The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Coel, Margaret

  “And that connection would be?” Coughlin’s eyebrows rose into his forehead.

  “Jake Tallfeathers. He was married to Ruth’s sister, Loreen.” Coughlin started writing something down, his pen making a scratching noise, like a mouse nibbling at the paper. “After Liz left Ruth’s house, she went to a friend’s in Lander, a woman named Ardyth LeConte.”

  “Ardyth LeConte?” Coughlin was scribbling on the pad.

  “She goes by a different name now, but Vicky found her.” He hurried on before the detective could interrupt. “Jake Tallfeathers came to her house looking for Liz. He wasn’t alone. Someone else was in the pickup. Liz managed to evade them. The woman thinks Liz made it to a safe house in Denver.”

  “And her new name is?”

  “She doesn’t want to get involved.”

  “I’m going to need her name, Father. This is a murder investigation.”

  “She’s scared to death. Now that Ruth’s been killed, she’ll probably leave the area.” Father John stopped, waiting a moment for this to sink in. “Look, the point is that someone Liz trusted, a man named Robert Running Wolf, sent her to the safe house. All these years, the woman believed that Liz managed to escape and start a new life.”

  “Robert Running Wolf?”

  “One of the AIM leaders. Nobody we’ve talked to knows what became of him. One more thing,” Father John said, and the detective dropped the pen and began massaging the back of his neck. “Whoever killed Liz might have ordered the murder of Jimmie Iron in Washington D.C. Jimmie was the father of Liz’s baby.”

  Coughlin leaned toward the desk and picked up the pen again. “What you’re saying is, we’ve got a kind of serial killer out there. Vicky should get away for a while.”

  “She’s on her way to Denver.”

  “Denver? The safe house? She knows the location?”

  Father John lifted his hands, then let them drop onto the top of his thighs. “Not as far as I know,” he said, but he knew that, somehow, Vicky would find the house, if it was still standing, and trace whoever had lived there in the summer of 1973. He knew she wouldn’t stop until she had the name of Liz Plenty Horses’s killer.

  “I’ll check out this Running Wolf. You talk to Vicky, tell her to call me. I want the name of Liz Plenty Horses’s friend.” Coughlin lifted himself to his feet, a dismissive sign, Father John knew. He stood up. “You should both be careful,” the detective said. He came around the desk and flung open the door. “I’m going to ask Banner to keep a car in the vicinity of the mission, keep an eye on things. If you hear anything else…”

  “You’ll hear from me,” Father John said to Coughlin’s back. He was already following the man back down the corridor toward the entry.

  VICKY WATCHED THE brown sedan slide into the empty space at the curb across the street. She sipped at the iced tea she’d ordered. Lucas’s image shimmered in the sunshine reflected in the café’s plate glass windows as he got out of the sedan and started across the street, stopping to let a black truck swish past, then darting around another vehicle before he reached the sidewalk. The glass image evaporated, and he was inside, striding around the other tables toward her.

  He was so much like his father, this tall, handsome warrior with black hair trimmed above his ears, brown skin and black eyes, muscular and strong looking in khakis and a yellow knit shirt. The first sight of Lucas, after a few days or weeks or even months, always made her heart take a little jump, as if she’d somehow stepped into the past and was eighteen again, and the man walking toward her was the one she’d watched riding the bronco bareback at the rodeo, gripping the edge of the bench, praying he wouldn’t fall off. After the rodeo—walking toward her, smiling at her, holding out both hands as if there had never been any question but that she would run into the arms of Ben Holden. Later he’d told her how he’d seen her in the stands, how he’d ridden the bronco into the ground for her.

  And this was their son.

  She started to get up, but Lucas placed a hand on one shoulder, then leaned over and hugged her. “How’s it going, Mom? Trip okay?”

  She told him the drive had been fine. It wasn’t exactly the truth. She’d stared through the windshield at the lines of traffic flowing like metal rivers as she drove toward Denver, so different from the open roads on the reservation, the vast spaces that melted into the horizons all around. It had taken a little time to adjust, refocus herself, concentrate on the lanes ahead, the merging cars and trucks, the semis looming in the rearview mirror.

  Hovering at the back of her mind, beyond the traffic and the mechanics of driving, had been the image of the house. She had an address now; she wondered if the house were still there. She knew the neighborhood—the Indian neighborhood near the Denver Indian Center. Arapahos, Cheyennes, Lakotas, Ojibwas, Pawnees, Apaches, Crows, Blackfeet—crammed together in blocks of tiny houses with rusting pickups perched on jacks in the driveways and sofas with stuffing poking out of the cushions jammed on the small porches. It wasn’t where the so-called successful Indians—the whiteized Indians—lived. Lucas lived in a house in Highland, lights from downtown Denver visible from his kitchen window.

  Of course the safe house would have been in the Indian neighborhood. Anyone hiding there would have been safe. None of the neighbors would have called the police to report an Indian fugitive.

  And yet, Liz Plenty Horses hadn’t been safe.

  Lucas settled across from her, picked up the menu, and studied it for a moment. There was the usual polite exchange of pleasantries. His job was going well; she was staying busy, working on a discrimination case on behalf of Arapahos and other Indians employed at Mammoth Oil. The only ones required to take regular drug tests, she told him. He shook his head at this, light flashing in his brown eyes. There was no sign of surprise.

  The small restaurant was beginning to fill up. Only one table left next to the window, in the flare of the setting sun, but the couple waiting at the hostess desk would probably be shown there. Memories crowded in on her; she’d spent a good ten years in Denver, lived in a house a few blocks away. In the Old Time, this had been Arapaho land, yet she could never shake the sense that she didn’t belong here. There were restaurants she’d never gone into, shops she walked past, movie theaters she ignored—as if there were invisible signs propped in front: Indians Not Welcome.

  And yet, Lucas had walked tall into the restaurant—college degree, systems analyst job at a big company, unaware that the signs had ever existed or that she still carried the image of them in her mind, part of the collective memory of her people. He would have walked just as tall into the office of Owens and Lattimore today for his interview.

  They had ordered plates of Italian spaghetti, and the waitress shook shredded parmesan over the top until the tomato sauce disappeared under what looked like heaps of snow. “How was the interview?” Vicky asked, after the waitress had taken the hunk of cheese and the grater to the next table.

  Lucas wound some pasta over his fork and shrugged. “You know how all that legal stuff goes,” he said.

  “How does it go?” Vicky kept her tone light. There was always an edge to any discussion that inched toward her career. Lucas and Susan had been growing up on the reservation with her mother while she became a lawyer.

  “The lawyer, Marshall Owens, kept asking questions. Was I sure I saw what I saw? Was it possible I’d been mistaken? How can I be sure? Was I willing to put his client in prison for a long time based on a shaky memory? Like he was trying to trip me up, make me doubt my own experience, start thinking that maybe I didn’t see what I saw, I don’t know what was real.”

  Vicky took a bite of her own spaghetti. After a moment, she said, “He’s trying to build a defense.”

  “Want to know how he’s building the defense? ‘Isn’t it true, Mr. Holden,’” Lucas dropped his voice a couple of notes, “‘there were other people in the alley when you stopped your vehicle? Isn’t it possible that another man was, in fact, beating the victim? Isn’t it pos
sible that, in the darkness and confusion, you failed to see Theo Gosman come to the defense of the victim? Isn’t it possible that you confused him with the actual assailant, and that, thinking you were aiding the victim, you attacked the wrong man?’” Lucas worked on another bite of spaghetti, then he said, “He kept trying to shake my story. Better prepare yourself. He’ll do the same to you tomorrow.”

  “And did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Shake your story?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Vicky smiled. “If that bastard goes to trial, you can be sure Owens will try to shake your version of what happened.” She knew the technique; she’d used it herself at times. Sometimes it worked, but those were the cases where the facts were blurred, where the truth could fall on either side.

  “What about Susan?” she said. It wasn’t her own interview tomorrow that she was worried about. But Susan…Vicky felt a prick of pain. Her daughter seemed to rummage through the past, select the memories she wanted, and discard the rest. It would be hard on Susan, the hammering: Are you sure? Can you be certain? Isn’t it possible…? Did you select the truth this time?

  “They’re flying a lawyer to L.A. to interview her,” Lucas said. “We talked last night.” He let a couple of seconds go by, apparently debating something with himself. “I told her what to expect,” he said finally. “Stay calm. Tell them what happened. Don’t let them make you believe otherwise. Don’t let them make you doubt what we all saw and what we know to be true.”

  Vicky sipped at the ice water that the waitress had delivered. She needed a moment. Lucas knew, she realized. All those years with Ben—Lucas knew what was true. He knew that Susan still clung to what she wanted to remember. The good times, they were her reality; not the rest of it.

  “What about the girl?” Vicky said, wanting to change the subject.

  Lucas shook his head. “It’d probably help if she could testify. If she dies, that bastard’s looking at a murder charge. He ought to be charged with murder anyway. Even if she lives, she’s never going to be the same. I heard she has brain damage.”

  After the waitress had materialized next to the table, cleared the plates, and, smiling down at Lucas, set the brown leather envelope with the check inside next to his arm, Vicky said, “There’s a house I’d like to see.” What she didn’t say was that she wanted to see if the house was still there.

  “A house?” Lucas ran his eyes over the check, then leaned forward and extracted a wallet from his back pocket—and this, too, so like his father. How many restaurants where they’d sat across from each other, the waitress flirting a little, and Ben, leaning forward, gripping his wallet.

  “You thinking about moving back?” Lucas inserted the credit card and handed the envelope to the waitress, looking up at her this time and smiling.

  “It has to do with another case I’m working on,” she said. “It will only take a little while. I’ll see you later at home.”

  “You sure? You want me to come with you? Where’s the house?”

  “Lucas…” She reached over and laid her hand on top of her son’s. “It’s a house, that’s all. I’ll bet you’ve brought some work home tonight. I’ll see you later.”

  28

  VICKY TOOK SHERIDAN Boulevard, the sun dropping over the mountains in the west, fracturing into a million pieces of light in the passenger window. Two lanes of cars and trucks lumbered ahead, belching noise and exhaust. A few blocks past Alameda, she turned onto a side street. In the Indian neighborhood now, driving through the shadows pressed against rows of small bungalows and oak trees with branches drooping from weeks of summer heat. She steered past the cars and pickups at the curbs, glanced at the address she’d scribbled onto a scrap of paper, then circled a block. She parked in front of a square-shaped house with yellowish siding, a front door in the center and vertical windows on either side. It had a vacant, run-down look, blue shadows washing across the front—like a Halloween house occupied by ghosts. She wondered how it had looked when Liz had come here.

  Jammed into the patch of dried, brown grass was a sign: For Sale by Owner. The telephone number at the bottom might have been written with a black felt pen. Vicky switched off the engine, dug a pen out of her bag and copied it down. Then she got out and started up the sidewalk. Inch-wide cracks with tufts of grass ran through the concrete. A dog was barking in a nearby yard, and in the distance, she could hear the roar of traffic on Sheridan.

  A narrow porch hung off the house with a white plastic chair smudged with dirt and twigs jammed into one corner. The screened door squealed on its hinges as Vicky pulled it open. She knocked on the inner door. There was always the chance someone might be around, she told herself, even though she could feel the vacancy leaking through the siding. She knocked again.

  This was the house where Liz Plenty Horses thought she would be safe, she thought. Stood on the porch, knocked at the door, Luna in her arms. What time had it been? How late was it? A summer night, but it might still have been hot. How tired were they, she and the baby, after the long drive? I gave her enough money for gas, Mary Hennings had said. Was it enough? Had she made it all the way to Denver, to a house where she would be safe? Beginning to relax, maybe, thinking everything would work out. A misunderstanding, that was all, and someone named Robert Running Wolf would see that it was cleared up. And until he did, she and Luna would stay here.

  There were no sounds inside, no footsteps pounding toward the door or TV noise suddenly turned down. But that night, the door had flown open—and then what? Come in, someone had said, pulling Liz and the baby inside where it was cool. The windows might have been opened; there would have been the slightest stirring of air, the soft billowing of curtains. She could almost see her stepping into a small living room and glancing around. Everything had seemed normal and so far away from the reservation and the men who wanted to kill her, and she had started to weep, dipping her head over the baby, not wanting them to see—whoever was in the house—the mixture of fear and fatigue and relief spilling from her.

  Vicky wiped at the wetness that blossomed on her own cheeks and moved toward the window on the right. She peered past the edge into the dimness inside: a small, bare room with a dark vinyl floor meant to look like wood abutting the walls. On the right were two doors and straight ahead, an opening into the kitchen in back. She could see the white enameled edge of a stove. She went back to the door and tried the knob, wanting to go inside, walk across the floor, see the kitchen and the bedrooms, see the place where Liz had spent her last days, as if the house itself might tell her what had happened. Places are changed by the things that happen there, Grandmother always said. Places remember.

  The knob didn’t turn. Vicky stepped off the porch, walked across the dried grass and down the side of the house. Windows were open in the house next door, and she could hear a baby crying over the noise of a TV and the sounds of a faucet running and dishes clanking. On the other side of the chain-link fence between the houses, a tricycle was tipped on its side in the dirt yard.

  She walked over to the little stoop at the back door and reached for the knob. It was then that she realized the door wasn’t tightly shut. It swung open when she pushed it, and she stepped into a small space with a stairway ahead that plunged downward into the dark of a basement and four steps on the left that led to what looked like a back porch with a row of windows on the outer wall, just below the ceiling. The air was hot and stuffy, as if the windows had been closed a long time.

  She started up the four steps, conscious of her heels clicking into the quiet. A refrigerator stood against the wall, taking up most of the porch. She moved past it into the small kitchen with cabinets and a counter on the wall ahead and a white stove and sink on the right. The turquoise linoleum creaked as she crossed the kitchen and went into the long, narrow room that must have served as both dining area and living room. The dining area was next to the kitchen; she could see the fine black lines, like a spider’s web, that the chairs
had scratched on the floor.

  They would have eaten at the table, the people who lived in the house and Liz—Liz cuddling the baby. There was probably a sofa, a couple of chairs near the front door, arranged around a TV against the wall, maybe, and she had been safe—until they came.

  Vicky crossed the living room to the far door on the left and stepped into a bedroom. The same brown, fake-wood vinyl on the floor, with nicks and scratches where furniture had stood—the four legs of a bed, a chest of drawers below the window. Outside a blue sedan slowed past the house.

  She went back into the living room and through the second door into a tiny hallway with two more doors. One opened into the bathroom; the other led into another bedroom, smaller than the one in front, but the door in back went into a covered porch with windows under the ceiling, like the porch next to the kitchen. Almost too small for a bedroom, but she could see the marks on the floor left by the legs of a twin bed. There were other scratches, possibly from chairs that had been pulled about.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on the picture forming on the back of her eyelids. A twin bed and two chairs pushed together to hold the cardboard box where Luna had slept. The porch had been Liz’s room, the safe place where she’d hidden.

  A door creaked open somewhere in the house. Vicky opened her eyes and stood frozen in place, muscles tensed, listening. The house had gone quiet again, yet she could feel the change in the atmosphere, the presence of another person. The footsteps, when they started, sounded like the thuds of a drum. It wasn’t possible, she told herself. How could he have known she’d come to the house? How could he have gotten here so quickly, unless…

  Unless he’d followed her from the reservation, a silver sedan hanging back, staying in her wake, not drawing her attention. My God. Why hadn’t she watched the traffic in the rearview mirror? She dug into her bag, extracted her keys, and jammed them between her fingers, making a tight fist. Then she moved slowly into the little hallway, walking on her toes, careful not to make a sound. She could see the living area—there was no one there—but the wall blocked her view of the dining area and kitchen.