Ghost Dance

by Mark T Sullivan

‘No, it’s not, but it’s true,’ Emily said, standing. She snuffled, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her cotton sweater and fought for composure. ‘I’m due on a plane day after tomorrow. I’m taking my car and going down to the city to get packed.’

  ‘Am I allowed to visit at least?’

  Emily hesitated, then choked out, ‘No.’ She turned and ran up the path, Gallagher watched her go the way he used to watch his parents as a child—as if through smoked glass.

  Lying there in the darkness beside Andie, Gallagher was aware that his thoughts looped. Images crisscrossed and bounced. Emily. Andie. Then Many Horses and now Terrance Danby led boys through dim hallways to Monsignor McColl. Mike Kerris motioned his cronies toward a young drunken innocent in a darkened condo bedroom. Mayor Lamont Powell dug at his gums with sharpened fingernails. The bodies of Hank Potter, Olga Dawson and David Nyren floated on a river of Gallagher’s daydreams. Behind him, Gallagher heard a gentle heave of breath that told him Andie was crying. His thoughts accelerated, flashing through the same circular pattern over and over, faster and faster. He held tight to the edge of the mattress, asking himself if this was what his father had felt like in the last days of his crack-up.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THURSDAY, MAY 21

  ANDIE SLAMMED HER POLICE bubble on top of her battered truck and accelerated toward Lawton in the pouring rain.

  It was less than an hour after Gallagher had left for the airport at West Lebanon, less than ten minutes since she’d received the phone call from Lieutenant Bowman. Her lips burned. So did her fingertips. And the back of her throat.

  ‘Get down to Lawton Center,’ the lieutenant had barked into the phone. ‘The parish secretary at St. Edward’s has been murdered. The husband said she had a piece of an Indian woman’s journal. Charun left evidence. A lot of it. Get down there now.’

  Andie spun off the River Road by the Otterslide General Store onto Main Street. She hunched over the steering wheel, her knuckles bone-white. ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ she whispered. ‘The courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.’

  Andie repeated the prayer over and over again, then told herself to take ten deep breaths. With each inhale and exhale she talked herself down.

  Libby Curtin had lived in a double-decker, red Victorian house at the dead end of Front Street. There was a black wrought-iron fence separating the yard from the street and the children’s playground next door. Halfway to the house was a blooming perennial garden in the middle of which stood a painted ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary.

  The street outside was already a sea of umbrellas and raincoats. A television truck from a Burlington station already in town to do a story on the killings had just pulled in and parked. A CNN van came in behind it. The lights went on.

  Up on the porch, almost a ghost through the gray, driving rain, Brigid Bowman gestured at two troopers weaving yellow tape through the balustrade of the wrought-iron fence. In the camera glare Bowman appeared older, harsh, almost grainy.

  The second she saw Andie, she broke away from the troopers and stepped behind a dense tangle of morning-glory vines that walled in the east side of the porch.

  ‘You were right. I was wrong,’ Bowman began in a no-nonsense voice. ‘Eddy, the husband, says Libby had a piece of a Sioux woman’s diary and a little crucifix passed on to her by her grandmother.’

  ‘You just wouldn’t believe me, would you?’ Andie asked.

  Bowman clenched the top of her trench coat. ‘Everyone makes mistakes, Andie.’

  ‘I’ve learned that,’ Andie allowed. ‘Have you?’

  Bowman clicked her thumbnail with the nail of her ring finger. ‘You aren’t going to make this easy for me.’

  ‘Have you made it easy for me?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was doing my job.’

  ‘I want my job back,’ Andie said. ‘The lead on this case.’

  After a long moment, Bowman nodded.

  ‘Good,’ Andie said. ‘Let me see her.’

  Together they went into the house. Plants had been tipped over on wooden floors recently varnished. Drawers had been tugged from a refinished chest in the corner. The white upholstery of the butcher-block living-room furniture was slashed. Bright blue fish from an overturned saltwater aquarium lay still and cold on sopping-wet newspaper.

  Bowman said, ‘With this amount of damage, a neighbor must have heard something. I’ve got teams fanning out.’

  They went up a narrow staircase to a bedroom. An evidence technician dusted the jewelry box on the highboy dresser. A second worked at the window over the porch roof where a climbing piton had been driven into the frame. A third technician snapped photographs. Clothes were strewn across the floor. A television tuned to a religious cable channel lay on its back. A nun in her habit was hosting a talk show.

  What had been a snowy-white comforter was now a tapestry of rose and rust. Libby Curtin’s body lay in the middle of it, curled into a fetal position facing the door, as if trying to hide from the blows.

  Libby’s white cotton nightgown was soaked in blood and indistinguishable from her flesh in places. She was gagged. Her eyes were stretched open. She appeared to be staring at the crucifix on the opposite wall. Four of her fingers had been clipped off as if with garden shears.

  Shakily, Andie put on latex gloves. She picked up the half-full wineglass next to the bed and sniffed the stale Chablis, then put it down abruptly at the sight of the fourth drawing pinned to the bedstead above the body.

  Charun’s penis was being throttled by a rope cinched tight, causing the tip of it to mushroom above the shaft. The monster’s eyes were half-moons now. The pupils were rolled back in his head. The irises had been painted crimson. Every stitch in the creature’s lips except one was severed. The mouth grinned and gaped, revealing razorlike canine teeth and swollen gums.

  Andie glanced at the wineglass, men unpinned the drawing and turned it over.

  I fucked Angel blindfolded and ear-plugged right to the far shore. Fucked until she stepped into the muddy water and climbed beyond.

  I stayed in my Persephone warm and alive. Warm and dead. Cold and dead, but even with the cord lashed tight around us, I never saw. I left her on the bank and she walked on while I rowed back alone.

  You think you know me now, Lawton, but you don’t. I am the boatman. I am the lover. I am the shaman and I am the mutator.

  Summer comes. And Hades has returned Persephone to Earth. I have seen her. I will have her again, for one more boat ride.

  ‘He’s not human,’ Bowman said, looking over Andie’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Andie said. ‘That’s the problem. Humans are capable of creating beauty or carnage.’

  She called out to the three technicians working in the room. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Lots of clear prints here,’ said the one working on the jewelry box. ‘But there are several smudges with no partials around them; I think our boy was wearing gloves again.’

  ‘Damn it!’ Andie said.

  Mel Allen, the state’s assistant medical examiner, crouched beside a white braided rug on the far side of the bed. ‘Andie?’ he called. ‘You better come take a look.’

  She and Bowman came around the bed and Allen smoothed a bushy eyebrow before pointing at soil from a boot at one end of a six-foot throw rug. Thirty inches from the dirt was a bloodstain and three pubic hairs. The rug had been slashed. There was a charred hole in the rug and a two-inch mound of what looked like burned tobacco mixed with little chunks of a mushroomlike: substance lying beside the hole.

  ‘What’s your explanation, Mel?’ Andie asked.

  ‘He lay here after the killing,’ Allen said with a look of distaste. ‘His boots were where the dirt is. His penis was at the pubic hairs. And those slashes—he hacked at the floor. It’s like he can’t stop the frenzy.’

  Andie crouched next to the examiner, looking at the rug, then back at the note.

&n
bsp; ‘How is it possible that someone smart enough to write that note, then draw these drawings in a sequence, goes so maniacal during the killing?’ she asked.

  Allen shrugged. ‘They’ve got psychiatrists to explain that kind of thing. I’m just telling you what I think he did.’

  The medical examiner leaned over and with forceps took up two of the charred fungal pieces. One had a bluish tint at the stem. The other looked like a chunk of wet leather.

  ‘We’ll have to run tests,’ Allen said, ‘but this one looks like a psyllocibin mushroom. The other one’s peyote. He’s smoking it, probably mixing it with marijuana and God only knows what else, from the smell of it.’

  ‘No wonder the guy’s out of his mind,’ Bowman said.

  ‘Bag the rug and everything and get it to the Waterbury lab,’ Andie told the technician standing behind Allen. ‘I want every inch of this room in the Waterbury lab.’

  Then Andie turned to the lieutenant. ‘Where’s Libby’s husband?’

  Eddy Curtin slouched in a hammock chair in a corner of the ruin of his kitchen. The young snowboard entrepreneur stared into an empty cup of espresso with the look of the damned. His lank, dirty-blond hair hung down around his face. The sleeves and collar of his khaki canvas work shirt were unbuttoned, revealing a powerful upper body and sinewy arms. A uniformed female trooper sat mute in a chair opposite Curtin. Andie motioned for her to leave and she took the trooper’s seat. Lieutenant Bowman stood in the doorway, listening.

  Curtin glanced up. ‘Hi, Andie.’

  ‘Hello, Eddy,’ she said softly. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Curtin nodded. ‘You don’t expect to run into your old baby-sitter this way. Can I call the funeral home for them to come and get Libby now?’

  ‘She’ll be going somewhere else first, Eddy,’ Andie said. ‘We have to gather evidence.’

  Curtin ran the knuckle of his index finger along the underside of his wispy goatee. ‘We were going to take off for Montana the end of the summer, move the business out West. It was our secret.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Eddy.’

  His chin trembled. ‘You want to ask me questions, I suppose.’

  ‘It will help catch the son of a bitch that did this,’ Andie said.

  Curtin had left the house at ten o’clock. He liked to work on his snowboard designs at night when no one was at the factory. He’d been absorbed in his work until nearly six-thirty. He’d last talked with Libby at 11 p.m. She’d been watching television.

  Andie said, ‘You told the lieutenant that Libby had a piece of a journal from a Sioux woman.’

  Curtin nodded. ‘In a pouch with a crucifix in it. Her granddad gave it to her when she was sixteen and told her to keep it because it was an important piece of Lawton history. At least the history nobody in Lawton wanted to talk about. It’s all about the seances they used to have up there at the old Danby place. Libby kept her promise to her grandpa, but she didn’t like having the pouch.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Bowman from the doorway.

  ‘ ’Cause it gave her the creeps,’ Curtin replied. ‘I’ve read it all and it’s like you were reading something that was never meant to be kept, but couldn’t ever get rid of. I don’t know, like it was testimony, you know?’

  Curtin turned the cup of coffee over on its saucer. ‘You think someone slaughtered my Libby because of some shit that went down here a hundred years ago?’

  ‘Yes, Eddy, I do,’ Andie said.

  Tears welled in Curtin’s eyes. He slammed his fist off the table. The cup jumped and crashed on the tile floor. ‘If I’d have known this was going to happen, I would have burned that damn pouch the first time she showed it to me!’

  Andie thought of her mother. ‘I feel the same way, Eddy.’

  Now the young man began to sob: ‘What could be in that thing that someone would do that to my sweet Libby? How could God let that happen to someone so devoted?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Andie murmured soothingly. ‘Where did she keep it?’

  Curtin got hold of himself and wiped his forearm across his face. He reached around behind him on the floor and picked up a framed piece of needlepoint daffodils and pink tulips and a monogram of their names, Libby and Eddy, separated by a heart.

  He turned it over, then fiddled with hasps that held the back to the frame. Andie’s breath caught in her throat when she realized the killer had not found Libby Curtin’s section of Many Horses’ journal.

  Eddy eased out the red leather pouch and gave it to Andie, who took it in both hands. Bowman stepped forward to see that which she had not believed existed.

  ‘I promise you, Eddy, I will find out who did this to Libby,’ Andie said.

  ‘That it? That her pouch? What’s it say?’ came two male voices from the hallway beyond Lieutenant Bowman.

  Chief Kerris and, right behind him, Mayor Powell. Kerris had a reddish patina to his skin. His eyes glistened with nervous excitement. Mayor Powell was standing on tiptoe, trying to see into the kitchen.

  Andie stood and held the pouch behind her back ‘Lieutenant, I would prefer these two men be escorted out of here.’

  ‘What?’ Kerris shouted. ‘This is our town. You can’t order us out of here.’

  ‘The woman’s way out of line,’ the mayor grumbled in agreement.

  ‘I’ve got my reasons,’ Andie told Bowman. ‘You said I was lead.’

  The lieutenant dug her fingers into a knotted muscle at the back of her neck.

  ‘Lead?’ Kerris cried. ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’

  ‘She’s not kidding,’ Bowman said at last. ‘And I’m sorry, Chief and Mr Mayor, but you’ll have to go. Sergeant Nightingale is in charge here.’

  ‘I’m not moving,’ Powell stated flatly.

  Kerris nodded. ‘Not until I know why we’re being kept out.’

  ‘How about because, around the turn of the century, your great-great-grandfather went nuts,’ Andie said. ‘He dug his teeth out of his head because he believed he’d helped kill an Indian girl.’

  She shook the pouch at them. ‘The Indian girl who wrote this journal. I think you’re trying to cover that up. I think that for some reason you’d like this whole investigation to go away.’

  Kerris and Powell both blanched.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the mayor puffed at last. ‘And I won’t have my family’s reputation impugned in this way. Lieutenant, I protest this slanderous, unfounded accusation!’

  Bowman’s fingers dug deeper into the knotted muscle. Andie brought the journal around in front of her and held it where the lieutenant could see it.

  ‘You’re sure,’ Bowman said at last.

  ‘Sure?’ Andie replied. ‘No. But convinced? Yes.’

  Bowman called out into the hall to troopers standing on the porch. ‘Please escort these gentlemen outside the yellow tape.’

  Kerris glared back over his shoulder as he was led out. ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he snarled. ‘The both of you will pay for this.’

  Andie followed them out onto the porch and watched the troopers walk them into the pouring rain, down the slate sidewalk to the wrought-iron gate. There were bouquets of flowers placed against the fence. The crowd had swelled and stretched fifty yards down Front Street. A half-dozen television vans were there now with cameras already set up under plastic tarps.

  ‘The press is crawling all over this,’ Bowman remarked gloomily. ‘And there are only going to be more of the vultures.’

  ‘Let them circle,’ Andie said. ‘We’re going to use them.’

  ‘How?’

  Before Andie could reply, one of the troopers who had escorted Kerris and Powell jogged back through the rain and up the porch stairs. ‘There’s a priest down there, says he wants to come in to console the husband,’ the trooper said. ‘He says the victim worked for him.’

  Andie put her hand to her brow to search the crowd pressed in against the fence. The massive upper torso of Monsignor McColl th
rust up and over an ornamental yew. He wore a black raincoat and was hatless in the driving rain. The priest had lost weight in his face and neck during the past week. Skin hung loose and gray like a turkey’s wattle under his chin.

  ‘In the letter Charun left at Nyren’s house, he said Angel cried out, Vida.’

  ‘So?’ Bowman replied.

  ‘So vida is the Spanish word for “life”,’ Andie said. ‘Mike Kerris lived in Chile six years. Monsignor McColl lived in Guatemala for nearly ten.’

  Bowman stared at her in total confusion. ‘What are you—?’

  ‘Monsignor McColl stays outside, too.’

  ‘But the man’s a priest.’

  ‘He’s a suspect,’ Andie declared. ‘I’ll explain it all later. Right now, we’re going to go down in front of those cameras and tell the world about the journal and the pouch. At the very least, we prevent another killing. At best, we lay a trap to catch a psychopath.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  IT WAS IN THE hot, humid twilight that Gallagher first caught sight of Harold. He strolled along a path through parallel beds of flowering shrubs from the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. He wore a crisp blue seersucker suit and a starched Egyptian cotton shirt with a blue polka-dot bow tie, all draped on a hanger-thin physique. He jauntily sported a slim black cane with a silver tip and an ivory handle carved into the face of a wolf.

  The slight limp only served to amplify his confident, almost aristocratic bearing. Without invitation, he sat between Jerry Matthews and Gallagher on a park bench in the trees near the Vietnam Memorial.

  Harold placed both palms over the wolf’s head and crooned in a velvety Southern drawl: ‘Viburnum. Isn’t the scent intoxicating? I have often thought that viburnum is the perfume of reincarnation, of spring awakening from winter.’

  Up close Gallagher could not tell whether Harold was sixty or ninety. His steel-colored hair was still full and had been slicked back on his head, preppy-style. His skin was taut and pale to the point of translucence. His lips were bloodless, almost blue. He took a deep sniff and beamed with pleasure. ‘Ahhh, viburnum!’