Eye of the Wolf (32 page)

“You're wrong, Professor,” Father John said. “No one deserves to be murdered. The Arapahos who were murdered here long ago didn't deserve their fates. Neither did the Shoshones. Your wife would have been brought to justice.”

The man emitted a growl of laughter that bubbled up like phlegm from somewhere deep inside the narrow chest. “Brought to justice? Spare me your platitudes, Father O'Malley. With attorneys like your friend here to assist her in avoiding her fate, I very much doubt she would have even faced charges, never mind a trial and conviction. I was left with no choice except to avenge my students and my own honor. You understand, I've spent my entire career, the most important part of my life, in the service of students who have relied on me as a guide into history. Surely you, as a former teacher, can appreciate my devotion. It consumed me to the extent I am afraid, that I did not give the proper consideration to the character of the woman whom I had decided to make my second wife.”

The man paused and glanced back at the prone body. “I admit that after the death of my first wife, I was felled by loneliness,” he said after a moment. “And, yes, I also succumbed to the siren call of lust. Dana was a beautiful woman. I was under the delusion that she would share in my devotion. I could not have been more mistaken. She assumed a man of my reputation must have a large bank account. I realize now how disappointed she must have been to find that my assets consisted of a modest retirement and meager royalty checks from my books. Naturally, she saw that the only asset which might be increased was the income from
Tribal Wars.
”

Lambert stared at the gun in front of him and listed sideways toward the walking stick. His jaw jutted forward, the muscles in his face seemed
to tighten, and his eyes began to look bleary—an old man's eyes blinking into the snow. “She dishonored me,” he said finally, his voice cracking with emotion. “Can either of you understand what it is like to be dishonored?”

“Put down the gun, Professor,” Vicky said. “We'll take you back to town. You won't face anything more than a temporary insanity charge.”

“Quiet!” Lambert shouted. His voice echoed from the bluffs. Then, in a calmer tone he continued, “I am Professor Charles Lambert. I am the foremost expert on the tribal wars of the Plains Indians. I will not be locked up in a grimy jail, dressed in orange clothing, and paraded around with my hands cuffed behind me. I will not cooperate with lawyers who seek to paint a false picture of what I have done and absolve me of my own responsibility. I will not prostrate myself in a public courtroom before an inferior man in a black robe. I will not dishonor myself.”

The professor started moving backward, leaning on the walking stick—a slow, jerky motion. He looked down for a long moment, as if he were studying the still body, attempting to make out how it came to be as it was. There was the faintest look of surprise in his expression. Then, he bent his arm upward and placed the gun against his right temple.

“Don't!” Father John started to lunge for the man. The sound of the gunshot came like a blast of fireworks that filled the space between them and rocketed through the canyon. The man's head had exploded into the falling snow.

Father John froze in place, scarcely able to believe what he was seeing. The old man folded downward, knees buckling, arms swinging at his sides, blood pooling into the dark scarf pulled around the collar of his topcoat. There was a loud thumping noise, and someone was screaming—a sustained howl, like the howl of grief. It was a half-second before he realized that it was Vicky who was screaming, and that the thumping in his ears was the sound of his own heart.

He felt himself moving forward, his boots dragging like chains through the snow. He went down on one knee beside the bodies of Charles and Dana Lambert, so close together, they were almost touching.

He dropped his face into his hands. Snow tipped off the brim of his hat and pricked the skin between the top of his gloves and the edge of his coat sleeves. He was aware of the snow falling everywhere, ridges of snow tracing the bodies, clumps of snow on the branches of the sagebrush all around. “God have mercy on us,” he whispered. The other words would come on their own. The usual prayers would form on his lips. He waited. There was nothing except the white void closing around them.

God. God. God. Where are You?

He lifted his head and stared through the snow at the steep slopes rising over them. The stillness was as deep as the canyon—the stillness of eternity. Then, the faintest sound, a staccato sobbing. He glanced around. Vicky was sitting in the snow, head buried in her arms, snow outlining the contour of her back.

Father John got to his feet and went over to her. He knelt beside her and gathered her to him. She shivered against him, small and light as if there was nothing to her at all except the shock and grief. Her sobs sounded muffled against his chest.

After a moment, he lifted her to her feet and kept his arms around her to steady her. “We have to get out of here,” he said, guiding her back along their footprints to the pickup.

SO MUCH DEATH
, Father John was thinking. Too much death. They'd driven back from Bates in numbed silence, he and Vicky. At some point, the cell had clicked in and he'd told Burton what had happened—jarred at the sound of his own voice in the silence. Ten miles later, a phalanx of white pickups and an ambulance, sirens blaring, red and blue lights flashing, had sped past. He had kept going, back toward the reservation, back toward life, not saying anything. He and Vicky, eyes fixed on the headlights flaring ahead, both of them seeing the same images of death, he knew. He and Vicky, each locked in their own worlds, and yet he had never felt so close to her.

Now he watched the dark shadow of her Jeep turning around Circle Drive and threading through the cottonwoods, taillights blinking in the snow. Then it was gone. He lifted his face to the snow; he could taste the snow, and for a moment, the sensation dulled the thirst that had started over him at the battlefield. He tightened his fingers around the
keys in his coat pocket, walked over to the church, and let himself into the dark vestibule. He flipped on the light switch. Faint white lights stuttered into life over the altar and cast columns of light across the pews and stucco walls. The church seemed set apart and self-contained, a world unto itself.

Father John walked down the center aisle, slumped into the front pew, and buried his face in his hands. He closed his eyes, staring at the image in his head. Dear Lord, would it never go away? The prayers were coming now, all the prayers engraved in his heart, and yet they seemed new and insistent, as if he'd just discovered them. Have mercy on all their souls, he prayed. All of those who died at Bates. Have mercy. Have mercy.

He wasn't sure how long he had stayed in the pew. Time had collapsed into the flickering light, the quiet and the sense of the eternal that closed about him. The thirst seemed to withdraw into that place where he managed to keep it most of the time. He finally lifted himself off his knees.

It was when he turned around that he saw his assistant in the back, half sitting, half kneeling, hands clasped over the next pew. Father John made his way down the aisle. “I didn't hear you come in,” he said, when he was a few feet away.

Father Ian pushed himself upright and headed into the vestibule. “I didn't want to disturb you.” He threw the explanation over one shoulder as he pushed the door open and stepped outside.

“Heard you drive in,” the other priest went on, still holding the door, half in shadow, half in light, until Father John flipped the switch and the other priest was enveloped in the shadow. “The news has been all over the radio and television about two more bodies found at Bates, and the phone has been ringing all evening. I figured that's where you and Vicky went this afternoon. Right?”

“Right.” Father John moved past and went down the steps, conscious of the other priest's boots scuffing the steps behind him.

“Thought you might like to talk,” Father Ian said, falling in beside him as they started across Circle Drive.

Father John jammed his hands into his coat pockets. The front of his coat was open, and he left it that way. The cold air swept over his face and neck and bit through his shirt, calling him back to life. After a moment, he explained how Dana Lambert had murdered the four men, hoping to start a tribal war that would promote her husband's book, how the professor had seen his world crumbling and had shot his wife, then himself.

Ian stopped walking. “You thought you could prevent what happened, and now you blame yourself, don't you? How did you plan to stop it?”

Father John could still see the gun pointed at his heart. They might have all been dead, and that was the thing, wasn't it? That was the thing that had propelled him into the church. It had made him open his coat to the cold, all to assure himself that he was alive. He was alive.

“When you drove in here,” Father Ian said, “there wasn't anything you wanted more than a drink, right?”

Father John turned around and faced the light-colored eyes shining out of a face striped with shadows. “Yes,” he said.

His assistant was shaking his head, everything about him looking satisfied and vindicated. “Alcoholics love guilt, John,” he said. “We seek it out, look everywhere for it, and if we can't find it, we invent it, because when we have the guilt, we have the excuse. I've found all the guilt I needed here at the mission. It was you that people wanted at meetings, you patients wanted in the hospital, so I told myself, I must be doing something wrong. It must be my fault. If I'm at fault, I must be guilty. And . . .” He shrugged. “There are a lot of bars. But I can't change the fact that people here love you, and you couldn't prevent a man from committing murder and suicide. Face it, John. We're a couple of alkies trying to stay sober and looking for the excuse to drink.”

“We?” Father John said. It was the first time that his assistant had actually admitted to being an alcoholic.

“Had a long talk with the Provincial today,” Ian said. “Don't worry,” he hurried on. “I didn't mention you and Vicky Holden.”

“It wouldn't have mattered.”

“I understand that, John. I've been watching you. I'm starting to understand some things. You'd like to stop in at the bars, that's what I started thinking, but you don't. Maybe you'd like to have an affair with her . . .” He tossed his head back toward Seventeen-Mile Road. “I have to believe what you say, that there's never been anything between you. You've made a life for yourself here and, well . . .” He hesitated, his gaze roaming over the grounds and the buildings settled into the shadows and the quiet. “I'd really like to do the same. It's like you said, whiskey won't let it happen. So I'm going to a clinic in Casper.”

Father John clasped the man's shoulder. “That's good, Ian,” he said. “I need you here. The people need you. You'll see.”

“I hope nobody's going to need me in the next three weeks.” Father Ian started toward the residence again, then turned back. “There was another call after you left,” he said. “A young woman named Edie Bradbury. Sounded scared. Said you'd told her she could come to the mission. I offered to go and get her, but she said that she'd drive over. She's at the guesthouse.”

“She's here,” Father John said. Thank God, he thought.

He followed the other priest up the steps to the residence, waves of gratitude flowing over him for this assistant, after the years of hoping for another priest who would want to be here, and for Edie Bradbury and life and all the possibilities that lay ahead. The minute he and Father Ian stepped into the entry, Walks-On came scampering down the hallway.

Familiar, Father John thought. Everything familiar. He stooped over and scratched the dog's ears as the other priest tossed his coat over the coat tree and started up the stairs. Then Father John hung up his own coat, set his hat on the bench, and started after the dog, who was already in the doorway to the kitchen, looking back at him with dog patience. Familiar and normal and expected, all of it—Walks-On and the old house creaking around them, the thud of the other priest's boots on the steps, the faint odor of stale coffee lingering in the air.

VICKY JANGLED THE
key in the lock, aware of the dim, orange glow of light in the empty corridor. She opened the door into her apartment and reached for the light switch. It was then that she saw the flicker of light in the living room. She gripped the doorknob, every muscle poised to bolt back down the corridor, but the figure rising off the sofa was familiar: the shape of the dark head and curve of the shoulders, the dark, thick forearms dangling from the rolled up sleeves of the light-colored shirt.

“I've been worried about you,” Adam said.

Vicky closed the door and leaned against it a moment. In all the hurry to end the law partnership, move out her things, find a new office, and—yes, this was the main part of it—end everything between them, she hadn't gotten around to asking Adam for her key.

“Are you all right?” His voice seemed to come from far away, breaking through the torrent of her own thoughts. Vicky felt the gentle pressure of his hands on her shoulders, but still she clung to the door. Would she ever be all right? Would anything ever be all right?

“Have you eaten?” Adam tried a different tack.

“I'm not hungry.” Finally, she found the strength to push off the door and walk past the man into the living room. She sank onto the far end of the sofa, away from the imprint of his body in the cushion. The television was lit, but Adam must have pressed the mute key because there was a man standing in a floodlit circle, hair blowing onto his forehead, lips moving, arms flapping about in a grotesque mime.

Adam dropped onto the cushion that he'd just left and, reaching forward, picked up the remote on the coffee table. He pointed it toward the TV and, as if he'd willed sound to erupt, the man's voice filled the room. A siren wailed in the background, mixing with the busy, purposeful noise of footsteps crunching snow and the sound of voices.

“We're still waiting for positive identification of the two bodies here at Bates tonight.” The man's voice cut through all the noise. “So far the spokesman for the Fremont County Sheriff's Office has confirmed that
the bodies are those of an elderly man and a woman most likely in her thirties . . .”

Adam pointed the remote again, and the sound went off. The screen went dark. For a half-second, they sat in the darkness, until Adam shifted around and flipped on the table lamp, sending a circle of light over the sofa. “Tell me about it,” he said.

Vicky turned toward him and let her gaze take a slow turn of his face, trying to glean from his eyes, the set of his mouth, the flare of his nostrils, some explanation of how he knew that she had gone to Bates. She was aware that he was also studying her, and after a moment, Adam said, “I called two or three times to see how you were feeling. There was no answer, so I came over to check on you. It surprised me that you weren't here. The doctor said you should rest. I decided to wait for you and turned on the TV.” He shrugged and looked away before hurrying on. “Two more bodies found at Bates. I called St. Francis Mission and learned that the good pastor wasn't in. I can do the math, Vicky. What I can't figure out is what made you and Father John go out to the battlefield today.”

Vicky leaned against the back of the sofa and stared through the circle of light at the small table and bookcase and desk swimming out of the shadows toward her and told him how she'd found out that it wasn't Frankie Montana who had made the tapes at a recording studio, but Dana Lambert. She'd gone to John O'Malley, she said, rushing through this part. She could never explain to Adam Lone Eagle. She should have gone to Burton; surely that's what Adam was thinking. But she and John O'Malley were stronger together, more convincing than either of them could be alone.

She rattled off the rest of it, all the way to Bates and the dead woman and Charles Lambert threatening to shoot John O'Malley until she'd let Frankie's gun drop into the snow where the deputies would find it. They had probably already found it. It was at this point that she was aware of Adam reaching over and taking both of her hands in his. She told him how the professor had put the gun to his temple, but she
didn't try to describe the sound of the explosion or the shell burst of tissue and blood in the falling snow. As she talked, she felt a kind of relief coming over her, a lightening, as if she were setting down a burden. Finally, she said, “Frankie won't be going to prison for homicide.”

“No,” Adam said, a thoughtful note in his tone. The warmth of his hands flowed into her own, and she realized that she no longer felt the chill of death. “But he'll go to prison for resisting arrest, taking a hostage at gunpoint, breaking and entering. Frankie's mother has retained another attorney, since you'll be the prosecution's star witness.”

Vicky turned to him. “Samantha Lowe?” she said.

He nodded. “She left a message on my answering machine a couple of hours ago that she'll be representing Frankie. She's already arranged to consult with a firm of criminal lawyers in Casper. She'll give Frankie a good defense, Vicky.”

Vicky tried to pull her hands free, but Adam tightened his grip and held on. “There never was anything between Samantha and me,” he said. “I was her adviser, that's all. A father figure.”

“Right, Adam.” Vicky yanked herself free at this and jumped to her feet. She walked over to the window and began threading the cord of the shade through her fingers. The sky was silver, lit with stars, and a faint glow lay over the snow covering the street and sidewalk below. Everything seemed fresh and new, almost as if spring were pushing through the snow.

“I'm not going to lie to you,” Adam said. “I was attracted to her, damn attracted. I got the feeling that Samantha might have been interested, and you had become so . . .” He hesitated. “A big space has opened between us lately, Vicky, and I haven't been able to figure out why.”

“You know why.” Vicky looked around. Adam had moved sideways into the corner of the sofa, arm draped along the back, leg crooked over the middle cushion. A polished black shoe dangled in the space between the edge of the sofa and the coffee table. A spark of anger flared inside her. They might have been chatting about the spring snow. “We want different things,” she said. “You want to be Crazy Horse riding in to
save the village. You want to be the one people count on. You want to take care of the big problems, make them go away in the courts.”