Vicky stood up, walked over to the window, and pushed back the lace curtain, the way Lucas had done. Rain washed down the other side of the black glass. A wavy stream of headlights moved along the street below. Ben was probably right. The sheriff was eager to close the case. White authorities didn’t want to hear about holy places and vision quests. Again she felt an old sense of failure moving over her skin like a fever. She should be with her people. She could talk to the sheriff, explain the Arapaho Way.
“You okay, Mom?” Lucas’s voice broke through her thoughts.
“Come on,” she said, walking back to him. “I’ll show you to your room.” She waited while he grabbed his backpack, then led him through the dining room, up the narrow steps, and into the rear sleeping porch with a twin bed and the dresser she’d cleaned out for him. The warm air from the floor vents rustled the white curtains she’d had cleaned and rehung on the windows.
A few moments later, when Lucas had returned to the living room, she said, “What sounds good for dinner? Mexican; Italian?”
“Flat bread,” he said, “and Indian stew and maybe a buffalo burger.”
She was about to tell him that she knew just the restaurant when the phone rang. She hurried through the shadows of the dining room to the phone on the small table beneath the window. Even before she picked up the receiver, before she heard the familiar voice—“Vicky?”—she felt her muscles tense.
“Vince Lewis is dead,” Steve told her.
The truth hit her like a clap of thunder. Vince Lewis had worked for a diamond mining company. There were no diamond deposits on Arapaho lands, as far as she knew, but he’d had information about the reservation, she was certain. A matter of life and death, he’d said. His death. Somebody had killed him to prevent him from talking to her, and she was going to have to find out why.
9
It was almost noon before Father John got away from the ringing phones, the parishioners stopping by to visit, the correspondence he’d been trying to catch up on, and started for Gus Iron Bear’s place. He’d been driving for most of an hour—Tosca playing beside him—when he turned north on Maverick Springs Road. North again through the open spaces cut with arroyos and filled with scrub brush and wild grasses. Crowheart Butte lifted into the sky ahead. The butte was sacred, a place of the spirits. This was an area of sacred places.
Another ten miles and he saw the clump of buildings on a rise ahead: white house, storage shed, pitched-roof barn. He took a right, bouncing across the rutted, muddy yard, and stopped in front of the house a couple of feet from the stoop. Slowly he unfolded his long legs and let himself out. He stood by the pickup, waiting. If Gus was ready to see him, someone would come out.
The door opened. Theresa Iron Bear, a small woman with white hair in thick braids that hung down the front of a red blouse, stood in the opening. “Come on in, Father,” she called.
“How are you, Grandmother?” he said, using the polite term. Removing his cowboy hat, he stepped into the rectangular living room. A table lamp cast a dim circle of light over the upholstered chairs, sofa, and television arranged around the Indian rug in the center of the linoleum floor. The odor of burned sage permeated the air.
“Have a seat, Father.” The old woman gestured toward the sofa. Then, disappearing down a hallway that led to the bedrooms, she called out, “I’ll get Gus.”
Father John sat down and waited, turning his hat between his knees a few minutes before tossing it on the cushion beside him. Beyond the window on the other side of the room, the plains, tinged with green, rolled like waves into the sky. The clouds had turned black, filled with rain.
A couple of minutes passed before the stooped figure of the medicine man emerged from the hallway. He looked older than Father John remembered—drawn and frail, dark eyes sunken beneath the curve of his brow. Father John got to his feet. “It’s good to see you, Grandfather.”
He waited until Gus had settled into the worn-looking chair by the lamp before resuming his own seat. For one crazy moment—the way the light washed over the old man’s forehead and cheekbones—Gus resembled a spirit. An untrue person, the Arapahos would say.
After the usual exchange of pleasantries—the rain, the crafts fair; it was never polite to come to the point right away—Gus said, “You come about Duncan, didn’t you?”
Father John shifted forward on the sofa and clasped his hands between his knees. “What can you tell me about him, Grandfather?”
The old man cleared his throat and rearranged his slight frame in the chair. “The kid drove into the yard. Stumbled out of the truck, crying like a woman. I says to myself, he’s drunk, but he was sober as the day the Creator give him breath. He was like a wild horse that finally give up and let himself be led into the corral. A wild one that got sick of his wildness.”