The Story Teller (23 page)

She walked down a wide hallway, fluorescent lights casting shiny circles over the green-tiled floor. Smells of
hot grease and charred meat drifted toward her. At the end of the hallway, a scattering of people lined up in front of a counter stacked with bowls of potato chips and buns, plates of hamburgers. On the other side several grandmothers scurried about the kitchen.

Vicky let herself through the door next to the counter, aware of the grandmothers’ eyes on her—the stranger. A Native American by the black hair, brown skin, and almond-shaped eyes, but not one of them. Not someone they knew. She stopped next to the old woman scooping coffee grounds into an oversized metal coffeepot. “Excuse me, Grandmother.” she began, “I see you’re very busy, and I’m sorry to interrupt you.” The dance of politeness must always be observed. “I’m supposed to meet someone here. Her name is Tisha Runner.”

The old woman shook her head and went back to scooping the coffee. Out of the corner of her eye, Vicky saw another woman set a bowl of potato salad on the counter and start toward her. “Come with me,” the second grandmother said.

The sound of drums faded behind them as they walked down another corridor past doors that had once led into classrooms. Small signs read:
LITTLE EAGLE PRESCHOOL, CIRCLE DAY CARE, HEALTH CENTER.
The old woman stopped at a door with the sign
OFFICE.
“You wait in here,” she directed.

The office was narrow and small, probably carved out of an adjoining classroom. Shoved against one wall were two desks cluttered with papers and notebooks. A couple of metal chairs were propped against the opposite wall. The drumming sounded far away, an echo of her own heartbeat.

After a few moments there was a shuffling of footsteps in the corridor; the door swung open and Tisha Runner walked in. She looked the same: the black shiny hair falling toward her face, the blue jeans and T-shirt.
She carried a small brown envelope. Without saying anything, she sank into one of the metal chairs, a tenseness in the way she moved.

“Police found a body in the river this afternoon,” she said. The words were clipped, abrupt. “It’s been on the TV. I’m scared it’s Julie.”

Vicky perched on the edge of the desk. “Is Julie a friend of yours?”

The girl shook her head, a stiff, deliberate motion. “She was staying with me the last couple days, that’s all. I didn’t want to say anything at school yesterday ’cause she was real scared. She asked me not to tell anybody where she was.”

“Tell me about her.” Vicky tried to conceal her anger and frustration. If Tisha Runner had told her about Julie yesterday, maybe the girl would be alive.

“I don’t know much.” A quick shrug. “She’s Lakota from up on the Rosebud. She got here a couple weeks ago and was looking for someplace to stay till she got a job. So she came to the center. I work here part time, over in day care.” She tilted her head toward the hallway. “Julie seemed real nice, kinda lost, you know, ’cause this was her first time off the res. I would’ve let her stay over at my place, but I only got a foldout. So I said I’d ask around, which I did over at school.”

She stopped a moment, gazing at some point beyond Vicky’s shoulder. “Somebody said Todd Harris had an extra bedroom. He was gone a lot, and he might like somebody watchin’ the place. So I gave her Todd’s number, and it all worked out, you know, except Todd was murdered, and now . . .”

Vicky gripped the edge of the desk and leaned forward. “Why did Julie leave Todd’s?” she asked.

“She didn’t want to leave,” the girl said. “He told her she had to get out.”

“When?”

“Last Sunday.” Another shrug.

Sunday, Vicky was thinking. The last time the old woman at the apartment building had seen Todd was Sunday.

“He told her it was too dangerous for her to stay in the apartment,” the girl went on. “He called me up and asked if Julie could stay at my place a few days. I said okay, a few days.” Tisha pushed back in the chair; the legs squeaked along the tile. “Next thing we know, Todd gets murdered, and Julie freaked out. I mean, she went nuts. Said she had to find some way to get to the reservation.”

“She wanted to go back to the Rosebud,” Vicky said. A confirmation. It was what she had expected.

“Rosebud? She was trying to find a ride up to the Wind River Reservation.”

“What?

“Todd gave her this.” Tisha held up the brown envelope. “He made her promise if anything happened to him, she’d get it to Father O’Malley. Then she heard how Father O’Malley was gonna say the memorial Mass, so she wouldn’t have to go to Wyoming. She could give him the envelope at St. Elizabeth’s. But she didn’t show up for the Mass. When I went back to my place to look for her, I found the envelope still in the closet where she was hiding it. And now she might be dead, and I don’t know what to do with this.” Another thrust of the envelope into the air. “I don’t know how to get a hold of Father O’Malley. I can’t go all the way up to Wyoming.”

“He’s staying at Regis,” Vicky said. She reached toward the phone. “I’ll call him.”

“No, wait.” The girl was on her feet. She handed Vicky the envelope. “Just give it to him, okay? I don’t wanna be involved.” She started for the door.

“Tisha.” Vicky caught the girl’s arm. “I was there this afternoon when the police found Julie.”

The girl blinked, pulling away, head shaking, nostrils flaring.

“You are involved,” Vicky went on. “The police will have to talk to you. There’s a detective—Steve Clark—he’s a friend of mine. You can trust him.”

Still backing up, the girl groped behind her for the doorknob. “I don’t want anything to do with murder. I didn’t know Julie very long. I didn’t know Todd real well. I don’t know what they were involved with, but I don’t want anything to do with it.” She found the knob and yanked open the door.

“You could be in danger,” Vicky said as the girl darted out the door. Vicky followed. “You’ve got to go to the police,” she called, but the girl had already disappeared around a corner.

Vicky stared down the empty corridor a moment. The drumming had stopped; in its place, the rustle of footsteps, the spike of voices coming from the serving counter. She turned back into the office and slowly opened the envelope. Inside was a diskette. It didn’t surprise her. She had expected Todd to keep a backup diskette. She slipped it back into the envelope and stuffed the package into her handbag. Then found the little sheet of paper on which John O’Malley had scribbled down the number at Regis.

22

F
ather John heard the phone ringing as he came down the corridor. He’d taken a walk along the lake after dinner, trying to sort his thoughts. He’d missed the chance to talk to the provincial this afternoon; the museum was beginning to seem like an impossible dream. The whole trip had been a waste of time—except he’d been here to say Todd’s memorial Mass, and he’d spent time with the old people. He was glad for that. He should go back to St. Francis tomorrow, but he didn’t want to leave yet.

The air had been cool, tinged with the violets and blues of evening, and he’d stared at the moonlight shimmering on the lake a long time, knowing he could not go back yet. Not with Vicky determined to find a ledger book that was in the possession of a killer. Not until he was sure she would let the police handle the matter. Not until he was sure she was safe.

As he opened the bedroom door he realized the ringing phone was his. In a couple of steps he was at the desk, the receiver pressed against his ear. “Father O’Malley,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be bothering you, Father.” It was Brother Timothy. “But someone named Vicky’s on the line. Says she has to talk to you, and with the time getting past ten o’clock! I tried telling her to call at a respectable hour.”

“It’s okay,” Father John told him. “Put her on.” There was a soft click, then the familiar voice. “John, I’ve got Todd’s thesis,” she said.

*   *   *   

Father John was waiting when the headlights flickered across the parking lot. He opened the driver’s door and Vicky slid out. Moonlight slanted across her face; he saw the agitation in her eyes. “Julie’s dead,” she said. “They found her body this afternoon. Beaten and thrown into the South Platte, just like Todd.”

“Dear God,” Father John murmured. Another Indian kid who had come to the city and, somehow, gotten lost. He’d been hoping the Lakota girl was safe at home on the Rosebud.

“Todd asked her to give this diskette to you.” Vicky handed him the envelope. “He knew he was in danger, so he gave the diskette to the girl who had been staying in his apartment less than two weeks. She wasn’t a friend; she was just somebody who needed a place to stay. He must have hoped no one would think he would trust her with the thesis. He arranged for her to stay with a student, Tisha Runner. Tisha got scared when she heard the police had found a woman’s body in the South Platte. She wanted to get the diskette to you, but she didn’t know where to find you. So she called me.”

Father John took her arm, and they crossed the campus, in and out of the circles of light, to the Math and Sciences building. Light splashing along the first-floor corridor confirmed what he’d guessed: the computer lab never closed. A humming noise, like the swarm of bees, greeted them as he opened the door with the small sign
LAB.
The room was the size of two classrooms, bathed in white light, computers marching along the tables. A student about Todd’s age, Father John thought, was tapping at a keyboard on the far table.

Vicky sat down in front of a monitor and snapped the disk into a slot. Pulling over a chair, Father John sat
down beside her. He hadn’t used computers much lately; St. Francis Mission didn’t even own one, but it would be the first thing he would buy if by some miracle the provincial approved his plans for the museum.

He stared at the scrolling screen as Vicky’s fingers clicked rapidly on the keyboard. In half a second several lines of type appeared:
The Colorado Presence of the Arapaho People: An Inventory of Sites of Arapaho Villages and Battlefields. A thesis prepared by Todd Harris for the faculty of the University of Colorado in Denver in compliance with the requirements for a master’s degree in history.

There was a stillness about Vicky, a focused quiet. He heard the soft intakes of her breath as she leaned toward the screen. Several other clicks and they were staring at the table-of-contents page. The first line read:
Sites of Arapaho Villages.
A list of familiar places followed: Denver, Boulder, Niwot, Longmont, Fort Collins, Golden, Lamar, LaJunta, South Platte River, North Platte River, Cherry Creek, Arkansas River, Smoky Hill River. At the top of the next page:
Sites of Arapaho Battles,
followed by another list—Julesburg, Cheyenne Wells, Fort Morgan, Brush, Sand Creek.

In half an instant Vicky had called up a page with the heading,
The Sand Creek Massacre.
He leaned close; they read the paragraphs together. A familiar story, one he’d read before in history books and heard from the elders, their voices filled with mourning as they talked about the men, women, and children who had died at Sand Creek. November 29, 1864. The earth, frozen; snow blowing across the plains, the Indian village sprawled along a creek in the vastness of southeastern Colorado—the No Water Land, the Arapaho elders called the area. It was dawn, with the sun lifting out of the east, and the sky blazing red, when the soldiers came.

They read on: the soldiers riding into the village, the
ponies’ hooves beating on the earth, guns retorting in the icy air. And the shouting and screaming, the whinnying of the ponies in the corral, the people running up the creek bed, half-naked, stumbling and falling, bare hands digging out holes in the rock-hard banks, shielding the children with their bodies against the guns that never stopped.

And then the frozen silence broken by the occasional scream of a horse, the moanings of the wounded as the soldiers went about their work, hacking and slicing at the fallen bodies: a woman’s breast, a scrotum—aha! Such trophies to carry back to Denver!

Vicky sat back in her chair. Father John placed one arm around her shoulders, and she allowed his arm to rest there a moment before she raised her hand and threaded her fingers into his. The warmth of her flowed through him, staving off the cold chill of death.