The Drowning Man Read online

  THE DROWNING MAN

  Berkley Prime Crime Mysteries by Margaret Coel

  THE EAGLE CATCHER

  THE GHOST WALKER

  THE DREAM STALKER

  THE STORY TELLER

  THE LOST BIRD

  THE SPIRIT WOMAN

  THE THUNDER KEEPER

  THE SHADOW DANCER

  KILLING RAVEN

  WIFE OF MOON

  EYE OF THE WOLF

  THE DROWNING MAN

  THE DROWNING MAN

  MARGARET COEL

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Margaret Coel.

  All rights reserved.

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Coel, Margaret, 1937–

  The drowning man / by Margaret Coel.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-1012-0623-2

  1. O’Malley, John (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Holden, Vicky (Fictitious character)—

  Fiction. 3. Wind River Indian Reservation (Wyo.)—Fiction. 4. Arapaho Indians—Fiction.

  5. Petroglyphs—Fiction. 6. Wyoming—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.O347D76 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2006040774

  For Jane Love and the late

  Dave Love,

  who first introduced me

  to Wyoming’s petroglyphs.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people helped to guide me through this story. I thank them all.

  In Fremont County, Wyoming: Merle Haas, director, Sky People Higher Education, Northern Arapaho Tribe; Julie Edwards, county librarian; Ed McAuslan, coroner, and his wife, Roni McAuslan; Edward L. Newell II, county and prosecuting attorney; Capt. David Good, sheriff’s department; Todd Dawson, special agent, FBI.

  In Rawlins: Linda Bryson, corrections officer, Wyoming Department of Corrections.

  And for the always gracious hospitality of St. Stephens Mission on the Wind River Reservation, I want to thank Ron and Laura Mamot; Sister Monica Suhayda, CSJ; Rev. Ronald Seminara, S.J.; Rev. Robert Hilbert, S.J.; and Rev. Dan Gannon, S.J.

  And thank you to my good friends, many of whom read and reread the manuscript and offered many excellent suggestions that helped shape the story: Karen Gilleland, Beverly Carrigan, Sheila Carrigan, Anne Stockham, Virginia and Jim Sutter, members of the Arapaho tribe, and Rev. Anthony Short, S.J.

  Ho’hou’!

  The rock, the rock,

  I am standing upon it,

  I am standing upon it.

  By its means I saw our father.

  My children, my children,

  I take pity on those who have been taught,

  Because they push on hard.

  They push on hard.

  Says the father.

  —ARAPAHO SONGS

  PROLOGUE

  NOW SOMETHING WASN’T right.

  Brian Little Wolf squinted past the pockmarked windshield at the mountain rising over the road and tried to put his finger on what was different. Something out of kilter, he could feel it in his gut. Red Cliff Canyon looked the same—the road snaking ahead around a hump of mountain, the sun beating down through a sky as blue and clear as glass. He adjusted his spine against the hard seat of the pickup and squinted into the sun that glistened in the streams of runoff tracing the road. He had the odd sense that he’d never driven up this road before, never been in this canyon.

  Well, that was ridiculous. True, Red Cliff Canyon was a sacred place, which always filled him with awe, as if, in the midst of the vast isolation and silence, he was not alone. Spirits dwelled in the canyon, and that was a fact. They had carved their own images on the boulders that jutted out of the mountain as proof of their presence, so the people would know they were always with them. They had watched over the canyon, the elders said, from the beginning of time when the Creator made the Arapahos—before He made the other human beings. Every time Brian Little Wolf drove through the canyon, he looked for the images, comforted by the flash of light-colored figures carved into the rocks. He’d always felt safe in the canyon, comforted. Not like today, when he felt bereft, alone in a strange and lonely place.

  He’d been driving through Red Cliff Canyon since the summer he was thirteen years old, hired on as a junior wrangler up at the Hidden Lake Dude Ranch where the road narrowed into two tracks that loped into the Shoshone National Forest. The foreman had tossed him the keys and said, “Kid, go down to the Taylor Ranch and get a couple extra bales of hay for the horses,” and he’d said, “Yessir,” and jumped into the old black pickup, this very pickup he was driving now, half sitting and half standing, hauling himself upright over the steering wheel so that he could see the road. He’d turned the key in the ignition and stomped on the gas pedal, the way he’d seen the cowboys do, and bumped across the field, hoping he’d make it to the road before the foreman realized he’d never driven before and called him back. He’d driven down the canyon, picked up the hay, and headed back to the dude ranch, fighting the steering wheel all the way to keep from plunging down the mountain into the creek.


  That was ten years ago, and ever since, he’d been in Red Cliff Canyon so many times that he could find his way blindfolded. In the summers, as soon as the tourists arrived, he stayed up at the dude ranch, looked after the horses, took the guests out on trail rides. Sometimes a whole week went by before he drove down the canyon. But during the winter, he’d drive up to the ranch two or three times to knock the snow off the roofs so they wouldn’t collapse and fix the fences around the corral. A thousand tasks, just to keep the place from being swallowed in the Wyoming blizzards.

  He knew this canyon, he told himself. He’d seen it in all kinds of weather, from a hundred different vantage points. Why did he feel as if he were seeing it for the first time?

  He pulled himself over the steering wheel and scanned the boulder-strewn slope. Ah, there was a petroglyph, and another right beside it. And up ahead, as the road started to curve, yes, there it was, the long wall of carved pictures that looked like humans with squared heads and rounded eyes and short, sticklike legs, and arms and fingers like twigs floating in the water.

  Water. That was it!

  He hadn’t seen the image of the Drowning Man. It was always the first petroglyph that came into view, looming over the road not more than thirty feet up the slope. The guardian of the canyon, welcoming visitors into the sacred place of the spirits. The image gave permission to proceed, and one shouldn’t proceed without permission. Yet somehow he’d driven right past. He hadn’t paid the proper respect. That explained why he felt so uneasy.

  He pressed hard on the accelerator. The tires skidded in the dirt as he drove around the curve, keeping his eyes glued on the road for the turnout ahead. He had to go back and pay his respects, ask the spirit to grant him a safe passage through the canyon.

  He pulled into the turnout, an apron of land that jutted over the steep drop-off into the creek below. Moving the gear—reverse, forward—he carved out a half turn until he was back onto the road heading downhill. Calmness began to settle over him. The other spirits had shown themselves—that was true, wasn’t it? He hadn’t just imagined them, or seen the figures that his eyes had seen so many times he’d assumed his eyes were seeing them again. Yet he had failed to see the Drowning Man.

  He came around another curve near the mouth of the canyon, crossed the lane, and bumped to a stop. This was the place. The pickup tilted sideways toward the barrow ditch. He got out and started up the slope. No sign of the image.

  He bent forward and kept going. There was a steep pitch to the slope, and he had to dig the heels of his boots into the soft earth, still moist from the snow that had covered the ground all winter. He could see the road unwinding below. The petroglyph had to be here somewhere. He kept climbing, struggling to fight off the panic that grabbed at him, like the branches plucking at his arms and pant legs. Why would the spirit refuse to show its image?

  It was then that he saw the rock where the image should have been. His breath knotted in his throat. The face was a raw wound with pink and white stripes running like blood and water through the stone. The edges were jagged, broken by the deep thrusts of some kind of weapon. Beyond the rock was nothing but piles of other rocks wedged among the scraggly brush and pines. There was a hollow sound in the breeze sweeping through the canyon.

  The Drowning Man was gone.

  1

  HE WASN’T SURE how long the gray sedan had been behind him. Somewhere along Seventeen-Mile Road, Father John Aloysius O’Malley had glanced in the rearview mirror and seen the vehicle hugging his bumper. He’d turned right onto Blue Sky Highway, the sedan following, then pressed down on the accelerator and lurched ahead. The sedan had dropped back before sprinting for his bumper again. The noise of tires humming against asphalt drifted past Father John’s half-opened windows. He caught a glimpse of the driver in the mirror: dark eyes that flashed in a square, brown face and black hair cut long, tangled around the collar of a reddish shirt.

  Father John held the old red Toyota pickup steady at about forty miles an hour and kept driving north. Turandot blared from the tape player on the seat beside him, mingling with the rush of wind through the cab. He’d just visited Hiram Whitebird, who had gotten out of the hospital yesterday. And he’d promised Mickey and Irene Wolf he’d stop by to see their new son this afternoon. He glanced at his watch: almost five o’clock. He didn’t have time for the gray sedan.

  They were the only vehicles on the road. Outside his window was a stretch of scrub brush that bumped into the barren foothills of the Wind River Range, and on the other side nothing but the flat, open plains of the Wind River Reservation melting into the blue sky. It was the third Monday in May, the Moon When the Ponies Shed Their Shaggy Hair, in the way that the Arapahos kept track of the passing time, and the wild grass that checkered the plains looked green against the brown earth. Houses were scattered about, set back from the road with rounded white propane tanks, pickups and old cars dropped onto the bare dirt. An assortment of clothes and towels flapped on lines strung between poles.

  The roofs of Ethete flashed ahead, and Father John started to ease up on the brake pedal. The sedan stayed with him, the driver staring into the specks of sun that danced on his windshield. He was Indian, Father John was sure, but no one he recognized. No one from the reservation. He considered pulling over to let the pickup shoot ahead, then thought better of it. There was a chance the vehicle might put him in the ditch. He could almost feel the resolve and—that was it—the anger in the man’s stare.

  Anything could have triggered the anger. Father John had been the pastor of St. Francis Mission on the reservation now for almost nine years. Nine years of counseling parishioners, listening to a hundred different problems—the alcoholism and abuse, the breakups and divorces, the lost jobs and rebellious teenagers, the lingering despair. And he, a white man, trying to talk Arapahos through to the other side where there was hope. But there was always the risk that when someone found the way to go forward, someone else was left behind, someone who blamed the pastor and decided to look for revenge.

  He followed the road through the outskirts of Ethete, mountain peaks floating into the sky on the west. The sedan was still on his tail. Ford, with an out-of-state license plate. A couple of houses passed outside his window, kids playing in the yards. A truck was stopped at the light swinging over the intersection ahead.

  Father John made a sharp left turn across the highway and into the parking lot of the gas station and convenience store on the corner, the sedan right behind. He skidded to a stop at the curb that ran alongside the sidewalk in front of the store, got out, and walked around to the car drawing into the next slot. The license plate was from Colorado.

  “What do you want?” he said as the Indian lifted himself out of the front seat. There was a defiance about the man in the way he thrust his shoulders forward, tilted his head back, and stared straight at him—the cockiness of a bully, Father John decided, sizing up his opponent. The leathery look of the Indian’s face, the weathered hands and tobacco-yellow nails might have put him at about fifty, but something about him—an uncertainty just below the surface—made Father John think that he was younger. No more than forty, a good eight or nine years younger than Father John, and close to the same height—six feet, three and a half inches—with rounded, muscular shoulders and brown, powerful-looking arms.

  “Thought you was never gonna stop,” the Indian said. The hard stare dissolved into a grin that seemed to affect only the lower half of his face. “I seen your red pickup back on Seventeen-Mile Road. Saved me drivin’ over to the mission.”

  “Do I know you?”

  The Indian jutted out his chin and let out a guffaw. “Me and the mission priest friends? I don’t think so.”

  “How did you know what I drive?” Father John knew the answer even before he’d asked the question. Whoever the Indian was, he’d been watching the mission.

  The man shrugged.

  “What’s this all about?”

  The Indian let his black eye
s roam across the parking lot: people banging in and out of the front door of the convenience store, two pickups parked at the pumps, blue sedan sliding next to a vacant pump. A car door slammed shut, and there was the muffled sound of a dog barking in one of the vehicles. Out on the highway, a line of pickups waited for the traffic light to change.

  “Man I know,” the Indian said finally, “has a message for the Arapahos and Shoshones here.”

  “You need to talk to them.” Father John jerked his head toward the Indians moving about the parking lot and coming out of the store. “The Arapaho tribal offices are down the road,” he said. “Shoshone offices are over at Fort Washakie. Take your pick.”

  “Well, I got to thinkin’ about it, and you know what I come up with?” The Indian was grinning again. “Soon’s this here Indian walks into one of them tribal offices and delivers the message, they’re gonna call the cops and slap me in their jail. I betcha they got one, right? And I don’t much like the idea of goin’ to jail, so I called up the man I know and said, ‘You gotta deliver your own friggin’ message ’cause they’re gonna throw me in jail.’ Well, he starts shoutin’ why the hell’d he send a dumb Indian like me on this job, and if I didn’t deliver the message, he was gonna take the pay he give me outta my hide, and I was gonna wish I was in jail, and a lotta shit like that. So I says, ‘Hey, take it easy; take it easy. I’m gonna deliver the friggin’ message.’”