The Shadow Dancer (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Margaret Coel

  She tapped out the first three numbers, then stopped, her fingers numb against the keys. The shadow dance would end tonight. Whatever great event Orlando had planned would happen tonight.

  She dropped the receiver, went into the bedroom, and stripped off the lawyer clothes—the linen dress, the hose and sandals she’d worn all day. If everything went okay, she’d be home by ten. She’d call the kids and arrange to meet them for breakfast tomorrow before they left.

  She pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a black T-shirt and jammed her feet into her sneakers. Then she tied her hair in a short ponytail. Rummaging through a closet shelf, she found a black waist pack and walked back through the apartment, gathering up the items she might need: screwdriver, tiny flashlight that fit in the palm of her hand, metal nail file. She pulled her cell phone and apartment key from her bag. Then she found her camera in the desk drawer and inserted a new roll of film. She jammed the items into the waist pack, except for the small key, which she stuck in the pocket of her jeans where she could find it without rummaging through the pack.

  Ten minutes later she was driving north onto the reservation, trying to recall everything John O’Malley had said about the shadow ranch. Armed guard at the entrance. Dirt road over the ridge into the village, guards around the periphery. When she was a child, she’d gone to the ranch with her grandfather to buy a bull. There was no guardhouse then, no village. Just a log ranch house where she’d sat at the kitchen table and licked at the sucker Mrs. Sherwood had given her. Through the window, she’d watched her grandfather and Mr. Sherwood leaning onto the top rail of the fence, the black bull pawing at the ground on the other side.

  She turned west at Fort Washakie and began winding up a graveled road. Dusk was moving down the slopes like a storm. She tried to fix the map of the ranch in her mind. Ranch house, barn and corral, a couple of shacks. The dynamite would be in one of the shacks, away from the house.

  She turned right where the road branched into a Y and continued climbing. The gravel road stopped, and the Bronco bounced along the dirt two-track that cut through the boulders and scraggly pines spilling down the slope. Around a bend, in the gray light, a small wood structure with a peaked roof came into view.

  She turned off the headlights, let up on the accelerator, and crept forward. The guardhouse was coming closer.

  And then she saw the clearing outside the passenger window. She maneuvered out of the two-track, across a narrow ditch, and through the clearing. She set the Bronco under a canopy of branches, the bumper nosing against a boulder, and cut the engine. The guardhouse was about a hundred feet away.

  She waited, not breathing, half-expecting the guard to appear in the rearview mirror. The wind hissed in the trees around her. She was alone. She tried to locate her position on the map in her mind. The road to the ranch cut over the ridge on the south. Guards could be patrolling the road. She had to stay north and work her way upward around the trees and boulders.

  She got out and, keeping her eyes on the guardhouse, buckled on her waist pack. Then she ducked low and started through the trees, her sneakers crunching the pine needles. The air was clogged with odors of pine and dried earth. She moved from shadow to shadow, plotting the route as she went, staying close to the branches that scratched at her hands and pricked at her T-shirt and jeans.

  The line of trees gave way to another clearing with patches of grass and scrub brush at the base of the slope. On the left, the two-track intersected with the dirt road that curved out of sight. The guardhouse was close; she could see a shadow moving inside.

  She moved back into the trees. A large man filled the doorway, then stepped outside. The white buckskin shirt and trousers, the flat, round face and ponytail—she took all of it in, but her gaze fastened on the rifle in his hands. He walked down the two-track, glancing in the direction she’d come, then swung around and started into the clearing.

  She held very still, watching him come closer. The rifle, a black cannon pointing toward her. He stopped, turned around, and went back into the guardhouse. A light flickered on, and the guard hunched over a shelf, as if he were writing something. He was making out a report!

  She ran across the clearing and, still running, started up the slope. Darkness was coming on fast. It was getting harder to see. The ground rose steeply beneath her; she could feel the pull in her calf muscles.

  She leaned onto the cold surface of a boulder and gasped for breath. A wall of rock loomed above, too high to climb. She edged along the base until she came to a place where the boulders looked manageable. Jamming one foot into a crevice, she propelled herself upward, the air burning in her lungs. She steadied herself and lunged for a higher boulder.

  And then she saw the flash of white as another guard came along the top of the ridge, rifle slung over one shoulder. She held still, the edge of the boulder cold and jagged against her palms. She could feel the guard’s eyes on her.

  The seconds crawled past. It was a long time—a lifetime—before she heard the shush of footsteps rocking away, as if the man were limping. She edged along the boulder until she could see the white suit silhouetted against the gray sky, the dark head bobbing. Then she pulled herself onto the top and, crouching low, darted across the flat, treeless ridge.

  Directly below, sheltering in a stand of cottonwoods, was the dark shadow of a log ranch house with dim lights twinkling in the windows. Behind the house were the shadows of the barn and two small sheds. In the meadow to the left was the village: about twenty tipis arranged around a clearing filled with white figures circling silently around the bonfires. The orange flames licked at the white clothing.

  A crowd was milling about the tipi that stood apart from the others, facing the east. Orlando’s tipi, she realized. The tipis of the leading men were always set apart. People ducked in and out of the opening, a deliberate intensity in the motion. She was wondering if Orlando himself might appear, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flash of white again moving toward her on the ridge.

  She slid down the slope and crouched behind a boulder, still watching the guard. Coming closer. Then he turned and started back the way he’d come. He was dragging his left leg.

  Vicky began working her way downward, slicing off the slope in dog legs. She reached the bottom and sprinted through the cottonwoods toward the house. She stopped next to the porch that extended across the front, watching the windows for some movement inside. There was nothing.

  After a moment, she walked up the steps and peered through one of the windows. Pushed against the living room wall were several tables covered with computers and monitors with white, ghostly lights shining into the shadows. Odd, after all these years, how she remembered the interior: living room, dining area, and kitchen on the left; bedroom on the right. But the wood-framed sofa and chairs, the crocheted doilies over the backs, the braided rug were gone.

  She moved past the door to the other window. She could make out a cot and a small table. There were no sounds. The house was vacant.

  She stepped back and tried the door. To her surprise, it opened and she went inside. There were no cabinets or chests in the living room, nothing in which to store dynamite. She pulled her flashlight out of her pack, went into the kitchen, and started flinging open the cabinet doors. The tiny beam played over paper plates, a can of coffee, and in one cabinet, stacks of brown prescription bottles. She focused the beam on one of the labels: James Sherwood. Valium. Take two pills daily for muscle spasms. The beam moved to another label: James Sherwood. Vicodin-ES. Take two pills daily for pain.

  She ran the light over the other labels: the same prescriptions from different pharmacies. Some pharmacies were in Denver, others in Riverton and Lander. It struck her that Sherwood had been stockpiling the drugs. She shook several bottles. They were empty.

  She retraced her steps through the living room to the bedroom. The closet was empty. She checked under the cot. Nothing.

  She went back into the living room, leaned over a monitor, and t
apped a key. The white light dissolved into a blue background with rows of brightly colored icons. She clicked on the e-mail program—there could be something, some hint of what Orlando was planning. Even that might prove the dynamite was here.

  She waited until the white blocks outlined in black began to take shape. Thirty new messages flashed on the in-box, all with similar subjects: “We love you, Orlando.” “Pray for us, Orlando.” “My offering.”

  She opened the last message. “I’m sending two hundred dollars to you for your preaching. I want to join you in the new world.” She opened another and another. They were like the first. She wanted to laugh. Orlando, preaching a return to the old Indian ways, using the Internet.

  She clicked on bookmarks. A list of website URLs popped up. She was about to select the URL for the shadow ranch when her eyes fell on the line below—the address for the Bureau of Reclamation, Bull Lake Dam. She highlighted the box and brought up the site. A color photo of Bull Lake, like the photo in the tribal engineer’s office, rolled onto the monitor. The lake wrapped into the mountain slopes, as quiet and blue as the sky.

  Black lines of text started forming below. She slid into the chair in front of the monitor, not taking her eyes away. She was reading the specifications for the dam! Height, ninety feet. Materials, earth covered with concrete on the inside and boulders and rock on the outside. Capacity, 156,000 acre-feet of water. Enough—the realization made her cold—for a great flood. She scrolled back to the photo of the lake and the dam. With sickening clarity, she understood why the Lakotas had brought the stolen dynamite to the shadow ranch. Orlando intended to blow up Bull Lake Dam.

  Voices, a snatch of conversation, broke into her thoughts. She glanced at the window. Shadows were moving across the porch toward the door.

  27

  Vicky slid off the chair and moved into the kitchen. The scuff of her sneakers was like drumbeats on the plank floor. Behind her, the front door creaked open. She lunged for the back door. The knob froze in her hand. The orange and yellow lights from the bonfires reflected in the window next to the door. It was then that she saw the man dressed in white standing out back.

  She stepped away from the window, heart thumping, legs shaking, and glanced about the kitchen. Cabinets too small to hide in. Table. Three chairs. Stove. Refrigerator in the corner.

  “I tell ya, somebody’s here.” A high-pitched, nervous voice bounced through the quiet. Light burst on in the living room and spilled into the kitchen.

  “Check the bedroom.” There was an edge of anger in the second voice. “I’ll get the kitchen.”

  The sound of footsteps rose toward her. Vicky darted past the table and squeezed into the corner on the far side of the refrigerator. The footsteps stopped, and a fluorescent bulb staggered into life overhead. She blinked in the brightness and pressed against the cool, smooth surface of the refrigerator. The man outside plastered his face against the window, his breath making a gray smudge on the glass. The slightest turn to the left and he would be looking right at her. She stopped breathing.

  The man in the kitchen stood near the table. She could see a slice of him: the thick shoulders and thigh beneath the buckskin suit, the brown fist at his side. A maroon scar seemed to pulse in his cheek. An odor of male perspiration floated toward her. The sound of his breathing was quiet and controlled, like that of a wolf stalking its prey, ready to lunge at the smallest movement.

  “Bedroom’s clear.” The high-pitched voice from the living room broke through the quiet.

  The man with the scar relaxed his shoulders into a flabby mound. He gave a wave toward the window, switched off the light, then moved out of sight, and the footsteps, steadier, more relaxed, receded into the living room. “Called me in here for nothing,” he said. The living room light went off. “Get back on the ridge. This ain’t the time to get nervous.”

  The guard outside was still peering through the window, shining a flashlight beam over the kitchen. The slim beam shimmered over the countertops and the table. Coming closer. Vicky slid back along the refrigerator until her shoulder and arm jammed into the wall and the plug in an electric socket scraped her leg.

  “I seen somebody running across the ridge.” An aggrieved, squealing sound came into the high voice. “I know what I seen, and I ain’t seein’ shadows.”

  “Yeah? Nobody’s here.”

  “Hold on.” The high voice again. “Looks like somebody’s been messin’ with this here computer.”

  Oh, God. She’d left the website on the monitor. She pressed her face into the smooth, cold refrigerator and tried to swallow the bile rising in her throat. She was going to be sick.

  “What the hell?” The light switched on again in the living room, and now the kitchen window reflected the image of the broad-shouldered man with the scar standing next to a shorter man with one shoulder lower than the other. They bent over the monitor.

  “Tol’ ya somebody’s—”

  “Jesus, Martin,” the big man interrupted. “Orlando must’ve sent somebody over to check the dam, that’s all. We don’t want no mistakes. All the same, I don’t want nobody in here I don’t know about.” He drew himself upright and moved out of view. Vicky heard the sound of a key rattling in the front door. Then, his reflection in the window again, moving toward the kitchen. The shorter man fell in beside him, walking in a jerky motion.

  Their reflections were gone from the window, and they were in the kitchen now. Vicky had a clear view of them in the shadows at the door. The man with the scar uncurled his fist, inserted a key in the lock, and yanked the door open.

  “You giving orders for the prophet now, Roy?” the other Indian said.

  Roy. The man with thick shoulders and the maroon scar was Roy He-Dog. The short, limping man was probably Martin Crow Elk. She was close enough to reach out and touch Ben’s killers.

  “Nobody’s gonna bother the prophet,” He-Dog said, stepping outside. “Medicine man’s taking care of him. All we gotta do is follow our instructions. Can’t have any mess-ups.”

  The door closed with a force that rattled the windowpane and ran through Vicky like an electric shock. There was another jingling noise, and she realized that He-Dog had reinserted the key and was locking her inside.

  They were gone. She could hear the voices receding toward the village. She crept to the door and grabbed the knob. Rigid. Struggling against the waves of panic that flooded over her, she moved to the window. There was no one outside; the guard must have left with the others. The tipis glowed through the trees, and light from the bonfires striped the ground and sides of the barn. The perfect ad for a dude ranch, she thought: Come experience the Old West. She gave a burst of laughter that sounded like a cry.

  The window was the old-fashioned type with two vertically sliding panes. She turned the lock in the center, then gripped the metal handle at the bottom and pulled. The window held fast. She examined the thick globs of paint around the edges and realized the window was painted shut. She made her way around the periphery of the house. All the windows, painted shut.

  She pulled the cell phone out of her waist pack and punched in 911. The Lakotas were here now; she’d seen them. The police, Gianelli, somebody had to get here. The phone felt inert in her hand, and she stared at the tiny green letters in the readout: NO SERVICE. A sense of unreality floated over her. She was in an unreal world, far from the normal, everyday things.

  She went back to the kitchen, took the screwdriver out of her waist pack, and started chipping at the frame. Little specks of paint pricked her hands. She cringed at the noise, then tried the window again. Still stuck. She stepped back. She could keep chipping—maybe it would work—but the noise could attract the guards.

  Think! she told herself.

  The big man had locked the doors with a key, which meant the other guards could also have keys, and that meant an extra key might be stashed somewhere. She raised herself on her toes and groped along the top of the door frame until her fingers ran over a small piece of
metal, cool and jagged, wedged in the crack. She managed to coax the metal over the lip of the frame. The key dropped at her feet.

  She picked it up, unlocked the door, and ran outside, down a path to the barn, still gripping the key, trying to stay in the shadows. About thirty yards away, the tipis wrapped around an arena filled with the orange and red light of bonfires. A large crow perched on top of the pole in the center. The dancers were wheeling in slow motion through the flickering light, their long shadows moving over the tipis. At the entrance to the tipi that faced the east, a guard stood motionless, one hand gripping the black barrel of a rifle.

  Vicky climbed through a log fence behind the barn, ran to a small shed, and tried the door. Locked. She moved sideways until enough light fell over the door that she could see the keyhole. She jabbed in the key, hoping the same key would fit all the locks on the ranch buildings. The lock remained rigid. Glancing back at the tipis, she inched around the corner to the window. It was black inside. She dug out her flashlight. The light beam fractured in the black glass, then spread over the shelves inside crowded with stacks of folded blankets, bolts of white cloth, industrial-sized cans of food. The labels weaved in the light: BEANS. STEWED TOMATOES. CHICKEN SOUP. In one corner was a pile of logs and branches, the kind Grandfather always kept to start campfires.

  She let the light rest on each shelf for a moment. No sign of dynamite. The dynamite would be in the other shed, as far away as possible from the food and computers.

  Switching off the flashlight, she picked her way past the pine branches toward the flat-roofed shed outlined against the gray sky. Through the trees, she saw the guard coming along the periphery of the village. She stood still until he was out of sight, then hurried to the door.

  It was also locked, and she tried the key, but it stuck in the keyhole. She had to yank hard to disengage it. She walked around the outside. There were no windows. She could imagine the oily, pungent odor of dynamite in the darkness.