The Drowning Man (23 page)

“You're not in a position to understand any of this, John.” Now the provincial's voice was heavy with disappointment. “Perhaps we should talk tomorrow when you're calmer and have a clearer head, when you're….”

Father John was on his feet. “You think I'm drunk?” He could hear himself shouting. Lord, he was providing the provincial with the kind of evidence he was looking for. “We're talking about the pedophile you sent to my mission,” he said, the words measured.

“Your mission?”

“I'm the pastor here. These are my people. You had the moral obligation to tell me the truth.”

“Let me ask you, John. Had I told you the truth, would you have taken Father Lloyd?”

“No.”

“Well, there it is. We have a sick man among us. Should I put him on the streets? Where do you suggest I place him?”

“There's a school on the grounds. We have a baseball team. There are kids coming and going all day long. I was going to let him do some counseling.”

“What? I told you Father Lloyd needed rest. A few routine tasks, maybe. He needs to pray and reflect. You had no right to let him resume counseling. The guesthouse was the perfect place. He could live quietly there. No one needed to know that he was at the mission.”

“David Caldwell knew.”

A sigh of fatigue floated down the line. “The man started hounding Lloyd three years ago. He finds out where he is and launches a campaign to get rid of him. I've moved Lloyd four times now. Obviously Caldwell discovered his location again. He's like a ferret that can find anything.”

“I want Lloyd Elsner out of here tomorrow.”

“He's an old man, John, with a bad heart. He's not going to live long.”

“You find him a home where there are no schools, no baseball teams, no kids.” He thought,
We have become jailors.

“Caldwell will come after him, cause the same ruckus, drive him out of wherever I send him. You don't understand, John. He's like a stalker.”

“There were others, weren't there?” Father John said. “How did you deal with them?”

The line seemed to go dead. A second passed before the provincial said, “We made financial settlements, paid for counseling, offered our apologies. We did what we could. But Caldwell has refused all offers. He wants revenge. He wants to see Lloyd suffer. The abuse happened in Denver thirty years ago. We've turned the complaints over to the police there, but the statute of limitations on abuse has expired. Sometimes I think…” He hesitated, then hurried on. “Caldwell won't rest until Lloyd Elsner is dead.”

“You have to move him, Bill,” Father John said.

“I'll need some time to make the arrangements.”

“There's no time. The people have left the mission. They won't come back until Lloyd Elsner is gone.”

“Give me the weekend.”

“I'm putting him on a plane Monday,” Father John said. Then he dropped the receiver into the cradle.
Two more days,
he was thinking.
Two more days in a deserted mission.

A BELL WAS
clanging somewhere. Vicky felt herself swimming against the dark undertow toward the insistent noise. Then the noise stopped. She realized that she was in her own bed with bright streaks of light outlining the edge of the blinds and that the phone had been ringing. On the nightstand, the red numbers on the clock shimmered through the glass of water that Adam had brought last night: 9:33.

They had driven to her apartment in silence, she and Adam. What was there to talk about? The fact that she'd visited Travis Birdsong in prison? That would have brought another lecture on how they had agreed to restrict the law practice to important matters. Then what would she have told him? That two men in cowboy hats driving a brown truck had tried to kill her? She gave a little laugh, muffled in the pillow. The effort sent a ripple of pain through her rib cage. She could almost hear Adam's voice:
Let the criminal lawyers handle clients like Travis Birdsong. They love cases like that—hopeless cases of unjustly convicted murderers. They live for such cases. They make their reputations by winning reprieves.

She had heard it all before. Silence was preferable. And there had been something else: She knew Adam Lone Eagle well enough to sense when he was angry. He had already guessed where she'd been.

She remembered leaning back against the headrest, conscious of the rhythm of her own heart beating and the hum of the tires on the asphalt. She'd felt drained. She'd hurt all over; she'd hurt with each breath. She'd wanted to crawl into bed and sleep. And fix in her memory the feeling of John O'Malley's lips on her forehead.

Then, somehow, they were walking into the apartment building, Adam's hand warm on her arm. She remembered the weightless sensation as the elevator rose to the second floor, and she was standing in her living room, clutching her bag, statuelike in the space between the front door and the counter that wrapped around the kitchen. Adam was at her side, his arm around her, holding her lightly, carefully. She remembered that. “What can I do?” he'd said. “What can I get you?” He'd led her down the hall to the bedroom. “I'll get you a glass of water,” he'd said.

She'd managed to undress, pull on a nightgown, and crawl into bed. Needles of pain pricked at her back, her hips, her ribs, working through the exhaustion that coursed through her. She was half asleep, vaguely aware of the warmth of a hand on her shoulder, and she was back in the hospital and John O'Malley was standing beside her.

“Sleep.” It was Adam's voice that had punched through the dream. “I'm going to stay with you tonight. Call me if you need anything. I'll be on the sofa.”

Now she threw back the sheet. It was warm and clammy; the flimsy nightgown stuck to her skin. She started to get up, but it was as if her body had stiffened like a fallen tree, and she had to lift herself out of bed piece by piece, leg, other leg, arms, shoulders, back. She stood up and started to stretch, trying to work out the worst of the stiffness. The odor of fresh coffee floated past the half-closed door. From the kitchen came the sound of a cabinet door snapping shut, paper rustling.

She gathered a pile of clean clothes and made her way into the bathroom where she stood in the hot shower for a long while, leaning against the tiled wall, the hot water and steam soaking into her muscles. Then she toweled herself off, dressed in a tee shirt and blue jeans, and, smoothing back her wet hair, went down the hall to the kitchen.

Adam sat at the counter, the
Gazette
opened in front of him, a mug of coffee at the edge of the paper. She felt his eyes following her as she poured herself some coffee and slid onto the stool next to him. “Good morning,” he said.

“I didn't intend to sleep so long.” She hadn't slept through half of the morning since she was a teenager. “You should have wakened me.”

“No way.” He smiled at her. “I checked on you. You were breathing. I figured you needed to sleep.” He got to his feet and pulled a set of keys out of the pocket of his khakis. “You are now driving a red Firebird,” he said, dropping the keys on the counter. “The Jeep will probably be at Mickey's Garage for a week, but Mickey assures me he'll have it in tip-top condition.”

“Thanks, Adam.” Vicky reached for his hand, but he pulled away and walked around the counter. It struck her that he had wanted to avoid her touch.

“Bagel?” he said, pulling an oversized bagel out of the brown bag next to the stove and setting it on a plate. “Cream cheese? Orange juice? I did a little shopping this morning.” He set the plate next to her coffee mug, then opened the refrigerator. In another moment, a tin of cream cheese and a glass of orange juice were in front of her.

“Maybe we ought to talk about it,” Adam said. He remained standing on the other side of the counter, facing her, and there was something in his voice that made her look away. She pulled the bagel apart, spread a glob of the cream cheese on a piece, and took a bite. When she swallowed, it was as if the food had dropped into a hollow space. When had she last eaten? Sometime yesterday, when everything had seemed normal.

Vicky could feel Adam's eyes boring into her. She made herself meet his gaze. “I went to the prison to talk to Travis Birdsong.”

Adam nodded, his gaze still fastened on her. For a moment, she felt like a child, trying to explain why she had misbehaved. The feeling went away, like a bat flapping past, leaving behind a spark of anger. “I'm going to take his case,” she said.

“I know.”

“You know?”

Adam swung around to the phone, picked up a pad of paper, and handed it to her. “You had a call this morning. He wouldn't give his name, but he said it was about Travis Birdsong's case.”

Vicky glanced at the number scrawled across the top page. A local number, not one she recognized.

“Travis didn't get a fair trial,” she said, locking eyes again with Adam.

“I see. A murderer who didn't get a fair trial. It'll be pro bono, right?”

“His lawyer was an incompetent drunk. He never filed an appeal, even though there were grounds.”

Adam was shaking his head. “There are lawyers in Cheyenne, Denver, Billings—take your pick—who would love to take the case pro bono. Get a reprieve for some poor Indian deprived of his right to a fair trial, never mind that he killed a man. Get the poor guy out of prison, get into the newspapers, go on the talk shows, become an expert on TV, and then, what do you know, they've made their reputation as smart criminal lawyers, the kind that guilty people pay large fees to hire. Is that what you want, Vicky?”

“That's unfair, Adam.” Vicky dropped the piece of bagel onto the plate and pushed it away. She picked up the mug, then set it down. She would choke if she tried to take a drink.

“What is it you want?” Adam jammed his fists into his khaki pockets and stared at her. “I don't get it. We're establishing the kind of practice that we agreed upon. Everything's going our way. What is it with you? A raging need to get Arapahos out of prison?”

Vicky got to her feet. “What I have is a raging need to make sure that my people have the same rights as everybody else. If you can't handle that…”

“You're right about that. I can't handle it. We don't want the same practice; we don't want the same things. Julie's right…”

“Julie! You discussed
us
with Julie?”

“She's my former wife, Vicky. I've spent the last few days trying to straighten out her finances, get her to a better place. We have a son together. We have ties.”

“You discussed our relationship with her?”

“Don't tell me you broke all the ties with Ben the day you divorced him. You hated him. You loved him. You told me you went back to him once. You had a history. You had Susan and Lucas. Ties like that can't be broken.”

Vicky lifted herself off the stool and stepped backward—away from the counter, away from Adam. She struggled against the urge to run out of the apartment, down the corridor, down the stairs. Run until she was out on the plains with nothing but the sun on her face and the wind whipping through her hair. What he'd said was true, and the truth of it had slammed into her like a tornado, bringing memories that she didn't want. All those times she had tried to make things work with Ben because of the
ties,
the ties that couldn't be broken—kids, family, history—and always knowing that it could never work.

“This isn't about Travis Birdsong,” she said. “This is about you and your ex-wife and whatever has happened while you've been in Casper.”

“We'll discuss this later.” Adam squared his shoulders and headed for the door.

“We need to discuss it now,” Vicky said to his back.

He gripped the knob, then turned around. “You know that I love you, Vicky,” he said.

“You love her.”

“She needs me.”

Vicky swung around, walked past the dining room table to the window, and stared down at a cream-colored sedan crawling along the street, a boy with black hair pedaling a bicycle toward some imaginary finishing line. The door opened and slammed shut behind her. She heard Adam's footsteps recede along the corridor, until there was only the vacant quiet settling over the apartment.

“Julie needs him,” she said out loud, talking to herself now, like some crazy, lonely woman with no one else to talk to. An ex-husband who was dead. Lucas and Susan grown and gone, living their own lives in Denver and Los Angeles. When did they even talk on the phone? A couple of times a month, and then it was like talking to strangers, her own children, because there was so much to catch up on, so much they didn't know about one another. It was impossible.
Hi sei ci nihi,
the grandmothers called her. Woman Alone.

She watched Adam burst through the glass doors at the entrance below, head for his truck parked at the curb, and climb into the cab. A puff of gray smoke broke from the tailpipe; then the pickup jerked into the lane and accelerated until it had disappeared behind the bushes and trees halfway down the block.

She leaned closer, the window pane cool against her cheek. She had wanted to need Adam Lone Eagle. She had wanted them to need each other. She had willed it to be true, but she had been fooling herself. It was not the true thing. “I'm sorry, Adam,” she said. The fog of her own breath appeared on the glass.

It was a long moment before Vicky walked back to the counter and sat down. A profound weariness wrapped around her like a heavy blanket. She tried to sip at the coffee, but it had turned tepid and bitter. A dull ache coursed through her head, and the stiffness in her body made her aware of her joints and shoulder blades, the outlines of her ribs, as if all of her bones were pushing against her skin. She reached out and brushed her fingertips against the notepad, bringing it along the counter toward her, then studied the unfamiliar telephone number, trying to connect it to a name or a face. Nothing.

Finally, she got up and walked over to the phone at the end of the counter. She tapped in the numbers and listened to the whirring noise of a phone ringing somewhere in the area, her gaze on the window and the white clouds skimming the blue sky.

The noise gave way to a deadness, followed by a thud, as if the phone had been dropped. Finally, a man's voice, “Yes? Who's there?”

“Vicky Holden. I'm returning your call.”

“Ah, Ms. Holden. I believe you have been trying to reach me. I'm Harry Gruenwald.”

“Mr. Gruenwald.” Vicky tried to mask the surprise that hit her. Her secretary had spent the last four days calling bar associations and law firms, trying to find the incompetent attorney that Travis had been stuck with, and had met with nothing but brick walls. Now the man was on the line. “I'd like to talk to you,” Vicky said. “I represent one of your former clients, Travis Birdsong.”

Vicky could hear the labored breathing at the other end, as if the man were sucking air through a tube. “So I understand,” he said finally.

“I can come wherever you are.”

“I'm thinking it over.”

“It's important, Mr. Gruenwald. There's new evidence in Travis's case.” She held her breath. There was new evidence, all right. Evidence that Travis's attorney had been an incompetent drunk.

A sigh floated down the line, like air escaping a balloon. “I knew this would happen someday,” the man said. “You might as well come to my house.”

“Tell me how to get there.” Vicky found a pen next to the phone and began scribbling the directions: Highway 28 south. Popo Agie River. White house on right. “I'll be there in thirty minutes,” she said.

She hung up, went back to the bedroom, and began pulling lawyer clothes from the closet: dark skirt, blue blouse, black pumps, trying to shake the sound of Adam's voice in her head.
What is it with you? A raging need to get Arapahos out of prison?
In ten minutes she was backing the red Firebird out of her parking space, her bag on the seat beside her next to the slim black leather folder with a notepad and pen inside. She shot a glance in the rearview mirror. Her hair was pulled back and clipped with a beaded barrette. She'd dabbed on a little makeup, a touch of lipstick. It would have to do.