The Spirit Woman Page 5

  Father John didn’t say anything. Outside the window, the snow was falling steadily. The music of Manon Lescaut softly enveloped the office: “In quelle trine morbide.” He said, “When will you have an ID?”

  Gianelli’s fingers tapped out a rhythm against the sheet. “You want the truth? Maybe never. These kinds of cases are the hardest to solve. We’re running a check on people reported missing in the late seventies, but the woman could be from anywhere. It’ll take a while to find possible matches. Even if we get lucky and come up with a lead, we may never track down the perpetrator after so much time. So you see . . .”

  “She’s not a top priority.” Father John finished the sentence.

  “I didn’t say that. She’s been dead a long time.”

  “I’m sure her family wants to know what happened to her.”

  “You don’t have to tell me my job.” Gianelli glanced away, then brought his eyes back. “Look, I’ve got four daughters. You think I like the idea of a world where this could happen to one of them? I’m going to do my best to solve this, John, but it might not be enough.”

  Father John got to his feet. “I’ll let the elders know about the report. They’ll still want the woman to have a proper burial, even if she isn’t an ancestor or one of the people. Frankly, so do I. If you get the ID in the next ten days, give me a call.” He put on his cowboy hat and started for the door.

  “Next ten days? What’re you talking about?” Gianelli walked around the desk, blocking his way.

  “Doesn’t the moccasin telegraph reach Lander?”

  “Yeah, all the time. I hear everything those Indians think I oughta know. If they don’t want me to know it, I don’t hear it. You going on vacation?”

  “I’m going to Marquette University to finish up a doctorate and teach history.” Father John had an odd sense that he was talking about someone else, someone he didn’t even know. “The new pastor’s already here.”

  “What?” Gianelli looked stunned, as if a tailback had just turned the corner on him. “They can’t send you away. The people need you here, John. I need you to run interference from time to time. You tell that to whoever’s in charge.”

  “The provincial.”

  “Yeah, you tell him.”

  “I’ve already mentioned it.” Father John walked around the man and opened the door. “It didn’t do any good,” he said as he stepped into the hallway.

  The snow was heavier as Father John drove north through Lander. It clung to the asphalt unfurling ahead and blew through the branches of the ponderosas. He crossed the reservation under a steel-gray sky and turned into the mission. As he came around Circle Drive, he saw Vicky’s Bronco parked in front of the Arapaho Museum next to a blue SAAB that he didn’t recognize, but visitors were always dropping by the museum. He felt his spirits lift. It had been two months since he’d seen Vicky. She hadn’t called, and there had been no legitimate reason to call her. He parked next to the Bronco and hurried up the steps.

  7

  A murmur of conversation drifted through the silence of the old school building, bouncing against the glass-fronted cases with Arapaho artifacts: painted parfleches, beaded moccasins, deerskin dresses, an Arapaho ledger book.

  He followed the voices down the corridor to the library in what had once been a classroom. Vicky was at one of the rectangular tables that had replaced the ink-hole desks. Across from her, huddling inside a white coat, a small, blond woman with the blanched complexion of someone who spent too much time under fluorescent lights. A large brown folder lay on the table in front of her. Standing by a stack of cartons next to the row of metal shelves was Lindy Meadows, the Arapaho woman Vicky had helped him talk into taking the job as museum curator.

  “John. We’ve been waiting for you.” Vicky glanced up. The slim brown hands were clasped on the table, fingers laced together. The ceiling light shone in her black hair, which fell loosely around the collar of her blue blouse. There was a faint blush in her cheeks, a hint of red in her lips. Her eyes narrowed with intensity the way they always did when she had something important on her mind. It surprised him. There was so little he had forgotten about her.

  “My friend Laura Simmons.” A nod toward the blond woman across the table. “Laura teaches Western history at the University of Colorado. Lindy and I were just telling her about you.”

  “I wouldn’t believe any of it,” he said, shaking the blond woman’s hand. He realized with a start that the dark bruise on the woman’s cheek was the size of a fist.

  “I’d say the museum speaks well enough for you, Father.” She gave him a nervous smile and turned away from his gaze.

  Vicky went on, explaining that her friend was here to research a biography of Sacajawea.

  “How can we help you?” Father John swung a chair over and sat down at the end of the table.

  “I’ve been telling her about our collections.” Lindy thumped one of the cartons, as if she were leading a spelling drill. She might have come with the building, he thought, one of the teachers a hundred years ago, dressed in a white blouse and navy skirt, black hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She had the dark complexion and eyes of the Arapaho, and the businesslike manner. He hadn’t worried about the museum since she’d taken over.

  She gave the cartons another thump. She was still shelving and cataloging documents. Some oral histories here, she knew. Letters from Arapaho elders in the early 1900s that might refer to Sacajawea. No guarantees, but she’d try to locate them.

  “I’d be very grateful.” Laura kept her face tilted sideways. The bruise might have been a shadow. “You never know where an important document might turn up.” A hint of anticipation and excitement worked into her voice.

  Father John smiled. He’d almost forgotten the surge of joy at the smallest possibility of finding something new in the past. This was why he’d fought for the museum—gone to the mat with the provincial—to help the Arapahos preserve their own past so that scholars like Laura Simmons could understand what had really happened.

  “There’s something else.” Vicky turned toward him. “There could be some evidence on the res that proves that the old woman who died here was the real Sacajawea.”

  Father John didn’t say anything for a moment. He’d heard the stories about such evidence as long as he’d been here—the Jefferson Medal given to Sacajawea, which the old woman supposedly gave to her son, Baptiste. He’d never heard that any evidence had been found. “Sometimes”—he hesitated, then plunged on—“there’s a powerful will to believe.” He’d seen it many times among his colleagues—the insistence that one theory or another must be true, regardless of contradictory evidence.

  “What do you believe, John?” Vicky met his gaze.

  She was always testing him, he knew. Was he really for the people? Or just another white man pretending that the truth of the past was important? The room was quiet, the other women watching him, too. He said, “When I came here I agreed with historians that Sacajawea died in 1812. William Clark himself believed she’d died.”

  “And now?” Vicky persisted. He might have been a defendant and she the prosecutor.

  Now, he thought, now there were the stories, passed down among both the Shoshones and the Arapahos, stories told by a woman buried in the Shoshone cemetery. He said, “The woman here knew things about the expedition that only someone who’d been part of it could have known.”

  “Exactly.” Laura seemed to jump in her chair. Her hands fluttered in the air. “My colleagues—our colleagues”—she lifted her chin—“refuse to give oral histories the same importance as documentary evidence. Well, I intend to present them with a document they can’t ignore. Sacajawea’s own memoirs.” The words seemed to hang in the silence a moment. “The memoirs are on the reservation somewhere,” she said.

  Lindy spoke up: “If it’s true, it would be an incredible find.”

  An incredible find indeed, Father John thought. One of the most important in American history—an Indian
woman’s own account of the great American expedition. “What makes you think they’re here?”

  Laura’s expression dissolved into what passed for a smile. She sat back, drew in a breath, then began explaining. Another historian—Charlotte Allen—had discovered the memoirs twenty years ago. Someone named Toussaint knows where they are.

  “Toussaint?” he said. “I’ve never met anyone by that name.”

  “Theresa Redwing may know who he is,” Vicky said. “Her mother was one of the elders who gave Charlotte Allen permission to publish the memoirs. Laura’s hoping the Shoshones will extend her the same courtesy.” She leaned toward him. “Would you ask Theresa to talk to her? You can explain the importance of writing the truth about the past.”

  “You sound like a historian,” Father John said.

  Vicky laughed, a soft, rippling sound. A relaxed look of familiarity came into her eyes. “Maybe I’ve been around historians too long.”

  “I don’t know Theresa Redwing very well.” He’d met the woman at celebrations and powwows. She was a respected Shoshone elder, but she wasn’t one of his parishioners.

  “The elders trust you,” Vicky persisted.

  Father John glanced at the blond woman. A friend, Vicky had said. She didn’t have many friends, it seemed. Woman Alone, the grandmothers called her. He sei ci nihi. A few relatives scattered about the res, two kids in Los Angeles, an ex-husband . . . He pushed the thought away. Laura Simmons was her friend, and Vicky had asked him to help. He had always found it difficult to turn her down.

  “I’ll stop by and have a talk with Theresa,” he said to Laura.

  The woman gave him a thin smile, a crack in the pale face. Then she began rummaging in the folder. She plucked out a legal-size notepad and pen, scribbled something, and tore off three triangles of paper. She handed them around. “You can reach me at this number,” she said. “The Mountain House in Lander.”

  Then she was on her feet, pulling on the white coat, fingering the buttons, nodding at the curator. “You’ll call me the minute you locate the letters?” she asked, gripping the folder and fixing her tan bag over one shoulder.

  Lindy promised. A day or two, and she should have them.

  “Still some time to visit the Shoshone cultural center,” Laura said, inspecting the gold watch on her wrist. “You never know, Sacajawea’s memoirs could be on a shelf somewhere.”

  The remark brought another jolt of memory. There was always hope—Father John knew it well—that other historians had missed something important, something in plain view on a shelf somewhere.

  “I’ll call you, Vicky.” Laura was at the door now, and in a moment she was gone, leaving only the shush of her footsteps fading in the hallway, the whack of the front door trembling through the floorboards.

  Vicky turned to him. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  “I can put on a pot of coffee in the office,” he said.

  8

  “What about the skeleton?” Vicky glanced up at him as they walked along Circle Drive, cutting fresh tracks in the membrane of snow on the asphalt. The wind sprinkled white flecks in her hair. She was wearing a long, black coat that she held closed with one hand. Her briefcase swung from the other, and the strap of the familiar black bag was fixed over one shoulder. She moved with an easy naturalness into the space ahead, displacing the emptiness. “Any chance it’s ancient?”

  “The elders think so,” Father John said. “They asked me to check with Gianelli.” This wasn’t what she wanted to talk to him about. She could have brought up the skeleton back at the museum.

  Vicky stopped and threw her head back. She gave a little shiver of cold. “The elders asked you?” Then, as if she would have liked to recall the words, she said, “See how they respect you, John? You’re the one they trust to find the truth.” She started walking again, and he stayed in step, not knowing what to say. The elders had turned to him, a white man. They should have asked her.

  Vicky linked her arm in his. “Of course they’d call you. They trust you, John, and you and Gianelli are friends.” She was quiet as they passed the church, the alley leading to Eagle Hall and the guest house. “I wish they’d called me,” she said finally.

  “I’m sorry, Vicky.” He could feel the light pressure of her hand through the sleeve of his wool jacket.

  “It’s not your fault you’re the one they trust,” she said as they walked up the icy steps in front of the administration building. He held the heavy wooden door and waited for her to step inside, acutely aware of the place on his arm where her hand had rested.

  He followed her into his office on the right and flipped the switch, displacing the gray afternoon with a tungsten-bright light that flooded over the desk and the two chairs arranged along one wall. Vicky sank into one of the chairs. He could feel her eyes on him as he picked up the glass coffeepot from the little metal stand next to the door. He went in search of water from the sink down the hall.

  “I came back home to help my people,” she said when he returned. Her coat was arranged around the chair behind her. “How naive and stupid it sounds. Indian lawyer wants to help her people! I’m just a woman who had the temerity to put herself forward. Divorce her husband and become a lawyer, like a man. My people don’t know which category to put me in—wife, mother, lawyer. I don’t really belong anywhere.”

  Father John took off his jacket, hooked it on the coat tree, and sat at the edge of the desk, facing her. “It takes time, Vicky. Old traditions are slow to change.”

  She lifted one hand and brushed back a small strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead. “What does Gianelli say?” she asked, bringing the subject back to the skeleton. A kind of uncertainty showed in her eyes.

  He said, “A Caucasian woman, somewhere between the mid-twenties and mid-thirties. She was buried twenty to twenty-five years ago.”

  Vicky stared at him, eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Charlotte Allen disappeared on the reservation twenty years ago.”

  In the quiet, the sound of dripping coffee. “What happened to her?” Father John said after a moment.

  “She was hiking in the mountains. Her body was never found. Maybe she wasn’t lost in the mountains after all. Maybe she’d gone walking along the river, fell down, knocked herself unconscious—”

  “The woman was murdered, Vicky. Her skull was fractured. She had a broken jaw and cheekbone, broken ribs and arms, consistent with a—”

  “Beating.” Vicky finished the sentence. Some of the color had drained from her face.

  “What does Laura know about Charlotte Allen?”

  “Not much.” Vicky was shaking her head. “Charlotte’s mother gave her the unfinished manuscript, as well as the journal Charlotte kept while she was here.”

  Father John reached back and picked up the phone. “We’d better let Gianelli know,” he said, tapping out the number.

  An answering machine clicked on at the other end. “You have reached the Central Wyoming offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He told the machine that he had some information on the identity of the skeleton, then replaced the receiver.

  Vicky had poured two mugs of coffee, set one beside him on the desk, and was cradling the other in both hands as she dropped back into her chair. “What about Laura?” she asked. “She’s here to do the same research that Charlotte Allen was doing. She could be in danger.”

  Father John leaned over and laid a hand lightly on her arm a moment. He could feel the tenseness in her muscles beneath the silky fabric of her blouse. “Look, Vicky, let’s not jump to conclusions. We don’t even know that Charlotte Allen was buried in that grave.” He heard his own voice, calm, logical. “Even if it turns out to be her, there’s no reason to suppose that whatever happened twenty years ago had anything to do with the research.”

  “You don’t understand, John,” Vicky said. “Indian people believe the real Sacajawea is buried here, but historians have argued the matter for decades. Some of t
hem have probably staked their professional reputations on the theory that Sacajawea died years earlier. What if someone killed Charlotte Allen to stop her from publishing the truth?”

  “A lot of what-ifs, Vicky.” An image of the slight, pale woman in the museum flashed in his mind: the joy in her expression at the possibility of finding something no one else knew, like the joy of an explorer coming into a place no one else had ever seen. “Gianelli will follow up on this,” he said. “As soon as I hear anything, I’ll call you. There’s no sense in alarming Laura.”

  “You’re probably right.” Vicky shifted in her chair. “I’m worried about Alva Running Bull,” she said after a moment. “I’d already drawn up the divorce papers when she and Lester started coming to you for counseling. Now she’s told me to tear up the papers.”

  This was what she’d wanted to talk to him about. Father John picked up his mug, walked around the desk, and sat down, aware of a distance opening between them. Usually they were on the same team. He didn’t like playing on opposing teams. “Alva and Lester want to make their marriage work,” he began. “Divorce court isn’t exactly the place where that can happen.”

  “He beats her. She has to leave him. Even Sacajawea left.”

  “Alva and Lester are both in counseling, and Lester’s agreed to go to an anger management group. There’s a good program in Riverton. People can change, Vicky. The grace of God can work in all of us, if we give it a chance.”

  “Can you imagine what it’s like?” Vicky went on, as if she hadn’t heard. “The man you live with every day, sleep with every night? The man you love? Can you imagine what it’s like?”

  “You took Ben back.” It startled him, the way he’d flung the words at her, like an accusation erupting out of his own uncertainty.

  Immediately he regretted stepping across the invisible line drawn around her personal life. He waited for her to rise from the chair, take her coat, and walk out of the office. If she did, he knew he would never see her again.