The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (23 page)

VICKY HAD REACHED
the top of the stairs in her apartment building when the cell started ringing. She fumbled among the hard and soft surfaces in her bag and extracted the small, smooth object.
Adam
appeared in the readout. She hurried down the corridor, pressing the cell against her ear. “How are you?” she said.

“Look, sorry I couldn’t talk earlier. The wake was about to start. Are you okay?”

She was fine, she told him, trying to inject the calmness into her voice that she wished she felt. She jiggled the key in her lock. The door behind her cracked open over the sound of Adam’s voice talking about the wake, the relatives he hadn’t seen in years, the feast the women had prepared.

Vicky glanced around. Mrs. Burton curled herself around the edge of the door across the hall. She glanced between Vicky and the elevator at the far end, her expression frozen in expectation, as if someone else might step past the elevator doors or emerge from the top of the stairway. Vicky gave the old woman a little wave and, still trying to follow what Adam was saying, pushed open her own door.

The strangeness hit her like a sharp gust of wind the instant she stepped inside. The apartment was shrouded in shadows. A thin beam of light from the corridor cast a tungsten glare over the small entry and the dining table. The wall beyond the table was in darkness with the cardboard tacked over the broken window. On the right, the darkened shapes of the sofa and chairs loomed against filmy light that filtered through the window blinds. She had an odd sense of
disturbance
, as if things had been looked at, pawed over, moved. As if another presence had inhabited her space.

“Vicky? What is it?” The tenseness in Adam’s voice was like a beam of light shooting into the shadows. She tried to focus the jumble of thoughts in her mind.

“Hold on,” she said, clamping the cell against her ear. She pushed the door against the wall to widen the column of light flowing inside, then flipped the light switch. The fluorescent lights in the kitchen staggered into life and swelled out over the dining area and into the living room. There was no one there, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been there.

“What’s going on?”

“I…I don’t know.” She left the door ajar and headed down the short hallway. “I just got to the apartment,” she said, checking the utility room behind the kitchen, then the closet. “I have the feeling someone was here.” She reached past the doorjamb and turned on the bedroom light. Everything was the same as this morning when she’d left, except for the strangeness—the sense that someone had moved through the apartment, rearranging the atmosphere.

“What are you talking about?” A rising note of anxiety sounded in Adam’s voice.

She crossed the room and looked into the bathroom, then flung open the closet door. No one. No one. She was imagining things. It was the noise of the gunshot and shattering glass from last night, the shock of it—that was all. “It’s okay,” she said.

“You sure?”

“I’ve checked,” she said. “There isn’t anyone here.” But someone had been here. She could sense the absence of the intruder.

“Lock the door,” Adam said.

She was already down the hallway, closing the door. She turned the lock.

“I don’t like it,” Adam went on. “You should go to…” He paused, and she waited for him to say the mission. “Aunt Rose’s,” he said. “You should spend the night there. The apartment isn’t safe with that psycho on the loose. I shouldn’t have left you…”

She started to reassure him then, saying she’d be fine. She told him she was going to Denver tomorrow for an interview with the lawyers defending the man who assaulted the girl in the alley. She’d be gone two or three days, depending on how things went, and that should give Detective Coughlin and the police time to find the man in the silver sedan.

“I’ll be back by then,” he interrupted. “I won’t leave you alone again.”

Vicky took a moment before she said, “I found out she went to Denver.”

“We’re talking about the skeleton again.” Adam exhaled a long breath that sounded as if he were blowing into his cell. “Haven’t you accomplished what you set out to do, Vicky? Coughlin’s investigating the murder. Sooner or later he’ll find last night’s shooter and wrap it up. Let it go.”

“There was a safe house in Denver,” Vicky said. “The people at the house must know what happened to her.”

“For God’s sake…”

“Adam, I need your help.”

“Look, I told you I don’t want to bring up AIM with my cousin.”

“He might know about the safe houses that AIM had in Denver. He might know where they would have sent a girl in 1973.”

“What? So you can go there while you’re in Denver? It was over thirty years ago!”

“Please, Adam,” she said. “I know she fled to Denver. Someone named Robert Running Wolf sent her there. She thought she’d be safe. I have to know what happened when she got there. Your cousin might know about the house. He might remember Robert Running Wolf. He might know where he is now.”

“He might not know anything,” Adam said. Vicky could hear the sharp edge in his breathing. A long moment passed before he said, “And then you’ll be done with it?”

She’d be done with it, she told him. When she knew what had happened, she was thinking. She sank onto the stool at the kitchen counter told him about meeting with Charlie Crow this morning and how he’d threatened Mammoth Oil during a phone call. They were going to have to file a complaint with the EEOC, she said. Roger could start interviewing the Indian employees while she and Adam were out of town. Adam agreed to all of it. Vicky could hear in his voice the way he was settling down, moving away from the past and a girl murdered so long ago that everyone had forgotten, focusing on what was important now. After a few more minutes, she told him good night and pressed the end key, feeling as if a distance had opened between them as vast as the plains rolling across Wyoming and South Dakota.

It was close to eleven when she crawled into bed, drained and exhausted. But the sense of strangeness had begun to lift, like the steam rising out of a lake. Just moving about the apartment, snapping on the television, listening to the voices of newscasters drone into the living room as she made herself a cup of tea and toasted a slice of bread—ordinary things—had brought back a sense of normality. Everything was fine. She was nervous, that was all. She had to get a grip on herself.

SHE SAT UP
straight in bed and squinted at the neon numbers on the clock until they were no longer a red blur in the darkness: 1:29. She felt cold and clammy. She could feel her pajama top clinging to her back, like a second skin. The sense of danger had come again and awakened her like a clanging bell—
You must listen
, Grandmother had said. She shifted her legs off the bed, moving slowly, tentatively, as if the movements might be interrupted, until she felt her bare feet plant themselves on the carpet. Her heart had started pounding in her ears, the noise so loud it must fill the apartment, she thought. Anyone here would hear it.

She worked her way around the foot of the bed and past the dresser, then inched along the wall, the plaster catching at the thin fabric of her pajamas, until she was at the window frame. She glanced around the edge, still pressing against the wall, her muscles tense, waiting for the gunfire. The street below was empty, nothing but the flare of lights from the streetlamps over the gray asphalt and dark stalks of trees and clumps of bushes. Beyond the circles of light were the gloomy nighttime façades of the brick bungalows across the street. And in the place where the sedan had been parked last night—nothing.

Nothing. God, she had to get a grip.

She walked down the hall and across the living room to the wide window behind the sofa. The blinds were closed, strips of light outlining the rectangular shape. She approached sideways again, laced her fingers into the edge of the blinds, and peered through the tiny opening. The far side of the street was also vacant. The same dull yellow flare of the streetlamps over the quiet, motionless patches of grass and trees and sleeping houses. There was the faintest sound of an engine, and she held her breath and leaned closer to the opening. A dark sedan was coming along the street, but it was a steady, purposeful speed. The sedan crossed the intersection and drove past, red taillights flickering in the darkness.

The blinds rattled against the window frame when she dropped them. She started to make her way back through the dimness, then walked across the front of the sofa instead to the slit of window behind the lamp. She always left the blinds down to hide the view of the apartment building across the alley.

Now she inched the narrow blind to the side. The building loomed in front of her, a dark brick wall with vertical rows of windows from the sidewalk to the roof. Closed garage doors faced the alley. Parked in front of a garage was the silver sedan. She stared at it a moment, trying to make out a figure inside, then jerked her hand away. The blinds snapped back into place. The sedan was vacant. She stumbled over the coffee table, her heart thumping. Her mouth was as dry as dust. The man who wanted to kill her was on his way up. He’d been in the apartment earlier today, she was sure now. He knew how to get in.

She plunged through the dimness, cracking her thigh on the edge of the desk, barely aware of the pain spurting through her leg, her thoughts racing ahead. There had to be a weapon…where was a weapon? She didn’t own a gun, but there was a knife in the kitchen. A knife! She clamped her hand over her mouth to hold back the hysteria building in her chest. What good was a knife? The man on his way to kill her had a gun. She spun sideways and lunged for the door, one thought hammering in her head. She had to get out of there.

She made herself look into the peephole. Empty corridor. Closed doors every ten or twelve feet marching toward the elevator and the top of the stairway that she’d climbed this evening. She opened the door, started for the stairway, and stopped. He could be coming up the stairs and she would meet him. God, on the landing between first and second floor, the explosion of a gunshot, and he would run back down and out to the sedan before anyone in the building registered what had happened.

Then she heard the whir of the elevator rising. She could feel the tremors running through the floor. It was too late. She’d never reach the stairway before he stepped out of the elevator. She swung around just as the door across from hers cracked open. Sleepy-eyed, hair mussed inside a net, Mrs. Burton peered out. “What is it?” she called. “I heard something.” Hysteria was working into the old woman’s voice.

For an instant, Vicky thought of slipping past the door into her apartment, but if Mrs. Burton panicked, if she started screaming—My God, he would come for both of them. The whirring was louder, and there were the bumping noises, the little gyrations before the elevator came to a full stop.

“Go back. Go back.” Vicky darted past the old woman. The whirring had stopped, leaving the absence of sound, and in that absence, she realized Mrs. Burton’s door hadn’t closed. “Lock your door now!” she whispered. At the other end of the corridor, the elevator doors started to scrape open. She lunged for the door to the back stairs and gripped the knob. It slipped in her hand, and she had to grab it with both hands before it turned. She saw the elevator doors pulling apart as she stepped onto the cold concrete landing and slowly let the door move back into place. She could hear the muffled sound of his footsteps on the carpet as he came down the corridor.

There was a narrow window in the upper part of the door, covered with mesh and cloudy. She moved to the far side and looked past the edge out into the corridor. He was down on one knee in front of her door, studying the contents of the small black case opened in his hands. A black knit face mask was pulled over his head. She could see the gun in the slit of his jacket pocket. She could see the glint of the metal handle in the pocket slit. Now he had what he was looking for—some kind of black object, like a nail, that he gripped between his thumb and forefinger as he turned his head toward the elevator, then toward the other end of the corridor. She pulled back from the window and waited, pressed against the wall, her palms stuck onto the plaster like suction cups, as if the wall might keep her legs from buckling beneath her.

She heard the crack of a door opening, and she inched closer to the side of the window in time to see him get to his feet and slip into her apartment. He was at least six feet tall, with wide, compact shoulders, and he looked clumsy in the way he balanced his weight on the balls of his feet, moving silently. The door closed behind him. She stood frozen in place, her heart banging against her ribs, trying to think. The stairs led down into the alley. When he saw that she wasn’t there—God, she’d left her bag on the kitchen counter and her cell was next to the bag! She’d run out, he’d see that, and he’d come after her. She would run down the alley, run down the street, and the sedan would crawl alongside her.

Her door swung open. He stood in the opening a moment, narrowed eyes peering through the slits of the black mask, looking up and down the corridor, deciding…

Then he was staring at the service door.