After the Thunder (33 page)

“Well, obviously,” she drawled. “Goodness, Tay, what an insight!”

He held her closer, with both arms around her, and dropped a kiss onto the top of her head. “All right, you just be as sarcastic as you want,” he said. “But settle down. We’re right here in the house with Cotannah and we won’t let her come to any harm.”

“I wish we could say the same about Walks-With-Spirits,” she said sadly. “Oh, Tay, I just have to go out there and help her!”

“Help her do what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is she’s doing.”

“So if you don’t know what it is, you can’t know whether she needs your help or not.”

“I am in no mood for any logical thinking,” she said.

She was only in the mood to do something,
anything
, to help her friend but she knew Tay was right. She had to wait until Cotannah asked for her help.

It seemed days, weeks, even, but just when she was losing control and about to go downstairs to see where Cotannah had gone, a faint sound, like glass clinking, floated to Emily’s ears. They saw Cotannah move silently across their field of vision, making one more small clinking noise, and the shine of light from the hallway lamp glinted off a bottle and some glasses in her hands.

“Whiskey!” Emily whispered. “She’s going to lie in wait for Phillips to come up. Now that’s the last tactic she ought to take, considering what she’s been through in the past. Oh Lord, Tay, what if she gets him drunk and he rapes her?”

I
t seemed to Cotannah that the night would stretch on forever and that Phillips would spend every second of it on the veranda. From her window she could hear his voice joining in the desultory conversation which kept returning, again and again, to the coming dawn’s execution. To her own amazement, none of it upset her terribly. Phillips was sitting down there thinking about her and that bottle of poison, no matter what words he was saying, and at dinner she had definitely seen that he was shaken. She would get the truth out of him long before dawn.

She smiled to herself. He probably was staying downstairs so long to give her time to go to sleep so he could sneak in and steal the bottle back from her.

While she waited, she thought about Walks-With-Spirits and spoke to him with her spirit.

I’m with you, my
holitopa.
Think of me and know that is true. We are truly set apart to be together, you and me, and in only a few more hours we’ll be side by side for years and years to come
.

Every little while she sent him that message and in between she tried to ready her mind and her body to
deal with Peter Phillips. It wouldn’t be long now.

Finally she heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. She ran to the mirror and smoothed her hair, adjusted the neckline of her dress. A few minutes after he entered his room she would go to see him.

To her shock, though, his footsteps stopped in front of her own door. She turned to stare at it and stood frozen, suddenly she realized that she was holding her breath, waiting for his knock.

It didn’t come. The knob squeaked, then turned, the door opened and he stepped in, closed it quickly, and reached behind him to turn the key in the lock. His face looked extremely pale in the lamplight.

He was smiling, though.

“I stopped by to ask about your ankle,” he said. “When you left the dining room after supper I thought you’d made a remarkable recovery.”

She gave him a blinding smile of gratitude and, pretending to limp slightly, took a step toward him in spite of every muscle in her body screaming for her to turn and run.

“I’ve recovered very well, thank you so much for asking,” she said, gesturing for him to sit at one of the chairs at the little table by the window. “It’s all to your credit that my ankle hardly swelled any at all, that ice you brought so quickly saved the day.”

He began to stroll toward her, not the chair.

“And you repaid me by taking something of mine.”

The hard-edged coldness in his voice chilled her through. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy to seduce him after all.

But now she had no choice.

She tilted her head and put on her most flirtatious air. “Why, sir, I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean you didn’t hurt your ankle at all. You only
wanted me out of the way so you could go through my things.”

She forced her lips to smile and her voice to drop to a husky intimacy. “I wanted to see your private space so I could learn more about you,” she said, “not to go through your things, Peter.”

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“The bottle you took from my desk.”

She clapped her hand over her heart as if shocked. “Whatever are you talking about?”

“At the dinner table you mentioned monkshood.”

She widened her eyes. “The poison?”

“Yes, the poison, you little vixen.”

“Just talking about poison makes me need some fresh air,” she said, turning away with a swirl of her skirts to go to the window. “As I’m sure poor Ruffy Sloan did, too.”

She threw the window open wider.

“Do you think Jacob was poisoned, too?” she asked, and turned to look at him.

But he had come up right behind her, fast, and his protruding belly pressed against her back as he reached up with both arms and pulled the window all the way down. He locked it.

“You’re going to give me that bottle, and you’re going to do it now, Missy.”

He sounded so cruel that her heart leapt into her throat, but she leaned into him seductively. “If I did take something of yours, did you ever think that it was only so that you would come to see me?” she purred. “Maybe I only wanted to have a private talk with you.”

“So you could hold me up for money?” he growled, stepping back from her, trying to see into her eyes. “Is that your game? You think I’m a rich man because I’ve
got a new brick building and a store full of expensive merchandise?”

She drew back, threw her hands in the air and pretended great shock. “Whatever are you talking about?”

His eyes narrowed to slits. “So that’s it. Well, let me tell you, little girl, I’ll tear this room apart and your beautiful body, too, before I’ll pay you one penny for that bottle. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Well, the best I can tell without understanding the subject of this conversation, you’re insulting me,” she said, making her voice rise, trying to sound angry instead of afraid. “You may leave my room, now, Mr. Phillips.”

He came toward her again.

“Not without what I came for, I’m not leaving. And I may just help myself to you while I’m here.”

He grabbed her upper arms with his fat, soft hands and jerked her to him with a strength that stunned her. She tried to turn her head away but he clasped her close to his rounded front with one hand and used the other to hold her chin in a vise grip and kissed her wetly, right on the mouth, so grindingly hard she couldn’t even get her breath.

Pure panic raced along her nerves.

Walks-With-Spirits stood in the open field that stretched from the back of the courthouse in Tuskahoma to the edge of the woods. He shouldn’t have come in so soon, he thought. Even though he’d promised to come in the evening before the dawn of his execution, and the Lighthorse had been waiting for him, he should have waited until right before first light.

Because now he couldn’t think, and he couldn’t regain his balance.

He turned his back to the lanterns hanging in scattered
trees near the building and tried with every scrap of strength left in him to remove this place and these Lighthorsemen from his thoughts so he could be at harmony in his spirit. He faced the south, the direction called white, the color of happiness and peace.

He said the incantation for removing enmity from his heart, said it silently four times.

Now. Listen! I am Walks-With-Spirits
.

All the White Pathways are mine!

I am wrapped in White Pathways!

Black Red Mockingbird! You have just come to make my soul beautiful!

After he finished, he stood still with his eyes closed, hoping for harmony in his heart.

Yet turmoil still filled him, unmerciful in its constant onslaught.

Cotannah.

He had thought he’d found his peace about her and even about her stubborn determination to find evidence against Peter Phillips, but this tumult came from Cotannah.

And it was rooted in more, much more, than her sadness about his death. Also, it was more than his own reluctance to be going from this world and leaving her behind.

He slipped out of his moccasins and pressed the soles of his bare feet to the face of the Earth Mother, praying for wisdom to come to him through the ground, feeling for balance. Oh, Great Spirit, he was losing the true balance that he’d achieved at Blue River.

He waited for the peace to come and slow the rapid beating of his heart.

When it didn’t come, he knew. The turmoil he felt was danger.

Cotannah was in danger, and a vision was coming to him.

The vision came clear, but only for an instant. Walks-With-Spirits stood with his head bowed and his eyes closed to look at it.

Sure enough, Cotannah was with Peter Phillips. She was trapped in the man’s arms. Peter Phillips was holding her against her will, he was kissing her …

A lancing of jealousy cut through Walks-With-Spirits’s heart but it soon faded. The real blow was the striking lightning of fear that burned through him. Evil was stalking Cotannah, the man meant to harm her.

“Turn around here and look at me,
Medicine Man
.”

The growling voice came from directly behind him, and it froze the vision on the backs of his eyelids. It refused to change. He waited another minute, but it would not tell him more. Then it was gone.

Slowly, resting his weight on the balls of his feet, he turned around.

Two Lighthorsemen stood there, directly in his face, straddle-legged and tense, as if they expected him to fight.

“Take off your shirt,” said the tall one.

“Aren’t you a little early with that order?” Walks-With-Spirits said.

To his deep aggravation, the sound of the rough voice not only had stopped the movement of his vision, it had intensified the tumult inside him. His muscles had gone taut and were strumming like bowstrings.

Cotannah needed help.

He had to go to her, he had to help her, he had to run!

“That’s not for you to say,” the shorter one said. “I can cut the rag off you if I need to.”

That one’s voice held just the smallest tremor. He was afraid, Walks-With-Spirits realized.

And so, come to think of it, was the other. They were starting to worry about being the ones who must shoot him—just in case he might be able to use his powers here after he’d gone on over to the next world.

“Maybe I’ll make my shirt disappear by magic,” he said.

Each of them stared at him, their own shirts billowing about them in the stiff breeze coming out of the south. It was cold, that before-dawn wind, and that was why they wanted his shirt off him now—just to punish him a little for being a shaman, or a witch. Whatever they thought him to be, they knew he was stronger than they, and so they craved power over him.

The shirt he wore was the soft skin of one of his brothers, the deer. Its fringes lifted and fell in the fingers of the wind. He crossed his arms, grasped it by the tail, and pulled it off over his head.

“Which of you wants to wear it and see what luck it brings to you?”

They both took a step back.

He smiled a little.

Then he let the shirt fall and walked forward, right between them, right into that cold wind from the south.

“Over there on that blanket,” the rough-voiced one shouted, “so we can sight the distance.”

Several men and horses were standing in the middle of the field, a pale square spread on the ground at their feet. Walks-With-Spirits walked toward them.

The moon was bigger now, and it gave enough light to make white streaks between the gray shadows and the yellow stripes of the lanterns. The blanket, he could see as he reached it and walked onto it, was woven of threads the color of raw cotton.

Good. It was close to white. That was a good omen.

“Kneel,” commanded one of the Lighthorse waiting at the chosen spot.

Slowly, Walks-With-Spirits went to his knees.

A man he’d never seen before stepped away from one of horses and came toward him, holding something in one hand.

Finally, he could see that it was the pot of paint. The man stopped in front of him, dipped two fingers in, and drew a white cross on the naked skin over Walks-With-Spirits’s heart.

Once his heart was marked they moved back and left him alone, so Walks-With-Spirits knelt there with his eyes closed and tried to calm himself enough for the vision to come to him again. When it did, it was the same.

No, the image was the same but the sense of danger to Cotannah was stronger now. Peter Phillips truly was evil.

Walks-With-Spirits’s muscles reacted, his instincts guiding them, long before the men standing around talking to each other near him knew what he would do. He was on his feet and running, he was throwing himself into an empty saddle on a ground-tied horse before one even noticed that he had even moved.

Phillips had killed Jacob. It was as clear to him now as the moon and stars overhead. He would have sensed that truth long ago whenever he was near the man if he hadn’t been consumed with jealousy at seeing him with Cotannah. Cotannah had unsettled his peace ever since the moment they met.

But now his only peace was with Cotannah.

And Phillips would kill her, too, if he didn’t get to her in time.

“Hey! Hey, there! What th’ hell …”

More shouts rang in his ears and then men were running toward him from every direction, yelling, as he picked up the reins and wheeled the horse around.

“Hold it! Hold it or I’ll shoot!”

Walks-With-Spirits spoke softly to the horse, who immediately did as he was asked and reared high into the air.

From his back, Walks-With-Spirits began to shout an incantation in the Choctaw tongue.

Then the horse was flattened out along the ground, galloping toward Tall Pine and Cotannah.

They were beginning to leap onto their mounts and chase after him, the Lighthorsemen and the others, but this horse was fastest of all. The Great Spirit had led him to the best running horse, the Great Spirit was giving wings to this horse.

And the Great Spirit was laying the portentous words on his tongue.

His pursuers dropped back a little bit, he could tell by the sounds of their horses’ hoofbeats. He smiled. Good. Let them be even more afraid. Giving such respect was good for them.

After what seemed a lifetime, Cotannah was able to pull her mouth free and step out of the trap of Peter Phillips’s arms. It surprised her that he let her go so easily.

“Why, you do take a girl’s breath away,” she cried, trying to smile.

He reached out and let his hand fall, deliberate and heavy, on her shoulder.