The Shadow Dancer (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky sank back against her chair. Marcia Bishop. Of course. The woman ran one of the biggest ranches in Fremont County. Vicky had never met the woman, but she’d seen photos of her in the newspaper, awarding trophies at the county rodeo, donating antique ranching gear to the historical society. She was blond and beautiful.

  She started to thank the waitress, but the woman had turned away. A pink flush worked its way along the back of her neck, like a visible wave of regret at having said too much, having gotten involved.

  Vicky fumbled with the cellophane wrapper, nibbled at the cracker, and took a few bites of the thick, lukewarm soup that tasted like congealed buttermilk. She threw a couple of bills on the table, enough for a large tip, and made her way back across the restaurant.

  “How was everything?” The hostess’s head snapped around.

  “Just fine,” Vicky said almost to herself. She was thinking that, first thing tomorrow, she was going to visit one of the most prominent white women in Fremont County.

  18

  My relations, Wovoka has spoken to me a great truth. It is Wovoka’s spirit that dwells within me. I am he, my relations. I am Wovoka come back to you. He has given me his great powers. I can control the elements. I will make the thunder and lightning. I will call forth the great cleansing waters. Oh, listen to me, my relations. The time approaches. You must dance and dance. There is nothing that will stand in our way. Together, we must prepare for the ancestors.

  The AA meeting was about to get under way. Lights glowed through the oblong windows of Eagle Hall, and several pickups stood at various angles in front. From the alley, Father John could see a few people scattered about the rows of straight-back chairs. He’d considered canceling tonight’s meeting—the AA members would probably go to Ben Holden’s wake. Then he’d thought better of it. There might be someone who needed the meeting.

  He needed the meeting; that was the truth of it. He’d wanted a drink all day. Each time the phone had rung, he’d thought it was Vicky, and he’d grabbed the receiver, reaching for her voice, a sense of premature relief flooding over him that she was safe. But it was never her voice on the line, and he’d felt the old tension grip his muscles. A sip of whiskey, that was all he needed. The tension would dissolve. He could remain calm and rational.

  He stuck his head in the doorway and told the Indian woman in the back row that he’d be there in a moment. He had to be there. Then he walked through the darkness to the guest house and rapped on the door. The blue sedan stood a few feet away.

  A moment passed, and he rapped again. The door swung open. Bishop McCall peered out over the half-moon glasses perched partway down his nose. He held a paperback book opened against his light-colored shirt.

  “Everything all right?” Father John said.

  “Ah, more than all right.” The bishop stepped outside. “Would you look at that.” He tilted his head toward the stars sparkling in the darkness overhead. “Peace, quiet, a good steak dinner with old friends, God’s own beauty, a twelve-inch trout waiting for me in the morning.” He pounded the book against his chest. “And a crackling good mystery novel tonight.”

  He lowered his head. Shadows sliced across his round face. “I understand there’s a wake this evening. Well-known man murdered, is that true?”

  “Ben Holden,” Father John said.

  “You have no part in the services?”

  “The family wanted a traditional burial.” The moccasin telegraph had reached the bishop’s friends, Father John was thinking.

  “Still a fair amount of tradition here.” The man pushed the glasses up over his nose. “I understand there’s a revival of the Ghost Dance religion on the reservation.”

  Father John said that was right.

  The bishop was quiet a moment. Unspoken between them, the thought that somehow Father John had failed. The Arapahos still clung to the old ways. “Well”—the bishop glanced up at the stars again—“it’ll be a shame to close this place. We both love it here, John, but . . .” Dropping his head now, staring into the darkness. “We mustn’t think only of ourselves.”

  “The mission belongs to the people, Bishop.”

  The man gave him a sideways smile, and Father John could see a flash of white teeth. “Don’t lobby me, O’Malley. I’m on to all the tricks. Every pastor thinks the world will end if his bailiwick’s closed.”

  Father John was aware of the sound of his own breathing in the evening quiet. He could almost taste the whiskey on his tongue—Dear God, would he never forget the taste? He’d been right. The board was planning to recommend the closure of St. Francis. Even the bishop knew about the plan. Everyone seemed to know except the pastor.

  Out on Circle Drive, an engine screamed and accelerated, tires skidded in a burst of gravel. Father John wheeled about, expecting a truck to careen down the alley and slam to a stop at Eagle Hall. Someone was shouting: “Get outta here! Whites outta here!”

  A dark-colored pickup sped past the end of the alley, kicking out a cloud of gravel, then was lost behind the church, the engine roaring into the night. The pickup came around the far side of Circle Drive. A man raised himself through the passenger window and pointed the barrel of a rifle into the sky. “Sonsobitch!” he shouted.

  “Get down!” Father John grabbed the bishop around the shoulders and pushed him to the ground, then dropped down beside him. The gunshots were coming faster, recoiling around them, punctuating the noise of the truck, the sound of glass shattering, and the shouting and laughing. He could feel the bishop shaking under his arm. People were spilling out of Eagle Hall, running about, screaming and shaking fists into the air.

  Father John lifted his head and shouted, “Go back,” but his voice was lost in the crackle of gunfire. The pickup careened past the alley on two tires, and he threw himself across the bishop’s head and shoulders.

  He counted the seconds. At twenty, he realized the roar of the pickup was farther away, and an eery kind of quiet was moving across the mission, like the quiet following a whirlwind. He waited another ten seconds. The pickup was gone.

  He scrambled to his feet, then helped the bishop upright. “You okay?” he said.

  The man was still trembling, and Father John kept an arm around his shoulder and walked him back to the guest house. His face looked white in the lamplight. He tried to adjust his glasses, both hands shaking against the frame, a perplexed look in his eyes. One of the lenses was shattered.

  “Stay inside,” Father John said. Then he left the man standing next to the sofa bed and ran outside, past the paperback book tossed under the sedan’s bumper, down the alley. Two vacant parking spots yawned in front of Eagle Hall. Three women stood outside the door, one towering over the others. “You all right, Father?” she called.

  “Get back inside!” He pushed his hand against the air. “They might be back.”

  “Bastards won’t be back,” she yelled, her voice edged with hysteria. “Joe and Lou chased ’em outta here.”

  Father John could taste the acid in his mouth. Dear God, they might have been killed. “Are you all right?” he shouted.

  “We know rifle fire when we hear it.” The tall woman raised a fist. “We hit the floor.”

  He gestured toward the hall. “Call the police,” he shouted, then he ran past the church, through the grassy area in the middle of Circle Drive to the Toyota pickup in front of the residence. He gunned the engine and, pulling the door shut, wheeled out onto the drive, then onto the straightaway, glancing both ways on Seventeen-Mile Road before running the stop sign and heading west. He drove into the darkness, his thoughts collapsed into a single intention: He had to catch the pickups chasing the gunmen before somebody was killed.

  19

  They were nowhere. Father John kept the accelerator to the floor and peered into the darkness beyond the headlights. Shadows rushed past the windows. And then, around a wide bend, taillights blinked in the distance. He stomped harder on the accelerator, aware of the chassis and doors shaking around h
im, the pickup bed bouncing behind.

  He drew up behind the taillights: an old sedan doing about forty, tiny head barely visible above the front seat. But there were headlights in the oncoming lane ahead. A light-colored pickup drove past, then another. He hit the brake and made a U-turn. The pickups had already pulled over, and he stopped alongside the first.

  “We lost ’em, Father. Sorry.” Lou LeBois was leaning out the window, one of the breeds on the reservation, descended from an Arapaho woman and a French trader.

  “You guys okay?”

  “No problem.”

  “They could have shot you.” He hadn’t meant to chastise them.

  “We was prepared.” The breed lifted a rifle off the front seat.

  Father John squeezed his eyes closed a moment against the feeling washing over him that some horrible event had been averted. “Mind coming back to the mission,” he said. “The police will want to talk to you.”

  “You got any idea who them bastards are?” The Indian in the other pickup leaned out his window and crooked his head back.

  “Yeah,” Father John said. “I know who they are.”

  “Who’d want to do this?” Ted Gianelli said.

  Father John stood at the window in his office. Three BIA police cars were parked in Circle Drive, blue and red lights blinking on the roofs. Several officers were walking about, stopping from time to time to scoop up something. The office window had been blown out, and a warm breeze blew past the jagged pieces of glass hanging from the frame.

  He turned around. Shards of glass littered the carpet and winked on the papers strewn over his desk. The FBI agent sat on one of the side chairs, a matter-of-fact look about the man, dressed in the usual blue sport coat and tan slacks, balancing a small notepad on one thigh. His thick fingers wrapped around a gold pen.

  Father George slumped in the other chair, elbows locked at his sides, chin dropped onto a fist. Father John had found his assistant standing in the middle of Circle Drive, talking to the officers. The other priest had broken away and walked over to the pickup. “God, what’s going on around here?” he’d said. Then he’d explained that he’d been in the kitchen, he and Walks-On. He dove under the table and pulled the dog—howling and shaking—with him.

  Father John walked over and leaned back against the edge of the desk across from the fed. “I told you. I had a run-in with one of the guards at the shadow ranch. He warned me to leave the reservation.”

  The fed dipped his head and scribbled across the notepad. Then he looked up. “Good time to shoot up the mission. Everybody else is at Blue Sky Hall tonight for Holden’s wake. Can you ID the shooters?”

  Father John shook his head. He’d already told the agent that he hadn’t even gotten the make of the truck. Lou LeBois thought it was a Ford, but he wasn’t certain. Nobody had gotten the license.

  Father George jumped to his feet and announced he was going to check on the bishop. The man had quite a fright, he said, shaking his head. He crossed the office and started down the corridor, his heels clicking on the wood floor. The front door slammed shut.

  Father John swept up another pile of glass specks. George and the bishop. That was great. Tomorrow they would be recommending that St. Francis Mission be closed before somebody was killed.

  He realized the fed had asked again about the shadow ranch. “Start at the beginning,” he said. “Give me all the details.”

  Father John walked back to the window. The scene below was the same: blinking lights, shadowy figures moving about. He told the fed about the armed guard and the two other guards. About Orlando and Janis and Dean Little Horse. “They know where Dean is.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I think Dean went to the ranch Thursday night after he left work. Maybe he stayed for a while, trying to talk Janis into leaving with him. He was gone by Sunday evening, because Janis Beaver went looking for him then.”

  “That’s it?” Gianelli got to his feet and stuffed the notepad back into the inside pocket of his sport coat. “Jesus, John. You’re jumping to a hellava lot of conclusions. All you got from your snooping was a visit from a couple of trigger-happy hotheads who don’t happen to like whites. Lucky nobody was killed.” He started toward the corridor, head down, a linebacker coming off the bench and into the action.

  Father John followed the man outside. “Wait a minute,” he said.

  Gianelli was partway down the steps. He turned and glanced up. The lights threw blue and yellow stripes over his face. “Make it quick. I want to get to the shadow ranch while the tires on any truck in the vicinity are still hot.”

  “What do you have on Holden’s murder?”

  The fed looked away, his gaze following an officer coming down the drive, picking up something, slipping it into a Ziploc bag. “I have to go where the evidence takes me,” he said.

  “Vicky didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I hope that’s true.” He met Father John’s eyes again. “I expect to have a report on the murder weapon tomorrow.”

  “Then you’ll have the killer.”

  Gianelli started down the steps. “We’ll have an indictment,” he called over one shoulder. Then he walked over to the officer, who held up the plastic bag.

  “We’ve found six shells,” the officer said.

  “Get a hold of Chief Banner,” Gianelli said. “I need a couple of BIA cars at the shadow ranch.” He brushed past the officer and walked over to the white Blazer in the middle of the drive.

  “Might want more than a couple,” the officer hollered. Then he went over to the squad car behind the Blazer, leaned inside, and lifted out a black radio. “That’s a tight community,” he called over the static and whining noise. “Don’t like outsiders, especially cops.”

  The Blazer was already pulling around the squad car. It sped out of the mission toward Seventeen-Mile Road.

  Father John crossed the alley and walked along the front of the church, searching the shadows that washed over the white stucco for signs of damage. There was one small chip near the door. He walked down the far side, then circled back and made his way down the alley, checking the walls and windows. The stained glass windows were intact, for which he gave silent thanks. Two windows shot out at the administration building, another two at the residence. A warning, this time.

  He spotted Lou LeBois sitting on the stoop outside Eagle Hall, holding a cigarette off one knee. The end glowed orange. Father John walked over and sat down next to the Indian.

  “You okay?”

  The Indian nodded. “Why do you stay here?”

  The question caught him by surprise. “This is home,” he said.

  “Them Indians want to run you off.”

  “We don’t run off easily.” He hoped that was true.

  The man laughed, then took a long draw on the cigarette and blew a gray plume of smoke into the shadows. “Indians like that don’t make rules for the rest of us.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Can’t live backward. Past is dead. Every day’s new.” He threw his head back toward the hall. “So they say in AA.”

  “Hey, Father.” Leonard Bizzel, the caretaker at the mission as long as Father John had been there, emerged from the alley and walked over. A group of men in blue jeans and cowboy hats crowded behind him. “We been lookin’ for you. We got a lot of warriors on the way over. We’re gonna hang around tonight.”

  “It isn’t necessary.” Father John pushed himself to his feet. The last thing he wanted was an armed guard. “The police will keep an eye on the place.”

  “We got a pickup out at the entrance,” Leonard went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “Another pickup’s gonna be parked by the church. That oughtta discourage the bastards. They’re gonna figure we got guns.”

  “Look,” Father John began. God, somebody could get shot! “I appreciate it, but the cops—”

  The man interrupted. “This is our mission, Father. We’re not leaving.”

  �
��Okay,” he said after a moment. “It’s your mission.”

  20

  Vicky drove down the long driveway, through the ponderosas and junipers, and parked in front of the two-story, log ranch house. A tall, slender woman with large blue eyes and an oval face framed with curly blond hair that looked white in the sunlight stepped onto the porch, almost as if she’d been watching from behind the curtain at a front window.

  “You must be Vicky,” she called, moving to the railing with the litheness of an expert horsewoman whose muscles flowed in rhythm with those of the horse.

  Vicky came up the wood steps. “And you must be Marcia Bishop,” she said. The woman was even more beautiful up close.

  “We might as well get this over with.” Marcia Bishop wheeled around and stepped back into the house. Vicky followed her through the door and down a hallway into a spacious room. Blocks of sunlight lay on the overstuffed sofa and chairs and winked in the large, glass-topped coffee table. A wall of windows overlooked a meadow with a barn and a corral where a couple of ponies nuzzled the fence, and beyond, the rock-bound slopes of the mountains west of Lander.

  The woman planted herself in the center of the room. “Something to drink?” she said, as if politeness required her to ask. She was dressed in a tan, silky blouse, unbuttoned in a long V that exposed her slim neck and pale skin, and brown jeans that hugged the smooth curve of her hips and made her look comfortable and at ease.

  Vicky shook her head, acutely aware of the stiffness of her lawyer clothes: the linen dress and high-heeled sandals that cut into the tops of her feet.

  “Sit down, please.” Marcia Bishop gestured toward the sofa behind the glass-topped table. She waited until Vicky settled herself, then sat in the flower-printed chair across from the table. “I’ve been expecting you, I must say.” She spoke in a precise manner that seemed natural and easy, like a long-accustomed habit.

  “Ben was . . .” She drew in a long breath; her nostrils flared. “A lovely man. Ben was a lovely man.”