When I think of my mother, Painted Horses, I think all of us shall come to be like the blizzard wind—icy, sharp-toothed and chasing after the fury of our lives.
I cut off a hunk of my hair and bathed it in the smoke of sweet grass I picked down by the Bluekill in August. I showed it to Heaven, to Earth and to the four corners of the universe. I wrapped it in buckskin like I was taught. This hair can free my soul.
But who shall guard my soul and my hair until I can be set free? Who shall kill the young cow buffalo for her robe? What woman shall care for my bundle?
What woman shall hang my soul on a tripod looking south and cover it with a buffalo hide and the feathers of a spotted eagle?
I am not scared to die. I am done now and ready for them. But I won’t go easy, like some scared deer caught in a pit trap. I shall run through the night in the snow to my secret place and dance there one last time. After the dance, let them come if they dare.
Grandfather, I am sending a voice. To the heavens of the universe, I am sending a voice.
A moist pressure built in Gallagher’s lungs as he read those final words. It was a piece of an old journal or a diary, though he had never read anything like it in all his years of research and travel—shattered, almost hallucinatory thoughts scribbled down under the threat of death more than a hundred years ago. Who was the writer? What had happened to her? Gallagher’s heart raced with the chance that this was a major anthropological find! He had to call Jerry.
The pouch shifted in his lap. A lock of jet-black hair about five inches long, sealed between two pieces of wax paper, spilled out onto his thigh. Several strands of the hair jutted free of the paper. Gallagher ran the tips of his fingers lightly over them, then jerked back at a mild stinging similar to the sensation he’d endured when fire ants crossed his hand in Africa years before.
‘That’s not possible,’ he whispered.
There was a chunking sound as the pistol action drove a cartridge into the chamber. Gallagher looked up from the hair. The muzzle of Andie Nightingale’s service pistol pointed dead at his chest.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ANDIE ELBOWED HERSELF FORWARD on the kitchen table with both hands wrapped tight around the butt of the gun only six feet away now and cobra-dancing in the air. One bloodshot eye peered above the tritium sights. ‘Put it back or I’ll kill you,’ she slurred.
‘What—?’
‘Do it!’
Jittery, Gallagher took up the wax paper so as not to brush the hairs again and placed it in the pouch. Then he folded the parchment pages and put them away.
‘Slide it across the table,’ she ordered. ‘Slow.’
All he could see was the black hole of the pistol barrel when he pushed the pouch toward her. She grabbed it, clutched it to her chest, then came around, the table with the gun still trained on him. ‘Who are you?’ Andie demanded in a thick-tongued voice. ‘What are you after?’
‘I’m not after anything,’ Gallagher stammered. ‘I saw you find that gold chain in the meadow behind Olga Dawson’s barn and wondered why you didn’t tell anyone about it. Then here you are—passed out with that journal and the hair and two gold chains and two crosses.’
She regarded him as a squirrel might a hawk, but did not respond.
Gallagher said, ‘The writer, she’s an Indian, isn’t she?’
In one motion, Andie flung the pouch on the table and dropped into a combat-shooting position. ‘How do you know about her?’ she rasped. ‘Tell me, or so help me God, I’ll shoot.’
‘Who do you think I am?’ Gallagher cried.
‘The sick bastard that mutilated my mom’s best friend and, before that, Hank Potter. Now you’re here for me and my pouch.’ She angled toward Gallagher’s chair in a predatory crouch, then ordered, ‘On the floor. Spread-eagle, belly down.’
Gallagher eased himself out of the chair onto all fours. Andie took a semi-drunken step toward him as if to push him down. Before she could, he swept his right leg through her ankles, then drove his left hand up to control her right elbow and get the gun out of his face. The middle knuckle of Gallagher’s right hand smacked her just below the rib cage at the kidneys. She made an oomph sound as she crashed backward through a stand of potted seedlings. Her gun spun crazily across the wide-planked floor. He dove on top of her and pinned her by the wrists.
‘Get off me!’ Andie shouted, squirming underneath him. ‘I won’t let you! I won’t let any of you—’
‘If I was Charun, you’d be dead by now!’ Gallagher roared. ‘Think about it!’
They stared at each other, gasping. Then Andie looked left and right at Gallagher’s hands against her wrists. She looked at his thighs pinned against hers and in a voice that wavered with effort, asked, ‘Please get off me, then. Please? Now?’
Gallagher stood up and backed away quickly. ‘Your gun’s under the desk.’
Andie blinked as if returning from a terrible memory, then got up onto her elbows. ‘Where … did you learn to fight like that?’
‘Tokyo,’ he said. ‘My ex-wife and I spent eighteen months there, studying and filming in an aikido dojo. The film shows up on cable now and then.’
Andie’s attention never left Gallagher as she sidled to the desk and retrieved her gun. ‘I want to know how you knew the hair and the writing are an Indian’s.’
‘Because she says she’s Lakota. But so what? There are New Age white guys from Westchester County who live out in Sedona, Arizona, and say they’re Lakota. What’s important is that phrase that’s repeated in the journal, “Grandfather, I am sending a voice.” I’ve heard it before.’
‘Where?’ Andie asked skeptically.
‘My first three years at graduate school, I had a job researching for a professor making a film about Sitting Bull—that’s how I got interested in documentaries in the first place. That line about the “Grandfather,” was in songs the Sioux sang around that time. Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, is also called Grandfather. She is Sioux, isn’t she?’
Andie nodded. Her hair was sweated and hung in her face. She pushed it back.
‘Now I want some answers,’ he said. ‘If that journal and those crosses are related to the killings, why didn’t you tell Lieutenant Bowman? Why are you withholding evidence?’
Andie glared at Gallagher, hating him, then brought up the gun and aimed it at his face. For a second there was craziness in her eyes and he thought he was going to soil his pants. Talk her down, he thought. Talk her down like you used to talk Seamus down from one of his tirades.
‘Forget about that for a second, Andie,’ he said in a soft, even tone. ‘I’m sure you had your reasons. But what you’re really upset about is that you picked up the bottle again. Am I right?’
Her grip tightened. Her finger closed around the trigger.
Gallagher swallowed, but went on. ‘You’re feeling guilty and angry and you’re afraid you’re heading back into the bottle full-time, aren’t you?’
There was a long moment; then her finger softened. ‘Yes,’ Andie whispered in resignation.
‘It’s just a slip, just one day. You don’t have to go down there again if you don’t want to.’
She let one hand come off the gun. ‘I’ve been trying so hard.’
‘The best way not to go back in the hole is by talking, right?’
She nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant about the chain?’
Slowly the pistol faded to her side. She slumped into a kitchen chair, that bird with the broken wing, and said: ‘Because I promised my mother I’d keep it secret. And when I saw the crucifix lying there in the mud, I thought: Olga had a piece of the journal, too. And then you found the letter from Charun … and …’
Andie let her attention sweep to the vodka bottle, then held her head in her hands and sobbed. Gallagher stood, scooped the bottle off the table and walked toward the sink, where he emptied it with a sadly familiar motion.
‘Start at the beginning,’ he said, filling th
e water kettle and setting it on the stove.
She snuffled, then nodded and gazed up at the ceiling as if seeing a movie in the swirls of ivory plaster. Nearly three years ago, Andie’s mother fell off a ladder and broke her femur. Grace Nightingale lay nine hours on the kitchen floor until her daughter came home from work and found her. The death certificate reads that Grace died of pneumonia brought on by an infection she developed after the operation to fuse her leg bone. Grace was in glaring pain the last night of her life. Restless. Moaning. In and out of consciousness.
At 2 a.m., she bolted upright and grabbed Andie’s arm with terrifying strength. Grace told her daughter to go home right then and find a loose fieldstone in the chimney in their basement and bring back what she found behind it. Andie tried to hush her mother, but that only made the old woman more frantic.
‘ “Go right now, Andie,” ’she had pleaded, Andie said.
‘ “I never wanted you to have it, but there’s no one else. You got to go now!” ’
Alone, in the middle of night, Andie found the pouch in the chimney. She held the lock of hair. She read what Gallagher had read.
‘I’d always thought of my mom as this simple, honest person who’d suffered more than her share of tragedies,’ Andie said. ‘When I found the bundle in the chimney, it was like she’d led this secret life and I didn’t know her any more.’
Gallagher scooped coffee into a French-press maker. The kettle whistled and he poured the steaming water into the glass vessel. He filled two mugs and handed her one. Her hands shook from the booze and sparked images of his parents nursing their hangovers before breakfast. Gallagher swallowed, then asked: ‘When you took the pouch back to the hospital and showed her, what did your mother say?’
Andie’s lower lip trembled. Relief at speaking at last. ‘She said her father gave it to her and my great-grandfather had given it to her father. It’s part of a diary kept by a Sioux woman who supposedly lived here in Lawton a long time ago.’
Anticipating his next question, Andie said she did not know how a Sioux had come to be in Lawton. Her mother said it was all about something awful that happened in Lawton more than a century ago, something ‘unholy.’
Gallagher leaned forward. ‘What do you mean, unholy?’
Andie took an unsteady sip of the black coffee. ‘My mom was a strict Catholic. She saw everything in terms of her religion. She called what was in this pouch “evidence of an abomination.” ’
‘That’s all she said?’
‘No, that’s not all she said,’ Andie responded testily. ‘But with the drugs in her, most of it didn’t make sense, except that a long time ago, some people in Lawton wanted the Sioux woman’s story to be preserved, but they didn’t trust just one person to preserve it. So they divided the journal.’
‘Who has the other pieces?’
‘My mother said there were six others, maybe more, but she didn’t know who. Neither did her father or her grandfather. It was almost like it was planned that way.’
‘By who?’
She shrugged. ‘I wish I knew. Maybe then I could save the others.’
‘You think Charun is killing the people who hold the journal?’
‘Yes, but I can’t prove it. I called Paula Potter and asked her if she’d ever seen anything like the pouch. She didn’t know what I was talking about.’
Gallagher squinted at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant about all this back there in the barn? Why don’t you call her up and tell her now?’
‘You don’t know anything about me, do you?’ she stated wistfully.
He did not reply. Andie pressed her fist to her lips. The cat came strolling across the kitchen floor and leaped into Gallagher’s lap. It purred and rubbed its head under his chin. Andie noticed and her eyes widened, then softened.
‘Tess doesn’t like anyone,’ she said, puzzled.
‘Nobody, huh?’ he asked, scratching the cat behind the ears.
‘Well, she likes me, too,’ Andie said.
‘You know, I can’t say that’s a surprise.’
Andie reddened and lowered her head at his teasing, but she allowed herself a smile.
She admitted that there was a history of alcohol abuse in her family. Her father farmed and logged in the winters. When Andie was seven, he was alone in the woods when a tree fell and pinned him by the leg. He dug his way out from under the tree and crawled out of the woods. He lost his leg below the knee but was back at work in six months.
But when her older brother, Billy, died in Vietnam, her father’s legendary toughness cracked. He drank himself to death in seven years.
‘My mother was able to do it in five,’ Gallagher said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For you, too.’
They were silent for a long time.
Andie went on to say that she had had a drinking problem as a teenager, but had been sober for nearly ten years when her mother died. Two months after Grace’s burial, Andie decided a screwdriver at lunch was a good way to dull the pain of loss. Soon there were screwdrivers at breakfast.
A year after the drinking began, she was called in on a double murder in Newport, along the Quebec border. She caught the Canadian dope dealer who had pulled the trigger, but mishandled the evidence. The defense attorney forced her to admit she’d been drinking at the crime scene. The doper walked. Andie was put on suspension, went through a rehab program and hadn’t had a drink in nearly two years, until last night. She hadn’t worked a real homicide case in that long either. Bowman kept her away from murder, assigned to cases where little old ladies fell down the stairs and died with no witnesses.
‘That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell her about the pouches—’
‘Because I lost it, okay!’ she shouted. ‘Have you ever just lost it? I found that cross on the ground and realized Olga must have had a piece of the journal. Then you found that second drawing and it was like all these voices started chattering in my head, telling me to do this, don’t do that, say this, don’t say that. It got so I couldn’t hear what I was saying. Then Brigid told me to go home. Did you know that the worst thing you can tell an alcoholic on the verge of a pickup is to go be alone?’
‘Call her right now,’ Gallagher said. ‘Get it off your chest.’
She shook her head violently. ‘I didn’t tell her right off about the drawing left at Hank Potter’s because I was trying to show her I could be a good homicide detective. That almost got me thrown off the case. If I come forward and tell her I did it a second time and was drinking, too … well, I can kiss this job goodbye. This job is my life.’
Her predicament hung between them, like a shroud.
‘There’s only one thing you can do,’ Gallagher said, mustering bravado. ‘Figure out who Charun is, then haul him in just like they do in the movies.’
‘Easier said than done,’ she said, but she smiled again and almost laughed. She got out a Kleenex and blew her nose.
‘I’ll help you,’ Gallagher blurted out, surprised at the offer.
Instantly there was a wariness about her. ‘Why would you do that?’
Gallagher felt himself immediately wanting to back away from the offer. What was he thinking? Part of him wanted to get up and leave. He’d had enough of the convoluted lies drunks conjure up to last a lifetime. But there was the mysterious allure of the drawings and now this journal of the Sioux woman. And one thing more.
‘Because I get the sense you and I are very much alike,’ he said. ‘And you need help.’
‘Have you been a drunk?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he replied levelly. ‘But I was raised by drunks. Both died of it. And I understand the urge to block out pain. My ex-wife liked to say I used the accumulation of information the way my parents used booze—as an insulator from the raw nerve endings of life.’
She stared at him for the longest time and then actually laughed. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you talk really strange?’
‘You’re n
ot the first.’
They grinned like idiots at each other for ten seconds; then Gallagher broke the spell by asking, ‘You must have some theory as to why Charun is killing for the journal of a Sioux squaw.’
Andie nodded. ‘He said in both of those letters that he was after something that was stolen from him. He must believe the pieces of the journal belong to him.’
‘Then he could be Native American,’ he said, ‘a descendant of the Sioux woman.’
‘Possibly,’ Andie agreed.
‘Is there a record of her death here in Lawton?’ Gallagher asked.
‘After my mother’s funeral I looked at old newspaper clippings and county death certificates, but I never found any record of a Sioux,’ she replied. ‘Then again I didn’t even have a name to go on.’
‘Did Olga ever tell you she had the journal?’
Andie shook her head. ‘Never. But I think she was trying to tell me the last time I saw her. She was talking about bears and secrets and I was too damn preoccupied to listen.’
‘So did Olga drop the cross in the meadow or did the killer?’
Andie chewed at the inside of her cheek. ‘There’d been so much rain, all the tracks were washed away. And the mud on the surface of the cross marred any chance at fingerprints.’
‘Let’s say it was her, so where’d she go that night? Toward the woods?’
‘She was weak. I can’t see her doing that,’ Andie said. ‘Unless … unless she was really scared.’
Gallagher tried to imagine it: the stricken old woman leaning on her cane, going through the tunnel to the barn to get her boots and her rain slicker; then, with the cat, struggling through the high grass of the meadow where the tangles—
He snapped his fingers, ‘Okay, she was scared. Let’s say she gets to the field and she trips and falls. And when she does, she drops that cross. If she kept her pouch the way you did, then …’
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