The Drowning Man

by Margaret Coel

  Another several miles, and the bluffs outside the passenger window took on the look of a fortress with steep walls carved out of various hues of red and pink stone. Below the bluffs stood a cluster of ranch buildings. She slowed and turned right onto a dirt road.

  The Jeep skittered across the pebbles for a few seconds before the tires began to dig in.

  Horses grazed in the pastures on either side. The Taylor Ranch could be a picture on a postcard, she thought. Two-story log house pushed up against the looming red walls of the bluffs, an apron of grass in front and rows of cottonwoods along the sides, branches swaying in the breeze. In the field beyond the house was a collection of pickups, tractors, and other vehicles. The road curved past the house and a cabin, then ran down a hill into a valley where the log fence of a corral stretched between a brown, sturdy-looking barn and a collection of outbuildings with corrugated metal roofs that glinted in the sun.

  Vicky parked close to the house and walked up the stone steps to the porch that ran along the front. The plank floor creaked under her footsteps. She knocked on the door and glanced around. No one was about, no sign of life apart from the horses nodding lazily in the pastures. The wind whispered in the cottonwoods, and a stray branch tapped against the side of the house. She knocked again. The house was silent.

  She stepped off the porch and took the dirt path to the small, one-story log cabin. Someone had walked here not long before. She could see the boot prints, the pattern of the soles. The cabin looked newer than the house: The chinks were still solid between the logs, and the logs themselves exuded the odor of freshly cut pine. There was no porch, only a small concrete stoop. She knocked at the door, then knocked again. Through the rectangular window next to the door, she peered into the dimness inside: A desk jutted into the middle of a neatly arranged room with a bank of filing cabinets against the far wall and several wooden chairs set at angles to one another.

  She went back to the Jeep and drove down the dirt road past the log fence that ran along the pasture. Two sorrel horses watched the Jeep approach out of almond-shaped brown eyes. One of the horses whinnied as she parked in front of the barn and got out.

  “Hello!” she called, pushing her hair back against the wind. Her voice sounded muffled, lost in the emptiness. She let the Jeep’s door slam into the quiet.

  The double door of the barn was open, and she walked over and looked inside. “Hello?” she called again. A wedge of sunlight lay over the center of the dirt floor, but the rest of the barn was in shadow. She stepped inside and glanced about. Harnesses and tack hung from nails along either side of a narrow, closed door on the far wall; tools and other metal equipment winked in the shadows on the left. On the right were the dark hulks of blankets and saddles thrown over benches and the outlines of stalls. Everything neat and orderly, in its place. Above the saddles, in a rack on the wall, was a shotgun.

  This was where Raymond Trublood died, she thought. She ran her eyes over the floor from the center where tiny particles of dirt flashed silver in the sunlight to the gray, dead shadows near the walls. There was a clacking noise overhead, and she felt herself tense until she spotted the small bird fluttering in the rafters. She was aware of being alone—Woman Alone, Hi sei ci nihi, the grandmothers called her. She should have told Annie—she should have told someone—where she was going. She tried to shake off the feeling of unease. There was no reason to be so jumpy, she told herself. Yet the atmosphere in the barn, a place of death, felt heavy and dark, like an invisible shroud.

  “What do you want?” A shadow moved into the patch of sunshine on the floor.

  Vicky whirled about. Standing in the doorway was the dark figure of a woman, backlit by the light. She was slender, dressed in blue jeans and a light-colored shirt that looked faded in the brightness. Sunshine shone through her long, blond hair.

  “You must be Marjorie Taylor.” Vicky started toward the doorway.

  “Who are you?” The woman barred the way. She looked trim and fit, with the compact body of a woman accustomed to hard work. Probably in her forties, Vicky guessed, close to her own age.

  “Vicky Holden. I’m an attor…”

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  “I’m here about Travis Birdsong.” Vicky could hear the sound of her own voice flapping like the bird’s wings in the rafters. “I’d like to speak with you.”

  The woman seemed to consider this. “What’d Travis do? Kill somebody in prison?” She began backing out of the doorway, and Vicky stepped outside after her, feeling a sense of relief washing over her in the hot wind. In the distance, she could see two cowboys galloping across the pasture.

  She said, “Travis’s grandfather thinks he was wrongly convicted. I’ve read the trial transcript, and I tend to agree. I’m considering taking his case. Before I see him in the prison Friday, I wanted to talk to you.”

  Marjorie Taylor studied her a moment. There was the slightest flicker of interest in the woman’s gray eyes. “On what possible grounds could you reopen that killer’s case?”

  “I’m not sure,” Vicky said. “Ineffective counsel, for starters. Trumped-up evidence. I’m wondering what other evidence the detective…”

  “Lou Hamblin. He knew what he was doing. Too bad he’s not around anymore. Moved to California, last I heard. Damn good investigator.”

  “It’s possible he missed something while he was investigating Trublood’s murder,” Vicky said. A dun-colored pickup was coming down the road, trailing a cloud of dust.

  “Missed something?”

  The pickup skidded to a stop, and the woman looked around. She hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans and waited as a tall, muscular man in blue jeans and a blue plaid shirt with a black Stetson shading his face hauled himself out from behind the steering wheel and came toward them.

  “Who’s our visitor?” he said, stopping beside Marjorie. He seemed to speak out of the corner of his mouth, lips tightly drawn. He looked younger than Marjorie Taylor, late thirties, perhaps, with eyes like blue slits in a sunburned, handsome face. Traces of brown hair poked from the rim of his Stetson and nearly obscured the squint lines that fanned across his temples.

  “The Arapaho lawyer, Vicky Holden,” Marjorie said. “Here about that ranch hand’s murder seven years ago.”

  “Andy Lyle, foreman,” the man said, lips still not moving. For a moment, Vicky thought he might extend his hand, but instead he hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and turned his attention to the pair of cowboys galloping toward the corral.

  “You testified you saw Travis run out of the barn,” Vicky said.

  “We’ll talk in the office.” Marjorie’s gaze had followed the foreman’s. The sound of the horses’ hooves vibrated in the ground. The woman swung about and started back up the road.

  Vicky walked past the Jeep and headed up the incline, holding her hair back in the wind with one hand. She could hear the foreman’s boots scraping the earth behind her. Then his shadow elongated next to hers. His boots kicked at small rocks that spun out ahead. She could almost feel his breath on the back of her neck as Marjorie pushed open the door to the cabin and led the way into the small office.

  “Yeah, I saw Travis leave the barn after he shot Raymond,” Andy Lyle said. He kicked the door shut, then nudged a straight-backed wooden chair away from the wall with one boot and nodded for Vicky to sit down. “Travis took off and I went after him.”

  “She knows all that.” Marjorie sat down behind the desk and began straightening the already straightened piles of papers, as if the desk and the papers somehow confirmed her authority. From this small office, from behind this solid wood desk, Vicky thought, Marjorie Taylor gave orders to her employees.

  “She’s read the transcript,” she went on, as if Vicky weren’t sitting in front of her. “She thinks the detective missed something.”

  “So what d’ya think he missed?” Lyle said.

  Vicky had to shift around to see the man leaning against the closed door—blocking the e
xit, she thought—arms folded across the front of his plaid shirt. He looked relaxed, as if they had all the time in the world to sit inside this cabin. No one would leave until he said so.

  Vicky took a moment before she said, “Who else was around?”

  When neither Marjorie nor the foreman said anything, Vicky pushed on: “What about the other wranglers? What did they see?”

  “Raymond and Travis, they were the wranglers,” Marjorie said, and Vicky had to turn back to face the woman. “Ollie had already left.”

  “Ollie?” Vicky heard the surprise in her voice. There hadn’t been anyone by the name of Ollie in the transcript.

  “Ollie Goodman,” Marjorie said. “Cowboy artist likes to paint at the ranch sometimes.”

  A loud snort erupted behind her, as if the foreman were clearing his throat and stifling a laugh at the same time. “Goodman roams over the countryside like a goddamn gypsy, painting pictures of petroglyphs mostly.” Something hard had come into the foreman’s voice, as if the conversation had lurched into familiar territory, and he was repeating already sharpened arguments. “You ask me, he don’t have any business using the ranch for his pictures. He’s no cowboy, goddamn cripple. Paints horses, that’s what he does, the only way he knows the front end from the back. Paints barns and pastures. Sells his pictures back East where everybody thinks they’re the real McCoy, genuine cowboy art.”

  “Ollie’s been painting at the ranch for a long time,” Marjorie said, her voice even and defiant. “Let’s not get on that subject again.”

  Vicky stood up and scooted her chair sideways so that she had a view of both the foreman and the woman behind the desk. Then she dropped back onto the edge of her chair. “You’re saying Ollie Goodman was painting here the day of the murder?”

  “He likes the ranch. Can’t blame him, can you?” She had stacked all the papers into a single pile that listed to one side and threatened to spill over the desk. “Old log house up against the red bluffs, the barn and pasture. There’s probably a dozen pictures of the Taylor Ranch hanging in rich people’s houses around the country.” She shrugged. “Ollie likes to paint in the mornings. Best light, he says. He’d left a couple of hours before Raymond got shot.”

  “Did the detective talk to Ollie?” Vicky said. She had the answer in the guffaw that came from the foreman.

  “How the hell do we know who that detective talked to?” he said. “We weren’t privy to his investigations. You’re the one that’s got the records. You tell us.”

  “I have no idea,” Vicky said. That wasn’t true, she was thinking. She was beginning to get the idea that everyone—prosecutor, defense attorney, even the chief investigator—had decided that Travis was guilty. She could feel the knot of frustration tightening in her stomach. It was an old story, wasn’t it? Indian’s guilty. Toss him in prison.

  “Look, Ms. Holden,” Andy Lyle said. “The killer’s where he belongs. You want my advice, stay out of it. Go back to the rez and ask the Indians. They’re gonna tell you the same thing. Nobody in these parts wants Travis Birdsong walking around free.”

  “How did you happen to hire Travis and Raymond?” Vicky said, turning toward Marjorie Taylor, whose eyes were still fixed on the foreman. Gradually, she shifted her gaze to Vicky. “They showed up here, wanting jobs wrangling. Lyle happened to need a couple of extra hands, and they had experience. Hands come and go in this business. Most times when you’re the busiest—take calving season—that’s when they go. Dad used to say the hardest part of ranching was keeping good hands. Probably different, back when his grandpa started the ranch. Lots of Indians around then, all of ’em looking for honest work.”

  The woman stood up and came around the desk. “Wasn’t til after the murder, I saw what Travis and Raymond were all about. They weren’t looking for honest work. They were looking for a place to hide out from the law.”

  Vicky remained seated. If she got to her feet, she knew, the woman would usher her to the door. Andy Lyle had already moved to the side, one hand gripping the knob, ready to fling the door open. “What makes you think that?” she said.

  “Why else would they show up here, out of the blue? We’re not exactly on the beaten track. They could hang out here for a long time before anybody knew where they were.”

  “Travis’s grandfather said that Travis came to the rez to see him.”

  Marjorie Taylor tossed her blond hair back and looked over at the foreman, who yanked the door open. “The old man said what he thought was gonna help Travis.”

  “What Marjorie’s saying,” the foreman put in, “is those two Indian cowboys stole the petroglyph. Who knows what else they’d been up to? They came here ’cause they had something to hide.”

  Vicky got up. She thanked Marjorie Taylor for her time and, brushing past the foreman, stepped outside. She started walking down the road, then turned back. The woman stood on the stoop, a head shorter than the man behind her in the doorway, both of them watching her. “Where can I find Ollie Goodman?” Vicky said.

  Marjorie tossed her head in the direction of Dubois, another three miles north. “Got a gallery over in town.”

  The man rolled his eyes and shook his head. His mouth was set in a tight line, but Vicky could almost hear the words bunching behind his lips: “Stubborn woman, doesn’t take advice.”

  Vicky swung around and hurried toward the Jeep.

  12

  DUBOIS BRANCHED FROM Highway 287 like a flag stretched from a pole. Another eighty miles, and the highway crossed into Yellowstone National Park, a fact that brought countless tourists through town every summer day. Vicky followed the traffic down Mercantile Street, looking for a vacant place along the curb. It was a town straight out of the Old West. Except for the SUVs and pickups crawling along a street wide enough in which to turn a wagon train, you could picture the gunslingers facing each other, revolvers drawn, and ladies with long skirts and parasols parading along the wooden sidewalks under the roofs that jutted from flat-fronted buildings. Behind the windows blinking in the sun were restaurants, gift shops, bars, Western-wear shops, a bookstore, local museums and art galleries, offering everything tourists, or even the locals, could want. It was hard to tell the two groups apart. Everybody was dressed the same, in jeans, boots, and cowboy hats.

  There were no vacant spaces, and Vicky drove on, hunting the signs over the shops and galleries for some hint of Ollie Goodman. She reached the end of the commercial district and turned into a street lined with small bungalows. As she made a U-turn, intending to retrace her route down Mercantile, she spotted the small sign propped on a single post in front of a Victorian house painted the light green color of new grass. Goodman Galleries Western Art. She left the Jeep in the driveway and followed a brick-paved sidewalk to the wooden porch with a swing on one side and a small, white, wrought-iron table and two chairs on the other. Through the oblong beveled glass window in the door, the paintings on the walls inside collided into different colors and shapes, like the glass pieces of a kaleidoscope. She opened the door and stepped into what had once been a living room. A bell continued jangling into the quiet for a moment after she shut the door.

  The room was filled with paintings hung in uneven rows, stacked in corners and against the Victorian loveseat, the scattered chairs, and the desk on the far side of the room. Mountains and pastures, horses, barns. The paintings captured the sweep of the plains in the sunshine and the reflection of the sky in the mountain streams. There was a musty odor in the room, a combination of oil and turpentine and dust, yet the paintings seemed alive, as if the actual landscapes had been transferred to the canvases.

  Several paintings on the left, above the loveseat, depicted the Taylor Ranch: the old house, gray against the sun-washed vermilion walls of the bluff. But it was the collection on the right wall that drew her. Six paintings of the petroglyphs in Red Cliff Canyon, arranged in two rows that extended from the ceiling molding almost to the gray carpet. Vicky moved closer. She was aware of her heart jumping. The
spirits themselves might have been in the room, the images were so clear and intense. Gray lines of figures carved into sand-colored rocks striped with shadow and light, sheltering under branches of pines.

  “Can I help you?”

  Vicky swung around, startled by a female voice erupting into the silence. A small, middle-aged woman emerged through the door next to the desk. Her dark, gray-flecked hair pulled back into a bun fastened with two black lacquered sticks that stuck out above her head, she wore a red dress with a skirt that flowed over the tops of her black cowboy boots and a belt of silver medallions that draped around her slim hips. Through the door, Vicky could see the clutter of papers and cartons that covered the surfaces of a desk and a sagging yellow sofa with rose-colored flowers.

  “I’m looking for Ollie Goodman,” Vicky said.

  “And you are?” The woman had green eyes narrowed into slits, as if she were staring into the sun.

  “Vicky Holden. I’m an attorney. Is Ollie available?”

  “An attorney?” The green eyes flew wide open. “Whatever has Ollie been up to?”

  Vicky tried for a smile that might set the woman at ease. “I have a few questions he may be able to help me with. It will only take a few moments.” She glanced at the opened door, half expecting a man to materialize.

  “Ollie’s not here,” the woman said. “What makes you think Ollie can help?”

  “He’s familiar with a murder case I’m looking into,” Vicky said. “When could I see him?”

  “Murder! I can’t imagine that Ollie could be of any help.” The woman tucked a little strand of hair into place. “He’s busy painting. Spends the summer working in his cabin. I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere for your answers.”