The Drowning Man (28 page)

“We're conducting an investigation here, John,” Gianelli said. “We're doing our job. We can't foresee how some psychopath might react.”

“Two men tried to shoot Vicky today,” Father John said.

“I heard.”

“They tried to run her off the road yesterday.”

The fed didn't say anything to that, and Father John waited a moment before he said, “We've lost the chance to get the petroglyph back. The caller will take off with it. The locals will melt back into their daily lives, just like seven years ago, and they'll wait for the next chance to make a big score, if they don't kill Vicky first.”

Gianelli glanced back at the room, and in the play of light and shadow, Father John could see the man's jaw working, but it was a long moment before he said, “Maybe not. My guess is that, as long as he thinks the tribes are ready to pay up, the caller will try to set up the exchange. He's pretty confident that you'll follow instructions now.” He nodded at the motel behind them. “You know what he can do. No way can you go in alone.”

Father John watched the three men hoisting a gurney with the lumpy body bag on top. They headed across the sidewalk and between two police cars toward the coroner's van. The rear doors hung open against the dim light suffusing the interior. Finally, he said, “It's our only chance. You want the killers. The tribes want the petroglyph. Let me get the petroglyph before you come in.”

Gianelli shook his head. “I don't want you or anybody else ending up dead. You're out of this. You take the call, and you call me. Understood?”

Father John didn't say anything. He turned and headed out into the parking lot toward the pickup.

IT WAS A
tradition after Sunday Mass. Greet the pastor in front of the church, comment on the homily. Always polite comments, even from parishioners he'd seen dozing off in the middle. Usually the line stretched up the steps and back into the church vestibule, but not this morning. There had been only a dozen people scattered about the pews. Three or four white people from Riverton. A few Arapaho elders and grandmothers. No families, no children. The Mass was half finished when Norman Yellow Hawk had let himself in through the door and slipped into the last pew. Father John had understood. The councilman had come to make sure that Father Lloyd Elsner was still leaving.

Father John had said the last of the prayers, taking his time, searching for comfort in the familiar words that fell around him like fine rain:
What shall I give to the Lord for all the things that He has given to me? I will call upon the Lord. Praising, I will call upon the Lord, and I shall be saved from my enemies. The Lord be with you and with your spirit. Thanks be to God.

“Got the news about the Indian on the telegraph,” Norman said now, shaking his hand. There was a fierceness in the man's grip. The elders were forming a circle around them.

“Spirits are upset,” one of the elders said. “We're not protecting them, way we oughtta. That's how come the evil…” the old man gestured with his head in the direction of the guest house. “…came right into the mission. Wouldn't've happened if the spirits had been watching.”

Father John told the elders that Father Elsner would be leaving the next day. Across the sidewalk, the three grandmothers were huddled together, brown faces shadowed with concern. He knew they were listening to everything.

It was then that he noticed the stocky white man walking across Circle Drive, thick arms swinging at his side. He didn't look familiar. Not one of the people from Riverton he'd gotten accustomed to seeing at Sunday Mass.

“We'll never hear from him again,” Norman said, and for a moment, Father John thought he was referring to Father Elsner. “Guy that's got the Drowning Man. He's gonna take off like last time. Didn't want to leave any loose ends, so he killed the Indian. Nobody around that might know what he did with the glyph.”

“Gianelli doesn't think so,” Father John said, but a part of him believed that Norman was right. The idea had circled through his head all night. The man with the glyph—the raspy voice on the phone—intended to take it to Denver or Santa Fe or Phoenix, or wherever he'd taken the last glyph, sell it on the black market, and take the profits himself. There would be no Indian to connect him to the locals. No Indian or locals to pay off.

“How come you found the Indian?” Norman asked. The others moved closer, brown, wrinkle-streaked faces turning a little so that Father John could speak into their ears. He glanced at the white man, standing in front of the church next to the cottonwood, and said that he'd gotten a message to go to the motel. The heads of the elders nodded in unison, as if that made sense.

“You heard anything today?”

“It's still early,” Father John said, but the councilman was nodding. He'd already proved his point. The stocky white man kept his eyes on some point across the mission, as if he were watching something in his head.

“I'm gonna call Mooney, guy that runs the bank,” Norman said. “Have him come to the tribal offices this afternoon. Hope I can get him at home.” The elders were staring at the ground. The grandmothers pulled blank faces, mouths tightened into silent lines. “No sense in keeping that much money around any longer,” the councilman went on. “We're not gonna be needing it for the glyph. Mooney can put it back into the bank.”

“I'm sorry,” Father John said. It hadn't played out right at all. No cops, the raspy voice had told him, yet he'd managed to lead Gianelli and the whole Riverton Police Department to the Indian. Now the man was dead, the Drowning Man probably lost.

The little group started moving back, a circle pulling away from him. They turned almost in unison—elders, grandmothers, the councilman—and started for the pickups in Circle Drive. Father John waited until the engines coughed into life, one after the other, and the little procession of pickups had turned past the cottonwoods on the way to Seventeen-Mile Road.

“Welcome to St. Francis,” he said, starting across the grass. The white man was dressed like a local—blue shirt, blue jeans, and boots—but he wasn't local.

The man came toward him, a slow, lumbering walk, as if he weren't sure of his footing. “That's funny,” he said. “You're welcoming me here, real funny. You know who I am?”

“You're David.”

The man stopped a few feet from him. He was in his midforties, Father John guessed, close to his own age, with the shadow of a beard tracing a prominent jaw and longish dark hair brushing the edge of his shirt collar. They'd been boys at the same time, and the thought gave Father John a sinking feeling. The priests he'd known then—the pastors, the teachers—had been so…so good. He had wanted to be like them.

The sun slanting across the man's face accentuated the pockmarks, as if he'd suffered from smallpox as a kid. The hair at his temples was sprinkled with gray, and there were gray hairs that stood upright in his bushy eyebrows.

“Thank you for letting us know,” Father John said. He was thinking that Father Lloyd Elsner might have been counseling some kid tomorrow.

“How could you not know? How could you let him come here? That's a school over there, right?” He lifted one arm toward the school out by Seventeen-Mile Road. “You got kids around here.”

“That's why I'm grateful to you.”

The man blinked and ran the palm of his hand over the stubble on his jaw. He glanced away for a moment, then brought his eyes back. “I looked up to him. I trusted him.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

“No,” he said. “I do have to tell you. I have to make you understand what he did to me. I was just a kid. Fourteen. I'd just turned fourteen when my dad died and Mom sent me to the Jesuit school. ‘They'll make a man out of you,' that's what she told me. I didn't wanna go to that school, you know what I mean? It wasn't where my friends went, so I started raising hell, and they sent me to the counselor. Father Lloyd Elsner. I really got on with him. He had this fancy car, and he said, ‘You wanna drive my car?' I said, ‘Yeah.' I never drove a car before, so we drove out into the country, just him and me. We got way out where nobody was around, and he pulled over and let me drive. That was the first time it happened, while I was driving. He put his hand down my pants.”

David Caldwell glanced away again and bit at his lower lip.

Father John didn't say anything. He was still wearing his vestments—the priest's vestments. The sun seared his shoulders. Even the breeze was hot, and branches of the cottonwood seemed to move with effort. He felt fixed in place by the man's pain and the force of his own anger.

“I didn't know what the hell he was doing,” David went on. His hands were shaking. “He said, ‘It's okay. I'm not hurting you, am I?' he says. And after that, it kept happening. Sometimes in counseling, sometimes in his car. I never told anybody. I thought I must've done something really bad for this to be happening to me. By the time I was a junior, I was bigger than he was, and I told him, ‘No more of that.' He didn't care, 'cause by then he'd found younger boys. So I put it away, stopped thinking about it. Then I flunked out of college, and my wife, she left me and took my kids. I married again, and she left me, too. And the jobs. God, I've had a thousand jobs. Three years ago, I finally knew what I had to do. I had to make sure that Father Lloyd Elsner didn't ruin any more lives.”

Father John waited a moment until he was sure the man had said what he needed to say. Then he told David Caldwell that he was sorry. Sorry for what another priest had done to him. Words—they were as flimsy as air. He made himself go on, saying that it was evil, that it never should have happened, and as he talked, he thought that something began to change and move in the man's eyes. It was like watching ice begin to melt.

“Father Elsner is leaving here soon,” he said.

“Where will it be this time?” The hard stare had returned. “Which neighborhood? Which school will be down the block?”

“That won't happen again.”

Now disbelief flashed in the man's eyes. The pastor of a remote Indian mission? What power did such a priest have?

And yet, sometime in the middle of the night, his thoughts jumping between the image of the dead Indian to the pedophile in the guesthouse, Father John had known what he would do, and he'd realized that Bill Rutherford also knew. Lloyd Elsner would be sent to a place where he could not harm anyone else. Otherwise, he would call the Jesuit Conference, explain how the provincial had violated canon law by placing a pedophile at the mission without informing the pastor, and Bill Rutherford, his old seminary drinking buddy, would no longer have his job.

“I give you my word,” Father John said. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the faintest movement in the alley, like a shadow flitting over the ground. The old priest appeared at the corner of the church and stopped.

David Caldwell spun around, as if he'd sensed another presence, and for a long moment, the two men locked eyes. Then Father Lloyd turned and started back down the alley.

The other man watched until the old priest had disappeared from view. “He's always younger in my mind,” he said.

“He'll be gone soon. You won't have to worry anymore. The offer that the provincial made is still open.”

“What? Money? You Jesuits think you can buy back my life? I don't want money.”

“Counseling.”

The man didn't say anything for a moment. Then he shrugged and started across the grass toward a tan sedan, the only vehicle still parked in Circle Drive. He glanced back. “I'll think about it,” he said, before lowering himself behind the wheel.

The sedan moved slowly, then sped up around the drive, tires spitting gravel. For an instant, Father John thought the sedan might miss the turn and slam into one of the cottonwoods, but it held the road and shot into the tunnel of trees.

Father John went back into the church. He knelt at the altar a few moments—
We are in need of your mercy, Lord
—then headed into the sacristy, took off the chasuble and alb, and hung them in the closet. He checked to see that the Mass books and the chalice were in the cabinets, then let himself out the back door and walked over to the guesthouse.

He could tell by the hollow sound of his fist against the door that the house was empty. He stepped off the stoop and headed down the alley in the direction of the river. He could see snatches of white hair moving among the trees.

“I don't know that man,” Lloyd Elsner said when Father John caught up with him. “I have never seen him in my life.”

“He recognized you.”

“He's lying. You're all lying.”

Father John waited a moment before he said, “I have to take care of my people. You're going to have to leave.”

“He'll come after me. Distributing his filthy flyers, talking to the newspapers.”

“I don't think so.”

“I'll never have any peace.”

“He's suffered a great deal.”

“Lies!” The man swung around and walked over to a fallen log. He turned back, and Father John could see that he was trembling. He clasped his hands together, as if he might keep them from flying away. “It wasn't what you think. I loved him. I loved those boys. I never hurt them. You wouldn't understand, would you, about love? Love doesn't hurt people.”

“I'll pray for you, Lloyd.”

“I don't need your prayers. God knows what was in my heart. You can't understand.”

“I want you to pack your things,” Father John said. He was thinking that there were so few. A worn suitcase with a red belt around the middle.

“There's no place for me, is there? I shall always be hounded. Wherever I go, David will be there, or another one…I'll never have any peace.”

“I'm sorry,” Father John told the old priest. Then he turned and headed back through the trees, down the alley, and across the grounds to the residence. Father Ian burst through the door as he was coming up the steps. “You have a call,” he said. “I was coming to get you.”

“The provincial?”

The other priest shook his head.

Father John brushed past and hurried into his study. He picked up the receiver. “Father O'Malley,” he said, but the line was silent, the receiver a dead object against his ear. He pressed the numbers 57. “Unavailable” appeared in the readout.

“Who was it?” Father John turned to his assistant, who had followed him into the study.

“Man, asked for you. I told him you were on the grounds. He said, ‘Go get him. He'll want to talk to me.' He'll probably call back.”

Father John stared at the phone. He felt a surge of relief. It was a good sign. The man was still in the area.