The Story Teller (31 page)

“How did you happen to get here in time for all the fun?” Father John asked. He kept one arm around her, and Vicky found herself leaning against him, steadying herself.

The agent kept his eyes on the police officers helping the handcuffed men to their feet, pushing them toward the door. “Thank a homicide detective in Denver by the name of Steve Clark. He called with some story about a ledger book worth a million dollars being stolen from a Denver museum and brought up here to the mission. Said we better check it out, that Vicky was taking the noon flight to Riverton and would probably go right to the mission. He was afraid she could run into trouble.
So I called the police on the reservation. We decided it might be a good idea to stop by here. I’m only sorry we didn’t get here sooner. You had quite a free-for-all going when we arrived.”

Suddenly there was a commotion: Emil Coughlin twisting his shoulders and pulling away from the hands guiding him toward the door. “I demand to speak to the FBI,” he shouted.

Gianelli crossed the room.

“You are making a terrible mistake. I am a nationally known ethnohistorian. I had no idea the ledger book may have been stolen. I came here for a legitimate transaction. These common criminals have duped me.”

The agent glanced back at Vicky.

“I’ll file charges,” she said. “Kidnapping and assault. I can testify as to everything he told me about his involvement in the murder of Todd Harris and two others in Denver.”

Turning toward the policemen waiting with the handcuffed professor, Gianelli said, “Get him out of here.”

*   *   *   

Vicky was curled into the roomy leather chair behind John O’Malley’s desk, holding a pack of ice on her cheek. She could feel the lump hardening below her cheekbone, the skin tightening and blackening under her eye. They looked like the walking wounded—she and John O’Malley. They weren’t cut out for street fighting. After the ambulance had arrived, the medics had given her the ice pack, then cleaned the cuts on his face and placed a plastic strip over one cheek and another across his forehead. He looked as if he’d walked into a wall, but she knew she didn’t look much better.

Slowly the office had emptied out. The medics had carried the Lakota out on a stretcher, although he had come to and was demanding the right to press charges against the priest who had assaulted him. The policemen
had gone. Only Gianelli had stayed behind to take their statements.

Vicky had told her story first, explaining about the ledger book, how she’d realized Todd Harris had brought it to the mission, how Emil Coughlin had reached the same conclusion, how he had threatened her on the plane.

“Threatened you?” Gianelli had interrupted.

Vicky stared at him a long moment. Why had she said that? John O’Malley was the one threatened. His life was in danger. Yet on the plane, hemmed in by the professor, crowding her, spitting out the Scotch-laden “instructions” as to what she must do if she wanted her priest friend to stay alive, she had felt her own life threatened. If they killed John O’Malley, she knew that even if she were to escape, a part of her would have died.

She told Gianelli about the instructions Emil had given the others, and as she’d talked she’d felt John O’Malley’s eyes on her.
Now he knows,
she’d realized. He knows she had put her own life in danger for him, just as he had jumped her assailant even though his partner held a gun.

Then Father John told how Loomis and Skip were waiting for him when he drove into the mission. Loomis had kept a gun on him while the Lakota had systematically pulled books off the shelves, emptied out desk drawers, tossed folders out of drawers, and generally turned his office into an even bigger mess than was normal. The Lakota had taken a tour through the building and reported that there was one other office and a couple of storerooms and closets on the main floor. Nothing but empty rooms and another storeroom on the second floor.

All the while Father John had kept talking to Richard Loomis, explaining how he’d been in Boston, how he had no way of knowing where Todd Harris
might have left the book, how most likely Todd didn’t even have the book with him when he came to the reservation, how he’d probably done the most logical thing: placed it in a bank vault in Denver.

But it hadn’t worked, Father John said. Richard Loomis had raised the gun and told him to save his breath. Then Emil Coughlin had arrived with Vicky, and everything had switched into fast time. He remembered the Lakota raising his fist and striking Vicky, but after that—a blur. At some point he realized he was pounding the man with his fists, shoving him against the desk, the wall, but the man kept fighting back, landing some blows of his own, including some jabs to the ribs, which he hadn’t felt at the moment, but which he was feeling now.

“You’re lucky Loomis didn’t shoot you,” Gianelli said. “If he could’ve gotten a bead on you without killing one of his buddies, he would have.” He glanced around the office; the floor was covered with scraps of paper, as if a large trash basket had been upended. “All this, and the ledger book’s not even here.”

“It’s here,” Father John said.

*   *   *   

Vicky lifted herself out of the chair and followed the priest and the agent into the corridor. A door opened on the right, and they started down a narrow hallway, past a series of closed doors—the closets and storerooms the Lakota had discovered. She had never been in this section of the administration building. There was so much she didn’t know about the man leading the way, so many spaces he occupied about which she had no idea.

He stopped at the far door, pushed it open, and led her and Gianelli inside. “The mission archives,” he announced. The room was small, little more than a closet, with a column of sunlight filtering through a narrow window across the table. Cardboard boxes and the
spines of old books protruded from the shelves on the walls; a storeroom, the Lakota had called it.

“Todd spent a lot of time working here,” Father John explained. “He found several references in the old records to places where the Arapahos had lived in Colorado. He would have left the ledger book with the other records.”

Vicky glanced about the small room. She felt both elated and weary. Dozens of cartons, several hundred books. They would have to go through every one.

Father John moved to the shelves on one side. He reached up and brought down a small carton, which he set on the table. Slowly he began pulling out the contents, arranging them next to the carton. “A guess,” he said. “Over the years the priests at St. Francis encouraged the elders to write down their stories. Some of them did so. Others were willing to tell their stories, and the priest wrote them down. They’re all here. Seems logical Todd would have put No-Ta-Nee’s story with the others.”

Vicky leaned toward the items spread over the table. An assortment of pads, notebooks, and papers stapled or clipped together. The carton appeared empty. There was no ledger book.

Except that now Father John was bringing out what looked like a tan leather envelope, and she realized it had been placed where Todd had found it in the carton at the museum. On the bottom—quiet and unobtrusive, like the carton itself.

Vicky cleared a space, and Father John set down the package, tied in leather thongs, like the parfleches used to carry small items in the Old Time. Carefully she undid the thongs, pulled back one flap, then another. Inside was a ledger book that looked like a thousand other ledger books manufactured for nineteenth-century merchants and accountants and government
agents: the gray-green color and the black curlicue design on the front cover.

The room was quiet. Gianelli shifted next to her, and for a moment she thought he might reach out and flip open the cover. She saw the look Father John gave him, the nod he gave to her.

She picked up the ledger book and held it toward the four directions—east, south, west, north.
“Ho ’Hou.’”
She murmured the word four times, thanking the ledger book for preserving the story, the story for allowing itself to be told, No-Ta-Nee for telling it, Todd for protecting it. Then she set the book down and slowly opened the cover. The figures danced across the page, moving right to left, in muted shades of red, blue, and yellow. Warriors on horseback, dogs pulling travois piled with household goods, women and children trailing behind: moving to a new village. Above the head of one warrior was the glyph of a red bull: No-Ta-Nee. The details in the pictographs told the story: name glyphs above the warriors; the colors of the horses; the types of wagons; the soldiers’ uniforms; and the weapons carried by soldiers and warriors.

She read each page out loud: Chief Niwot leading the people to Sand Creek. She knew it was the chief by the figure of a left hand above his head: Niwot meant Left Hand. The women setting up the village in the midst of the Cheyenne village, the soldiers appearing on the bluff, carrying the weapons used at Sand Creek; the attack at dawn. On she read, her voice quiet and calm, until she reached the last page. There were six figures: four children, a woman, with the glyph of a snake above her head: Mahom, Snake Woman, and No-Ta-Nee. “The Arapaho survivors of Sand Creek,” she said.

She closed the book, but kept her hand on the rough cloth cover, allowing the power of the story to gather inside her. The sunshine slanting across the table felt warm on her hand.

Gianelh’s voice broke the quiet. “The book belongs to the Denver Museum of the West. And three people were murdered over it. It will be used as evidence. I’m going to have to keep it.”

Slowly Vicky slipped the book back inside the leather package and tied the thongs into a gentle, secure knot. Then she picked up the package and handed it to the agent. “Not for long,” she said.

29

V
icky turned onto Circle Drive, following a flatbed truck with planks of wood hanging out the back. She stopped in front of the administration building, but the truck rumbled on down the drive, its engine growling into the quiet of St. Francis Mission. Slipping out into the sunshine that burst across the graveled parking area, she gave the door a hard slam and studied the facade of the building in front of her. It had the vacant look of three weeks ago, when Emil Coughlin had climbed out of the passenger seat and hurried her up the stone steps.

Now she climbed the stairs alone, her heart sinking. What if Father John had left again? She hadn’t heard anything on the moccasin telegraph about his going away, but she hadn’t heard he was going to Boston either. Only that one day he was gone. She hadn’t talked to him since the day he’d almost gotten himself killed trying to protect her—the day they had found the Sand Creek ledger book. She could still feel the reluctance with which she had handed the book over to the FBI agent, Ted Gianelli, despite the way Father John had slipped an arm around her and said, “You can trust him, Vicky. He won’t let anything happen to it.”

He had called the next day to see how she was feeling. She was feeling lousy, she told him, with an egg-sized lump on her face and an eye ringed in black. She
looked like a one-eyed raccoon. And how was he feeling? Just great, he assured her. But it was a little tough cleaning up the office with a cracked rib.

“A cracked rib?” she had said.

“The Lakota had a punch that came in like a fastball.”

She had offered to come over and help him clean up the office, but he assured her Elena and the grandmothers had already run him out of the place, and by this evening he was sure the office would be in better shape—

“Than you are?” she had said.

He laughed and told her he was having a hard time explaining the cuts and bruises to the kids on the Eagles baseball team. It was really
not
the way to settle disputes, but sometimes, well, sometimes, you had to stand up for the people you—he had stopped, drawn in a breath, and said—the people you care about.

He hadn’t called her since, which meant he hadn’t needed her help. No kids in trouble. No couple bound for divorce court. Nobody in jail. Which was good news, she realized, and just as well. She’d been so busy the last three weeks, negotiating with the museum for the Arapaho artifacts, tying up the loose ends, arranging for the elders to go to Denver to claim the sacred and cultural items. So busy she hadn’t called him; she’d had no reason to call. It was an unspoken rule between them—they never called each other without a legitimate reason.