Blood Trail (24 page)

Joe said, “I want to ask about a teacher here, Alisha Whiteplume.”

Mrs. Thunder’s eyes flashed and Joe couldn’t interpret the reaction.

“I’ll be back,” Mrs. Thunder said.

Joe wondered what he’d just done.

In a few moments, Mrs. Thunder reappeared and said, “Principal Shoyo is waiting for you in there,” gesturing to an open door at the back.

Mrs. Shoyo was surprisingly young, Joe thought. She was dressed in a white blouse and business suit and wore a gold medicine-wheel pendant. She stood as Joe entered and they shook hands. Mrs. Shoyo had black hair that was swept back and piercing brown eyes. She was Native. He noted the pin on her lapel, a horizontal piece with a red wild rose on one side and a flag with parallel red and black bars on a field of white on the other side. The pin represented the two nations on the reservation: the rose the symbol of the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho flag.

“Joe Pickett,” he said. “Thanks for taking a few minutes.”

“My pleasure,” she said, sitting back down.

He glanced at the wall behind her where she displayed photos of her family: three beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed girls, a shot of her husband, he assumed, on a knee next to a dead bull elk he was very proud of; her diploma from the University of Wyoming; a certificate naming her one of the “Top 100 American Indian Women Leaders of 2001.”

“Mrs. Thunder said you were asking about one of my teachers, Alisha Whiteplume.”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“What about her?” Shoyo asked, her eyebrows arching, “Did she commit some kind of
game
violation?”

Joe laughed. “Not at all. I wish I weren’t wearing this uniform shirt right now. No, I’m here because she was last seen in the presence of a friend of mine I’m trying to track down. I was hoping she could help me find him.”

Mrs. Shoyo narrowed her eyes as if to read him better.

“I hope that’s all this is about because Alisha is one of my best, if not
the
best teacher I’ve got here. She left the reservation after graduating from here and went off and made a success of herself. Then she chose to come back, to help her people. She’s such a role model because she’s bright and attractive and her students always do the best on the aptitude tests. She’s also one of my closest friends.”

Joe now knew why Mrs. Thunder had flinched.

“Then you know of Nate Romanowski,” Joe said.

Mrs. Shoyo smiled gently, but Joe could see that she had placed an invisible shield between them. “Everybody knows Mr. Romanowski,” she said, which somewhat surprised Joe. “But my understanding is he’s in Cheyenne in jail waiting for his trial.”

“He’s out,” Joe said. “He’s supposed to be in my custody.”

“But he isn’t,” she said.

“But he isn’t,” he sighed.

“Are you saying you think Alisha is with him, wherever he is?”

“Possibly.”

“And by finding her you might find him.”

“That’s the idea,” he said.

She raised her hand and fit her chin into her fist, studying him across the desk, making a determination, he assumed, about how much she should tell him and what she should keep to herself.

“Is Alisha in trouble?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why should I believe you?”

Joe shrugged. “Because I’m telling you the truth. I just want to find Nate.”

Mrs. Shoyo nodded as if she’d come to a conclusion. She leaned forward on her desk and showed him her palms. “I’d like to know where Alisha is as well because I’m starting to worry about her. She called in yesterday morning so we could line up a substitute teacher. I didn’t talk with her, Mrs. Thunder did. Alisha told her she might be out for a few days so to try and get a good replacement. I don’t think we did, though. I think we hired a man who spends all his time telling the students how hip and sympathetic he is to them instead of teaching them math and science.”

Joe recalled the man in Alisha Whiteplume’s classroom: it fit.

Joe asked, “Did she say where she was calling from?”

“No, she didn’t,” Mrs. Thunder answered from just outside the doorway, where she’d been listening.

“You can come in, Alice,” Mrs. Shoyo said, doing a quick eye roll for Joe’s benefit. “Nothing goes on in this school that Alice isn’t aware of.”

“I understand,” Joe said, looking over his shoulder at Mrs. Thunder, who came into the room.

“I don’t think she was calling from her house, though,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I could hear the wind in the background, like she was outside somewhere. I assumed she was calling from her cell phone. I didn’t question her. It’s her right to call in sick and she hardly ever has until this year. She’s had trouble shaking cold after cold this year, and she’s missed quite a few days the past few months.”

“Outside,” Joe said. “Could you hear anything else? Background talk? Highway noises?”

“No.”

“And she didn’t call again this morning?”

Mrs. Thunder shook her head.

Joe dug in his pocket for two business cards and handed one to Mrs. Shoyo and one to Mrs. Thunder. “If she shows up or calls in again, can you let me know? And if she calls, can you please try to find out where she is and when she’ll be back? I’m not asking you to rat on her—she’s not in trouble at all. I just want to make sure she’s safe and knows what she’s doing.”

Both women took the cards and looked at them in the long, contemplative, and deliberate way Joe had noted before in many American Indians.

“Alisha is a smart woman,” Mrs. Thunder said, finally. “I’m sure she wouldn’t do something stupid.”

“But she’s with Nate Romanowski,” Joe said, immediately regretting he’d put it that way.

“How can she be,” Mrs. Shoyo said slyly, “if he’s in your custody?”

“Not you too,” Joe moaned, and both women laughed.

 
 
AS JOE walked back down the long hallway toward the parking lot, the bell rang. The hall was suddenly filled with students pouring out of doors, gathering books, chattering, bound for their next class. Rather than swim against the tide, he stepped to the side and flattened himself against the wall. Due to his uniform and sidearm he got his share of inquiring looks. A pack of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys passed close by him talking loudly to one another in a staged exchange:

“Benny, are we still on to go poach some antelope after school today?”

“Absolutely, man. I got two guns and a bunch of bullets in my car! We can shoot a whole herd of ’em just like we did last night!”

“It’s a good thing there ain’t no smart game wardens around here, huh, Benny?”

“Yeah, that’s a good thing. Otherwise, he’d know we were killin’ and poachin’ fools!”

“Ha-ha,” said Joe, and the boys broke up into self-congratulatory laughter.

 
 
AS THE halls thinned and cleared he found himself looking at the framed photos of the Class of 1991, which had graduated seventeen years before. There she was, Alisha Whiteplume. Her beauty was striking, and intelligence shone in her eyes. But there was another female student two rows up from Alisha who was familiar as well. This girl exuded brash self-confidence. Her eyes seemed to challenge the photographer to take the picture, and she had an inscrutable smile of self-satisfaction. Joe knew her now as Shannon Moore, Klamath’s wife.

 
 
“THAT DIDN’T take long,” Mrs. Thunder said when Joe returned to the office.

“I was hoping you could give me some background on another student I saw in one of the photos in the hallway,” Joe said.

“I’ll try,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’ve been around this place for thirty years. If it’s before that I might not be able to help you.”

“Class of ’ninety-one,” Joe said.

“That”—Mrs.Thunder beamed—“was a very good year. That’s when Alisha graduated.”

Joe nodded. “And the other student I think I recognize. Her name is Shannon Moore now, but I don’t know her name at the time she graduated.”

Mrs. Thunder sat back, puzzled. “Shannon?”

Joe’s heart sank for a moment. Had he screwed up and mistaken one face for another? Then: “Maybe I can point her out to you.”

“Show me,” Mrs. Thunder said, plucking the 1991 high-school yearbook off a shelf behind her and opening it on the counter.

Joe used his index finger to guide him through the photos of graduating seniors. It settled on the one he’d seen in the hallway. As he read her name, Mrs. Thunder said, “So she goes by Shannon now, huh?”

“It says here her name was Shenandoah Yellowcalf,” Joe said. “Do you know her?”

Mrs. Thunder snorted. “Do I know her? She was only the best girls’ basketball player we’ve ever had here. I’m surprised
you
don’t know her.”

Joe explained he’d only been in the valley for eight years.

“Here,” Mrs. Thunder said, flipping through the yearbook pages, “let me show you.”

Joe looked at countless photos of Shenandoah Yellowcalf in the activities section of the yearbook. There were action photos of her on the court, at the foul line, and in the lane, another of her cutting down the net at the state championship.

“You’ve never seen a girl play like Shenandoah played,” Mrs. Thunder said softly, caressing the photos with a stubby fingertip as if drawing memories from them. “She had a blinding crossover dribble as good as any great NBA point guard as she brought the ball down the court, and she left her opponents flailing at air in her wake. She made us gasp the way she played. There has never been a player here with so much determination. She was so
fierce
. Shenandoah led our team, the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, which was made up of only seven girls, to win the state championship game.”

Joe read from the yearbook. “She scored fifty-two points in the championship game?” he said. “Good Lord!”

“Oh, she was good,” Mrs. Thunder said, shaking her head. “Alisha was on that team too,” and pointed her out in the team photo.

“Was Shannon—um, Shenandoah—recruited by colleges?” Joe asked.

Mrs. Thunder nodded enthusiastically. “She was offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, all the national powers. We were so proud of her.”

“Where did she go to school?” Joe asked.

“She didn’t,” Mrs. Thunder said sadly.

Joe shook his head, confused.

“Shenandoah’s grandmother got really sick, so she stayed on the reservation to take care of her. I think she was scared—there was so much pressure on her—and I told her that, but she said she would go to college and play basketball when her grandmother was better. Like all those schools would just wait for her.”

She looked up at Joe, moisture in her eyes. “I get disappointed to this day when I think about the potential she had and the opportunity she missed.”

Joe nodded, prodding her on.

Mrs. Thunder looked down, as if she didn’t want Joe to see her eyes, didn’t want to see how he reacted to an all-too-common story on the reservation. She said Shenandoah did, in fact, nurse her grandmother for a year, then two. Her devotion was extraordinary for a girl her age, she said, but didn’t entirely mask the fact that part of the reason she stayed was because of her fear of leaving the cloistered reservation for the punishing high-profile world of big-time college sports—or at least that’s what Mrs. Thunder surmised. Plus, there was the pressure from those she’d grown up with, her friends and family and coaches. Too many people lived vicariously through her, saw her triumphs as their triumphs. When she failed, they failed too.

“Kind of like me,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’m guilty of that as well. I think of a lot of these kids as my own, and I wanted her to do so well, to make us all be able to say, ‘I knew her when.’”

“Where did she go?” Joe asked gently, knowing where she ended up but not how she got there.

“Nowhere, for way too long, I’m afraid,” she said. “The time away from sports didn’t do her any good. She gained a lot of weight the way kids do when they’re used to playing sports all the time and they just stop. It was pretty obvious after a couple of years that it would be tough if not impossible for her to get a recruiter interested, even if they still remembered her. But that’s me speaking . . . I don’t even know if she tried.”

Shenandoah started running with the wrong crowd, she said, a bad mixture of Indians and town kids. She got involved with alcohol and drugs, and was arrested for dealing crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation as well as small-town Wyoming. Her grandmother died and Shenandoah drifted back and forth from the res to town. Mrs. Thunder said she’d hear of Shenandoah from time to time, that she worked as a barmaid, a waitress, even as a roughneck on a coal-bed methane crew. She hired out as a cook and a guide for elk camps as well, Mrs. Thunder said, raising her eyebrows as she said it.

Joe grunted. While there certainly were legitimate cooks for elk camps, there were also “cooks”—mainly younger women—who provided other services for well-heeled, mainly out-of-state hunters. Joe had seen and met some of the camp cooks in the mountains, and it was obvious few knew anything about making breakfast. He felt the same irony and sadness Mrs. Thunder conveyed as he imagined the scenario and looked at Shenandoah Yellowcalf ’s bold face and eyes in the yearbook. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-year-old Northern Arapaho “camp cook” they’d hired was once one of the greatest basketball players in the state of Wyoming, he thought. He searched his memory; there was something familiar about the story. Something about a young female Indian camp cook. Something he’d heard years before when he was a trainee working under the former game warden Vern Dunnegan . . .

But he’d sort that out later.

He asked, “Do you know if Shenandoah and Alisha were friends?”

Mrs. Thunder smiled. “They were best friends. I think Alisha did everything she could to help Shenandoah.”

“Did they keep in touch?”