Ghost Dance

by Mark T Sullivan

  ‘Isn’t that what I lost?’ she seethed.

  Kerris threw the Suburban in gear, but held his foot on the brake pedal. ‘That is over, Andie,’ he said. ‘Forgotten around here by everyone but you!’

  With that he released the pedal and burned rubber speeding away.

  Gallagher shook his head, bewildered. ‘You want to tell me what that was all about?’

  ‘No,’ Andie said icily.

  She marched across the street and up the stairs to the rectory. By the time Gallagher got up on the porch, the door was opening and Libby Curtin had poked her head out. Her wooden cross dangled over a simple white fleece pullover. Libby saw Gallagher first. Her granny glasses slipped off her nose and she caught them. ‘Mr Gallagher, the monsignor said to say if you came again that we can’t help you.’

  ‘It’s not about Father D’Angelo,’ Andie said. ‘We’d like to review some parish records from the 1890s.’

  Curtin’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Eighteen-nineties?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ she said.

  With that the parish secretary scurried down the hallway, her cork-bed sandals scuffing on the blue Oriental rug. Andie and Gallagher followed her straight into McColl’s office, where the giant priest was already rising behind his desk

  ‘Andie Nightingale!’ he boomed. ‘Haven’t seen you on Sundays in quite a while.’

  Andie shifted awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry, Monsignor, I’ve been busy.’

  He rubbed his massive hands together. Then he saw Gallagher and his exuberance cooled. ‘The bishop already gave you his response. You don’t think bringing the police in on your side’s going to change things, do you?’

  Gallagher repositioned the crutches under his arms. ‘No, Monsignor. I get the feeling you’re not easily swayed by secular authorities of any kind.’

  McColl’s jaw set hard at that crack but he gestured to them to sit, asking, ‘Is your request to see the records from the 1890s official or unofficial, Andie? And what might your role be in this, Mr Gallagher?’

  ‘Something wrong, Monsignor?’ Andie replied.

  ‘Answer my question, I’ll answer yours.’

  ‘Right now it’s unofficial,’ Andie said. ‘Pat has taken an interest in my project. We’re sort of working together.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘I’d rather not say. Why the concern?’

  The priest drummed his fingers on the desktop. ‘Because many of the original records from that decade, and indeed from the forty years prior, were stolen.’

  A few minutes later a very worried Libby Curtin played with the wooden crucifix around her neck and in a stammering cadence said that back in mid-March she’d received a phone call from a man who told her he was doing genealogical research. He thought his maternal great-great-grandmother was from out Lawton way and he wanted to know about the condition of the parish’s baptismal and death records for the years 1865 to 1895.

  Libby said the records were in excellent condition and offered to look through them herself, but the man said he liked examining the documents firsthand and would be out sometime soon to have a look. In the meantime, Libby went on her honeymoon.

  At that point, McColl chimed in to say that during her absence he had traveled to a conference in Boston. When he returned, someone had jimmied the lock to the back porch and taken five hundred dollars, a silver Eucharist plate and the records.

  ‘And damaged the painting of Father D’Angelo?’ Gallagher asked.

  ‘Yes, that too,’ Monsignor McColl replied. His face flushed. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped at his sweating brow. Then he reached for a bottle of antacid pills and swallowed two. ‘I’m sorry. This stomach thing won’t quit. And I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.’

  In the outer office, a phone rang. Libby Curtin quietly opened the door and slipped out.

  ‘Monsignor,’ Andie said, ‘in your research into Father D’Angelo, did you ever come across mention of an Indian woman, a Sioux?’

  ‘No,’ he said immediately. His face flushed again, redder this time.

  ‘Her name, we believe, was Sarah,’ Gallagher said, watching McColl closely. ‘Sarah Many Horses.’

  ‘No, no,’ the priest said, shaking his head vigorously. He made as if to get up and then thought better of it. ‘I would remember that name. A Sioux, you say? How in God’s name did a Sioux get to Vermont?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to figure out,’ Andie said.

  The monsignor hesitated. ‘So that’s why you wanted to review the baptismal certificates?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The priest forced a chuckle. ‘Well, I can tell you there are no Sioux in our records here.’

  ‘We weren’t expecting to find her in the records,’ Andie replied. ‘Just people who might have known her.’

  He crossed his beefy arms. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Let’s say I suspect this Sarah, the Sioux woman, was murdered in Lawton a hundred years ago.’

  ‘A hundred years ago?!’ Monsignor McColl cried ‘No offense, Andie, but is this the best spending of the taxpayers’ money?’

  ‘It is if it’s connected to the two murders here, as I believe it is.’

  ‘The two murders?’

  ‘Hank Potter,’ Gallagher said. ‘And Olga Dawson.’

  ‘Olga Dawson?’ he repeated slowly, rolling the words meekly in his mouth. He was staring out at the birdbath in the garden. ‘No one told me she’d been murdered. I’m to say her memorial service tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe you can help us,’ Andie said.

  He patted his forehead with the handkerchief again and turned away from the window. ‘Yes, yes, of course, anything, Andie.’

  Libby Curtin quietly reentered the room and shut the door behind her.

  Gallagher said, ‘We want to put together a list of parishioners who would have been active at St Edward’s in 1894.’

  The priest sat silent for a moment, his jaw moving as if he were chewing or talking to himself. Then he leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m afraid those certificates were your best bet.’

  ‘Dead end?’ Andie asked.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Monsignor?’ the secretary said.

  ‘Yes, yes, what is it, Libby?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Monsignor, but if it’s old lists of parishioners they’re after, I know where to find them.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  SUNDAY, MAY 17

  A FINE MIST FELL when Gallagher and Andie drove past the village of Cartersburg in south-central Vermont three days later.

  ‘McColl’s hiding something,’ Gallagher said.

  ‘That’s at least the twenty-fifth time you’ve said that since we left his office,’ Andie replied sourly. ‘I say he looked like a man who can’t kick a stomach flu.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what I saw.’

  ‘I heard you the first time. We decided to focus on finding the journal holders, remember?’

  There had been a significant cooling between them in the past few days. After leaving the rectory, Gallagher had made the mistake of bringing up Chief Kerris again. Ever since then, their interaction had been strained. A voice inside Gallagher told him to withdraw his help and focus on Father D’Angelo. But then the memory of his dream of Many Horses would reappear, and instantly the thought of quitting would be discarded.

  ‘That must be Nyren’s driveway up there on the right,’ Gallagher said, looking at the manila folder and the map on his lap.

  According to the records the driveway belonged to David Nyren, the head librarian in Cartersburg. Nyren was the sole living descendant of Martha and Paul Nyren, who in turn were descended by matrilineal lines from Arthur Webb, a St. Edward’s parishioner and former first constable of the town of Lawton in the 1890s.

  Libby Curtin had described a file at the Lawton Historical Society that included rosters of the Knights of Columbus and the St. Edward’s parish going back one hundred and twent
y-five years. Those lists yielded thirty-two names. It had taken them two days to track forward eighteen of the thirty-two, using state and local birth and death records as well as the Internet and CD-ROM telephone directories to identify a possible hundred and seventy-six descendants, sixty-seven of whom were living in Vermont. Before spending another two days tracking forward the remaining fourteen names, Andie and Gallagher had decided to take a look at as many of the known descendants as possible.

  They had feared a cold telephone call might provoke a false response, so they had gone to the homes or businesses of sixteen of the possible journal holders in the past twenty-four hours, all of whom lived in the southern half of the state, and all of whom had greeted their questions about a journal and a crucifix with blank stares and, in several instances, incredulous laughter. Four didn’t even know they had relatives who hailed from Lawton.

  Nyren was possibility number seventeen.

  His dirt driveway was almost a quarter of a mile long. They drove through a dense spruce forest and Gallagher’s mind drifted back, as it had so often in the past few days, to Monsignor McColl and his work for Father D’Angelo. His nervousness when questioned about the soon-to-be-venerable priest nagged at Gallagher.

  They broke through the forest. Nyren’s house, yellow with a gambrel roof, was set on a manicured lawn. The lime sprouts of tulips showed along a brick walkway. A late-model white Honda Accord was parked in a turnoff under a white pine.

  When they got out, Gallagher grunted at the stiffness in his thighs, but knew the crutches were no longer necessary. He left them in the truck.

  The storm door to the front porch napped open against the shake-shingle siding. Rain puddled on the warped, wide-planked porch floor. Spirals of violet and blue twisted on the dappled water surface and ran downhill toward the interior door, which was also ajar. The air reeked.

  ‘Gas?’ Gallagher said.

  Andie nodded. She pushed the interior door open another couple of inches. The fumes became even stronger. ‘Mr Nyren?’ she called.

  At the far end of the short hallway, a grandfather clock struck the quarter hour. From upstairs came a squeaking noise, as if a piece of furniture, possibly a chair, had been pushed across the wood floor. Andie took several steps inside, with Gallagher right behind her taking inventory of the decor. Sprays of baby’s breath highlighted the light blue wallpaper in the hallway. A maple drop-leaf table covered with a white doily rested against the wall below a gilt overmantel mirror. Queen Anne chairs in faded chintz braced the table.

  ‘Welcome to Grandma’s house,’ Gallagher murmured.

  ‘Quiet, he might hear you!’ Andie hissed. Then she called out, louder this time, ‘Mr Nyren? I’m Sergeant Andie Nightingale with the Vermont Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Hello?’

  The clock ticked. The steam register knock-knocked. Light rain splatted against the windows.

  Andie’s lips pursed. She drew her pistol. She went up the staircase with a powerful grace. Gallagher trailed three feet behind, listening to the amplified roar of blood at his temples. When he stepped on the fourth stair, it whined. Andie twisted, nostrils flared, and motioned with her toe that he should come up the inside of the riser.

  Above them, the floor broke around to the right and she craned her neck to see up over the landing. Gallagher wondered what he’d do if there was gunfire. Running like hell seemed the obvious choice, but to his surprise, he knew he wouldn’t. Not while Andie was there.

  On the landing, the drawers of two legal-size filing cabinets had been tugged open, the files and papers within thrust up in disarray. One cabinet sprawled on its side. Thousands of pieces of paper were strewn across the green carpet.

  Andie came to the landing in a crouch. The door on the left opened into an office. The burled walnut desk had been turned over. The computer screen still radiated blue despite its cracked housing. Files and papers from three more cabinets were tossed about the room. The bookcase was toppled. Nyren’s framed diploma in library science from St. Michael’s College and two honorary plaques from the Vermont Historical Society hung askew on the white wall beyond the desk. A floorboard was propped against one of the standing files. A hole gaped in the floor below.

  Andie brushed by Gallagher and, over the gas scent, he smelled the good, clean autumn odor of her that had surrounded him the morning after he was shot. A pleasant feeling came over him, only to be washed away in the next instant by a surge of dread, for him and for her; and he wanted to tell her they should leave the librarian’s house before they looked in that other bedroom.

  But Andie was already sideslipping across the blizzard of paper on the landing. She pressed against the jamb, reached out and turned the mock crystal doorknob. It turned easily. She motioned to Gallagher to stay back. In one movement, Andie used her left hand to push open the door while looping around and into the room with the gun leading.

  Her breath came in a snap, and a whoosh. Gallagher stepped in behind her and the first flares of disbelief and revulsion mutated to vertigo. The floor seemed to float away underneath him.

  The linen on the sleigh bed lay a-tangle. Green drapery billowed free in the dank breeze coming through the open window. Nyren was on his knees, his white terry-cloth robe hoisted up over his fat, naked back. Two leather belts strapped his legs around the chair legs. Sash from the drapery bound his wrists to the arms of the chair. A second sash was wound around his neck and tied to one of the chair slats. An orange washcloth jutted from his mouth. The index finger on his left hand was gone at the second joint. Blood from a series of brutal oblong wounds to his upper torso drenched the terry-cloth robe. A similar blow cleaved triangularly into the side of his head above the right ear. Dried snot and tears streaked those portions of his cheeks not bloodstained.

  Pinned on the left arm of the mutilated corpse was a third drawing.

  Andie waved her left hand at Gallagher, but did not take her eyes off the librarian. ‘Go … go back downstairs to the hallway,’ she said. ‘I saw a phone. Call nine-one-one.’

  Gallagher moved as if in a trance. Over the years he had witnessed many disturbing things—an exorcism in western Africa, a circumcision puberty rite in Papua New Guinea—but never a ritualistic killing like this. By the time the brutality of it broke through the protective shock that had cradled him in the librarian’s bedroom, he had reached the head of the landing and began to choke.

  Suddenly, the air in the hallway below gusted unnaturally and a six-foot incendiary wave of reddish blue heaved up, hungry, hot and explosive, across the saturated rug, gorging on the gasoline fumes. The flame stumbled at the bottom of the stairs, then garnered hellish strength and came on.

  The entire house breathed asthmatically as the blaze sought vapor and the oxygen pouring through the open window in the librarian’s bedroom.

  ‘Fire!’ Gallagher bellowed. ‘Fire, Andie! Get out!’

  He sprinted back across the sea of paper, tripped and went headlong into Andie as she appeared at the door. They crashed together at the dead librarian’s feet, then scrambled up as the incandescent cloud sniffed the gas-soaked paper behind them and the fire’s breathing became the labored rumbling of freight cars at night.

  Gallagher had Andie by the upper arm, dragging her toward the window. A metal climbing piton jutted from the sill. A blue rope fell away into space. ‘Go down the rope!’ he yelled.

  But she jerked away just as the flame billowed in the doorway, went back and fumbled at the corpse. She got the note, then looked around.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ Gallagher screamed.

  ‘Looking for the journal!’ she yelled. ‘The crucifix! Anything!’

  ‘They’re not here,’ he bellowed, grabbing her tighter this time. He hauled her to the window and forced her through even as the flames sawed furiously across the royal blue carpet, enveloped Nyren and set the drapes and Gallagher’s gas-dampened pant cuffs afire. He dove out onto the steep roof, clawed for the rope, missed, tumbled twice and then, still bur
ning, twisted into space.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘IF I DON’T GET a straight answer on how you two came to be in a burning house with a dead librarian strapped to a chair, I’ll arrest you both, trooper or no trooper, big-time filmmaker or no big-time filmmaker,’ Lieutenant Brigid Bowman fumed.

  Andie and Gallagher huddled with blankets around their shoulders on a gurney in the back of an emergency response van. The EMT said two of Andie’s ribs were bruised. Gallagher had minor burns on his calves. Outside, a crew of volunteer firemen soaked down what little remained of the antique Cape. The rest of the yard was already taped off. Troopers were scouring for evidence.

  ‘I’d like to hear this, too,’ Chief Kerris said, appearing from behind the ambulance door. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He had scratches on the backs of his hands and one large scratch across his cheek. His fourteen-inch rubber boots were coated in mud.

  Bowman’s focus wavered. ‘How did you get here so soon, Chief? Lawton’s an hour away.’

  Kerris reached up to adjust the brim of his baseball cap. ‘The family has a camp on a lake about ten miles from here. I was clearing some brush, getting it ready for summer, when I heard the call on my scanner. Is it him again? Charun?’

  Bowman nodded, then said to Andie, ‘I’m still waiting, Sergeant.’

  Andie examined the stitching of the blanket around her shoulders with the sort of lost facial cast Gallagher used to see on his father when Seamus was preparing to pick up the bottle again after one of his intermittent layoffs. She took a deep breath as if to prepare herself for the long fall into the abyss.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Gallagher blurted. ‘I found a crucifix on a gold chain in the meadow down by the barn at Olga Dawson’s and I should have shown it to you right away, but after seeing the drawing, I forgot.’

  Bowman glared at Gallagher and then at Andie. ‘Crucifix? Olga Dawson? Out with it. I want it all and I want it now.’