Ghost Dance (34 page)

The priest began carefully shuffling the fragile pages of the journal.

Gallagher looked at Andie and mouthed the words ‘Keep him talking!’

Andie nodded. ‘When did you believe the journal really existed?’

McColl looked up at her. ‘I didn’t think about it for nearly fifteen years, until I had returned to Lawton and begun to research Father D’Angelo’s cause,’ he said. ‘Father D’Angelo was a saint. He did perform miracles. My own father saw one. I heard about it all the time I was growing up, and I used to lie awake at night wondering what made him a saint when I was such a sinner.’

The priest rapped his hand across his chest three times. ‘That’s right, a sinner. I know what I am and what I have done.’

Gallagher felt the outer sheathing of tape give way and stopped cutting when McColl glanced over at him. ‘You found D’Angelo’s piece of the journal, didn’t you?’ Gallagher said.

‘Four months ago,’ McColl agreed. He rolled Many Horses’ stones into one of the pouches. ‘Deep in the files of Father’s vast correspondence I found a letter to the bishop that somehow never got mailed after Father D’Angelo’s death. It talked about the journal and his own seven-volume diary, and directed the bishop to a box stored above the rafters of the rectory’s attic. The letter said that what was in the box would explain the ‘tainted nature of his miracles,’ as he put it. I went and found the metal box.

‘Father D’Angelo had two parts of the Sioux’s journal, actually,’ the priest went on. ‘The first part, ten pages perhaps, is a bunch of pagan gibberish about various ceremonies taught to her by her mother and father. The second part is from a time much later in her life and concerns her meetings with Father D’Angelo.’

‘This happened, when?’ Andie asked. McColl turned his head toward her and Gallagher began to cut again.

‘September and October 1893,’ he said, speaking as an academic might on a favorite subject. ‘She tells Father D’Angelo how Joshua Danby was making spirits appear during the seances. A total sham. Father rightly considered it a sacrilegious act. He meant to expose the Danbys. You have to understand the times. People were leaving the church all across the country to follow such charlatans, and Father D’Angelo despised Joshua Danby because he had most of Lawton believing in his ‘religion.’

‘Every time the squaw came into Lawton to see Father, she was more and more upset. She said Joshua was using a narcotic elixir almost constantly and the drugs were making him deranged and violent.’

The duct tape and then a strand of parachute cord gave way. Gallagher’s fingers explored the knotting, to see how much further he’d have to cut. He almost hissed in frustration; Danby had braided the cording into a rope almost an inch thick.

‘This is when Father D’Angelo became a sinner like me,’ McColl announced. ‘This is the moment that led him to murder.’

Andie gasped. ‘Father D’Angelo killed Sarah Many Horses?’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ McColl grunted. ‘But, good Catholic that he was, he felt as if he had a hand in her death. The last time he saw her, she begged for his protection and he forced her to return to Joshua’s house to gather more information he could use to expose the blasphemous fraud. It haunted him until the day he died.’

‘How did Many Horses die?’ Andie asked softly.

McColl reached down and picked up the lock of hair in the wax paper and examined it in the flickering candlelight. Dusk was coming outside.

‘Caleb Danby, Joshua’s brother, came pounding on Father D’Angelo’s door late one November night in 1893,’ McColl said. ‘Caleb said that his brother had gone insane on the elixir and had convinced himself and several of his closest followers—also elixir addicts—that the Sioux had stolen from him the power to make spirits materialize. Joshua convinced his followers that Many Horses was an evil threat to a new religion he had envisioned called Guidance. But for Joshua’s power to be restored and his vision to become reality, he and his followers would have to kill Sarah, and, like the Catholics, take communion of her.’

Gallagher stopped cutting. His mind jumped from the journal to the mental-hospital records about Mayor Powell’s great grandfather to what Many Horses had said in his second dream:
I was eaten not by fire, not water nor earth, but by man.

‘No!’ he cried.

‘Oh, yes,’ the priest said. ‘Caleb begged Father to go to the farm and save the squaw before it was too late. Father D’Angelo got six of his loyal parishioners, including the chief constable who I would guess was the Cartersburg librarian’s—Nyren—great-grandfather.

‘According to Father’s diary, it was snowing hard by the time the horsemen reached the Danby temple,’ McColl continued. ‘A dwarf and a strongman were packing crates in a wagon. They said they were leaving before they were sucked down into Joshua’s mad plan. They said Joshua and a score of his followers had gone off into the snowstorm after the squaw. Father D’Angelo, his men and Caleb Danby followed the tracks in the snow up Lawton Mountain to a cave where Joshua used to hold seances when it was warmer.’

Another strand of the parachute cord gave way. Six cords to freedom, Gallagher thought. A second candle snuffed and smoked. McColl stopped, squinting into the gloom.

‘Monsignor?’ Andie said. ‘What happened?’

‘It must have been a grisly thing to behold,’ the priest said. ‘Father wrote in his diary that he already knew what Hell would be like from what he witnessed and did that night in the cave. By the time they got there, Many Horses was dead. Joshua had slit her throat because she would not give him the secrets. He was in a frenzy. He had already cut off several pieces of her skin the size of wafers. Joshua was exhorting his followers to eat and drink of the squaw so that they might know their immortality.’

Andie shook her head in revulsion. ‘That’s why Lamont Powell cut out his teeth and his tongue before he killed himself.’

McColl acted as if he had not heard her. ‘Joshua’s followers had entered some kind of ecstatic, violent state brought on by the elixir when Father D’Angelo and his men stormed the cave. During the melee, Father D’Angelo got Joshua’s knife away from him and stabbed him in the heart. And the moment Joshua died, it was as if a fog lifted from the minds of his followers and they confronted what they had done.

‘They realized that if what had happened in Lawton that night ever came out, the town, the church and all its people would become as cursed and reviled as the Donner party,’ McColl said.

He glanced at Gallagher just as another strand let go. Andie called him, ‘So they decided to cover it up?’

McColl nodded. ‘What choice did they have? The mayor, a famous Civil War Veteran and a Manhattan socialite, had become drug addicts, spiritual fanatics and ghouls as well as accessories to murder under the influence of a sideshow messiah. The constable and five other parishioners had turned vigilante. The parish priest was a hot-blooded killer. Everyone present was fouled by the deaths of Joshua and the squaw.

‘So they dragged Joshua’s body back down the mountain and buried him in the root cellar under the temple,’ McColl continued. ‘Everyone swore themselves to secrecy for the common good. Several people, including your great-great-grandfather, Andie, were for burying the squaw with Joshua and burning the journal and the things they found in the leather bag she carried—a pipe, some stones, this lock of hair.

‘But Father D’Angelo would not hear of it. He buried her himself in sacred ground. He told the others with him that night that they were all responsible for her death. And they had the duty to preserve the relics of her story so that if the truth ever had to be revealed, Joshua’s followers could not disprove his guilt. No one trusted any one person to hold the journal. So it was divided.’

‘And passed down from one generation to the next,’ Andie said. ‘With each generation knowing less and less about what really happened.’

McColl did not answer. He dropped the lock of hair into a pouch before picking up Ten Trees’ pipe and studying it with great relish. Behind him, Danby’s hand moved ever so slightly.

Four strands to go, Gallagher thought. Unless McColl kept talking, he could not saw toward freedom. He watched for any sign that Danby would move again. But the giant lay still.

Gallagher thought about McColl’s admission that he was a sinner just like D’Angelo, probably a murderer just like D’Angelo. He played with that idea against why the priest would want the journal himself. And then it hit Gallagher. The priest was not interested in preserving a cover-up. It was about salvation.

‘Father D’Angelo murdered and yet performed miracles,’ Gallagher said. ‘You have sinned and you want the same gift.’

Andie saw where Gallagher was going and piped up. ‘You think D’Angelo somehow got his powers from Many Horses, don’t you?’

Night was falling. Nine of the twelve candles had snuffed out. McColl’s face flattened in the waning light.

‘That’s what Father D’Angelo believed,’ he said. ‘It haunted him that after killing his fellow man, he was granted the healing touch. He wrote that the Sioux visited him in dreams. He often wrote, “Who gave me the gift, the Christ or the savage?” ’

Gallagher’s mind flashed on an empty hole in the rectory garden. ‘You believe she did, don’t you, Monsignor?’ he demanded. ‘You’re like Joshua Danby—you believe the power is contained in her bones, her writing, her relics.’

‘I’m a dying man,’ McColl announced wearily. Two different kinds of cancer. Less than twenty months, the doctors figure. And I lost my personal relationship with Jesus many years ago. But relics are a proven way to touch the stuff of immortality. Maybe even to becoming a saint. Maybe even for a sinner like me.’

Two more strands of cord gave way and Gallagher’s fingers itched and tingled as blood returned to them.

‘That’s what my poor, mad, beloved boy didn’t understand,’ McColl said, throwing Danby’s inert form a sympathetic look ‘The last time I saw him was nearly eight years ago in Guatemala. I gave him that lovely knife and sheath he wears. Then, two months ago, he showed up out of the blue at my office. We played our little game. I made him confess to his naughtiness.’

The second-to-last parachute-cord strand broke free. Gallagher’s shoulders relaxed forward. McColl snapped his head suspiciously toward him. Gallagher did not move another muscle. He just held the priest’s gaze steady and true, telling himself, one more strand, one more strand.

Andie called to McColl. ‘Confess to what naughtiness, Monsignor?’

McColl hesitated, then curled his lips with distaste. To engaging in a bizarre, heathen, drug-saturated ritual invented by some South American slut who believed that through it you could experience death and return Terrance killed the slut during a sexual act in which they each throttled the other with the kind of noose you both have around your necks.

‘Terrance was wild at her death,’ McColl went on. ‘He told me he had to see his Angel again. He told me he was going to reclaim what was stolen from his great-great-uncles. That’s the story the surviving Danbys passed down from one generation to another that an Indian’s journal describing a method to consort with the dead was stolen from Joshua. And that Joshua had been murdered by Father D’Angelo for wanting it.

‘Of course, I immediately showed my boy the piece of the journal I had found, on the agreement that he show me whatever he might recover.’

‘But you didn’t show him D’Angelo’s diary,’ Gallagher said. ‘You didn’t explain to him what really happened a hundred years ago.’

‘It was just one man’s interpretation of the events, Mr Gallagher,’ the priest said blithely. ‘As a filmmaker, you can understand that. I offered Terrance what he wanted—advice on how he might track down the other pieces and form his own interpretation.’

‘But you had the list of journal holders from D’Angelo’s diary, didn’t you?’ Andie cried. ‘That’s how he found the people so quickly. You knew, and the stolen baptismal certificates were your way of keeping anyone else from finding the journal. You let those people be killed one by one. You let him slaughter your own secretary!’

McColl sniffed insistently. ‘I offered guidance. How was I to know his desire for revenge on the town was as strong as his desire for the journal?’

‘You’re as big a monster as he is!’ she shouted. ‘You used him on the town the same way you used him to kill that boy at Hennessy House twenty years ago. You set a maniac loose so you could get the journal for yourself when the killings were done. You planned to kill Terrance all along.
Your beloved boy
!’

The priest was expressionless for a long, long moment; then he turned stony and distant. He dropped the stuffed leather pouches and a few loose pages of the journal onto the floor. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I will have to kill three.’

‘You’re mad!’ Gallagher yelled.

‘No,’ McColl replied. ‘I am not.’

The priest’s left hand traveled inside his coat. He came out with an exact replica of the machete Danby carried. He took three quick steps toward Gallagher and trumpeted, ‘May God have mercy on your immortal soul!’

McColl raised the blade up over Gallagher’s head just as he felt the final cord binding his wrists give way.

T
ERRANCE DANBY WAS A
blur of doom in the twilight.

He sprang into a crouch and rushed the priest, kicking over a chair and one of the candles as he came.

‘Time to die, Father!’ he growled. ‘Time to take that boat ride across the river!’

McColl spun and slashed at the hurtling madman. Danby dropped and rolled. The priest’s blade passed an inch over his back. Danby kept rolling, deep into the far shadows of the room. The priest stalked after him.

‘You don’t want to kill me, Terrance,’ the priest soothed. ‘My boy, my boy, I’m Father, the only one who ever understood. The only one who ever will.’

Gallagher got up on all fours and saw the tomahawk lying underneath the overturned chair. He grabbed it and scrambled over to Andie. Neither man noticed. They were low, ready, ensnared in each other’s movements.

‘You’re a liar, Father,’ Danby seethed. ‘You wanted it just like all the others. You figured I was just a Danby and you could treat me like dogshit.’