In the shadows beyond the windows, he could see the rows of cubicles, computer monitors, and keyboards on the desks. A cone of light shone over the center of the office, where a man in a white T-shirt with sleeves rolled to the shoulders, earphones clasped over his head, and hips swinging side to side, steered a vacuum cleaner about, as if the machine were a stiff, unwilling dance partner.
Father John waved, but the man kept pushing—pushing and dancing—lost in the rhythms probably blasting in his ears. He swung around in an awkward tango, and Father John waved again. This time, the man looked up, his round, pinkish face frozen in a mixture of surprise and fear. He let go of the vacuum, pointed to his wristwatch, and shook his head.
Father John gestured toward the closed doors in the shadows beyond the light. Some poor, overworked manager might still be in the office. But the man waved him away, then turned around and curled his back over the vacuum cleaner.
Back in the pickup, Father John made a sharp U-turn in front of a truck, which sent out a loud blast. The noise reverberated off the parked vehicles. He waved in the rearview mirror at the driver, who was giving him the finger. Five minutes later, he was on Highway 789 heading north, a profusion of stars popping like firecrackers in the sky. The spiky shadows of junipers passed outside the passenger window, and outside his window, the Popo Agie River reflected back the stars, like a long, narrow mirror.
He slowed past the steak houses in Hudson, then turned left into the shadows of Rendezvous Road, his thoughts still on Dean Little Horse. College degree, good job, grandmother and great-aunt, and a girlfriend looking for him as recently as last night. A man like that didn’t just step off the earth. First thing tomorrow, he decided, he would pay another visit to the Blue Crow Software Company.
Ahead, around a wide bend, blue, red, and yellow lights flashed into the gray dusk. Father John could see the vehicles blocking the road, men moving in slow motion, flashlight beams crisscrossing the flashing lights. Shards of broken glass glistened on the blacktop.
He stopped next to a policeman in the navy blue uniform of the BIA and leaned out the window, craning to see past the vehicles. “Anyone hurt?” he said.
“That you, Father John?” The officer moved closer and shone a flashlight in his face. Colored balls of light exploded in his eyes for half a second. “Chief Banner’ll want to talk to you.” The policeman turned the flashlight on three officers standing next to the dark truck parked ahead of the police cars.
Father John inched ahead a short distance, set the gear in park, and got out. The breeze was warm, laced with the odor of manure and something he couldn’t identify for certain. Smoke? Voices, subdued and serious, mixed with the crackle of police radios. In the lights swinging over the white cars, he saw Art Banner, the Wind River police chief, coming toward him.
“How’d you hear?” The chief was only a couple of feet away, but he sounded like he was shouting through a bull horn. The lights alternated over the round, dark face.
“Hear what? What’s happened?” A single-vehicle accident, Father John was thinking. Besides the police cars, the only other vehicle was the dark truck.
It was then he saw the shattered windshield and the figure slumped over the steering wheel, as still as death. It hit him like a sledgehammer in the chest: he’d found Dean Little Horse.
“We got a homicide.” The chief tilted his head toward the truck. “Looks like he might’ve stopped to help somebody. Trying to be a good Samaritan.” He stared for a moment at the plains extending into the shadows beyond the road. “Took a bullet in the head for his trouble. Anonymous call came in from one of the steak houses in Hudson about forty minutes ago saying somebody was dead out here. That’s a fact. He’s dead, all right.”
“Who, Banner? Who is he?”
For a moment, the chief stood motionless in the flashing lights. Then he took off his cap and drew a fist across his brow. “Thought you must’ve heard already, John. Thought that’s why you showed up here.” He took in a long breath, as if he were trying to get enough air to expel the name: “Ben Holden.”
6
Father John stepped past the police chief and walked over to the truck. He had a sense of unreality, as if he had stepped into a nightmare of darting lights and hushed, disembodied voices. The brown Ford truck was solid and clear, real. Inside, collapsed over the steering wheel, was Ben Holden: the humps of his shoulders beneath the blood-soaked shirt, the head falling against the steering wheel. His temple was smashed, bloody.
He couldn’t remember when he had last seen Ben Holden, what they had talked about. It made no difference. The unspoken subject between them had always been Vicky.
A flashbulb went off behind him, suffusing the slumped body in the yellow light that exploded in the shattered windshield. The police photographer moved in closer and took a couple more shots, then backed away.
Father John reached inside the window and began tracing the sign of the cross over the man’s head. “May God have mercy on your soul, Ben,” he whispered. “May He take you to Himself and grant you peace.” He was startled by the grief that hit him, like a cold blast out of nowhere. He and Ben were alike—they might have been twins—battling the same demon, loving the same woman, in need of forgiveness and redemption. Redemption took time—a lifetime. Someone had robbed Ben of his time.
Out of the corner of his eye, Father John saw the shadowy figures converging on the truck. The breeze swept off the plains and swirled little bits of dust and twigs over the blacktop.
“This is gonna be the FBI’s case.” Banner’s voice behind him. Father John turned slowly. “Agent Gianelli’s on the way. Meantime we’ve got the weapon. Twenty-two-caliber pistol tossed in the barrow ditch over there.” He gestured toward the ditch a few feet beyond the truck. “Lab’ll pick up the fingerprints,” he went on, a new confidence in his voice, as if his professional duties were the only thing of which he was sure. “Gianelli’ll run a trace on the gun, see if he can identify the owner. My boys’ll lift tire prints, if we find any.”
Father John realized the chief had been hit by the same wave of grief that had hit him. Ben and Art Banner went back a long time. They’d grown up together, served in the Army at the same time, married the same year. There was the shock of it, the death of a man who had always been around.
The chief said, “Family’s got to be notified.”
“What about Vicky?”
“Just about to send White over to tell her.” Banner glanced at an officer standing behind the truck. “I’d go myself, but the fed’s . . .”
“I’ll tell her,” Father John said. His shirt felt moist against his back. This was the toughest part of being a priest, bearing the bad news that no one wanted, like a ragpicker appearing at the door with a burden of trash. And with the trash—words, that was all he had. Weak, indistinct, inexact words to try to convince the family that God would not desert them.
He started toward the pickup, then turned back. “You have her address?” They hadn’t spoken, he and Vicky, since she’d returned to Lander. But she’d been on his mind. He’d picked up the phone—how many times?—wanting to know how she was, wanting to hear her voice. Each time he’d set the receiver down. There’d been no legitimate reason to call her: no parishioners thinking about divorce, no one picked up for selling pot or driving drunk. The moccasin telegraph kept up a running account of her new office, new apartment, but she hadn’t called.
A faint look of surprise crossed the chief’s face. There was an awkward beat of silence, and Father John wondered about the gossip on the moccasin telegraph that never reached St. Francis Mission, at least not his ears.
“Hold on.” The chief nodded to the officer behind the truck, but the man was already thumbing through a notepad. He leaned into the flashing lights and read off an address.
Father John knew the place, a two-story apartment building with white railings around the second-floor balconies—a New Orleans building plunked down on the plains. He started for the
pickup; the chief’s voice trailed behind, ordering White and another officer to drive out to Spring Valley Drive and notify Ben’s brother.
Father John backed across the road, then headed south the way he’d come, saying the same prayer over and over: “Lord, have mercy on the Holden family.”
The apartment was warm and stuffy, and even though she’d stood in a hot shower for twenty minutes and wrapped herself in her white terry cloth robe, Vicky couldn’t shake the cold that gripped her. What had she been thinking? That she could return to Lander and go on as before? That Ben would be on the other side of Blue Sky Hall at tribal gettogethers. Across the aisle at powwows. How was she doing? Oh, fine. And he? Just fine. A woman at his side, strikingly beautiful, clinging to him for her very breath. And Susan and Lucas on the phone: You hear what Dad’s up to? They’d relate how Ben had increased the herd and accomplished other amazing feats to make the Arapaho Ranch the most successful in the state.
But he wouldn’t be in her life.
She’d been wrong. Ben would never leave her alone. What did she have to do to be free? The iciness inside her, she knew, was anger as distilled and pure as crystal. She would be free when one of them was dead.
She sat down on the sofa, tucked her legs under her robe, and tried to concentrate on the report she’d given to Weedly this afternoon. She had to build a strong case, if she was going to convince the JBC to go back to court over the Wind River. It was important. The river was dying. They had no choice.
An insistent knock sounded at the door. She froze, her heart pounding in her ears, her breath trapped in her lungs. Some part of her had been waiting for Ben to come to the apartment. The Bronco in the parking lot, the light filtering at the edge of the drapes—he could see that she was here.
The knock came again. She got up, went to the door, and peered through the peephole. On the other side: the tall, handsome man, the blue eyes, the red hair glinting under the ceiling light. A wave of warmth and surprise washed over her. Then she realized that John O’Malley would never come here unless something had happened. She yanked the chain free and opened the door, her hands shaking. Something terrible had happened.
“I have to talk to you.”
“Susan?” she said as he stepped inside, his eyes never leaving hers. “Something’s happened to Susan? Lucas? What? An accident? You’ve got to tell me.” She was struggling not to scream. She knew how it went: An accident somewhere. The police called the mission, and Father John O’Malley drove out to deliver the horrible news.
“It’s not your kids, Vicky,” he said. Taking her hand, he led her to the sofa.
His voice had seemed to come from far away, the words seeping into her consciousness a half-second after he’d spoken them. She was still shaking, an involuntary motion that worked its way into the muscles of her arms and legs.
She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “Who, then?”
“It’s Ben, Vicky. He’s dead.”
She stared at him, unable to summon a response. There were no words to contain the reality. Two hours ago, she and Ben were having dinner at the restaurant. They’d argued. He’d pulled off the tablecloth, sent their dinners flying over the floor, and stomped out. There must be some mistake. She could still see the wrinkled back of his white starched shirt.
“Accident?” Her voice sounded low and cracked in her ears. She realized John O’Malley was holding both of her hands in his.
“He was shot on Rendezvous Road,” he went on, his tone punctuated with sorrow. Something about Ben stopping to help someone. The police getting an anonymous call.
She couldn’t understand. Nothing was making sense. She withdrew her hands and pulled back against the cushion. She was drowning, she thought. Wave after unfathomable wave of disbelief and confusion crashing over her.
She realized that John O’Malley had gone into the kitchen. There were the sounds of a faucet squeaking open and water splashing into the sink. How odd to be drowning, she thought, when the inside of her mouth was as dry as a bone.
He was standing over her, handing her a glass. She took a long sip of cool water. Then, steadying the glass in the folds of her robe, she looked up at him. “I’m responsible,” she said.
“Vicky . . .” he began, but she put up one hand to silence him.
“We were supposed to have dinner this evening. Instead we had another argument. It was terrible. Ben . . .” She hesitated, blinking at the scene burned into the back of her eyes. “Ben stomped out, and I thought, I thought, the only way I would ever be free was if one of us was dead.”
“No, Vicky.” His voice cut through the fog in her head. He sat down beside her. “Whatever you thought, it didn’t make it happen. It didn’t kill Ben. That’s magical thinking.” She felt his hand covering hers again. “You must try to be rational.”
She yanked her hand away. She knew all about white man’s rationality. She’d sat through their logic classes and studied their laws. What did they mean? What the elders taught, that was the truth.
“You don’t understand.” How could he understand? “We must guard our thoughts. We must send only good thoughts into the world, because once they exist, they become real. They become reality. I’m responsible . . .” She dropped her head into one hand. The tears were coming, a dam bursting, for the man she’d once loved and for the way things should have been.
“I’m so sorry.” He took her glass of water and set it on the coffee table. Then she felt his arms slipping around her, pulling her close. She leaned against his chest, feeling as if time had stopped. She could hear his heart beating. How fitting that John O’Malley was here. Of course he would come to her. Curious, she thought, that in the new world she’d tried to carve for herself since she’d divorced Ben, this white man had become so necessary.
There was a thud on the door. A second passed before John O’Malley settled her back against the cushion and got up. “Ted Gianelli,” he said behind her. “He may have more information.”
“Give me a minute.” Vicky lifted herself to her feet. She made her way down the hall to the bedroom—shaky, dizzy. She untied her robe, tossed it over the bed, and pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white cotton blouse, her fingers numb as they worked the tiny front buttons. The male voices floated from the living room like the low rumble of drums.
In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face, then stared at the woman in the mirror: mussed black hair; dull, black eyes; face blanched of color, like someone who had been ill a long time. Her ancestors would have chopped off their hair, slashed their arms and legs with knives—a fitting expression of the enormity of death.
She ran a brush through her hair and put on some lipstick. The woman in the mirror was transformed, a rational look about her, like an attorney, a white woman. She went back to the living room.
“Rotten news, Vicky. I’m very sorry.” Ted Gianelli, the local FBI agent, was standing next to Father John, twin pillars of solemnity caught in the light from the table lamps. The agent was dressed in a dark sport coat and light trousers with knifepoint creases, a red paisley tie knotted at the collar of his light blue shirt, as if he’d dressed for the office and this was just a routine part of the day. His short black hair lay tightly against his head; his fleshy face remained as immobile as a mask.
“What happened?” Her voice sounded shaky. She dropped onto the sofa, and Father John walked over and sat down beside her.
“We don’t have all the facts yet.” The fed pulled a side chair over and perched on the edge. “Looks like Ben stopped voluntarily. There’s no sign of skid marks. Could be somebody was in trouble.”
Vicky nodded. That made sense. The reservation was Ben’s place. He was perfectly at ease there. If someone needed help, Ben would stop. A chief was responsible for the welfare of his people.
“What was it? A robbery?”
Gianelli shook his head. “He had a hundred dollars in his wallet. Some very expensive tools in the lockbox in the truck bed. No sign t
hat anyone tried to break in.”
“The killer could have been scared away,” Father John said. “Maybe he saw headlights coming down the road. Banner said somebody passed by and called the police.”
Gianelli leaned forward, rested his elbows on his thighs, and clasped his hands between his knees, as if he were considering the possibility, his face still unreadable. Finally he said, “Police got an anonymous call from a pay phone in Hudson. Caller said he didn’t see anything except a guy sloped inside the truck. But we’ve got the gun. Twenty-two-caliber pistol. Should tell us something.” The agent turned toward her, anticipation working into his face muscles. “Ben Holden was a strong and powerful man. Men like that make enemies. What can you tell me, Vicky?”
She closed her eyes. The scene at the restaurant reeled through her mind in slow motion. She saw clearly now, all the details, nuances, and shadows she’d missed the first time. Ben wasn’t angry with her. He was angry before he came to the restaurant. She was the catalyst that caused the explosion. She had always been the catalyst: the ranch equipment broke down, the kids misbehaved, she said something wrong, and the explosion burst forth.
She looked at the agent. “Ben was angry when I saw him.”
“You saw him this evening?” Something changed behind Gianelli’s eyes.
“We met at the Peppermill.” Vicky paused, gathering the details. “He said two ranch hands—Lakotas—had ripped him off.”
“Ripped him off? You mean stole something? Embezzled money?”
“He didn’t say. He’d talked to them this afternoon. He said he’d straightened everything out.”
“Where do I find the Lakotas?” The fed was jotting notes in a notepad he’d fished from the inside pocket of his sport coat.
Vicky shook her head.
“What time did he meet you?”
“About seven-fifteen.”
“When did he leave?”
The scene was still rolling across her mind. She tried to calculate how long it had taken the waitress to deliver the hamburgers, how long they had argued. “It must have been close to eight.” Then she added, “We had an argument.”
The Shadow Dancer (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 5