The Thunder Keeper(44)

“This here’s Robert Yellow Wolf.” Marie tilted her head back. “He was one of the guys broke up the fight in the parking lot.” She glanced up and gave him an appreciative smile.

“Did you know Grover?” Vicky asked.

“Nah.” Yellow Wolf shook his head slowly. “That dude give Indians a bad name. Didn’t surprise me none he jumped off a cliff.”

“What about somebody called Eddie?”

He was still shaking his head. “Never had the pleasure. But he could’ve been the guy Grover beat hell out of. I heard him shouting something like, ‘Eddie, you sonovabitch, I’m gonna kill ya.’ ”

So he did exist, Vicky thought. Eddie was real. Not an untrue image. Real, and possibly a murderer.

“Eddie who?” Vicky persisted.

“Eddie sonovabitch.” The Indian shrugged.



Vicky drove north on Sheridan Boulevard through neighborhoods of white frame bungalows, brick ranches, and strip malls anchored by gas stations and fast-food restaurants. The rain had stopped, leaving the air heavy with the smell of wet leaves and grasses. The evening traffic was light: arrows of yellow headlights blurring over the asphalt, the sound of tires splashing through puddles in the intersections.

She would call John O’Malley the minute she got home, she decided. She was ready now. The lawsuit had been in the back of her mind all day. She’d felt betrayed somehow. It was silly. Whatever had happened—it had nothing to do with her.

He would be in the residence now—she could picture him—in the study, as crammed with papers and books as her own, the music from some opera blasting around him. She’d tell him what she’d learned. Eddie had reason to hold a grudge against Duncan Grover. And the promise Marie had made to keep asking around on the chance someone might know the man.

She wondered what difference it would make if John O’Malley did find Eddie. It was all theory and shadows. Visions of what had happened. There was no physical evidence, or the coroner would have ruled the death a homicide and the police would be looking for Eddie.

She turned right onto Twenty-ninth Avenue. Downtown lights rose in the distance. After a few blocks, she made a U-turn and parked behind another vehicle in front of the white house rising from the bluff. “Spirits dwell on the bluffs,” her grandmother had said.

For a brief moment a sense of loneliness and disorientation hit her, and along with it, a dread of going into the house, wrapped in the quiet of its thick walls. Lucas was out to dinner with his new boss; he’d been out almost every evening since he’d arrived. He planned to move into his own apartment in a few days. She would be alone again. Hisei ci nihi. Woman alone. The grandmothers had given her an appropriate name, she thought.

She started up the concrete steps, trying to shake off the odd feeling. The house loomed above, shadows falling off the steeply pitched roof and clinging to the oblong windows and the stucco. The gate at the top of the stairs squealed when she opened it. She closed it behind her, then stopped.

Something wasn’t right, some slight disturbance in the atmosphere. An animal, she told herself, aware of the prickly feeling on her skin. She remained motionless, her eyes searching the shadows on the front porch until she saw the figure of a man rising from the bench inside the railing. He started down the sidewalk toward her.

She clasped her keys tightly, the jagged metal cutting into her fingers. “Who’s there?” she called, moving back toward the gate, her other hand brushing the air, searching for the latch. She heard her own voice again, disembodied somewhere ahead of her. “What do you want?”





21


“Vicky, it’s me. Steve.”

She held on to the latch a moment and made herself breathe slowly—in and out, in and out. In the dim light of a passing car, she could see the familiar slouch of his shoulders, the easy angle of his posture as he walked down the sidewalk. Hands in his slacks pockets, the fronts of the dark sport coat pushed back, tie loosened at the collar of a light shirt.

“Sorry, Vicky,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I got your call, and since I was in the neighborhood . . .” He hesitated, and she knew it wasn’t true. “I took a chance on finding you home. Been sitting on the porch waiting. I just decided to give you another ten minutes, and here you are.”

“Let’s go inside,” Vicky managed, not trusting herself to say more. Her throat felt as scratchy as sagebrush, as if she’d been riding all day on the plains. She moved past him, aware of his footsteps, soft and measured, behind her. She jabbed the key at the lock, her hand shaking.

“Let me,” Steve said. The shadow of his arm reached around her, and his hand covered her own. “I’m good at this sort of thing.” In a half second the door swung open. She stepped inside and flipped on the wall switch, sending a flood of light over the entry, the living room on the left. She made her way through the shadows of the dining room ahead, dropping her bag on the table, and into the kitchen. Another wall switch. The fluorescent ceiling light stuttered into life as she opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of water.