Apparition Trail, The (13 page)

Four Finger Pete’s wife spun to face me, a wild expression in her eye. I thought for a moment that her husband’s blood had splattered her, then saw that her nose was swollen and leaking blood. The hand that held the revolver was still raised; smoke drifted from the gun’s barrel. As our eyes met, my mind registered the fact that the fiddle playing and tapping of the dancers had stopped. The only sound was the steady gurgle of the perpetual engine.

I stared at the woman, wondering for a heart-pounding moment if she was about to shoot me as well. The Indians have a morbid fear of hanging, and one who has committed murder will do anything to avoid being taken into custody by a member of the police. I wondered if I could draw my own revolver in time — and if I’d have it in me to shoot so pitiful a figure as the woman who stood in front of me. When that pistol in her hands had gone off, sending Four Finger Pete to meet his maker, I had seen in an instant that she had only been defending her child from its lout of a father. I couldn’t help but marvel at the bravery of this meek and downtrodden member the weaker sex — although it shouldn’t have surprised me. I have heard tales of women running into conflagrations, or attacking wolves with their bare hands, when the lives of their children were at stake.

As if suddenly realizing that she held a gun in her hands, the Peigan woman dropped the revolver. It thudded into the expanding pool of blood at her feet. In that same instant, she rushed forward and pressed her face into my chest. The child in her arms let out a small whimper, but otherwise remained still. It didn’t appear to be injured — it must have been weak with fever.

My reaction was instinctive: I put my arm around the woman to comfort her. She stood no taller than my chin, and I could smell the scent of her hair as she sobbed against my chest. I am embarrassed to admit it now, but I had a reaction to her then that was purely sensual, as I felt the press of her soft body against my own and stroked her hair. It seemed, in that moment, not to matter a jot that she had just shot her husband, and that a child was cradled in her arms. A very sick child: even through the fabric of my jacket, I could feel the heat of the child’s fever.

I heard the sound of running footsteps, and pulled gently away from the Peigan woman as the other passengers on the lower deck ran to where we stood. I could feel that my face was flushed, and was glad that darkness hid it.

The Metis and half-breeds exclaimed in alarm as they saw Four Finger Pete’s lifeless body.

“
Mon dieu!
” one exclaimed. “Murder!”

“His wife ’ave shot ’im,” another guessed.

“If she committed murder in front of a police officer,” another added, “she will surely hang.”

“
Non
,” said the first. “See how he regards her. He cares for her.”

I turned to face the crowd. “I saw the entire incident. It was self-defense. This man—” I gestured at the body “—struck his wife and child repeatedly, then drew his revolver in a rage, with murder in mind. In the resulting struggle, the revolver discharged, and a bullet struck him. His death is not a murder, merely an unfortunate accident, brought about by his own hand.”

The passengers muttered. Despite the weight my uniform lent my words, they obviously didn’t believe me — not fully. The Metis were a suspicious lot, especially now that their leaders were urging them to open rebellion. They had no love of the police.

Then Chambers stepped forward out of the darkness. “I saw it as well,” he said. “The gambler drew his weapon and tried to kill his wife. It would be this innocent woman who lay dead before us if this brave officer of the law had not intervened.”

I turned, surprised, and nodded my thanks. Chambers touched the silver handle of his umbrella to his hat in acknowledgment.

The murmurs of the passengers had changed in tone. They nodded, staring now at the body with the same look that jurors will give a condemned man.

“Will one of you please fetch the captain?” I asked. “And the rest of you, please move on. There’s nothing more to see here.” I leaned down and grabbed a blanket that had already become soaked with blood and flipped it over the body, covering the gruesome remains.

Reluctantly, murmuring to each other and casting looks back over their shoulders, the crowd obeyed. Chambers shooed the last of them away, then vanished into the gloom himself.

The child began to cry again. Four Finger Pete’s wife adjusted its blankets, jiggling it gently in her arms and speaking softly to it in Peigan. Wiping away the blood that had finally stopped flowing from her nose, she pressed a cheek against the child’s brow to check its fever.

Suddenly realizing that I still held the hymnbook, I handed it to her. She at first shook her head, refusing it, but accepted it when I opened it a little to show her the bank notes inside.

“For medicine,” I said, choosing simple words that a woman with only limited English would understand. “For your child.”

Her dark eyes widened, then filled with tears. Embarrassed, I looked at the child in her arms instead. It was too dark to see much, but I could tell that the child was a girl, about a year old, with her mother’s Indian features and her father’s pale blonde hair. The child’s eyes were mere gleams in the darkness as she stared silently up at me. Strange though it might seem, I had the feeling those eyes were taking my measure, as an adult’s might do.

I tore my gaze away from the child. “Don’t worry — I’m not going to arrest you,” I told Four Finger Pete’s wife. “It’s bad enough that your child has lost her father. I don’t want to cause her to be bereft of a mother, as well.”

She shook her head. “Pete not her father.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see.”

Some other man had fathered the child, then — which could very well have been the reason why Four Finger Pete treated his wife so unkindly, and cared so little for the girl’s welfare. I shook my head sadly. Despite his wife’s infidelity, it was no excuse for brutality.

The captain arrived then, tousled as if roused from sleep, and I was kept busy explaining what had happened and discussing what would be done with the body of Four Finger Pete when we arrived at our destination the next morning. The gambler’s wife shook her head mutely when we asked if Four Finger Pete had any next of kin; I supposed it would be up to the traders at Victoria Mission to bury him, now that Reverend McDougall was missing and there was no one to conduct a Christian burial.

Once that was decided, it was time for me to write a report: not to Q Division, since there was clearly nothing paranormal about the shooting of a husband by his wife, but a regular police report of an accidental death. Before I retired to my cabin to set pencil to paper, however, I made sure that the version of the incident told by Four Finger Pete’s wife — whose name, I only learned now, was Emily — would match my own. I repeated for her what I had told the other passengers: that Four Finger Pete had drawn his weapon, and that it had accidentally discharged.

When I was done, she stared solemnly at me. “Thank you,” she said. “I say that. And I also say this: you good man. Do not stay this land. Do not stay here, or when Day of Changes comes, you will be made go.”

I stared at her, wondering if I had understood what she had just said. She spoke only broken English, and I did not speak enough Peigan to ask her what she’d meant. Nevertheless I thanked her before proceeding to my cabin.

It never occurred to me to ask who the child’s father was, but I doubted that Emily would have had the nerve to seek the affections of another man while her husband was still alive. I guessed that she must instead have been ill-used by Four Finger Pete, perhaps given over for the night to one of the men he’d lost a hand of poker to, or prostituted to a trader in exchange for whisky.

Later, I would come to realize how wrong my guess had been.

Chapter III

The empty church — A conversation in the graveyard — A most unusual child — Signs of a struggle — Steele’s urgent message — A very peculiar stone — Descent into darkness — Buffalo! —An unnerving confrontation — The peace pipe — Buffalo tracks

The
North West
reached Victoria Mission early the next morning. First ashore were two of the riverboat men, carrying the body of Four Finger Pete. As they descended the creaking gangplank, a white bird that had been sitting among the reeds along the shore startled and winged its way into the air. The men carrying the body made their way up the bank toward the settlement, sweating in the hot sun. They were followed by a crowd of spectators, old and young: the dozen or so settlers who lived near enough to Victoria Mission to meet the riverboat, and a handful of traders from the fort, on hand to take delivery of the crates of tea, flour and salt pork that filled the
North West
’s lower deck.

Four Finger Pete’s wife followed the canvas-wrapped corpse ashore, carrying her daughter, who was bundled in a blanket. The Peigan woman’s nose was swollen, and there was a purple bruise on one side of her face, but her eyes were free of tears. While the riverboat men made their way to the settlement itself, followed by the curious crowd, she turned and headed in the direction of the trading post. I presumed that she would buy the medicines she needed for her child first, and then attend to her husband’s burial after that. I planned to visit the trading post later myself, to see if the traders had any decent tobacco in stock.

Just before Emily disappeared into the trees, she turned and looked directly at me, as if I had called out her name. My breath caught in my throat: I wondered if thought transference was at work.

I lifted my haversack and strode down the gangplank, glancing back with amusement as Chambers oversaw the unloading of his steamer trunks, valises and boxes from his cabin. Just as he had each day of our river voyage, he had changed into a fresh suit of clothing: today it was a Norfolk jacket in brown serge, matching trousers, and boots with button gaiters. He’d replaced his black derby with a brown one; the black band around it matched his black silk tie. I wondered if he’d chosen the jacket because its cut matched that of the red serge jacket that I wore.

“Go on ahead,” he called out to me. “I’ll catch you up in a moment.”

I smiled and waved back at him. I had every intention of doing just that. Even though Chambers had backed me up by attesting to my version of what had happened the night before, he was a civilian. He might be knowledgeable about psychical phenomena, but I was the expert on physical evidence. I didn’t want him mucking up what little of it might remain here.

The riverbank at Victoria Mission was heavily treed, with a trail leading up to the half-dozen homes that made up the settlement. The Methodist church was easy to find; I simply followed the two riverboat men at a discreet distance as they carried the body of Four Finger Pete up to a tiny graveyard that had been hewn from the forest. I waited while they set the body down, watched them speak to the crowd and point at the ground, and saw the settlers suddenly disperse. I guessed that the riverboat men had asked for volunteers to bury the body and had found none.

I continued down the trail to the church itself. With a peaked roof, it was a one-story rectangular building made from square-cut logs that had been chinked with mud and whitewashed. Although it was a Sunday, the church doors were closed and the building was silent; the Methodists had yet to send another minister to replace McDougall.

I circled around the depression in the soil where the Manitou Stone had stood. It was a squarish patch of bare soil, dry and dusty, with a fringe of grass around the perimeter. The sides of the hole had not been disturbed, leading me to conclude that the Manitou Stone had not been dragged away; it must have been lifted straight up. Yet there were no adjacent tree branches to which a block and tackle could be attached. I wondered how the stone had been carried away; from Steele’s report, I understood it to weigh close to four hundred pounds.

The door of the church was not locked, so I opened it and stepped inside. Three wooden pews provided seating for about twenty people; I set my haversack down on one of them so I could wander about unimpeded. At the front of the church was a raised platform, on which sat a preacher’s pulpit. A stack of leather-bound hymn and prayer books lay on a shelf to one side of the platform. The shelf was dusty, but the books were not, suggesting that they had been restacked there recently. Several of the covers were badly stained, as if the books had been thrown in the mud.

On the other side of the platform stood a melodeon. The small organ had a stool behind it; lying on the floor next to it was a book of
Gospel Hymns Consolidated
that had fallen from the melodeon’s music rack, and some splinters of wood.

I saw the reason for the wood splinters immediately: the melodeon had several deep gouges in it, as if someone had chopped it with an axe. A number of the keys were missing, and several of those that remained were stuck in the down position. I could see a chip of stone wedged between two of the keys, and concluded that an Indian tomahawk must have wrought the destruction.

I placed a hand upon the silent keyboard, my fingers falling naturally into a C Major chord. During the year that I had attended church in an effort to appease my mother, I had been taught the rudiments of the instrument by the minister’s wife. I could still remember the shiver of excitement I’d felt when the church’s massive organ filled the air with strident music as my fingers struck the keys. It was no wonder the Indians feared organ music with such superstitious dread.