The Dream Stalker (24 page)

F
ather John spent most of the morning arranging the cowboy’s funeral. He made a half dozen phone calls: Fred Brush would make sure the grave was ready—Fred and his brother always dug the graves at St. Francis Cemetery; the mortuary would bring the corpse to the church; Max Ernie, one of the elders, would be the orator and take care of the painting; Jonathan Razon would bring the drum group. The cowboy deserved the sacred paint Ernie would place on his body, deserved the sound of drumbeats rising into heaven, conducting his spirit to the ancestors.

With the funeral arrangements made, Father John dialed Alberta Cavanaugh’s number. He wanted to give the woman another chance to say good-bye to her brother. Sheila answered. The funeral at nine o’clock tomorrow would be fine, she assured him. Anytime was probably fine; she doubted Alberta would be there. Then she asked how his day was going. He excused himself and rang off.

Next he tried Vicky’s office. She had not come in today. Even the secretary seemed perplexed. “She left a message on the answering machine this morning to cancel her appointments,” the woman explained, more forthcoming than usual.

Father John pushed down on the bar and tried Vicky’s home number. Pressing the receiver to his ear, he
listened to the rhythmic buzzing noise, imagining the phone ringing on the desk in her living room. The answering machine came on, and he hung up. Maybe she had taken his advice after all and gone to Denver. He knew he was grasping for some logical explanation. It would be so unlike her to leave.

He forced his attention back to the mission. He’d asked Father Geoff for the financial records earlier, before his assistant had left for a meeting of the senior parishioners in Eagle Hall. Now Father John scanned the pages, searching the neat columns of numbers for some hidden asset, some deposit lost in the swelter of debits. His assistant had brought the accounts up to date. As of yesterday, debits exceeded assets, and nothing balanced. He pulled out some sheets of stationery from the side drawer and wrote several letters to people who had contributed to St. Francis in the past.
We’re still here,
was the gist of the messages.
Still need your help.

Just before noon, he tried Vicky’s office again on the chance she’d picked up her messages. But the secretary said she hadn’t called in. He heard the worry in the woman’s voice as he struggled to keep his own anxiety in check, to keep his thoughts logical. He wanted to believe she had taken his advice and gone away for a while.

He slammed down the phone and strode out of the office. A few minutes later he was driving west on Seventeen-Mile Road,
Carmen
blaring from the player. He turned south onto Plunkett Road. The asphalt wound up an incline ahead, and Father John pressed on the accelerator. The engine roared with disapproval as it went into the climb. From the top, he spotted the small gray house in a cluster of cottonwoods, a creek loping along the periphery like a silver ribbon flung over the plains that were flushed with green from the rains.

Father John left the Toyota under one of the trees and walked across the soft dirt to the front of the house.
The screen door hung out over the stoop, its mesh curling downward. He stepped around it and rapped on the wood door. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move.

He glanced around. A boy, maybe four or five years old, stood at the edge of the house, brown face smudged with dirt, eyes wide in curiosity. Long black hair hung around the shoulders of a worn blue jacket, and one knee poked through the slit in his jeans. “Hello, there,” Father John said. He didn’t move, not wanting to frighten the child. “What’s your name?”

The boy moved toward the corner of the house. “Jamie,” he said, dropping his eyes. It was impolite for Arapaho children to make eye contact with adults.

“You know a man named Clarence Fast?”

“Yeah.” A smile lit up the boy’s face. “Grandfather.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“Yeah.” Jamie turned and disappeared beside the house.

By the time Father John rounded the corner, the boy was already in the back, waving for him to come on. He strode alongside the house. The gray paint crumpled in ridges on the boards. His boots sank in the moist, brown earth. When he reached Jamie, he saw the old man seated in a webbed folding chair in a sunny spot a few feet from the back door. He had pulled a white blanket over his shoulders. One leg was extended, the heel of his boot sunk into the dirt. The other leg was missing. A crutch lay alongside the chair. “You meet my grandson?” Clarence Fast asked.

The boy ran to a mound of dirt close to the chair and scrunched down. A pudgy hand reached out to gallop a tiny plastic horse over the imaginary plains.

Fast kept his eyes on the child. “I watch him while his mother’s workin’. She’s my brother’s granddaughter.”

Father John understood. In the Arapaho way, she was also his granddaughter, and her son, his great-grandson. He introduced himself and said he was from the mission.

“I figured that’s who you was.” The old man looked up, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. He was in his sixties, with a rough, weathered face. He wore a jeans jacket over a dark plaid shirt, and blue jeans with one pant folded and pinned around the stump. “I sent my granddaughter over to the mission to find out about old Gab’s funeral.”

Crouching close to the chair, Father John took off his cowboy hat and began turning it between his hands. “I’m going to hold the funeral tomorrow at nine o’clock. What can you tell me about him?”

The old man took his hand from his eyes and, squinting, seemed to assess him a moment.

“I found his body,” Father John said.

The old man nodded, as if the explanation was satisfactory. “I ain’t seen Gab in more’n thirty years. Two days ago, my granddaughter went to the post office and brung me home a postcard. Doggone if it wasn’t from Gab. Wantin’ to meet me Sunday afternoon over Betty’s Place. Trouble is, Sunday’d come and went by the time I got the card, and old Gab was dead.” The Indian slipped one hand past his jeans jacket into the pocket of his shirt, brought out a postcard, and held it toward Father John.

Father John took the card. A photo of a cowboy flying off a bucking bronco on one side, the loopy, hurried scrawl of a dying cowboy on the other. “Don’t know where you is for sure. If this finds you meet me at Bettys you know the place Sunday in after noon. Gotta clear up some thing very important.” The cowboy had underlined the last two words.

Father John handed the postcard back. Gabriel must have sent a similar message to Matthew Bosse. Who else
had he tried to contact? And what was so important he wanted to clear it up before he died?

“We was the best wranglers there was by the time we wasn’t much bigger’n Jamie here. Gab come up to the rez one summer with his grandfather. Liked it so much he stayed around.” The old man turned his eyes to the child, who was making little snorting noises as the plastic horse leapt over a mound of dirt. “We probably worked every spread in Wyoming one time or another.” He waved one arm overhead taking in all directions.

“You and Gabriel and who else?”

“Mattie Bosse.” The Indian brought his eyes back to Father John. “Now he’s dead, too. Who’d wanna shoot a couple of broken down old cowboys?”

Father John was quiet a moment. He hadn’t realized Bosse had also been a cowboy, hadn’t thought of him as other than one of the tribal councilmen. “What do you think Gabriel wanted to see you about?” he asked.

The old man shook his head. “Like I said, Father, I ain’t seen Gabriel in more’n thirty years, not since I got hired on down at the KO Ranch in west Texas. Worked there up ’til a few months ago when my leg went and got gangrene and they had to cut it off. Wranglin’s not much good with one leg, so I come back up here where I got family. Gab stayed around here for a while after I left, then he lit out for some ranch in Arizona. That’s the last I heard ’til this.” He waved the postcard before slipping it back inside his pocket.

Father John stood up and stamped his boots into the ground to work out the kinks in his legs. He wasn’t getting anywhere; he didn’t know much more than when he’d driven out here. The cowboy had a sister and two old friends. One of the friends was dead, and the sister and other friend knew nothing about him. Unless. . . . “Did Gabriel have any other friends on the rez that you know about?”

The Indian shook his head slowly. “Nah. Gab left thirty years ago. Earth keeps turnin’.” He looked at the child, eyes watchful. “Might’ve called on Mattie, I guess, ‘cept he was on the tribal council. Doubt he would’ve remembered old Gab or me. Same with Alex, even though he used to cowboy with us.”

“Alex? You mean Alexander Legeau?” Father John swallowed back the excitement. Maybe there was some kind of pattern after all.

The Indian let out a quick snort. “He only got to be Alexander after he got his uncle’s ranch. He was always a lucky—” The Indian stopped himself, his eyes still on the child, who had produced another horse and was staging a kind of war in the mound of dirt. “Alex was a good cowboy, but I never thought he had it in him to run a big spread like that. Surprised the hell outta me.”

“Do you think Gabriel went to see Legeau?”

Fast kicked the heel of his boot into the dirt, building up a miniature mound, then knocking it down. “How’d I know? I ain’t seen nothin’ of Alex in more’n thirty years either. You think he wants an old one-legged cowboy come callin’ at his big, fancy ranch house? I ‘spect he’d sic the dogs on me. Sic the dogs on Gab, too, most likely.” The old man let his head wave back and forth. A faraway look came into his eyes. “The days we was friends is long gone by. Him and Mattie went their ways and got to be real important. Me and Gab just kept on cowboyin’.”

The little boy had started running around the mound and hollering, as if he were now the horse. “Would’ve been real nice to see old Gab,” Fast said over the sound of the child’s voice. “Talk about the old times. I’m real sorry I didn’t get down to the post office for my mail.”

Maybe you were lucky,
Father John thought. He patted the old man’s shoulder, thanked him, said he hoped to see him tomorrow at Gabriel’s funeral. Then
he told him Matthew’s funeral would probably be held in a couple of days. It depended on the coroner, on the family. He was thinking the coming days could be filled with funerals.

As the Toyota shuddered into life, Father John debated with himself whether to call Gianelli right away. All he had was another theory—the possibility of a connection between the two murdered men and a prominent rancher who may or may not have known that Gabriel Many Horses had returned to the reservation. He rammed the gear into drive and nudged the Toyota across the dirt yard and out onto the road. Before he mentioned the name of Alexander Legeau in the same sentence with murder, he wanted to have a talk with the man himself.

24

F
ather John drove north across the reservation, past the turn-off to Fort Washakie and on through Ethete. A few miles beyond Bighorn Flats, he took the jog around Riverside Dam and continued north on Maverick Springs Road, “Toreador en garde” filling the cab. The sun rode on his left, leaping over the buttes, draws, and arroyos. The farther north he went, the more isolated the land, with the only sign of human life an occasional wreck of an old cabin rising unexpectedly out of the bareness. Ahead lay the humpbacked hills of the Owl Creek Mountains.

As he came down the gradual slope into Wildhorse Flats, he saw the Legeau ranch before him. The barns and outbuildings, the pastures girdled with log fences, the white ranch house—all glowed in the sun, like a medieval village. He swung right into the driveway and parked near a bed of red and yellow tulips. A series of paving stones led across a stretch of lawn to the house.

The front door opened partway as he came up the steps to the porch. Peering around the door was an elderly Indian woman—Arapaho, he guessed by the quiet way her eyes stayed on him.

“I’m Father O’Malley, Grandmother,” he said. The woman gave a little nod: She’d heard of him, the priest at St. Francis.

“Is Alexander Legeau in?”

The woman pulled the door back and motioned him to enter. He removed his cowboy hat as he stepped into the entry. Sunshine streamed through the two windows flanking the door. The floor was dark and polished, a handsome frame for the rug upon it, woven in reds, whites, blues, blacks, and yellows—the colors of the Arapaho. A staircase rose on the left, the railing and balustrade polished to the same hue as the floor.