The Story Teller (12 page)

“A dead Indian washes up on the banks of the South Platte. He looks like a drug dealer, probably dealing to other Indians. Another case of Indians killing Indians, just like the warriors killing other warriors over the best hunting grounds. Only the hunting grounds are drugs. Do the white authorities really care?”

“Of course they care,” Father John pushed his own plate to one side. Clumps of greasy fries clung to the rim. “A human life is a human life. Murder is murder.”

“I’d like to believe that, John. But unless the police start thinking this wasn’t just another drug murder, that’s how they’re going to handle it. Meanwhile the killer will be busy covering his tracks. Todd’s murder might never be solved.”

“Look, Vicky,” Father John began—the conciliatory tone he always used, she knew, when he was trying to bring her around to the most logical way of thinking. “This isn’t the reservation, where you know everybody and understand how things work. Denver is a big city. If you start nosing around and asking questions, you could stumble onto whatever it was that got Todd killed. It could be dangerous.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t want to see Todd’s killer brought to justice,” she said, an edge in her tone.

“You know better than that.” Father John leaned closer. “I just don’t want to see anything happen to you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.” Vicky shrugged, picked up the coffee mug, and took another sip, wishing she felt as confident as she hoped she sounded. “I’m going to see if I can find Todd’s new girlfriend, Julie, and talk to her, that’s all.”

“What if Julie is involved?”

Vicky set the mug down hard on the table. This was something she hadn’t considered. She closed her eyes a half second, then opened them on this new possibility. “Todd was a great kid,” she began, groping for an explanation that would seem logical to the man across from her. “Why would he associate with anyone who might get involved in drugs or murder?”

Father John picked up a fork and rapped it against the table. “You’re a difficult woman, Vicky.”

“You happen to be a priest, John O’Malley. Your experience, I would suggest, is quite limited.”

“You expect me to believe all women are as difficult as you?” He pushed the fork away and smiled at her a moment. Then he reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small pad and a ballpoint. “Where are you staying?” he asked.

“Are you going to check up on me? Warn me about getting into trouble?”

“I want to satisfy myself you’re still alive,” he said, the pen poised over a clear sheet of the pad. Vicky gave him Marcy’s telephone number and watched him print the numbers on the page and under them, in block letters,
VICKY.
On another page, he jotted down other numbers. A quick tear, and he handed her the page. “Doyal and Mary asked me to hold a memorial service in Denver, so I’ll be at Regis for the next few days. This is the number. Will you call me if there’s anything I can do?”

Vicky brushed his hand as she took the paper. Knowing she could call him, that he would be close by, buoyed her confidence and gave her a sense of comfort. She slipped the paper inside her handbag as they slid out of the booth and strolled together to the counter. There was a moment when they argued over the check, a moment when they both tried to force a ten-dollar bill on
the woman behind the cash register, another moment when they all laughed.

Outside in the parking lot, he waited as she sank behind the wheel of the Taurus. Leaning toward her, he said, “Promise me something.”

She turned toward him, knowing what he was about to say, wanting to hear the words.

“Promise me you’ll be careful.”

*   *   *   

By the time Vicky parked in front of Marcy’s house, a cold tiredness had crept through her. It was nearly midnight, and she longed to sink into bed and abandon herself to sleep, but the light falling past the slats of the mini-blinds at the windows told her Marcy was waiting.

As she walked up the sidewalk she heard the soft staccato of drums. The door swung open, and her friend stood in the opening; the flickering light behind her cast fingers of shadows over her face and the long blue-splashed kimono she was wearing.

“You’re here!” There was excitement in Marcy’s voice.

Vicky walked past her into the living room, where round, thick candles winked from the glass top of the coffee table and the little tables at the ends of the sofas. Another woman, also in a kimono, sat cross-legged on a woven rug, curled over a small drum, like the drums Vicky had seen all her life at powwows and celebrations on the reservation. The woman rapped the drum with both palms—a gentle thumping noise that reverberated across the wood floors, the white walls.

“Come, come,” Marcy ordered, taking Vicky’s hand and pulling her toward the drummer. “This is my friend Louella Barkley,” she said. “Louella has been waiting all evening to meet you.”

The pounding stopped as the other woman lifted her eyes. They were blue gray, calm and watchful in a white, doughy face. Her blond hair was caught in two thick
braids that hung over her bosom and folded into her lap. She reached one hand upward: squared red nails, gold rings, a row of gold bracelets jangling at her wrist.

“My pleasure,” she said. There was a shrill, airy quality to her voice, as if she were blowing a whistle.

“Louella was a Cheyenne princess in her past life,” Marcy said. “You must hear her story.”

Vicky let herself down slowly on one of the white sofas, numb with sadness and her own tiredness. The drummer’s eyes followed her.

“I feel we were friends in the buffalo days,” Louella said, air cushioning the words. “When your people came to the village to trade with my people, we used to sit in front of Grandfather’s lodge. My grandfather was a great chief.”

“Of course,” Vicky said.

Louella closed her eyes, perhaps viewing some lost world. “We played with dolls our grandmothers made for us. We were only little girls when we met, but we stayed friends through the summers. Oh, how I remember my older brother watching you. You were very beautiful.” She gave a quick shrug, and her eyes flew open. “If only you had belonged to our people, we might have become sisters-in-law.”

“Tell me,” Vicky began, her voice thick with irritation, “did the spirits give you a vision of our past lives?”

“Oh, yes,” Marcy cut in. She had settled in the sofa next to Vicky. “Louella had a dream in which she saw her entire past life. Since then she has been blessed with the ability to dwell in two realities. She has integrated the present with the past. While she’s at work in her bookstore—a place of peace, Vicky; I must take you—Louella remains immersed in her other, more authentic life.”

The other woman gave a brief, wan smile. “My life is finally meaningful, now that I am one with my past identity.”

“I’ve also been crying for a dream,” Marcy said. “I pray the spirits will send one so that I may increase the peace in my own life.”

Louella waved one arm above the drum; the bracelets made a clanking sound. “I must warn you, it is very difficult and unnatural to maintain your inner peace in the city.” She shifted her gaze to Vicky. “You are so fortunate to have the reservation, where one can exist in close harmony with the spirits.”

Vicky was thinking of the three-room houses, the thin-board walls, the bare-dirt yards with white tanks standing on spindly legs and filled with propane gas that never banished the cold, the snow peppering her blanket on winter mornings when she was a kid, and the struggle—the never-ending struggle—just to live.

She said, “Perhaps you should come to the reservation.”

“Yes. It would be a wonderful experience.”

“You could open a bookstore, one with a coffee shop.”

“You mean, move to the reservation?”

“Yes, why not? I could help you work out the legal details.”

“Live there permanently? But it’s so far away. In the middle of Wyoming, I believe.”

“You really must consider it.” Vicky got to her feet and turned toward Marcy. “And now you’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I’m exhausted.” She stepped around the coffee table and walked down the hallway to the bedroom.

Just as she was about to close the door, Marcy appeared. “I’m so sorry if we offended you, Vicky,” she said.

Vicky gripped the edge of the door, trying to sort through her feelings. Had she been offended by Marcy and the Cheyenne princess? She didn’t think so. She felt sorry at the seeming emptiness in their lives. She said,
“Is there nowhere for you to turn, nowhere to go in your own culture, Marcy, that might help you?”

Marcy jerked backward, as if she had been struck. The color drained from her face. Instantly Vicky regretted the words. But they had been sent into the world, and someday, she knew, their sting would return to her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as her friend turned and started down the hallway. She watched Marcy retreat into the living room, then closed the bedroom door, shutting out the drums—a hard thump, thump, thump.

11

V
icky awakened into a vacant quiet, the sun drifting lazily past the white curtains; she had slept the sleep of exhaustion. Marcy was nowhere about, but she had left a pot of hot coffee and a plate of muffins on the kitchen counter. After showering and slipping into the other attorney dress she’d brought—a soft linen the color of sage—Vicky ate one of the muffins and sipped a cup of coffee in the early-morning coolness on the back patio, grateful for the solitude and the chance to collect her thoughts. She hadn’t wanted to call Annemarie in the middle of the night to tell her about Todd. She would call the girl this morning. Although what difference could it make when Annemarie got the news? It would still be the end of plans and hopes, of her life as she had believed it would unfold, and a horrible thrust into a new and unexpected life where, somehow, Annemarie would have to find her way.

Vicky carried the half-empty coffee cup into the bedroom. Rummaging through her purse, she found the pad on which Annemarie had written down her own number under the others.
Call me as soon as you find him,
she had said. Even then, Vicky had detected more fear than hope in the girl’s tone.

Vicky dialed the number. The girl picked up immediately, as if she’d been waiting by the phone. Her voice
sounded weak and trembling. “Annemarie, I’m afraid I have some very bad news,” Vicky began.

“I know,” the girl said.

Vicky drew in a long breath. The moccasin telegraph had been busy all night. She explained that she had gone to the morgue, that Todd’s grandparents had also gone there—as if it might comfort the girl to know Todd had not been completely alone—and that Father O’Malley would be saying a memorial mass in Denver. As she talked she had the feeling Annemarie already knew everything; the moccasin telegraph was efficient and thorough.

But there was one detail the girl didn’t know, Vicky realized the moment she mentioned that the police mistakenly thought Todd was involved with drugs.

“Drugs!” The word came over the line like a wail. “How can they think that?”

“They’re wrong,” Vicky said, fumbling in her purse for Steve Clark’s card. “Look, Annemarie”—she hurried on—“I want you to call the homicide detective and tell him everything you know about Todd.” She read off Steve’s number.

“I loved Todd,” Annemarie said. “The detective might not believe me.”

That was possible. “It’s important you talk to him anyway,” Vicky said.

*   *   *   

It was mid-morning when Vicky wheeled into the last available space in a lot across from the Auraria campus, where groups of students toting backpacks hurried along the sidewalks toward the red-brick buildings of CU-Denver. On the west, the city slanted up several miles into the foothills. Beyond was the blue-purple mass of the Rocky Mountains, the peaks and ridges bathed in sunlight.

She hurried past the rows of parked vehicles, bumpers glinting metal hot in the sun, trying to imagine what it
must have been like without high-rises and asphalt, without the incessant throb of automobiles and trucks. The land was open in the Old Time, a vast expanse of gentle knolls that rolled toward the horizon. Streams and creeks, hardly wide or deep enough to qualify as rivers, wound out of the mountains and across the plains, like silver paint spilled over a giant canvas. Not far from the corner of Speer Boulevard and Larimer Street, where she waited for the “Walk” light, the village of her people had stood at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, where Todd’s body had been found.