The Dream Stalker (5 page)

Father John flinched, as if this stranger had hurled an invisible stone at someone in his family. He and Vicky Holden had worked together for three years now, ever since she’d returned to the reservation. Arranging adoptions and divorces; keeping some juvenile out of jail; talking some alcoholic into treatment. Vicky handled the legal side; he, the counseling. They made a good team. He enjoyed working with her—he loved being with her—although he hadn’t called her in almost three months. And she hadn’t called him. It was as if they had reached an unspoken agreement not to spend so much time together.

It didn’t surprise him, Bryant’s singling out Vicky instead of the protesters—the outsiders. As Banner had said last night, the outsiders wouldn’t change the mind of any Indian. But Vicky might. Father John knew she’d spoken against the facility at several meetings on the reservation; she’d written a number of pieces for the
Wind River Gazette.
He’d read them all. All variations of the same question: If a nuclear waste facility brought so many benefits, why did no one else want it?

He said, “Vicky Holden is not the only one who opposes the facility.”

“That’s the point, Father.” This from Redbull. “We got outsiders crawling all over the rez, thanks to her articles. They’ll be at the public hearing tonight. And they’ll be causin’ trouble ’til the final vote at the joint council meeting. Some folks are gonna listen to them
outsiders. Then they’re gonna demand the joint council turn down the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Bryant said, “I’ve looked into St. Francis Mission and your work here, Father O’Malley. You have a great deal of influence with the people. You could allay any unfounded fears. All you would have to do is explain the data in the report.”

“The Arapahos can read the report for themselves,” Father John said, getting to his feet. He had no intention of becoming a spokesman for a nuclear waste facility. As far as he was concerned, the meeting was over. His own thoughts had already shifted to the office: the bills, the messages. Gianelli had probably called by now.

The two men raised themselves out of the wingbacks, reluctance in their movements. The white man reached long, manicured fingers into the inner pocket of his suit coat and extracted a small leather case. He slipped out a business card and, leaning over the desk, set it on the report. “I’ll be at the Alpine Bed and Breakfast until the joint council meeting. You can reach me there if you have any questions.”

Father John followed his visitors into the front hall and reached around to open the door. He shook hands with both men—a nod to convention—and Redbull stepped out into the sunshine.

Bryant hesitated in the doorway. “I always like to know my adversary,” he said. “I understand Vicky Holden’s quite intelligent, as well as beautiful. Is there anything else I should know about her?”

Father John felt the flush of anger in his face. Who was this man? What right did he have to pry into Vicky’s life? He felt as if her privacy had been violated, and some part of his own. He said, “I’m not in the habit of discussing my friends.”

Bryant broke into another slow, knowing smile. “I’m looking forward to meeting her,” he said. Then he turned, crossed the stoop, and started down the short
sidewalk. Redbull was already behind the wheel of the green pickup parked at the edge of Circle Drive, but Bryant took his time removing his suit coat, opening the passenger door, and smoothing the coat over the seat. Then he stretched his arms upward and rolled his shoulders in an isometric exercise before lowering himself inside.

Father John watched as the pickup swung around Circle Drive and disappeared behind the cottonwoods at the intersection with Seventeen-Mile Road. Slamming the door shut, he walked back into the study, the dull throbbing now a full-blown headache. He picked up the phone and punched in Vicky’s number. She should know about this outsider—Paul Bryant. He knew about her.

The secretary at Vicky’s office sounded tentative and nervous. It was not a voice he recognized. Ms. Holden had just left, an emergency. Would he care to leave a message?

He would. He asked her to have Vicky call him the minute she returned. Father John O’Malley. Yes, she had his number.

The phone rang as he replaced the receiver, and he answered quickly, half expecting Vicky to be on the other end. It was Gianelli. “Need to talk to you,” the agent said. “My office in about an hour?”

That left thirty minutes to make a stab at the work in his own office, Father John was thinking. Thirty minutes to hear from Vicky.

4

V
icky Holden saw the plain white sheet of paper with the strips of black type pasted on in irregular, horizontal rows before she had taken off her jacket or set down her purse and briefcase. She felt her heart jump. The paper hadn’t been on her desk when she’d left the office last night, but now it floated on top of a stack of folders.

She should have been prepared for another threat, she thought. The dream had come to her again last night, the same frightening dream she’d had several nights now. She had awakened this morning feeling weak and shaky. She still didn’t feel like herself, and here was another threat, like the three others she’d gotten in the last three weeks. She bent over it until the type came into focus. Her breath sounded like the gasps of a small bellows.
YOU WANT TO LIVE? STAY OUT OF WHAT ISN’T YOUR BUSINESS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
.

She let her briefcase and floppy black purse drop onto the carpet beside the desk and crossed to the open door that led to the outer office. Hunched over a computer keyboard, eyes fixed on the green monitor, sat the white woman the temp service had sent over last week after Robin Levall left to follow her boyfriend on the rodeo circuit. “Mrs. Peters, who was here this morning?” Stay calm, Vicky told herself.

The white woman raised her eyes from the monitor
and turned in her chair, a tentativeness in the movement. She appeared to be on one side or the other of sixty, with a pale, round face, short hair dyed as black as coal, and bangs that crept down the top half of her forehead. She wore a prim white shirt buttoned to the neck, a black skirt, and sturdy shoes, the kind of business uniform she had probably worn to work forty years ago. “Here.” She repeated the word in a flat tone, as if to make certain she had heard it correctly.

“Someone left a note on my desk.”

“I came in promptly at 8:30, as you requested. . . .”

Vicky held up one hand. “Mrs. Peters, I’m simply wondering how a certain paper got on my desk.”

The older woman stared at her a second. “I didn’t go into your office, and nobody else has been here.”

“The outer door was locked when you arrived?”

The woman nodded, worry and fear mingling in her expression. “I used the key the service gave me.”

Vicky glanced at the closed door with the frosted glass panel and the dark letters marching backward that, from the outside corridor, spelled
VICKY HOLDEN, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
. A few feet down the corridor was the flight of stairs leading to the sidewalk on Main Street in Lander. Someone had climbed the stairs between 8:00 last night, when she had finally packed her briefcase and left for home, and 8:30 this morning, when Mrs. Peters had arrived. Or someone had come up the stairway from the parking lot and entered her office through the back hall. Either way, whoever had left the threat had come through a locked door. A chill ran across her shoulders: Someone had a key to her office.

“Please call the locksmith, Mrs. Peters, and have the locks changed immediately,” Vicky said before turning back into her private office. She opened the top drawer of the gray file cabinet and extracted the brown envelope in front. Lifting the latest threat from her desk with two fingers, as if it carried some type of fungus, she
slipped it into the envelope. Now there were four. Variations on a theme: If she wanted to stay alive, she should mind her own business; she should stay out of matters that didn’t concern her.

Of course the threats were about the nuclear waste facility. She opposed the plan to store radioactive materials on the reservation. It didn’t matter that it would only be for forty years—forty years was a generation, a lifetime. She would do everything in her power to make her people realize the dangers. Speak out. Write articles. Just as she’d been doing.

The day after her first article had appeared in the
Wind River Gazette,
she got the first threat—wedged between her front door and the frame. The second threat showed up on her windshield in the parking lot at Safeway. The third on her windshield again, four days ago, in the parking lot behind her office.

She had meant to report the threats. Why hadn’t she reported them? Why had she put it off, told herself it was just some crank getting his kicks trying to scare her? The world was full of cranks, and something like a nuclear storage facility was bound to smoke them out. She had convinced herself not to take the threats seriously. But now a fourth one had joined the others inside the envelope. It was as if her grandmother had grabbed her by the shoulders and begun shaking her. Four. There are four of everything important in the world. Four winds. Four directions. Four seasons. Four hills of life. Four quarters of creation. You must pay attention.

Vicky grabbed her purse and slung the strap over one shoulder. Tucking the brown envelope under her arm, she walked through the office. The secretary had gathered herself toward the monitor, as if to seek some kind of shelter from a storm that had suddenly burst around her.

“Call Detective Eberhart. Tell him I’m on the way over.” Vicky slammed out the door, not waiting for any
confirmation, and ran along the corridor and down the stairs. The clack of her heels echoed off the brick walls. From somewhere came the languorous sound of a ringing phone.

Sunshine washed over the sidewalk, but the coolness of early spring still hung in the air, with its ever-present hint of rain. A gust of wind whipped her gray wool skirt around her legs and flattened her suit jacket against her back. Pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles lined the curb and streamed down the wide street. Two men came along the sidewalk—businessmen in cowboy boots and cowboy hats and suits, suit coats blown back in the wind. Vicky started around the building toward the parking lot where she had left the Bronco fifteen minutes ago, then hesitated. The police department was only a few blocks away.

The moment the light turned green, she struck out across the street behind the businessmen, clutching the brown envelope against her chest, annoyed at having to take the time to admit this intrusion into her life. She had a full day of appointments. Molly Red Cloud would be in this morning to see about adopting her granddaughter, Little Molly, the child she’d raised from the moment Little Molly had opened her eyes on the world six years ago. Jane Latter needed help with the new lease on her beauty shop in Fort Washakie. And this evening was the public hearing on the nuclear storage facility. Vicky wanted to reread the environmental report before she finished writing the speech she intended to give.

She heard the roar of an engine and the squeal of brakes in the same instant that she glimpsed the truck out of the corner of her eye—a blurred mass of black and silver metal bearing down on her, threatening to engulf her. She leapt sideways, stumbling over the curb, the draft sucking at her as the rear wheels screeched past. One of the businessmen gripped her arm; she realized
he had stopped her from falling. The strap of her purse had slipped off her shoulder, wrenching her other arm. The brown envelope scuttled along the gutter in the wind.

The other man ran to retrieve it as a crowd began to gather: a couple of gray-haired women; a young woman with a baby stroller; a teenaged boy, the knees torn in his jeans; a man in work clothes with a tool belt slung around his waist. Was she okay? That fool in the truck, he could’ve killed her.

One of the businessmen handed her the brown envelope, while the other kept his hand on her elbow, steadying her, asking if she were hurt. She was aware of the red blur of his tie, the outsized blue eyes behind thick glasses, the smell of coffee on his breath.

“I think I’m okay,” she managed, pulling herself upright and away from his grasp, stamping her feet to stop her legs from quivering.