The Thunder Keeper(17)

She followed him through the archway into the living room on the left and turned on a table lamp. The light lapped over the gray sofa and chair, the tiled coffee table, and the TV cabinet that she’d brought from Lander.

“Looks like home.” Lucas stood in the center of the room, glancing about.

She felt a sharp stab of pain. By the time she’d moved back to Lander, after undergrad and law school and three years at Howard and Fergus, Lucas and Susan were grown, on their own in Los Angeles. They’d never lived in the rented bungalow in Lander. In her mind, their childhood was forever compressed into the image of two small faces distorted behind the screen door of her mother’s house as she’d driven away fifteen years ago, telling herself that she’d be back, and knowing, just as Susan and Lucas had known, that it wasn’t true.

The memory always left her weak-kneed. Lucas was twenty-four years old now. She’d been nineteen when he was born. He was at least six feet tall, at least six inches taller than she was, with a lanky, muscular build, the dark complexion and neatly trimmed black hair, still shiny wet, and the handsome face with the little crook in the long nose—the mark of her people.

“You look like your father,” she blurted.

He gave a nonchalant shrug, walked over to the window, and pushed back the edge of the lace curtain. Lights from the passing cars elongated into red-and-white smears across the glass.

“Sorry about the airport,” she said. She was thinking: the lost years.

“No problem, Mom.” He threw a little smile over one shoulder, then turned back to the window. “Something must’ve come up.”

Vicky sat down in the middle of the sofa. She stopped herself from blurting out that Ben’s drinking and beatings had come up. She said, “A man I was supposed to meet was hit by a car this afternoon.”

“Jeez, Mom. I’m sorry,” Lucas said. Then, a hint of impatience in his tone: “How do you get involved in this stuff, Mom?”

“What?”

“Dad worries about you, you know. Susan and I worry, too. You’re always putting yourself in danger. We thought you’d change after you had to shoot that guy.”

Vicky drew in her breath at the sting of the reminder. Less than six months before—a world ago—she had shot a man. Justifiable homicide in defense of another was the official ruling, but the legal explanations, the justifications, could never diminish the horror of it. It was one of the reasons she had left Lander.

“The man this afternoon was a potential client.” She stopped herself from saying that Vince Lewis had wanted to tell her something about the reservation. “It was a hit-and-run,” she went on. “I saw it happen.”

Lucas crossed the room and sat down beside her, his eyes clouded in concern. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed it lightly. “Promise me you won’t get involved.”

“I’m a witness, Lucas. The police expect me to give a formal statement tomorrow.”

“So tell them what you saw and let them find the driver. Promise you’ll leave it at that, Mom.”

Vicky set her hand over his. “I promise that I won’t be in any danger.” She hurried on, before he could object: “Tell me about your new job.”

He shrugged and gave her the same mischievous grin he used to give her when he was a kid. “Information specialist, keep all the systems up and running. How much do you really want to know?” He took his hand from hers and waved away the question. “I’ve been thinking about leaving L.A. for some time. Now that you’re here, well, Denver looked pretty good. I can look after you. Dad thinks it’s a great idea.” He seemed to be studying her for a reaction. “Dad’s not drinking anymore,” he said.

Vicky nodded. She’d gotten the news on the moccasin telegraph: Ben out of rehab, back at his old job as foreman on the Arapaho Ranch. She smiled at the irony. Ben always landed on his feet, while the ground beneath her was always slipping away.

She tried to focus on what Lucas was saying, something about an Arapaho from Oklahoma jumping off a cliff, about Ben making the arrangements to send the body back to Oklahoma for burial.

“Dad says everybody on the res is pretty upset the sheriff called it suicide. The sheriff jumped to conclusions, Dad says, so they could close the case. The guy was on a vision quest at Bear Lake.”

“Bear Lake!” It was preposterous. The spirits were in the cliffs at Bear Lake, their images carved into the sandstone. It was a sacred place. A man on a vision quest would have been waiting for the spirits to speak to him. He wouldn’t kill himself! He wouldn’t defile a holy place like Bear Lake.