Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery

by Coel, Margaret

  Now she was aware of Adam leaning into her window. She tried to focus on what he was saying. Dinner tonight? “We can go to Hudson and have a good steak.”

  Vicky didn’t say anything. She stared straight ahead at the redbrick building. The distance between them had been opening for some time. She had known and not known, she realized, not wanting to bring it into her consciousness, where it would demand attention. Since last night, the distance had expanded around them like a black cloud coming across the plains.

  “Okay.” She heard her own voice, disembodied in the heat. It demanded attention. She was still staring at the building.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven.” Adam closed the door. She started the engine, rolled down the other windows, and backed into the lot, trying to ignore the black-haired man watching her in the rearview mirror, waiting until she had driven off.

  * * *

  OUT ON BLUE Sky Highway, Vicky called the office as she headed north. “I’ll be in after lunch,” she told Annie Bosey, her secretary. She had seen herself in Annie the morning the slim young woman with shoulder-length black hair had stepped into her office. “Hear you’re looking for a secretary, and I’m a good one,” Annie had said. “I got two kids to feed.” Vicky had hired her on the spot.

  “I had cleared your day for the trial. I hear you reached a plea bargain.”

  My God. The moccasin telegraph was a thing to behold. It had worked in the Old Time on the plains, when the criers walked through the villages, shouting out the news of the day. “If anyone calls . . .”

  “Got it. You’ll be in after lunch.”

  Vicky pressed the end button. The plains flashed past the windows, sagebrush and wild grass swirling in the wind, little clouds of dust blowing across the highway. Everything looked brown under a sky crystalline blue with a snowy bank of clouds floating past. She had a sense of coming home. This was her place, all the brown emptiness and the blue sky and the sun glowing red and orange on the foothills.

  She made a left onto Trout Creek Road, trusting to memory. The RJ Ranch, it had been called when she was growing up. A white man had purchased the land a hundred years ago, when the government had allowed Indians to sell reservation land, and white men had owned it ever since. The law had changed as reservations began to diminish, and tribes were always trying to buy back land owned by outsiders, but white people had hung on to the RJ. About twenty years ago, the owners had decided to raise buffalo and had changed the name to the Broken Buffalo Ranch. She’d heard that new owners had bought the ranch almost two years ago.

  She took a left onto a dirt road that ran ahead into a two-track. A tight-looking barbed-wire fence came into view, tall enough to keep buffalo from jumping over. They could jump like deer, she remembered Grandfather saying. Wild animals, tough and hardy. They could never be domesticated; they were always themselves.

  Ironic, she thought. Dennis Carey and his wife, a white couple, raising buffalo in Indian country.

  The ranch house seemed to grow out of the plains ahead, lifting itself upward like a crop of corn. The two-track led through a gate with BB carved into the overhead post and down a narrow dirt road toward a log house with a porch that stretched across the front. Beyond the house, she could see sides of the barn and outbuildings and an assortment of ranch vehicles: a tractor and flatbed, several pickups and trucks and a yellow forklift parked next to the stack of hay bales. A barbed-wire fence with a gate in the middle ran between the buildings and the pasture. Out in the pasture was the buffalo herd, great brown hulks as placid as cows. Until you got close to them, she thought. Intelligent animals. Grandfather’s voice in her head again. They gave themselves as food and sustenance for their Indian brothers and sisters. Don’t want to be ranched, corralled inside pastures. The plains are home. They used to roam for miles and miles. If you corral them, be very careful. They could kill you.

  Vicky stopped close to the house and waited. If Sheila Carey didn’t come to the door, she would write a note of condolence, leave her number in case Sheila wanted to talk about last night, secure the note on the porch, out of the wind, and drive back to Lander.

  She was digging in her bag for a notepad when the front door opened. A small, attractive woman with reddish hair stepped onto the porch, came down the steps, and walked over, a mixture of surprise and curiosity in her eyes. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” Vicky said across the top of the window rolled halfway down. “I’m Vicky Holden. Adam Lone Eagle and I found your husband. I just wanted to . . .”

  “You’d better come in.”

  8

  SHEILA CAREY WAS the picture of a grieving widow. Face drawn and blanched, red hair haphazardly knotted in back with strands poking into the air. Her gray western shirt and blue jeans looked worn and crumpled, as if she had slept in them. She didn’t say anything until they had crossed the entry into the living room, where she nodded at an upholstered chair as worn-looking as her clothes. “You want coffee or something?” She might have been talking to herself the way her eyes flitted about the room.

  “Nothing, thank you. I’m sorry to intrude.” Vicky sat on the edge of the cushion. “I thought you might like to know how we found your husband.” A pounding noise outside sounded muted and far away.

  “I need some coffee.” Sheila started toward the kitchen in back. “You want to change your mind?” The question was tossed over one shoulder.

  “All right. Thank you.” In the Old Time, Vicky was thinking, it was unthinkable to turn down any offer of sustenance, and no one who came to the village left hungry. You never knew when you might eat and drink again. She glanced about the living room. Typical of a ranch house, familiar even. Overstuffed sofa in a wood frame, wood armrests nicked and stained. Gray carpeting with pathways worn silver and, in the middle, the kind of rag rug that had lain on the floor of her home when she was a kid. A square pine coffee table littered with coffee-stained mugs and plates covered with crumbs. From the kitchen came the faint sounds of clinking glass and shuffling footsteps. A cabinet door slammed.

  Sheila Carey was back, carrying two mugs of coffee. She set one down on the table close to Vicky. “I didn’t ask. You take anything?”

  “This is fine.” Vicky lifted the mug and took a sip. The coffee was hot and strong and smelled of cocoa. She waited as Sheila settled herself on the sofa and sipped at her own coffee. When the woman was ready, Vicky knew, she would start the conversation.

  “The cops told me two lawyers came across Dennis’s body. You and . . .”

  “Adam Lone Eagle. He’s my . . .” Vicky hesitated. He was nothing to her, no relation that could be categorized. Husband, fiancé, brother, uncle, cousin. He was none of these. He was her lover. “Friend,” she said. Then she told the woman about last night, how they had left the tribal college at ten thirty, saw the two trucks parked on Blue Sky Highway about eleven.

  “Two trucks? You saw two trucks? The cops didn’t say anything about two trucks. Neither did the fed.”

  Because they are investigating your husband’s murder, Vicky started to say, then stopped. Investigators gather information; they don’t give it. “Yes. A large, dark-colored truck was parked ahead of your husband’s truck. It took off as we approached.”

  “You saw the truck?”

  “It was very dark. We couldn’t make out the model. It was like a large shadow that sped past in the oncoming lane.”

  “You saw the driver?”

  “Only a glimpse. It looked like a man.”

  “The man who killed my husband.”

  “It could have been a passerby who didn’t want to stay. I’m sure the police and the fed are trying to find the truck and get some answers.”

  “Please.” Sheila coughed a little laugh. She leaned over and set her mug on the table. Her hand was shaking. “The cops can’t even find the crazy shooter that’s been terrorizing the highways. I begged Dennis not to go out. ‘Don�
��t go to that stupid meeting,’ I told him. Those ranchers don’t care about raising buffalo. They think we’re nuts running a buffalo herd. Nothing but trouble from the . . .” She lifted one eyebrow. “Keeper of the animals, or whatever you Indians call buffalo. Takes dedication and persistence to raise buffalo. Nobody gets into this business without a strong back and a big wallet. One bull, one bull can cost eighty thousand. Who wants to take that on? Oh, the environmentalists, they think we’re saints. Last year a blogger came out here and interviewed Dennis. Heaped on the praise for raising buffalo that graze lightly and don’t destroy the Earth. And meat that’s good for everybody’s health. That’s not why we got into this business. Dennis liked the fact that buffalo are wild, can’t be tamed. The Broken Buffalo was Dennis’s dream, and I went along like always. You know how that is?”

  Vicky didn’t say anything. Was that what she had done? Gone along with Ben Holden until she had summoned the courage to leave? Was that how it was with Adam? Going along?

  Finally she said, “We called 911 when we saw your husband had been shot. We stayed with his body until the police came.”

  “What if the killer had come back?”

  “We weren’t thinking of that possibility.” Except that Adam had been thinking of it.

  “It was foolish of you. But thank you for staying with him. I don’t mean to be rude.”

  Vicky took another drink of coffee. Had she expected Sheila Carey to thank her for watching her husband in death? She wasn’t Arapaho. What were the white rituals for death? Vicky had attended the funerals of friends and colleagues in Lander. Memorial services, graveside rites. She had been the outsider, wondering about the rituals that touched these white mourners.

  She said, “Do you think the random shooter killed your husband?”

  “I know who killed my husband.”

  “You know the killer?”

  “It’s obvious. I told the cops. I told the fed. I told anybody who would listen. One of the two hands used to work on the ranch. Dennis had to fire them in June. Too unpredictable, out drinking and fighting in town. One got involved in an assault case. Bar fight in Riverton.”

  “Tomlin?”

  “You know him?”

  “I never met him. I represent the man accused of assaulting him. The trial was this morning, but Tomlin didn’t show up.”

  “Sheriff’s deputies came here looking for him. I told them, ‘Go look in Montana or Canada.’ You ask me, that cowboy couldn’t get away from here fast enough. Same for the other hand we took on last fall. Worst mistake we ever made, hiring on hands. We’d tried to run the ranch ourselves, Dennis and me, but Dennis said it was too much. So a year ago last spring, Dennis hired the first cowboys that drove up. That was a mistake. Always wanting money. Advances on paychecks. Do we look like we’re made of money? Dennis told them, we harvest some of the herd or sell a bull, and you’ll get paid. But that wasn’t good enough for Tomlin and the other hand. Accused us of trying to cheat them. Dennis paid them as much as he could, and they took off, mad as hornets. You could tell they weren’t going to let it go.”

  “You believe they came back . . .”

  “Tomlin. He drove a big, four-door Chevy truck. Blended right in with the darkness.”

  “You’ve told the fed?”

  “I didn’t know you saw the truck. I’ll be sure to tell him. That bastard Tomlin deserves to rot in prison. If the cops can find him. So far the Broken Buffalo’s been nothing but bad luck. Things had just started to look up.” She hesitated and dropped her gaze to the table, as if she were considering whether to continue. Then she seemed to shake herself back into her line of thought. “Enough of that. We have to go on, like Dennis would’ve wanted. Carlos and Lane, the new hands, are hard workers. Been repairing the fences, getting the ranch ready.” She stopped again and pinched her lips together a moment. “For the burial,” she went on. “I plan to bury Dennis’s ashes on the ranch. It was his dream,” she said again, looking off into a space somewhere in the middle of the room. “As soon as I can get the fed to release his body. Why does it have to take so long?”

  How many times had she been asked that question? Vicky was thinking. The anguished voices, the survivors, and even that word, survivors, was suffused with anguish. In the Arapaho Way, the body had to be buried in three days so the spirit could go to the ancestors. Perhaps it was the same for whites, wanting the body of their loved ones to be at peace.

  “I can make a call to Gianelli, if you’d like.”

  “Oh, would you? We’re anxious to . . . you understand, we’re anxious to get on with it. There’s a lot of work on the ranch. Too much for a single person. I’ll have to work with the hands. Taking care of the herd doesn’t stop just because . . .” She halted again. “I don’t mean to sound hardhearted. It’s just that we have to pay the bills. We have to eat.”

  Vicky tried for a reassuring smile. The woman’s husband hadn’t even been dead for twenty-four hours, and Sheila Carey was eager to get on with it? People were different; you could never anticipate reactions. She slipped a business card out of her bag and set it on the table. “If there is anything else I can do, please call me.” Then she stood up and walked to the door. Opening it, she looked back. The woman remained on the sofa, slump-shouldered, hands grasped between her knees, which rose over the top of the table.

  * * *

  VICKY GOT INTO the Ford and was about to back around when she saw the dark, husky-looking cowboy with a straw hat pushed back on his head walking over. He had short, bowed legs, which gave him the hip-hop walk of rodeo riders. She rolled down the front windows. The hot smell of manure and wood clippings spilled into the car.

  The cowboy set his arm across the top of the door and leaned into the open window. “I hear you found Mr. Carey’s body.” He had large teeth, tobacco stained in various shades of brown.

  “That’s right.” There’s no way he could have known that unless he had been in the kitchen eavesdropping. She thought about the pounding outside that she had heard earlier. When had the noise stopped? “You must be one of the new hands.”

  “Carlos,” he said. “Hired on the first of July. I been helping Dennis keep things running. Now I’m going to help that little lady in there, who needs all the help she can get.”

  “You mean running the ranch?”

  He stared at her out of narrowed, flashing eyes. “What else? You seen the killer?”

  “It was dark,” Vicky said. What else indeed, she was thinking.

  “All the same, you seen him?”

  “I saw someone behind the steering wheel of a big truck. He wore a cowboy hat.”

  “Every hand in these parts wears a cowboy hat.”

  True, she thought. “Is there anything else?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Go in peace.”

  9

  REG HARTLY SLOWED his pickup past the fence that enclosed the pasture. Appaloosas grazing on the stubbly grass lifted their heads, chewed, swallowed, and sent long, slow gazes his way. He parked behind a battered white pickup faded almost to yellow. There was an emptiness about the old ranch house. The steps creaked and groaned as he climbed to the porch. The morning was already hot; no telling how high the temperature might get today. The creeks were drying up. Narrow borders of sand along the banks. White, billowy clouds floating over the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Not a drop of rain in them.

  Reg knocked at the screened door, which banged against the frame and jumped on its hinges. Not the kind of neglect Josh would have stood for if he were home working on the ranch. His ranch, he called it, except that old Ned, his father, wasn’t ready to retire, and the spread along the Gunnison River on the Colorado Plateau outside Grand Junction belonged to Ned. Things would be done his way. Reg had tried to talk Josh out of leaving. Cowboying, moving from ranch to ranch, was no kind of life. You never could get a stake in a place of your own that
you could leave to your son.

  He remembered how Josh had laughed at that. Set the glass of beer down so hard that the foam had spilled onto the bar, threw his head back and laughed as if Reg had turned into a stand-up comedian, spouting truths as sharp as arrows. Well, you had to laugh or you would cry. “He’s going to realize he can’t run the ranch without you,” Reg had said. Josh still laughing. “He’s going to have to pull back. Your mother’s been after him to take it easy for years. Someday he has to listen.”

  “You don’t know my old man. He’s gonna live forever. He can lift ninety-pound bales of hay. I got to get out of here.” He had left six months ago. A knapsack, an extra pair of boots, and his saddle, all piled into the bed of his pickup truck. Going to Wyoming, he said. You could always cowboy in Wyoming. Besides, he wanted to work with buffalo, and there were buffalo ranches in Wyoming. Crazy animals.

  Reg realized the door had opened and the old man himself was standing on the other side of the screen. “You heard from Josh?”

  Reg shook his head. He opened the screen door and stepped inside. “I came to see how your wife’s doing.” The living room looked dusty and unkempt, empty beer bottles on the floor next to the sofa. A bachelor’s place.

  “Poorly. Right poorly. Ada is dying, no doubt about it, but she’s taking her time, waiting for her boy to come home. He’s all she’s got. All we got. Never should have left. This here is our home. You want to see her? Pay your respects? She’s gonna ask you about Josh. Give her some kind of story that might ease her a bit.”

  Reg followed the bent back and knobby spine around the sofa and down a dim hallway into a dimmer room with a lace cover over the bed, the kind his grandmother used to crochet, and the tiny figure of Ada Barker under the cover. Thin, blue-white fingers spread over a swollen belly. “Josh?” Her voice was as high and thin as a cricket’s.

  “It’s Reg Hartly, Josh’s friend.” He set a hand over the old woman’s. It felt like a cool sheet of parchment. “Just came by to see how you’re doing. Your old man taking good care of you?”