Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  “Bustamante doesn’t think so. Going back through the articles might trigger something.”

  “You’ve talked to Bustamante?”

  “Of course. What do you think? He called an hour ago.” Marjorie stepped back to the door and pulled it open. “He wants you to call him immediately if you find anything in the articles.”

  5

  Catherine walked back into the noise of the newsroom—the ringing phones and jangling activity. She could feel Marjorie’s eyes on her. Then she heard the door slam shut. She retraced her steps to the cubicle, ignoring the curiosity in the faces behind the glass panels. The red light on her phone was blinking furiously. More messages had come in. She pressed the message button and wrote the date at the top of the notepad.

  “Sorry to hear about your troubles . . .” Catherine hit the delete button. There were seven or eight similar messages from other readers. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She deleted them all. She supposed she should be grateful that someone out there actually cared, but the messages left her feeling hollow inside, as if she were listening to eulogies at her own funeral.

  “Honey, I’m so worried. Please call me right away.” Catherine stared at the phone. It was Marie’s voice, strained and comforting at the same time. She picked up the receiver, dialed Marie’s number, and listened to the noise of the phone ringing in the house in Highlands. Then Marie picked up: “Catherine?”

  “I’m okay,” Catherine said. “I don’t want you to worry about me.”

  “Oh, my goodness, I’ve been so upset. The neighbors have been stopping by, and I didn’t know what to tell them. Are you certain you weren’t hurt?”

  “No. No. I’m fine,” she said. She let this hang between them a moment before she told her that Maury was in pretty bad shape.

  “Who would do such a thing?” When Catherine didn’t say anything, she went on: “You better come stay with me. Don’t you think that would be a good idea? Rex can have the run of the yard.”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said. Then she made up an excuse about having to take another call, told her not to worry, and hung up. She probably should have said yes, yet the thought of leaving the town house, moving even a few of her things into the old redbrick house on top of the hill, settling into the upstairs bedroom that still had the pink bedspread and curtains, even for a few days, a week, a month—how long would it take Bustamante to arrest the man?—was crazy. She had built a new life; he would not take it away.

  She pressed the message button again. “Catherine, it’s me.” Lawrence’s voice. Even when weeks went by without hearing from her ex-husband, she could still summon his voice in her head. “I’m terribly worried about you. Call me right away and tell me you’re all right.” A faint click followed by the buzzing noise.

  Catherine lifted the receiver again and called him back. He answered on the first ring. “Tell me you’re not at work,” he said, incredulity working through his voice.

  “Where else should I be?” she said. “I can’t sit at home. I’m not even supposed to be there.”

  “Of course not. You can’t stay alone at the town house, not until they get the bastard. Who was he?”

  “God, Lawrence. I have no idea.”

  “You’re not hurt, right? He didn’t hit you, or—” He stumbled over the thought.

  “He didn’t do anything to me. He shot Maury.”

  “The divorce lawyer.”

  Catherine didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve called Gilly at the ranch, told him to get the cottage ready for you. He’ll stock the kitchen. You can stay as long as you like. You’ll be safe there, Catherine, until they put that SOB in jail.”

  “I can’t do that,” she said. This was even worse than the idea of being drawn back into childhood. She would be drawn back into the wide net of security and comfort that Lawrence Stern and his family cast over everything and everyone they touched. “A detective is handling the case. He’ll get the guy.”

  “Until that happens, you have to stay at the ranch.” There was the authoritative note of a man used to being obeyed. “It’s all arranged. You know the way.”

  “Did your grandmother agree to the invitation?” Catherine said. Elizabeth Stern, the matriarch of the family, had never agreed to the marriage. She had attended the wedding ceremony in the gothic apse of St. John’s Episcopal Church where generations of Sterns had taken their marriage vows only because it would have created a scandal had she not been there. She stared narrow eyed out of the wedding photos, her face a powdery mask.

  “Let me worry about Grandmother.”

  Catherine was quiet a moment before she said: “I just wanted you to know that I’m all right.” Lawrence was saying something as she replaced the receiver. She deleted the rest of the phone messages—two more from readers, several from acquaintances. She couldn’t call them friends. Friends had been hers and Lawrence’s; they had remained his friends. She turned her attention to her e-mail, scrolling down the screen. The messages looked like more of the same: concerned readers, people with whom she exchanged pleasantries at the coffee shop or the deli.

  The headache had developed fingers that stretched across the top of her skull. Halfway through the messages, she saw the name Norman Whitehorse. The subject: rally. Norman was the Arapaho who had alerted her to the fact that the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes intended to file claims on half their ancestral lands, which amounted to twenty-seven million acres, nearly one-third of the state of Colorado. She’d gone to the Indian Center and interviewed Harold YellowBull, an Arapaho elder, and James Hunting, a Cheyenne elder. Norman had arranged the interview, an exclusive, he’d promised her. He had been waiting outside the glass door entrance, straight backed and slim in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, black hair pulled back in a ponytail and narrow black eyes. Smoke curled from the cigarette burned down to a stub in his fingers.

  “Don’t ask questions,” he had told her. “Just be quiet and wait. The elders will want to check your heart first.”

  “What?” She’d stopped at the door and turned to him.

  “Make sure you have a good heart before they talk to you. They know you’re one of us.”

  She hadn’t said anything to that. She looked Indian, black hair and dark complexion. Let them think she was Arapaho, if it meant getting the exclusive.

  They had sat at a round table in a corner of the cafeteria, sipping black coffee out of white mugs. Other tables had been pushed toward the walls and a teenage girl with long, black hair was running a mop across the green linoleum floor. The old men had been reticent at first. Nodding, smiling, taking long draws of coffee.

  Then they had begun talking. The black eyes looking out across the cafeteria toward some other time and place. This was their land, their place on the earth, they said. From the Continental Divide out across the plains, all the beautiful mountain slopes and prairies had belonged to the Arapaho and the Cheyenne. It was called the land between the two rivers, the Platte River on the north and the Arkansas River on the south. The government had sent commissioners out to Fort Laramie in 1851, Harold YellowBull said, and James Hunting had nodded. Yes, that was right. And the commissioners had made a treaty with the tribes on sheets of paper. Oh, they had seen copies of this treaty. The treaty acknowledged that the land between the two rivers belonged to the tribes. A total of twenty-seven million acres.

  Covered over by concrete highways and asphalt streets, Catherine had been thinking. And steel and glass skyscrapers and miles and miles of residential neighborhoods that constituted the city of Denver and the sprawling suburbs, and dozens of smaller cities, ranches, and farms, and close to three million people.

  But there was something else they had spoken about, and this had made her glimpse the heart of the story, and she’d known that the story had legs. In the early dawn of November 29, 1864, the Third Colorado Regiment had attacked the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps at Sand Creek on the plains of southeastern Colorado. “So many of our people were killed there,” Harold Ye
llowBull said. “One hundred and sixty of ’em, mostly old men and women and children. The troops waited until the warriors had ridden out of camp to go hunting, get enough meat to feed the camp.”

  James Hunting had shifted forward, brown, knobby hands clasped around his mug. “Rest of the people, they were driven off our lands. They never came back to Colorado. Experts are calling that massacre at Sand Creek genocide, ’cause that’s what it was. They tried to exterminate our people.”

  Catherine had understood right away. Despite the fact that the tribes had agreed to a $15 million settlement for their ancestral lands, this new claim—that the massacre at Sand Creek was an act of genocide—might erase any other settlements or agreements. It was possible that Congress might agree to reconsider the Arapaho and Cheyenne land claims. The tribes could never reclaim the old lands—the elders said they knew the truth—but they might get enough land to operate tribal ranches, raise cattle and horses, maybe even grow hay and barley. The ranches could provide a steady income for the people.

  “Rally 3:00 p.m. this afternoon,” the e-mail said. “Peter Arcott says he’ll show.” There was a map attached, and she hit the print key.

  Peter Arcott. Catherine jotted down the name. She would check it on the Internet later. The printer next to her desk had spit out a map of black, blue, and red lines. The red lines outlined a rectangle on the plains east of Denver, near the airport. Five hundred acres of bare dirt and scrub brush, undeveloped and wild, the black line of I-70 running across the northern border.

  She folded the map inside her notepad. She would have time to cover the rally and still get to the hospital this afternoon. She ran her eyes down the rest of the e-mail messages. More of the same: readers and acquaintances whose names she barely recognized.

  Here was something different. She felt her stomach lurch. She didn’t recognize the e-mail address. In the subject line were the words, “Last Night.”

  She clicked on the e-mail and watched the text appear on the screen. “Say good-bye, Catherine. Your friend, Erik.”

  Catherine took I-70 East, weaving around the semis and buses and jamming down on the gas pedal to pass the slower vehicles. She’d put the top down in the Journal parking lot, and the sun glinted on the dashboard and beat hard on her arms and hands. The sounds of Coltrane on the CD mixed with the noise of the wind. Through her dark sunglasses, the highway ahead looked bathed in shadows. Miles of squat buildings and warehouses—the industrial outcroppings of Denver— blurred past. In the rearview mirror, she could see a semi shimmering in the hazy heat, splashes of sunlight beaming on the metal bumper. The windshield looked like a black wall in the brightness, as if the semi were driving itself, some anonymous danger hurtling toward her. She pressed down on the gas pedal, passed a couple of cars, then settled into the outside lane ahead of a blue sedan. In the rearview mirror, she could see the cab of the semi looming over the line of vehicles. Beyond the semi, the front range of the Rocky Mountains, blue and streaked with snow, lifted into a perfect blue sky.

  She took the exit that Whitehorse had marked on the map, and within a half mile, she was driving down an unpaved road that flung itself ahead like a yellow gash across the plains. There were scatterings of gray sagebrush and clusters of old cottonwood trees along the banks of dry creeks. The air smelled of dust and sage and the outdoors. The great wall of mountains curved in the distance. She could see Pikes Peak a hundred miles away. The white Teflon peaks of the airport roof glimmered in the rearview mirror. The roof was supposed to resemble the snowy peaks of the mountains, but she’d always thought that was wrong. The roof resembled the tipis of the villages that had once stood on the plains. Clouds of dust rolled behind her, and a gust of wind battered the side of the convertible and blew her hair about. She lifted her face into the sun a moment and let her hair blow free. Then she propped her elbow on the top of the door and held her hair back. She wasn’t sure when she had lost the headache, but it had dropped somewhere behind. Each time she drove onto the plains, she had a sense of freedom.

  The brown envelope that contained a month of stories rippled in the wind on the passenger seat. Somewhere in the articles was the reason that a man called Erik was determined to kill her. And somewhere inside her she had known it was true. She hadn’t wanted it to be true. She hadn’t wanted the truth to change her life the way she knew now that it would.

  She’d called Bustamante, told him about the e-mail message, then forwarded it while he was still on the line. He’d remained silent a moment, considering the message, she knew, and she had gone on talking, rambling on about what she intended to do, not wanting Erik’s words to fill up all of the silence. She would take Bustamante’s advice, and everyone else’s it seemed, and stay somewhere else until he’d arrested the man.

  “You will find him,” she’d said, trying to reassure herself.

  “It’s my every intention. I’ll get a warrant right away on the Internet service provider. They’ll have his name.” He hesitated a moment. “Chances are he isn’t using his real name. Where will you go?”

  She’d told him she wasn’t sure, and yet that wasn’t the truth. Not only did Erik or whoever he was know where she lived, he knew where she worked. He knew her. There was every possibility that he knew where Marie lived. She couldn’t put her mother in danger. But the Stern ranch was in the mountains, twenty miles from Denver, and it was private—a private retreat for the Stern family for more than a century. There were only a few people who even knew the family had a ranch, although, if anyone had taken the time to think about it, they would realize the family must have a ranch. Most of the old Denver families had ranches in the mountains where generations of wives and children had escaped the summer heat while the men built the buildings and houses, railroads, water systems, streets, and public transportation that turned a prairie settlement into a city.

  Erik might know about the ranch; he was sure to know she’d been married to Lawrence Stern. Still, there was no address in a phone book, no signs on the road. A log fence ran around the periphery, and there were iron gates across the only entrance, with an intercom on the post. Gilly Mason guarded the property like a Marine sergeant. He opened the gates only for people who were expected. There were security cameras everywhere. If they detected any movement, Gilly dispensed a half dozen ranch hands, armed with rifles. She would be safe at the Stern ranch.

  She’d told Bustamante that she had to go to the town house, get Rex, and pack a few things. She should call him first, he’d said. She shouldn’t be alone. He’d have a patrol officer at the house.

  She’d been reluctant to hang up, she remembered, as if the detective’s voice at the other end meant that everything would be all right, that her life wouldn’t change after all. Bustamante had been the one to end the call. She’d stared at the inert receiver a moment before she’d dropped it into the cradle. She’d started shivering then, as if a freezing wind had blown through the newsroom. The pain had exploded in her head. She’d had to force her attention back to the computer: Erik would not steal her life. She would not allow it.

  She’d spent several minutes looking up Peter Arcott. She’d found numerous websites, the same information highlighted in bold, black type. Developer. Hotels. Restaurants. Resorts. Indian casinos in Alaska, Nevada, California.

  It was then she’d understood what the rally was all about. This was what Whitehorse, her contact, a man she’d trusted, had done: He’d drawn her into a story about tribal claims for ancestral lands. He had known the elders would talk about an old massacre that nobody cared about, and he had taken the chance that she would care. She’d written an article on Sand Creek, the surprise attack, the lost lands, the injustice of it all. The article would pressure Congress to consider the new claims. The story would influence the people of Colorado to agree to an Indian casino on the plains—people who had voted seven times against any more casinos in the state. And she had written all of it without realizing what the story was about.

  Little clouds
of dust rose against the horizon ahead. Catherine spotted the rows of pickups and SUVs parked off-road in the bare dirt and the crowd beyond the vehicles. A platform had been erected, and dancers in Indian regalia—splashes of whites, yellows, blues, and reds against the brown backdrop of the plains—swayed to the rhythmic sound of drumbeats that pounded through the wind.

  She turned off the road, bumped across the dirt past the rows of parked vehicles, and stopped next to a green pickup feathered with dust. People were walking toward the crowd in front of the platform, some of them pulling on ribboned shirts, beaded aprons, and feathered headdresses. Several men wore headdresses made of eagle feathers that draped down their backs, the kind of headdresses she’d seen in old photographs of the Plains Indians.

  She went to find Norman Whitehorse.

  6

  Catherine spotted Norman next to the stage with a group of Indian men, all brown skinned and black haired, faces tilted up toward the dancers. A splash of color wove across the stage in rhythm to the steady beat of the drums. The feathers in the dancers’ headdresses fluttered in the hot breeze. Norman wore a white shirt that stood out in relief against the dark plaid shirts of the others. His black hair, smoothed back and tied in a ponytail, shone silver in the sun.

  She looked around for Marcus Henning, the Journal photographer. She’d called him before she’d left the office. He was on another assignment, but he’d promised to get here. There was no sign of him. Digging the notepad and pen out of the bag slung over her shoulder, she made her way through the crowd bunching in front of the stage. She found herself glancing about, searching the faces of the men, aware of the tightness in her muscles. Erik could be here.

  Which didn’t make any sense. There hadn’t been any public announcements of the rally—nothing in the papers or on the radio or TV. If Norman hadn’t e-mailed her, she wouldn’t have known about it. How could he know she was here? And yet, there were two or three hundred Indians standing in a blistering sun that had dried the land to dust. Somebody had made a few phone calls, and news about the rally had passed around. That’s how it was in the Indian community, she suspected. They had their own way of getting the news. Still it didn’t mean Erik had found out, unless he happened to be Indian. She had to hold herself together, not fly into pieces.