Ghost Dance

by Mark T Sullivan

  To her credit, Agnes did instill in Gallagher a great love of books. She taught him to read when he was four—in part, he believed, as a way to keep him occupied while she worked. Be that as it may, books became Gallagher’s refuge from the warm and nurturing environment he was raised in.

  By the time Gallagher turned fourteen, the bottle had completely consumed his father. There was no single, dramatic incident that precipitated Seamus’ decline, just a steady accumulation of setbacks—jail twice during antiwar protests, a string of lost cases, government harassment—that triggered benders that caused more setbacks and so on in a great downward spiral.

  One afternoon when Gallagher was fifteen, he happened to board the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn after a class trip to the Museum of Natural History. It had been one of the best days of his life. The class had heard a talk from one of the curators about masks from the Dogon tribe of Mali in western Africa. The lecturer had spoken about the Dogon belief that both humans and animals have a soul substance called Nyama which returns after death in a mask such as the four-foot carved bird face he held up for all to see. The masks could be used to drive away the souls of the deceased who might harm the living.

  Gallagher had left the talk enthralled by the idea that people in primitive cultures all over the world had explanations of why we exist and what happens after we die. It was that day Gallagher decided to study anthropology.

  But when he got into the subway car with his classmates and his teacher, Gallagher was shocked to see his father slumped in a stupor in one of the seats. Seamus sang gibberish to the window, then raised a finger to his own reflection and spouted off a line from his closing argument in the school-prayer case. Several of Gallagher’s classmates, who did not recognize Seamus, began to snicker and make jokes about the crazy drunk. Seamus’ head turned and his eyes focused on them before refocusing on his son. Gallagher turned away from his father, acted as if he did not know who he was and laughed out loud with the other boys.

  A week later Gallagher came home from high school to find the front door unlocked. The shades were drawn and the lights were off. The thermometer had been turned down. Seamus liked a cold house.

  Agnes had told Gallagher the night before that she’d be spending her deadline day at the magazine offices. He went through the house raising the shades and turning on the lights one by one until he reached the kitchen. It looked like it had when he left early for school—strewn with post-party scud: cigarette-filled ashtrays, half-empty glasses, empty bottles.

  Gallagher cleaned the glasses, emptied the ashtrays and tossed the beer and vodka bottles into the trash. It took him about forty minutes to complete that fond ritual. Then he poured out the remaining vodka so his parents would have to suffer a trip to the corner store. It was his daily act of rebellion.

  Finished, Gallagher climbed the stairs to begin studying. As he passed his parents’ bedroom he glanced to the left.

  Seamus hung by the neck from a rope he’d slung from a heating pipe. He left no note.

  There was a public memorial where all the people with whom Seamus had worked on various causes before his downfall showed up and praised him. And raised toasts to him in the pub afterward. The actual burial took place with just Gallagher and his mother and the casket on a raw April day in a cemetery in Queens.

  Two men with shovels waited about a hundred yards away. Gallagher asked his mother if they should say something. She looked down at the pine box.

  ‘I hate you, Shea,’ she said.

  Gallagher understood, and hated his father, too, because suicide, to believers in a life beyond, is based on the idea that they are departing this world for something better. Gallagher’s old man did not believe. He jumped ship on his wife and son for the void. But Gallagher’s hate was tempered and warped by the memory of Seamus’ lost expression when he’d laughed at his father in the subway car.

  Truck headlights on high beam lashed through the cabin window, startling Gallagher from his memories. He had not allowed himself to think of his famer in years and believed he had gotten over Seamus’ demise. But for some reason at that moment, Gallagher had the desperate need to talk to Seamus, to explain himself.

  Andie Nightingale’s rattletrap Toyota pickup pulled in and Gallagher’s mood improved considerably. There was something about her that reminded him of a beautiful bird hopping along bravely trying to hide a broken wing from the world.

  He opened the door. Her hair sparkled with raindrops. Her cheeks glowed from windburn. She looked nervous, but altogether lovely in a mountain woman sort of way.

  He threw her a welcoming smile. ‘You look like you had as rough a day as mine. Can I offer you some trout? It’s store-bought, but it’s all I’ve got.’

  She gave no immediate response, but brushed by him without even a smile in return. ‘You’re some kind of expert in religion and mythology, right?’

  The question deflated Gallagher. ‘And here I was hoping your visit might be social.’

  ‘Are you or aren’t you?’ she replied sternly.

  ‘I know enough.’

  ‘Where were you between three and four o’clock this morning?’

  ‘Tossing and turning in that lumpy bed upstairs,’ he said, not liking where this was going. ‘What’s this all about, Ms. Nightingale? Or should I be calling you sergeant?’

  ‘Any witnesses to say you were upstairs?’

  ‘I guess I should call you sergeant,’ he said. ‘Witnesses? Yes, a trio of mice.’

  ‘I’m being serious, Mr Gallagher.’

  ‘So am I. One of the little bastards gnawed a mallard wing I brought up to tie dry flies with. Now, do I need a lawyer?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you think I killed the dentist and then called you in to find him.’

  ‘It’s crossed my mind,’ she said.

  Gallagher rubbed his fingertips over his temples. ‘This couldn’t get better, could it? Look, Sergeant Nightingale, you’ve now become part of the worst day of my life—I turned the big four-oh. My ex-wife, my ex-wife! … ahh, forget that one … and I found a dead man in the river. But the only thing I’ve killed lately is a cockroach that skittered out from under the sink. Any more questions, I am calling an attorney.’

  Nightingale studied him for a long time; then her expression softened by several degrees, as if she’d decided to change course in the questioning. ‘Have you ever come across a myth about a river being blood-red?’

  Gallagher screwed up his face, trying to figure where she was leading with the question, then said, ‘Doesn’t ring any bells offhand. That’s all you have—a river that’s blood-red? Is the myth Greek, Roman, Sumerian, what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can’t help you if you don’t have more than that.’

  Nightingale hesitated, then reached inside her raincoat. She came out with a gallon-sized zip-lock evidence bag. She put on latex gloves, then slid out a drawing faceup on the kitchen table under the gaslight.

  Gallagher gave the creature, the boat and the river a closer look, then felt himself go weak-kneed. ‘The red, is it …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From the man I found?’

  ‘I’m assuming so,’ she said. ‘We’ll run tests.’

  ‘The killer left it?’

  ‘I’m assuming that, too.’

  In the past, getting close to death had nearly always sent Gallagher into a state of paralysis; despite years of studying and filming other religions and culture, he had not found any clear evidence to refute his father’s disbelief in God and an afterlife. The finality of death frightened him to his core.

  But he sank into the wooden chair to gaze at this artifact of a vicious crime with something approaching awe. The man-creature rowing the boat—with his beak and animal ears, the snakes for hair and the sewn-up mouth—was somehow familiar, but distorted enough that he could not place its significance. ‘Why are you so sure this is suggested by myth?’

  �
�Because the killer says so,’ Nightingale replied, flipping the drawing over. ‘Don’t touch.’

  Gallagher nodded uncertainly, understanding that she was still studying him. He turned up the gas on the light hanging from the ceiling. The glass in the etching of the Indian on the wall reflected the light so brilliantly that Gallagher had to turn the lamp back down again to see the writing clearly. His mouth ran dry at the words scrawled in the same black ink used to draw the creature rowing the boat:

  In the myth, the river’s waters are deep and blood-red. I have been the deaf, dumb and blind oarsman to the other side. I have felt your hatred, Lawton, since the day I was born. I have smelled and tasted your treachery. You stole what was ours. You damned me to take the gold coin. You damned me to feel the wooden bow slough against the muddy bank with the black poplars and never know the fields beyond. Lawton, I will be your navigator to hell. But only the oarsman shall return from the other side.

  Outside, the wind became a growl. The door blew open and wet leaves billowed inside. Nightingale got her shoulder into the door and shut it while Gallagher read the note over and over. In the year since Emily left, Gallagher had felt clouded, lazy, uninterested. Now his brain felt heated as it considered the words and the pictures. The beak, the boat, the oarsman, the gold coin. He jumped on a connection.

  ‘Charun,’ Gallagher said in a shocked voice.

  Nightingale sat down in the chair opposite him. ‘Who?’

  He spelled the name. ‘C-H-A-R-U-N. He surfaces in the underworld myths of several ancient societies. The Estruscans believed he was the male demon who escorted the dead to the afterworld.

  ‘Charun had these features,’ Gallagher said, pointing to the beak, the pointed ears, the blind eyes and the sewn-up mouth. ‘But he did not row a boat. He carried a hammer or an ax, if I remember. The maritime element does not surface until the Greeks, when he becomes Charon—C-H-A-R-O-N.’

  ‘And who’s he?’ Nightingale asked in obvious puzzlement.

  ‘The ferryman who rows the dead across the River Acheron, the river of sadness,’ Gallagher said, looking at the note again. ‘He has to be paid with a gold coin placed on the mouths of the dead. The far shore of the Acheron was supposedly thick with black poplars that the dead had to negotiate alone before they could reach the afterworld.’

  Nightingale shook her head, trying to absorb it all. He could almost see her thoughts churning: a killer was prowling central Vermont, a madman who saw himself as the embodiment of an ancient death myth. If Gallagher hadn’t seen the body of Hank Potter, he could have laughed it off as some over-the-top effort in a Hollywood melodrama. But Gallagher had seen the body.

  She grabbed the note and reread it. ‘Was something stolen from Charun in the myth?’ she asked.

  ‘Doesn’t sound right. Charun’s a minor figure in tales about greater gods,’ he replied. ‘I’d think you’d be more interested in who he was writing the letter to.’

  Gallagher stood up and came around to her side of the table so they both could see the note. Her clothes smelled as if she’d just brushed up against pine boughs.

  Nightingale twisted in her seat and leaned away from him. ‘What do you mean?’

  Gallagher pointed at the middle of the note. ‘He, the killer, is addressing a “you” in the letter. He says, “Lawton … You stole what was ours. You damned me …” He describes “your treachery” and “your hatred.” He says, “Lawton, I will be your navigator to hell”.’

  ‘So this is revenge on the town for some wrong he believes was done to him.’

  ‘That and worse,’ Gallagher replied. ‘The note’s written in the tone of an oracle, which in mythological terms is both a warning and a promise.’

  Nightingale stared down at the end of the note. Her shoulders shook with the enormity of it all. ‘You’re saying he’s going to kill again, aren’t you?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TWO HOURS LATER ANDIE Nightingale paced in her kitchen between the table and the alcove that served as her winter greenhouse. On each trip she passed a red enamel woodstove mounted on a brick hearth, two overstuffed leather chairs, a shelf chockablock with cookbooks and gardening guides, as well as a country pine sideboard that she was in the process of refinishing.

  On each trip she paused before the phone atop the sideboard and with her finger tapped the coffee cup cradled in her palms. Suddenly, on its own, the phone clanged. She startled and spilled coffee from the mug as she put it down. She reached for the phone with a shaking hand.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Andie, honey, is that you?’ an elderly female responded. Her voice was as smooth and rich as hot chocolate.

  ‘Yes, Olga,’ Nightingale said, smiling with relief. ‘It’s me.’

  Olga Dawson was Nightingale’s late mother’s best friend, seventy-eight and slowed by three minor strokes in the past eighteen months. Olga lived where she had lived almost her entire life, on a farm at a dead-end spur off the River Road, six and a half miles beyond Nightingale’s home.

  ‘Someone’s been around the house again,’ the old woman complained.

  Nightingale held the phone in the crook of her neck, walked to the alcove where she kept her plants. She inspected the soil around her tomato seedlings, then began transplanting a fuchsia she’d managed to coax through the winter. ‘You think someone’s there now?’

  ‘A few hours ago, right at last light.’

  ‘Could I come tomorrow and see?’

  ‘Oh, that would be so nice, dear,’ Olga replied. ‘You’ll call ahead so I can have something ready for you?’

  ‘I will,’ Nightingale promised.

  ‘Maybe it was a bear in the yard, come looking for the new green grass,’ Olga said. She paused. ‘Do you remember the time when we went to the bear cave?’

  ‘Now, how could I forget that?’ Nightingale replied, laughing. ‘I was seven and you told me the cave up there on Lawton Mountain was the biggest bear cave in the world.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I forget lots of things.’ Olga sighed. ‘But some memories still burn bright.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Nightingale reassured her. ‘Now, no smoking in bed. See you tomorrow around ten?’

  ‘That would be wonderful. Good night, dear.’

  Still smiling thoughtfully, Nightingale rested the phone in its cradle. Olga had been crying wolf about seeing a stranger in her yard once a week now for the past five years; it was her way of telling Nightingale she was lonely. Thoughts of tea and Olga’s homemade apple pie comforted Nightingale as she built a fire in the woodstove to ward off the chill that had accompanied the building storm. But when the fire crackled, she stood and looked at the phone again, sighed, picked it up and punched in a number.

  ‘Brigid,’ Nightingale began almost before Lieutenant Bowman had said hello, ‘I need to stay on this case.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you be?’ Bowman replied perfunctorily.

  The lieutenant came from a longtime Vermont Yankee family from Plymouth and operated in a brusque style that bordered on rudeness. Bowman was not only a smart cop, but an agile and ambitious bureaucrat. At thirty-four, she had been named the first female detective in the history of the Vermont State Police. At forty-six, she had become the first woman lieutenant in the prestigious Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Rumor had it she was in line to become a captain.

  Nightingale briefed her on the drawing, the note and Gallagher’s explanation of the myth of Charun. After Bowman had her repeat it all twice, there was a protracted silence on the other end of the line. ‘Why didn’t you call me immediately after you found the note and drawing?’

  Nightingale twirled the gold stud in her left earlobe and said, ‘Because I wanted to show you I could use the evidence to move the investigation forward, which I did.’

  ‘By not calling in an evidence team and discussing the letter with a likely suspect?’ Bowman cried. ‘Didn’t you hear this Gallagher say he was an anthropologist, an expert in myths?’

  ‘Of course
,’ Nightingale retorted. ‘But I questioned him at length, and my instincts say he’s not the one. I agree he’s a confused New Yorker, but if that was the sole motivation for this killing, we’d have fifty thousand suspects in Vermont every weekend.’

  ‘He’s our prime suspect,’ Bowman insisted.

  ‘I haven’t ruled him out,’ Nightingale allowed. ‘And I sealed off the Potter house and had his wife and children move to her sister’s until after the evidence team is done. They’ll be there first thing in the morning.’

  Silence; then Bowman asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Brigid, it’s been two years.’ Nightingale twisted the telephone extension cord into knots.

  ‘I know, but not calling in something like that note—’

  ‘I need you to believe I can handle this … like you used to.’

  There was a third long silence between them; then Bowman said, ‘We’ll take it day by day.’

  ‘Thank you, Brigid.’

  ‘I want your report on my desk first thing tomorrow,’ Bowman said. ‘I want that drawing and that hunting locker gone over for prints and then photographed, and a copy of the whole file sent to the FBI. Clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The press is swamping us with calls,’ Bowman informed her. ‘I hope your Mr Gallagher doesn’t go blabbing about the note. That’s how hysteria starts.’

  ‘I asked him not to talk with anyone about the note or the body,’ Nightingale said. ‘I’d like your permission to keep talking to him. He seems to have insight into the killer’s mind.’

  ‘Maybe because he’s the killer,’ Bowman said. ‘I want to be there the next time you talk to Mr Gallagher.’

  ‘Fine,’ Nightingale promised. ‘And, Brigid?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you for this chance. I’ll see you at the autopsy first thing Monday morning.’

  Nightingale hung up the phone. She threw her fists up in the air, shook them and did a little victory dance. Almost instantly her elation ebbed. Her palms sweated. Her tongue thickened. Her attention came to rest on the fuchsia, which she went back to quickly. She finished repotting the plant, then sat at her computer and tried to write the report, but an edgy energy got the better of her.