“Did you tell this to Detective Slinger?” Father John suspected the answer.
“Told the detective about the spirits and Duncan’s vision quest. He didn’t wanna hear any of it.” A kind of hopelessness came into the old man’s eyes. “I’m afraid it’s my fault the boy’s dead.”
Father John got to his feet and set his arm on the old man’s shoulder. “Listen to me, Grandfather. It is not your fault.”
Gus tilted his head back and looked at him with a mixture of grief and trust. He nodded.
Father John thanked the old man and let himself out. He checked his Timex. One-thirty. Another hour and he could be at Bear Lake. Before he paid a visit to Detective Slinger, he wanted to see the sacred place where Duncan Grover had been murdered.
10
Leaving the Wind River Reservation.
Father John passed the sign and continued north on Highway 287 through a landscape of flat-topped buttes that glowed pink in the aftermath of the rain. The sounds of Faust—“De l’enfer qui vient”—mingled with the hum of the Toyota’s engine, the thump of the tires. He crossed Bear Creek, Indian Meadows passing outside the window. A few more miles, and he turned west off the highway and started up a narrow road into the foothills, the Toyota straining against the climb. Black clouds still formed over the mountains, threatening more rain.
More rain. That meant a day or two before he could call another practice for the St. Francis Eagles, the baseball team he’d started seven years ago, that first summer at the mission, when he’d needed a baseball team to coach. Only three practices so far this season. The kids were looking good: Chester Wallowing Bull sprinting for a grounder, sliding through the mud, coming up grinning, the ball gloved. Joseph Antelope covering first like a pro. The kid’s dad, Eldon, had played first base in the minors twenty years ago, and he’d agreed to help coach this season.
Father John felt the old excitement at the prospect of the new season, and yet—Duncan Grover was still on his mind. Alone in the mountains, on a cliff, hungry, thirsty. Lightning flashing, thunder erupting. Thunder kills. But it wasn’t thunder that had killed Grover. It was the boss. There’s gonna be more murders. The words cut through his thoughts like a harsh, dissonant melody.
Ahead, the road emptied into a high mountain valley, ringed with slopes of pines, topped by red sandstone cliffs—the place of the spirits. Bear Lake lay ahead, placid and self-contained in the gray afternoon light. He came around a bend and pulled off into a clearing near a clump of willows. In the distance was the sound of thunder, as crisp as a drumbeat.
It might have been here, he thought, getting out of the pickup, that Duncan Grover had waded into the lake, hands grasping at the willows for support, feet sinking into the sandy bottom. He had cleansed himself in preparation to meet the spirits.
Father John tilted his head back and scanned the red sandstone cliffs above. The spirits don’t show themselves to everybody, the elders had told him. Only to those who are worthy.
It was a couple of minutes before he saw the petroglyph: a large, white humanlike figure carved onto the flat face of a red sandstone cliff. The guardian—the keeper—of the valley. In the Old Time, an elder had once explained, the spirit had kept the deer and sheep in the valley so the people could find food. Now the spirit protected the valley from harm.
Father John walked along the shore looking for the path up the mountain to the petroglyph. He’d gone about fifty yards when he spotted the depression in the ground, a mud-filled gully that meandered upward through the pines. The thunder crashed again, shaking the ground. There was a flash of lightning above the cliffs.
He started uphill, walking fast. He didn’t want to be on the mountain during a storm. The path lay in shadow, disappearing at times, then reappearing. Pine branches grabbed at his jacket and scratched at his hands and face.
He’d gained about three hundred feet in elevation, he guessed, when he stopped. His boots were caked with mud. He gulped at the thin air, his heart pounding against his ribs. Bear Lake floated in the shadows below, and on the cliffs across the valley, he could see other white figures emerging out of the red sandstone. Symbols of other spirit guardians: the deer, keeper of the animals; the eagle, keeper of the wingeds; the thunder, keeper of the atmosphere. In the winter, the elder had said, you could hear the spirits chipping out their own reflections in the cliffs.
He resumed the climb, pacing himself now. The path was steep, and he had to dig his boots into the soft earth to keep from sliding backward. His calf muscles protested, and his breath came in ragged, painful spasms that punctuated the sound of the wind in the pines. At an outcropping of boulders, he stopped again and looked up.