The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (13 page)

Father John glanced at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. He’d planned on stopping by the senior center this morning for coffee with some of the elders and he promised Irma Dancer when she was about to be released from the hospital last week that he’d visit her at home, which should put him in Fort Washakie by eleven. “Tell Banner I’ll stop by later,” he said.

He set the receiver in the cradle and waited, half expecting the ringing to begin. Bill Rutherford would expect him to take the sabbatical, and he wouldn’t allow much time for him to change his mind.

Father John closed the book on Sitting Bull and made a small attempt at straightening the desk. Then he crossed the office and lifted his cowboy hat off the rack. He walked down the corridor and told Ian he’d be gone the rest of the morning, then retraced his steps and let himself out the front door, hurrying he realized, before the phone started to ring.

THE BROWN HOUSE
had a vacant look about it—no vehicles parked in the dirt yard, no towels or blue jeans flapping on the lines strung along one side. Still, it was the only brown house she’d passed on Mill Creek Road. She slowed down for a right turn and bounced across the barrow ditch. Fresh tire tracks crisscrossed the dirt. A vehicle had been here not long before. She stopped near the wooden stoop at the front door and turned off the ignition. If Ruth Yellow Bull was home, she would have heard the Jeep. If she wanted visitors, she’d come outside. It wasn’t polite to step onto the stoop and bang on the door.

Vicky waited for a couple of minutes before she got out. She slammed the door hard. The warm breeze whipped her skirt around her legs, and she could feel the sun burning past her hair into the back of her neck. She gave it another minute, then walked up the wooden steps and knocked on the door, trying to ignore the idea jabbing at her like a spear. Maybe she had become whiteized, like the grandmothers said. All those years in Denver going to school, working in a large, white firm—she, the token Indian—and what had she really been doing? Trying to be white? Trying to forget who she was, where she’d come from? Becoming a
ho:xu’wu:nen
? A lawyer living by the white man’s rules, and all the time, losing some part of herself.

I came home!
She’d wanted to say to the grandmothers when they’d turned away from her at the powwows or the tribal meetings and whispered among themselves, loud enough so that she could hear.
Well, look at her. Don’t she think she’s something? Made herself real big, like a chief. Don’t she know, women don’t have no business being chiefs?
It was Ben Holden who had been like a chief, a leading man on the reservation, and she had left him, just driven off one day. It amazed her when she thought about it. Had she really believed she could make it on her own? Woman Alone, the grandmothers called her—
Hi sei ci nihi
—because it was true. And yet it was strange, about the name. It had given her strength and courage, and she knew that even when the grandmothers had turned away, they had still blessed her with the name.

And here she was banging on the front door of a house on the rez, like a white woman. There was no sound inside, no scrape of footsteps or clack of a door. Nothing except the faint reverberation of her own pounding. She stepped back and glanced around. A dark pickup was coming down the road, the bed swaying as if it might break away from the cab, little clouds of dust swirling around the tires. The pickup slowed a little, then dived to the right, jumped across the barrow ditch and plunged toward the Jeep. It slid to a stop, both doors swinging open. A heavyset woman with gray hair that hung in clumps around the shoulders of her denim shirt and a round face marked by deeply set lines and what might have been old scars got out of the pickup. Two little boys, maybe eight or nine, piled out on the passenger side and started pushing and pummeling each other until one of them was down on the ground, the other kicking at his legs. “Knock it off,” the woman shouted as she came around the hood of the Jeep.

“Ruth Yellow Bull?” Vicky had to shout, too. One boy was crying, the other yelling. She stepped off the stoop.

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m Vicky Holden.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re that lawyer lady.” Without moving her feet, Ruth Yellow Bull rolled herself sideways toward the two boys, still jabbing and yelling at each other. “Shut up, you hear me? I have to come over there and kick your butts?” She rolled back. “What d’ya want?”

“I’d like to talk to you about a girl named Liz. She was active in AIM back in the seventies.”

Ruth Yellow Bull didn’t say anything at first, but her eyes narrowed, as if she were trying to bring something into focus, something forgotten. “Why’d you come here?” she said finally.

“I understand you were part of AIM back then.”

“So what? Lots of people joined up.” She turned back to the boys, this time stomping her feet in a half circle. “Get them bags of groceries into the house,” she shouted. Vicky noticed the three brown bags in the bed of the pickup, propped against the rear of the cab. It was a moment before the kids stopped wrestling and sauntered over to the pickup. The taller boy lifted out two bags and smashed them into the chest of the other boy, who staggered off, fighting to keep the bags upright. Then the other kid dragged the last bag across the bed and over the side of the pickup and headed for the house.

“Grandkids,” Ruth said. “Who needs ’em?”

Vicky tried to catch the younger boy’s eyes, then the older boy’s, but they kept their eyes averted and plodded on, brushing past her. “Is their mother at work?” Vicky heard herself asking. Gray dust streaked the small brown faces and clung to the plaid shirts and blue jeans. The boys’ hair, black and knotted, seemed stuck to the wrinkled collars of their shirts, and she wondered if this was how her own children had looked, unwashed and uncared for, after she had left them. She blinked back the idea; her mother had loved them and taken good care of them, that was the truth, just as her mother had loved and taken good care of her.

“Work? Yeah, she’s at work all right, at some meth house. Look, I don’t know nothin’ about AIM. Whoever sent you here is a damn liar if they said I did.”

“What about Liz? She was an Arapaho who went to Pine Ridge. It’s possible she was at Wounded Knee before she came back here. You might have run into her, or heard about her.”

“What the hell’s this all about?” Ruth crooked both elbows and set her hands on her waist, fingers spread apart across her ballooning abdomen. She bent her head forward, like a bull ready to charge.

“It’s possible she was murdered,” Vicky said. “It could be her skeleton that was found out in the Gas Hills.”

The woman dropped her hands and went over to the stoop. Gripping the railing with one hand, she swung her thick legs onto the first step, then the second, and finally planted herself in front of the door, which hung open into the shadows of the living room. Past the edge of a sofa, Vicky could see the two boys jostling in the kitchen. The sounds of paper crackling and something hard bouncing across the floor drifted outside.

Still holding on to the railing, Ruth looked down. “Don’t got nothing to do with me.”

Vicky tipped her head back and locked eyes with the woman. “I heard you were at Wounded Knee,” she said.

“Who the hell you been talkin’ to?”

“It doesn’t matter. I understand there were other Arapahos at Pine Ridge,” Vicky said, not taking her eyes away. “Could I come in? I’d like to talk to you for a moment. It’s possible you might remember.”

“Maybe I don’t want to remember. Maybe it don’t matter anymore, ’cause it’s over and done with. It’s the past, and ain’t you heard, the past is deader than a skinned rabbit. What’s it to you, anyway?”

“It’s a cold case,” Vicky said. “I’m trying to find something that will keep her murder from being buried in a file with a lot of other unsolved murders. I’d like to see her given a proper burial, with her own name. Whoever killed her has gotten away with it for more than thirty years. I’d like to see him brought to justice.”

“I don’t know nothing about it. I don’t know nobody by that name.” The woman hesitated, her lips working around soundless words. Then she said, “Besides, maybe she deserved what she got.”

In the narrowed eyes and the set of the woman’s jaw, Vicky realized that she was lying. She waited a moment, allowing the lie to grow between them, like an expanding bubble that couldn’t be ignored. “Why, Ruth?” she said. “Because she’d talked to the police, and the police killed one of the AIM members? Is that why she deserved to die?”

The woman leaned forward until the railing cut into her fleshy middle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know nothin’ about that time. Maybe I was stoned, so I don’t know what came down.” She lifted her head and gazed for a long moment across the road and beyond, to the empty plains. Finally she pushed off the railing, swung around and stepped into the house. “Forget about it.” She threw the words over one shoulder. “Nobody cares what happened then.”

“You know what he did to her, Ruth.” Vicky called out to the woman’s back, hoping she wouldn’t slam the door shut. She had to hold her hair back against the gust of wind that swept across the yard, blowing up billows of dust. “He beat her up first, broke most of her bones, knocked out her teeth. He took her to a desolate gulley and put a bullet in the back of her head. He’s a monster, Ruth, and I think he’s still on the rez.”

Ruth turned back, her eyes like black lines slashed across the flesh of her face. Her lips were moving, forming and reforming around silent words as she negotiated some track in her head. Vicky held her breath and waited. Then something new came into the woman’s expression, some acute look of fear that turned her features into an icy sculpture. She grabbed the edge of the door and, stepping backward, slammed the door shut.

Vicky waited a moment, half hoping that the door would open again, that the woman would say, “Come in; I’ll tell you all about her.” Because she was certain now that Ruth Yellow Bull knew a girl named Liz. She
knew.

The door stayed closed. From inside the house came the muffled noise of the boys yelling and the sharp, staccato notes of Ruth’s voice punctuating theirs.

Vicky went back to the Jeep and crawled inside. She felt limp with frustration. She was so close, so close. She’d found someone who knew about that time, knew about a girl named Liz. But she wouldn’t tell what she knew. She’d closed the door on that time just as she’d slammed the front door on her and Father John. It was over. All over, she’d said. It was dead.

Vicky turned the ignition and backed around the yard. She drove forward, dipping down into the barrow ditch before crawling up the other side, then turned onto the road. Holding the wheel steady with one hand, she rummaged in her bag on the passenger seat with the other and pulled out her cell. She started to punch in the number for the sheriff’s department. She had something now. She and John O’Malley had come up with a name: Liz. And she’d found a woman who’d been at Wounded Knee, and that woman, she was sure, knew what had happened to Liz.

She pressed the end key. Ruth Yellow Bull would not talk to Detective Coughlin. She would deny she’d ever gone to Wounded Knee, and who could prove otherwise? She would keep her secrets because…

Because she was afraid. Vicky tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone dry, her tongue felt like a bloated twig flapping against the back of her teeth. Ruth Yellow Bull was afraid because the killer was still around and if she talked, if she told anyone what she knew, he would kill her.

The noise of the cell ringing broke into her thoughts. She turned onto Plunkett Road and pressed the cell against her ear. “Vicky Holden,” she said.

“Oh, Vicky.” Annie was shouting, as if Vicky were across the street. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” she hurried on, and Vicky realized she hadn’t checked the messages. “Adam wants to know when you’ll be in. He wants to get started on that discrimination case.”

“Tell him I’m on the way,” Vicky said, surprised at the ripples of irritation running through her. It would be a big case, with either a major complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or a major lawsuit, unless Mammoth Oil agreed to settlement and stopped discriminating against Indians. There would be a lot of work; people to talk to, statements to obtain. They’d have to prepare an initial letter to Mammoth’s legal department. It was the beginning of a long and complex process, and she was also eager to get started. Of course she was. Wasn’t this why she’d come home, to help her people get their rights?

She’d call Coughlin, tell him what she’d learned, and leave the case of a girl murdered years ago to the proper investigators, just as Adam had said. This wasn’t her fight.

Then she realized that Annie was talking about a call that had come from a law firm in Denver.

“What was the message?” she asked. She knew the firm—highprofile criminal defense attorneys for wealthy clients. She could guess the message, even as Annie launched into the explanation. They were defending someone named Theo Gosman charged with assaulting a woman in an alley. Would she be willing to be interviewed?

Vicky didn’t say anything for a moment. There was no reason for her to consent to an interview with the defense attorneys for the man who had beaten the girl in the alley. But she knew the way the game was played. If she or Lucas or Susan refused an interview, it would be used against them in Gosman’s trial. The defense would try to make it look as if they were biased or trying to hide something.

“Anything else?” she said. Her thoughts were spiraling like a gyroscope toward a single point: The girl in the alley would have been dead if Lucas hadn’t taken the side street. She could have been like Liz, beaten and shot in an empty canyon where there was no one about, no one to take a different turn and help her.

And Liz’s killer was still around.

“Diana Morningstar called,” Annie said.

“The women want to talk again?” This was a good sign, she was thinking. Someone in the group might have learned something. They were all upset, on edge. A skeleton with no name might be any of them. Except that, now, the skeleton had a first name.