opposite wall. The drumming sounded far away, an echo of her own heartbeat.

  After a few moments there was a shuffling of footsteps in the corridor; the door swung open and Tisha Runner walked in. She looked the same: the black shiny hair falling toward her face, the blue jeans and T-shirt. She carried a small brown envelope. Without saying anything, she sank into one of the metal chairs, a tenseness in the way she moved.

  “Police found a body in the river this afternoon,” she said. The words were clipped, abrupt. “It’s been on the TV. I’m scared it’s Julie.”

  Vicky perched on the edge of the desk. “Is Julie a friend of yours?”

  The girl shook her head, a stiff, deliberate motion. “She was staying with me the last couple days, that’s all. I didn’t want to say anything at school yesterday ’cause she was real scared. She asked me not to tell anybody where she was.”

  “Tell me about her.” Vicky tried to conceal her anger and frustration. If Tisha Runner had told her about Julie yesterday, maybe the girl would be alive.

  “I don’t know much.” A quick shrug. “She’s Lakota from up on the Rosebud. She got here a couple weeks ago and was looking for someplace to stay till she got a job. So she came to the center. I work here part time, over in day care.” She tilted her head toward the hallway. “Julie seemed real nice, kinda lost, you know, ’cause this was her first time off the res. I would’ve let her stay over at my place, but I only got a foldout. So I said I’d ask around, which I did over at school.”

  She stopped a moment, gazing at some point beyond Vicky’s shoulder. “Somebody said Todd Harris had an extra bedroom. He was gone a lot, and he might like somebody watchin’ the place. So I gave her Todd’s number, and it all worked out, you know, except Todd was murdered, and now . . .”

  Vicky gripped the edge of the desk and leaned forward. “Why did Julie leave Todd’s?” she asked.

  “She didn’t want to leave,” the girl said. “He told her she had to get out.”

  “When?”

  “Last Sunday.” Another shrug.

  Sunday, Vicky was thinking. The last time the old woman at the apartment building had seen Todd was Sunday.

  “He told her it was too dangerous for her to stay in the apartment,” the girl went on. “He called me up and asked if Julie could stay at my place a few days. I said okay, a few days.” Tisha pushed back in the chair; the legs squeaked along the tile. “Next thing we know, Todd gets murdered, and Julie freaked out. I mean, she went nuts. Said she had to find some way to get to the reservation.”

  “She wanted to go back to the Rosebud,” Vicky said. A confirmation. It was what she had expected.

  “Rosebud? She was trying to find a ride up to the Wind River Reservation.”

  “What?

  “Todd gave her this.” Tisha held up the brown envelope. “He made her promise if anything happened to him, she’d get it to Father O’Malley. Then she heard how Father O’Malley was gonna say the memorial Mass, so she wouldn’t have to go to Wyoming. She could give him the envelope at St. Elizabeth’s. But she didn’t show up for the Mass. When I went back to my place to look for her, I found the envelope still in the closet where she was hiding it. And now she might be dead, and I don’t know what to do with this.” Another thrust of the envelope into the air. “I don’t know how to get a hold of Father O’Malley. I can’t go all the way up to Wyoming.”

  “He’s staying at Regis,” Vicky said. She reached toward the phone. “I’ll call him.”

  “No, wait.” The girl was on her feet. She handed Vicky the envelope. “Just give it to him, okay? I don’t wanna be involved.” She started for the door.

  “Tisha.” Vicky caught the girl’s arm. “I was there this afternoon when the police found Julie.”

  The girl blinked, pulling away, head shaking, nostrils flaring.

  “You are involved,” Vicky went on. “The police will have to talk to you. There’s a detective—Steve Clark—he’s a friend of mine. You can trust him.”

  Still backing up, the girl groped behind her for the doorknob. “I don’t want anything to do with murder. I didn’t know Julie very long. I didn’t know Todd real well. I don’t know what they were involved with, but I don’t want anything to do with it.” She found the knob and yanked open the door.

  “You could be in danger,” Vicky said as the girl darted out the door. Vicky followed. “You’ve got to go to the police,” she
called, but the girl had already disappeared around a corner.

  Vicky stared down the empty corridor a moment. The drumming had stopped; in its place, the rustle of footsteps, the spike of voices coming from the serving counter. She turned back into the office and slowly opened the envelope. Inside was a diskette. It didn’t surprise her. She had expected Todd to keep a backup diskette. She slipped it back into the envelope and stuffed the package into her handbag. Then found the little sheet of paper on which John O’Malley had scribbled down the number at Regis.

  22

  Father John heard the phone ringing as he came down the corridor. He’d taken a walk along the lake after dinner, trying to sort his thoughts. He’d missed the chance to talk to the provincial this afternoon; the museum was beginning to seem like an impossible dream. The whole trip had been a waste of time—except he’d been here to say Todd’s memorial Mass, and he’d spent time with the old people. He was glad for that. He should go back to St. Francis tomorrow, but he didn’t want to leave yet.

  The air had been cool, tinged with the violets and blues of evening, and he’d stared at the moonlight shimmering on the lake a long time, knowing he could not go back yet. Not with Vicky determined to find a ledger book that was in the possession of a killer. Not until he was sure she would let the police handle the matter. Not until he was sure she was safe.

  As he opened the bedroom door he realized the ringing phone was his. In a couple of steps he was at the desk, the receiver pressed against his ear. “Father O’Malley,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be bothering you, Father.” It was Brother Timothy. “But someone named Vicky’s on the line. Says she has to talk to you, and with the time getting past ten o’clock! I tried telling her to call at a respectable hour.”

  “It’s okay,” Father John told him. “Put her on.” There was a soft click, then the familiar voice. “John, I’ve got Todd’s thesis,” she said.

  * * *

  Father John was waiting when the headlights flickered across the parking lot. He opened the driver’s door and Vicky slid out. Moonlight slanted across her face; he saw the agitation in her eyes. “Julie’s dead,” she said. “They found her body this afternoon. Beaten and thrown into the South Platte, just like Todd.”

  “Dear God,” Father John murmured. Another Indian kid who had come to the city and, somehow, gotten lost. He’d been hoping the Lakota girl was safe at home on the Rosebud.

  “Todd asked her to give this diskette to you.” Vicky handed him the envelope. “He knew he was in danger, so he gave the diskette to the girl who had been staying in his apartment less than two weeks. She wasn’t a friend; she was just somebody who needed a place to stay. He must have hoped no one would think he would trust her with the thesis. He arranged for her to stay with a student, Tisha Runner. Tisha got scared when she heard the police had found a woman’s body in the South Platte. She wanted to get the diskette to you, but she didn’t know where to find you. So she called me.”

  Father John took her arm, and they crossed the campus, in and out of the circles of light, to the Math and Sciences building. Light splashing along the first-floor corridor confirmed what he’d guessed: the computer lab never closed. A humming noise, like the swarm of bees, greeted them as he opened the door with the small sign LAB. The room was the size of two classrooms, bathed in white light, computers marching along the tables. A student about Todd’s age, Father John thought, was tapping at a keyboard on the far table.

  Vicky sat down in front of a monitor and snapped the disk into a slot. Pulling over a chair, Father John sat down beside her. He hadn’t used computers much lately; St. Francis Mission didn’t even own one, but it would be the first thing he would buy if by some miracle the provincial approved his plans for the museum.

  He stared at the scrolling screen as Vicky’s fingers clicked rapidly on the keyboard. In half a second several lines of type appeared: The Colorado Presence of the Arapaho People: An Inventory of Sites of Arapaho Villages and Battlefields. A thesis prepared by Todd Harris for the faculty of the University of Colorado in Denver in compliance with the requirements for a master’s degree in history.

  There was a stillness about Vicky, a focused quiet. He heard the soft intakes of her breath as she leaned toward the screen. Several other clicks and they were staring at the table-of-contents page. The first line read: Sites of Arapaho Villages. A list of familiar places followed: Denver, Boulder, Niwot, Longmont, Fort Collins, Golden, Lamar, LaJunta, South Platte River, North Platte River, Cherry Creek, Arkansas River, Smoky Hill River. At the top of the next page: Sites of Arapaho Battles, followed by another list—Julesburg, Cheyenne Wells, Fort Morgan, Brush, Sand Creek.

  In half an instant Vicky had called up a page with the heading, The Sand Creek Massacre. He leaned close; they read the paragraphs together. A familiar story, one he’d read before in history books and heard from the elders, their voices filled with mourning as they talked about the men, women, and children who had died at Sand Creek. November 29, 1864. The earth, frozen; snow blowing across the plains, the Indian village sprawled along a creek in the vastness of southeastern Colorado—the No Water Land, the Arapaho elders called the area. It was dawn, with the sun lifting out of the east, and the sky blazing red, when the soldiers came.

  They read on: the soldiers riding into the village, the ponies’ hooves beating on the earth, guns retorting in the icy air. And the shouting and screaming, the whinnying of the ponies in the corral, the people running up the creek bed, half-naked, stumbling and falling, bare hands digging out holes in the rock-hard banks, shielding the children with their bodies against the guns that never stopped.

  And then the frozen silence broken by the occasional scream of a horse, the moanings of the wounded as the soldiers went about their work, hacking and slicing at the fallen bodies: a woman’s breast, a scrotum—aha! Such trophies to carry back to Denver!

  Vicky sat back in her chair. Father John placed one arm around her shoulders, and she allowed his arm to rest there a moment before she raised her hand and threaded her fingers into his. The warmth of her flowed through him, staving off the cold chill of death.

  After a moment her breathing became quiet. Removing her hand, she bent toward the keyboard and scrolled to the bibliography page. Manuscript Materials appeared at the top. Halfway down the page: Ledger Book, by No-Ta-Nee, Arapaho. Denver Museum of the West Collections.

  Father John felt the rim of his chair hard against his ribs. The student had left. They were alone in the lab, alone with the proof that No-Ta-Nee’s ledger book had existed last week. “You’ve got what you need,” he said, his voice soft. “We’ll take this to your detective friend tomorrow. He’ll find whoever killed Todd and Julie. We’ve got to trust him to do his job.”

  “Trust him?” A note of hysteria sounded in Vicky’s voice. She shifted in the chair, turning toward him. “Steve is looking for the drug connection. As far as he’s concerned, the Sand Creek ledger book is a fantasy, a story that exists in the mind of an old man and a graduate student who wished it were true. Rachel Foster, Bernard Good Elk, and I don’t know how many other experts will convince him the ledger book doesn’t exist. There are no records, and Steve wants proof. I’ve got to find it.”

  “No, Vicky,” he said. “It’s dangerous. Two people have already been killed. You should go back to Lander. Wait until the police complete the investigation. Sooner or later they’re bound to stumble onto the truth.”

  Vicky shook her head. She pushed the save key; the computer made a soft rumbling noise. Then she pulled out the disk and slid it inside the envelope. Setting the package inside her bag, she pushed back the chair and got to her feet.

  He hadn’t convinced her, he knew. There were no words to convince her. He walked her back across campus, aware of the low rumble of traffic from the highway a mile away. As she got behind the steering wheel he leaned toward her. “Will you call me and let me know what you decide to do?”

  She gave her head a litt
le nod before she pulled the door shut. It was some consolation.

  23

  Father John had slept badly. The dreams were jarring and nonsensical, urgent and demanding, propelling him toward some idea he couldn’t grasp; something he should know, should understand. Why didn’t he understand? The closer he came, the farther away he was from the key that would help him understand. He’d awakened in a sweat, gotten out of bed, and cranked open the window, breathing in the cool air, his thoughts switching between the horror he’d read of in Todd’s thesis and the meeting earlier with Bernard Good Elk. A man capable of murder to keep a ledger book secret? He couldn’t imagine it, but then he couldn’t imagine murder. It always took him by surprise, the ugly and unexpected twist in the logical unfolding of human life.

  But what if Good Elk were responsible for Todd’ murder? Father John forced himself to move on to the logical conclusion looming dark and terrible at the edge of his mind: Vicky was also in danger. She knew about the ledger book; she wouldn’t stop until she proved what had become of it. And who would help her? A homicide detective who had convinced himself Todd was killed over drugs?

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d stayed at the window but the first red light of dawn was flickering in the dark sky when he laid down again, propping his hands behind his head. He would call Vicky first thing, he resolved. Try to convince her to return to Lander. Two murders already—enough! If they were right—if Todd had been killed over the ledger book—the detective would eventually figure it out. He was a good detective—Vicky said so herself.

  It was still early when he’d given up all pretense of sleep. The air floating through the window was cool with the smell of pine that reminded him of the reservation. He’d showered, dressed, and shaved, then eaten a bowl of cold cereal and downed a mug of hot coffee in the dining room. Except for Brother Timothy, he’d been the only one up at that hour. Afterward he walked to the lake again, his thoughts on Vicky. If anything happened to her—he couldn’t make his mind grasp the possibility. He couldn’t imagine a world she was not in.