The Story Teller (6 page)

Vicky picked up her briefcase and handbag and followed the curator down the short hallway to the elevator. They rode in silence to the lower level: a steady pull downward. The doors opened onto a carpeted corridor that ran along a glass-enclosed wall. Beyond the wall, Vicky could see shelves stacked with books and gray cardboard cartons. She followed the curator through a door with
LIBRARY
printed on the clear glass panel. The room was square, with dark-wood tables lined up in rows, polished tops gleaming under the fluorescent ceiling lights. Several researchers sat hunched over papers and books. A young woman with a wedge of brown hair over her forehead and tiny half-glasses looked up from the desk on the left. A small sign on the desk said
REFERENCE LIBRARIAN.

Rachel Foster sailed past, and Vicky followed. The muffled sound of their footsteps, the occasional turning of a page, broke the library quiet. A right turn, and they were in the stacks, slipping sideways around the cartons and books, the piles of newspapers jutting beyond the metal shelves.

“Every item is briefly identified,” Rachel Foster said. Her red nails trailed along the plastic labels at the edge of one shelf as she walked on. “Complete identifications are in the files.”

Vicky stopped, her eyes on the labels:
Gorsuch collections, 1913; Black and Riddle Papers, 1902–1910.
And beneath a shelf of old books:
Colorado History, 1858–1888.

The curator had disappeared, and Vicky hurried along the stacks. She found the other woman punching in security numbers next to a metal door on the far wall. “What you see here,” she said with a wave toward the
stacks, “are library materials, a small part of our collection.”

The door slid open, as if some invisible arm had pulled it back, and Vicky followed the curator into a cavernlike space as large as a football field and at least two stories high. The air felt cool—the controlled, even coolness of a morgue. There was an odd musty odor, like that of old spices and decaying fabrics. Rows of large metal shelves resembling scaffolding stretched into the far shadows. At a glance, she saw the items on nearby shelves had been gathered through the last century: Victorian chairs and tables, feather boas, flapper dresses, poodle skirts, saddles, firearms.

She hurried to stay abreast of Rachel Foster, who, with single-minded intensity, was marching down an aisle with shelves looming on both sides. The shelves were crowded with Native American artifacts. Abruptly the curator stopped and swept out one hand. “The Arapaho collection,” she announced. “You will find everything listed on the inventory.”

Vicky moved slowly along the aisle, allowing her eyes to roam over the items: beaded moccasins and gloves, breastplates strung with eagle bones, pipes decorated with feathers and beaded thongs, eagle-feathered warbonnets that, she knew, had once been worn by chiefs. From somewhere came a faint rumble of traffic, and she realized the storeroom reached far under the city streets. For an instant she felt as if she’d stepped into another time, surrounded by objects waiting with mute patience for owners to return and take them up again, while the city pulsed overhead in the distant future.

She reached the end of the aisle and turned, slowly retracing her steps, eyes combing the shelves. Nothing resembled a ledger book.

Rachel Foster waited, arms folded across her waist,
red nails tapping her elbows. “I hope you have satisfied yourself,” she said.

“Perhaps the ledger book is lost somewhere.” Vicky swung the briefcase toward the shelves extending around them. “It could be wedged between cartons, or hidden behind some other artifact.”

“Impossible,” the curator said. “We know the precise location of everything in the collections. I can assure you if we owned a ledger book worth one-point-three million dollars, we would know where it was.”

Wheeling about, Rachel Foster started back along the aisle. Vicky stayed in step. When they reached the cool hush of the library, she said, “We’d like an explanation as to what became of the ledger book. You must have records dating back to 1920.”

The curator turned and faced her. “Of course we have records.” There was a note of scarcely disguised contempt in the woman’s voice. Nodding toward the filing cabinets against the wall at the end of the stacks, she said, “The old records are in the files. We have records for each item acquired from the day the museum opened in 1896 until 1975. After that date our records are in the database.” She drew in a long breath, turned, and started back through the library.

“Then you must have a record of the ledger book,” Vicky said, staying in step.

The curator stopped again and turned—a deliberate movement. “Are you suggesting we search every file cabinet?”

“If necessary, yes,” Vicky said.

“Impossible!” The curator took in a gulp of air. “Records prior to 1920 are nothing more than notations jotted on slips of papers.” Another gulp, and she went on: The overburdened staff. A wild-goose chase. Beyond the requirements of NAGPRA.

Vicky gripped the handle of her briefcase, struggling to control her growing impatience. “The law requires
you to furnish my tribe with a complete and accurate inventory of Arapaho artifacts. We know the ledger book was once in the museum. We want to know what became of it. I must ask you to check your records.”

The curator glanced about, as if to beckon assistance from the tables, the researchers, the young woman behind the desk. Then: “You are making this very difficult.” Little dots of spittle peppered her chin.

Vicky said nothing, watching the other woman’s eyes travel again over the room. After a moment the curator brought her eyes back. “It will take some time,” she said.

“I’d like a copy of the ledger book record by Friday,” Vicky said. She’d been hoping to settle matters and fly home tomorrow. Now she would be lucky to get home for the weekend.

“Friday! Two days! Impossible.”

“I’ll be back on Friday,” Vicky said.

5

I
t was almost noon before Father John drove out of St. Francis Mission. He’d spent the morning returning phone calls and tending to the most urgent messages on his desk. The rest he’d stacked into piles—less urgent, important, not important—that he would handle as soon as he got back.

He caught Highway 135 and headed south. Not far beyond the southern outskirts of Riverton, the ranch houses and clusters of barns began to fall away, leaving the open land running into an azure sky and the two lanes of asphalt ahead shimmering in the sun. Hot air rushed past the half-opened windows and mingled with the sounds of
Rigoletto
blaring from the tape player on the seat beside him. Except for an occasional semi roaring past and the small herds of antelope racing along the highway, he was alone.

“Another trip?” Father Geoff had said, when he’d told his assistant he was going to Denver. As if the pastor of St. Francis Mission was always casting about for some reason to leave, when the truth was he hated having to leave again. He’d only returned from Boston three days ago. He was glad to be home. Yet Boston had been home for almost thirty years—the throb of traffic and rush of people once as familiar as the rhythms of his own life. How strange and jarring they had seemed on this last trip. He’d felt only a sense of relief as the plane
had lifted into the clouds, leaving the city far behind, like the life he had once led there.

He had spent two weeks at the Jesuit retreat house in Boston, praying over the direction of his life and, in the privacy of the chapel, renewing vows he had made to God seventeen years before. Made of his own free will, gladly. Knowing that he would not be like other men, would not marry, would never have children, that his life would take a different direction.

After the retreat, he’d spent another two weeks visiting old friends, taking in the museums and a couple of concerts. He’d set aside an afternoon to spend with his brother, Mike, and his wife, Eileen. Nothing had changed with Mike. He still made it clear—the reserved manner, the forced camaraderie—that he wished Father John would go away and not return, as if he feared he might still be in love with Eileen. How silly, Father John thought. After all these years.

There was a time he
had
loved Eileen. He still remembered the stab of pain when, three months after he’d entered the seminary, she had run off and married his brother. But that was years ago—a lifetime ago. He hardly recognized the woman—the faded red hair, the wide hips and large, rounded breasts. What had become of the lithe, slim colleen with red-gold hair and flashing green eyes he’d guided across the dance floors at Boston College?

These were not thoughts he wanted. Father John snapped down the visor against the sun glinting off the hood. He had chosen a different direction, had been called to a different life—a life he’d found difficult at times and filled with temptations. He hadn’t stood the test well. He’d let everybody down when he’d started drinking—his superiors, his students at the Jesuit prep school where he used to teach American history, himself. He thought of that time as his Great Fall, when he had fallen from what everyone had expected.

He’d spent almost a year in recovery at Grace House and, afterward, old Father Peter had agreed to let him work at St. Francis Mission, a place he’d never heard of, among people—the Arapahos—he knew little about. He’d arrived in the emptiness of the plains, feeling both grateful and depressed. Grateful to the old priest for taking a chance on him, depressed at the distance between an Indian reservation and a university history department, where he had hoped to be.

But the more he’d gotten to know the Arapahos, the more he had felt at home, as if his life had been pointed in the direction of St. Francis Mission all along. Still the temptations persisted, the thirst that came over him at unexpected moments, especially in the evenings, when he was alone. And then the day, nearly four years ago, when he’d looked up from his desk and seen the woman dressed in a blue suit, carrying a briefcase, a small fist about to rap against the opened door.

“Excuse me, Father,” she’d said. He’d known who she was even before she introduced herself—the dark skin, the black hair pulled tightly back, the black eyes shining with intelligence. The grandmothers had been clucking for weeks over how Vicky Holden had gone away and become
ho:xu’wu:ne’n,
a lawyer, like a white woman. And now she had come back. As if she could ever come back, the grandmothers said, as if things could ever be the same. From that first day he’d known he must not spend much time with this woman.

His instincts had been right, he thought, stomping down on the accelerator and passing a truck. The Toyota vibrated around him as he pulled back into his lane, the stretch of asphalt empty ahead. Last month, when he’d thought Vicky had lost her life to a deranged killer, he’d wondered how he would stand it. And when he’d found she was okay, he’d known he had to step back, get his own bearings. He had fled to Boston.

He’d returned with a sense of peace and determination about the things he wanted to accomplish at the mission: the new classes and programs and, especially, the museum in the old school. He felt a twinge of guilt at leaving his assistant in charge of the mission again, especially since Father Geoff had to cancel his plans for a backpacking trip into the Wind River mountains this weekend. But it could be another year before the provincial returned to Regis, another year before he could meet with him. The Arapahos needed the museum now. They had already started to reclaim funeral and cultural artifacts from museums around the country. Just yesterday, the cultural director, Dennis Eagle Cloud, had called to say he was expecting a shipment of artifacts from the Smithsonian. He’d wanted to know if the mission had any storage space, until he could find a permanent location. Father John had offered the empty storerooms on the second floor of the administration building. Storerooms were hardly a substitute for a museum.

“How are the plans for turning the old school into a museum?” the director had wanted to know.

“Coming along,” Father John had told him, a forced tone of optimism. He refused to take Father Stanton’s word as final.