Watching Eagles Soar (15 page)

Liam, Liam, where are you?

* * *

C
harlie awoke in the freezing cold. Coming through the darkness was the faint sound of laughter and music. It took a moment to get her bearings. At first she thought she was in the cabin at Mount Princeton, but why was it so cold? Liam must have let the fire die down. Then it came to her, like an arctic blast of wind, that she was in an abandoned log cabin in a ghost town, and the fire had burned out, and she was alone. Except that she wasn't alone. Outside somewhere, somebody was having a party!

She managed to get to her feet, her legs and arms as numb and heavy as logs. She struggled into her backpack and gathered up the skis and poles. She hadn't meant to fall asleep. Liam was out there somewhere looking for her, but now there were other people around. Someone could have seen him. She could get other skiers to help her find him.

Charlie stepped out onto the porch and stopped. It was night, and the sky was light and clear. The blizzard had worn itself out, leaving little flurries of snow swirling in the air. Main Street in St. Elmo stretched ahead in the moonlight that flooded the snowy ground. Wooden sidewalks ran up and down the street in front of the buildings—houses and stores shouldering one another, painted blue, red, and yellow. She could see the black lettering painted on the front windows. There were boot tracks in the snow on the sidewalks. Snow drifted over the roofs and piled behind the second-story false fronts.

Amber lights glowed in the windows, and in a nearby house, she could see a woman seated at a dressing table brushing her hair. Outside, a horse was hitched to a small sleigh. The music and laughter were coming from the building about halfway down the street, lights shining in the front window. The saloon, Charlie thought. Everything was just as Liam had described it, a little town in a snow globe, a little town beneath a Christmas tree.

Two men came out of a shop and hurried along the sidewalk. One of them called out to someone on the other side of the street. Charlie hadn't noticed anyone else, but now she saw there were a lot of people walking along the sidewalks. Most were men, but there were a few women, and the women wore long dresses that swept over the snow.

Charlie swallowed hard. Her mouth had gone dry, and she could feel the cold working its way back inside her. There was a party going on, all right, a party that she and Liam had known nothing about when they had set off for St. Elmo. Some historical society must have scheduled a get-together in the old ghost town and people had brought clothes from the 1880s. Somebody had even driven a horse and sleigh up the trail. There were societies like that, Liam had said, people who dressed up like mountain men and went to rendezvous, just like the mountain men in the 1800s, and people who dressed up like cavalry and Indians and staged mock battles on old battlegrounds. Liam would be furious, she thought, when he saw all the people here. He had wanted St. Elmo in winter just for the two of them.

Charlie stepped into her skis and started down Main Street. There were tracks everywhere made by hooves and wheels and sleigh runners. The gathering, whatever it was, had been going on for some time. She expected the tracks to be frozen, but the snow was soft, glinting like diamonds in the moonlight, and her skis glided through them. “Hello!” she called to several men wearing long black coats and brimmed hats. They stood in a little circle in front of a shop with a false front and black letters that spelled Tobacco painted on the window. “Can you help me?” But they ignored her and kept on talking, one of them puffing on a cigar, another throwing back his head and laughing into the night sky, as if no one saw her, as if she didn't exist.

“Hello! Hello there!” Charlie called out to a couple walking arm in arm along the sidewalk, but they kept walking. “Hello!” she called to two men heading into the shop with letters that spelled Hardware on the window. The door shut behind them, and she skied toward two other men farther down the street, standing on the sidewalk, heads dipped in conversation. Still no response, as if she weren't there. It was as if the people attending the gathering had decided to ignore anything—or anyone—from the present.

The music was louder. A tinny-sounding piano pounded out a ragtime piece that burst out of the saloon and floated down Main Street every time someone opened the door. Above the door, St. Elmo Saloon was painted in red letters across the false, second-story front. Charlie took a diagonal route across the street. She left her skis propped against the hitching log at the edge of the sidewalk. Farther up the street a black horse was tied to another log. She walked over to the front window of the saloon. It was crowded inside, women in brightly colored, shiny dresses that sloped off their shoulders, with ruffles at their ankles that showed off their high-heeled shoes; men in dark suits with white shirts and black string ties, some with cowboy hats pushed back on their heads.

Across the room, a line of men stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the bar, but Charlie watched the line break up and the men turn around as a tall woman in a blue dress, with blond hair stacked on top of her head, walked over. There were a half dozen round tables set about where men were laying down cards on the green baize tabletops. A shiny-dressed woman perched on the lap of one of the cardplayers.

It was then that she spotted Liam. The black-haired man with the mustache—he'd always wanted to grow a mustache—and the redheaded woman in a green dress leaning over his shoulder, brushing her face against his. Several cards lay facedown in front of him. Deftly he lifted the corner of one card, then tossed some gold coins toward the coins stacked in the middle of the table. The dealer dealt out a round of cards, and then it seemed to be over. Liam reached out both hands, circled the stacks of coins and pulled them toward him. He handed some coins to the woman. Grasping his chin with one hand, she turned his face toward her. She kissed him on the lips.

Charlie pressed her face against the freezing window and tried to blink back the tears that had made the saloon seem watery and unreal. At first the tears felt warm on her cheeks, but then they turned to ice. Still she couldn't take her eyes away from the black-haired man with the mustache, staring at the new round of cards that had been dealt, pushing a small stack of coins into the center of the table. It was Liam, and yet it was not Liam. The truth hit her like a sledgehammer: The Liam that she knew and loved was dead.

The saloon door opened and two men spilled outside and walked past. Charlie made herself move away from the window. She walked over to the edge of the sidewalk where the men stood looking up and down Main Street, as if they were expecting someone. She reached out and tried to take hold of one of the men's arms, but the sleeve of his jacket dissolved in her grasp. There was nothing but air. She could hear the rumble of a train, the shrill sound of the whistle, and the swooshing noise of steam coming closer. They had pulled up the tracks in 1926, Liam had said.

Later, Charlie barely remembered stepping into her skis and heading back down Main Street, past the lights in the windows and the people walking about. Barely remembered the freezing cold and the blizzard starting up again and the snow driving against her face as she skied up the incline past the little cabin and started downhill toward the fork in the trail. She remembered only skiing as fast as she could, the music and laughter receding into the night behind her and the words pounding in her head:
Get away from here. Get away from here.

* * *

“C
an you hear me?”

A man's voice cut through the blackness, and Charlie tried to fight her way upward into consciousness. She blinked into the bright spotlight shining somewhere above her. The face of a man with a knitted ski cap pulled low on his head was coming closer, and she struggled to bring him into focus. Snow was everywhere: snow on her jacket and gloves, snow piled over her legs. She was buried in snow. She tried to sit up, aware of the strength in the hands pressing on her shoulders.

“Better lie still until we make sure you don't have any broken bones,” the man said. Then he shouted: “Over here! We found the woman off the trail.”

Other men were stomping through the snow, and a woman, too, and then all of them were hovering over her, brushing the snow from her jacket and pants. She could barely feel the hands moving over her arms and legs. It was as if they were moving over stone.

“Can you tell us what happened?” The man's voice again. “Did you fall?”

“I don't know,” she said. “It was snowing. I was so cold.”

“Maybe she just lay down,” the woman said.

“What about your friend, Liam Hollings?” The man's face came into focus now: a prominent nose and flushed cheeks. Light eyes peering at her from beneath the cliff of his forehead.

“Liam,” Charlie said, feeling the softness of his name on her lips.

“Any idea where he might be? When did you last see him? Did he fall off the trail?”

Charlie closed her eyes. She and Liam were skiing up the trail together, the old railroad bed.
We'll have to watch ourselves. The old narrow-gauge trains didn't need much room.
She could feel the tears starting again as she looked at the man. “He got ahead of me. Somewhere around the fork. I couldn't see him.”

“Trail gets real narrow in that area,” the man said. “Not much room for mistakes.” He dropped his head into the hush that moved over them. Charlie could hear the soft thud of snow falling off a branch and the quiet sound of her own weeping. Then the man said, “We're going to move you onto the snowmobile. An ambulance is waiting in Mount Princeton to take you to the hospital in Salida.”

Already the strong hands were sliding her out of the snow.

“You're lucky you didn't get any farther off the trail.” The woman's voice came from somewhere behind. “Another foot and you would have rolled into the canyon. We never would have found you.”

T
HE
S
ALIDA
J
OURNAL

The search for missing skier Liam Hollings has been called off after two weeks, according to a spokesman at the Chaffee County Sheriff's Department. Hollings, 29, and Charlie Lambert, 26, graduate students in physics at the University of Colorado, had set out the morning of January 6 on a cross-country skiing trip along the abandoned railroad bed in Chalk Creek Canyon. When they didn't return that evening to Mount Princeton, where they had rented a cabin, the manager notified the sheriff. The county search and rescue team located Lambert around 10 p.m. about a mile from the abandoned town of St. Elmo, but the team has been unable to find any sign of Hollings.

“The extreme winter weather, with deep snows and freezing temperatures, makes it highly unlikely that Hollings can be found alive,” the spokesman said. “The skiers were on a very steep and narrow expert trail. The rescue team believes that Hollings became disoriented in a blizzard and may have skied off the trail into the canyon.”

Lambert was evacuated to Salida Community Hospital where she was treated for hypothermia, frostbite, and exhaustion before being released last week. She could not be located for comment.

Otto's Sons

“R
obert's come home.” Otto Hunting Bear stood in the doorway, leaning on a knobby walking stick carved from a branch. He was bronze-skinned and whipcord thin, with buzz-top gray hair, and a worn, weathered look that made him seem older than his seventy years.

Father John got to his feet and motioned him into the office. “Nice to see you, Grandfather,” he said, using the polite Arapaho term for addressing an older man. “I heard the good news,” he said as Otto lowered himself into a side chair that Father John kept for visitors. Outside St. Francis Mission was quiet, except for the undertow of the wind and the small tapping of a cottonwood branch against the front window. Beyond the mission were the open, brown stretches of the Wind River Reservation. If he put his finger on a map, the reservation looked like a small rectangular block in the center of Wyoming, but that was only because Wyoming itself was so big. It took the best part of an hour to drive anywhere on the rez.

“You must be very happy,” Father John said.

“Happy? Happy don't touch it.” A smile creased the old man's face, light bouncing in his eyes. “Walked into the living room two weeks ago, like he'd been gone a couple hours. Just stood there, hands in his jeans pockets, that stupid smile he used to get on his face when he was little and got himself into trouble. That was Robert. He could pretty much smile his way out of anything with Mame. ‘Hi, Dad,' he says. ‘You're lookin' good,' like I wasn't busted up with two hips the doctor give me and a back that don't hold me straight. Wonder I didn't have a heart attack. I couldn't even speak. I got outta my chair, went over, and hugged him so hard, I like to squeezed the breath outta him. ‘Take it easy, Dad,' he said, but I couldn't let go. All I could think was, My son was dead and now he's alive. He's come back.”

“How's he doing?” Father John resumed his seat behind the desk.

“Okay, I guess.” Otto gave a forced shrug and piled his hands on top of the walking stick. “Hard work fitting in again after all them years.” He shook his head and stared into the middle of the office. “Twelve years, and not a word, no sign he was walking the earth. Nothing but the big, empty space he left behind the day he packed his bag and drove off. I'll never forget that old wreck of a pickup that he won off some guy in a poker game bumping across the yard and heading down the road, trailing black smoke. ‘Gotta get off the rez,' he'd told me. ‘Nothing for me here.' Mame and me didn't know where he went, what he was up to. After five, six years, we started thinking our boy was dead. Tried to convince ourselves there wasn't no reason to keep hoping, but it was tough. Wore her out, worrying about Robert and what become of him. She got thinner and thinner until she was nothing but a skeleton in a bag of skin before she died. Only thing that kept her hanging on long as she did was our other boy. Tom was still with us. He's a good boy.”

Father John took a moment. He could sense the unspoken words hanging in the air like mist: the good son, the one who had stayed home, helped his father on the ranch, branded the cattle, loaded the trucks and drove to market, bred and cared for the horses, watched his mother die and looked after his father, witnessing his father's love poured out to his brother. He waited for the old man to go on, and when he didn't, Father John said, “Want to talk about it, Otto?”

“I was thinking we'd be a family again,” Otto said, trying to staunch the cracking in his voice. Moisture pooled in his eyes, and he wiped it away with the pads of his fingers, surreptitiously, as if he were brushing away a mosquito. “Mame's gone, but ever since Robert got back, I been feeling like her spirit's with us, like she knows our boys are back on the ranch. Robert's real sorry for staying away. Spent time in prison in Colorado. Got mixed up with a bad sort and did time for breaking and entering, assault. That's why he never got in touch. He was too ashamed, and to tell the truth, if Mame had known, it would've killed her even sooner. But all that's past now. Robert got his life turned around. Even got himself a son down in Denver. Wants to bring him home soon's he can work it out with the boy's mother. Bring the boy home to the ranch.” Otto waved one hand in a wide arc. “Things are like Mame and me always dreamed they'd be. Our boys running the ranch together. I turned the deed over to them last week, one of those quit claims that Rap lawyer helped me with. Equal shares for each of 'em.”

Father John set his elbows on the armrests and looked at the old man over the tipi he made with his fingers. Surely Vicky Holden would have suggested he might want to go slowly, give Tom time to adjust. Before his brother's return, Tom would have inherited the entire ranch. “How's Tom taking it?” he said.

“I thought he was gonna be real happy. Ranch is big enough for him and Robert. It's easier running a spread if you got somebody alongside you that loves it much as you do. Only Tom don't like it.” Otto laid his head back, gulped in some air, and exhaled slowly, as if he were exhaling cigarette smoke. “He hates Robert,” he said, and Father John could hear the pain in the old man's words. “Don't want him around. Yesterday I heard him tell Robert, ‘Go on back to whatever hole you crawled out from. We got along fine without you. We don't need you.'” He ran his knuckles over his eyelids again and stared up at the ceiling a moment before he said, “Trouble is, I need both my boys.”

“How about Robert? What did he say?”

“Nothing. Looked real sad. Glanced over and seen me in the hallway. Give me a little smile, like he wanted to encourage me and make me think Tom was gonna change his mind sooner or later.”

“Maybe he will, Otto.”

“You don't know my boys.” The old man spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “They're stubborn as mules. Clamp their minds shut like traps. Take a crowbar to pry them open.” He shifted sideways a little as if to readjust the weight on his hips. His expression was filled with desperation. “You think you could talk to Tom, Father?” he said. “Might be you could get his mind open.”

* * *

T
he ranch sprawled across acres of sun-dried plains that rolled on a gentle upslope into the stunted pines and rocks of the Wind River range. The Toyota pickup shuddered as Father John tapped on the brake pedal and drove through the opened gate with Hunting Bear Ranch carved on the overhead post. The skies were alive: the sun, a great orange ball, riding over the mountain peaks; orange, magenta, and purple flames shooting across the western horizon. The air was bright and intense. He drove down a narrow dirt road, squinting past the visor, swerving to avoid the potholes and slowing almost to a crawl over a section of washboard. The road dead-ended in a Y. On the left was the ranch house, two stories of blue siding and a sloping front porch huddled under a canopy of cottonwoods, white blossoms blazing against the orange sky. He took the road that branched right and led directly to the double doors of the raw-board barn ahead. The doors were closed. Everything about the place looked deserted.

“Best time to see Tom alone will be around seven,” Otto had said. “He'll be in the barn like usual, pitching hay for the horses. I got a meeting over at the senior center, so Tom won't think we was expecting company. It'll be like you were in the area and dropped by.”

Father John veered off the dirt road and parked alongside the barn. A gust of wind sent a tumbleweed skittering past the front of the Toyota. There was no sign of any other vehicle, and he wondered whether Tom had finished the chores and gone up to the house. The pickup door made a loud thwack when he shut it. He walked over to the front of the barn and waited. If Tom was inside and wanted company, he'd come through the doors. It was polite to wait, not hammer on the doors and push himself on anyone. If Tom didn't show in two or three minutes, he'd get back into the pickup, drive off, and return tomorrow. It was the Arapaho Way.

The door on the right flew open a couple of feet and stopped, as if the wind had pushed against it, then caught and held it. A man bolted through the opening. Tall and broad-hipped, black cowboy hat, dun-colored jacket, jeans—a blur dashing down the front of the barn and darting around the corner.

“Hey!” Father John ran after him, but when he reached the corner, the man was already racing across the pasture. He leapt over a gulley without breaking stride, the black hat bobbing against the orange horizon, the dun-colored jacket flashing green in the brightness. He was like a cartoon character, fading into the plains until he was lost altogether in the fringe of trees that bordered the far side of the pasture. It had all happened so fast, a matter of seconds. There was nothing distinctive about the man. The cowboy hat, jacket, and jeans—almost every man on the rez dressed the same. He could be anybody, Father John realized. He hadn't seen the man's face.

Father John swung around and walked to the door that juddered in the wind. An icy sense of foreboding gripped him like a steel vise. He jammed the door hard against the side of the barn and stepped inside. “Tom,” he called. “You in here?” The inside of the barn seemed pitch-dark. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light that glowed in a bank of windows beneath the ceiling and shone past the bales of hay stacked overhead. “Tom!” he shouted.

There was no sound except for the quiet shuffling of the horses in the stalls and a muffled snorting noise that mingled with the drip-drip-drip of a water pipe somewhere. He took several steps across the dirt floor, taking in the whole place: the tack hanging on the walls, the horse blankets draped over benches, the tools arranged above a workbench, the bin of loose hay, the faucet over the metal tub half-filled with water. A neat, tidy barn, a working barn that someone took pride in.

He moved deeper inside, the foreboding changing into a certainty. He could hear his heart thumping. He knew what he would find before he spotted the body of a man facedown, legs bent at odd angles, as if he had fallen in midstride, arms flung ahead to fight off his attacker. Next to the body was a pitchfork, stone gray, inert and yet as menacing as an instrument from hell.

Father John dropped onto his knees. Part of the man's face was pressed into the dirt, but Father John could see who he was. He laid a finger on the man's carotid artery. There was no pulse. Blood had puddled in the deep gash that ran down the side of his head, and there was a dark wetness glistening along the edge of the pitchfork. “God have mercy,” he said, making the sign of the cross over the body of Tom Hunting Bear. “God have mercy.”

He got to his feet, dug in the pocket of his jacket for his cell, and tapped out 911.

* * *

“M
y boy Tom's dead.” The old man's voice was strangled with grief, barely audible, as if the words had made their own way down the line without any effort on his part.

“I'm so sorry,” Vicky said. She leaned into her desk and pressed the receiver against her ear. The moccasin telegraph had been zinging all morning: Tom Hunting Bear killed last night in the barn. Robert must've done it. Never should've come back, that man. Always was trouble.

“Robert's all I got left now,” Otto said. “They're gonna try to take him away. You know the fed?”

Vicky said yes, she knew FBI agent Ted Gianelli.

“Knocked on the door this morning. It wasn't much after dawn. Told Robert to get dressed. He was taking him in for questioning. Questioning? Robert didn't have nothing to do with Tom getting killed. Somebody else done it. We got cowboys coming by all the time looking for work. Sometimes they're desperate. Haven't landed a job in months. Things have been tough on ranchers in the area. Some of 'em are barely holding on, so they're not hiring. Since Robert got back, we don't need any extra hands. Could've made a guy real mad when Tom told him that, could have sent him over the edge. The fed says it looked like Tom put up a fight for his life until the guy got hold of the pitchfork and hit him in the head. But it wasn't Robert. He woudn't've done that.”

Otto stopped for a moment, cleared his throat, and made a couple of stabs at beginning again before he managed to say that Tom and Robert had gotten into a couple of fights. “We was still adjusting, working things out,” he said.

“A couple of fights?” Vicky said. “Where?”

She could hear the slow, deliberate exhalation at the other end. She held her own breath and waited for the old man to go on. It didn't look good for Robert Hunting Bear. She could have listed the reasons Gianelli had for questioning him. Robert had disappeared for twelve years, while Tom had stayed and helped his father run the ranch. Still, Otto had insisted upon deeding the ranch to both sons. Now, with Tom dead, the ranch would be Robert's. That could be construed as a motive as big as the side of a barn. Even Otto admitted his sons weren't getting along. They had gotten into fights. There were probably witnesses. Gianelli had all the elements of a strong circumstantial case against Robert Hunting Bear.

“The casino parking lot.” Otto's voice was a whisper. “Last week, I sent Tom over to the casino to get his brother home before he lost half the ranch on the tables. Tom did like I said. He was a good son. He asked Robert politely to leave, but Robert was a hothead. He threw a punch, the security guards took 'em both outside, and . . .” He smothered a sob. “I guess they fought it out pretty hard. Took four guards to separate 'em. Guards told 'em to get off the property and not come back.”

“Anybody call the police?”

“Nah. I guess the guards figured it was a family beef.” The old man's voice dissolved into sobs a moment before he cleared his throat and said, “None of it means anything. They was brothers, and sooner or later, brothers come together. Just needed a little time, that's all. Please, Vicky, you gotta help Robert. He's all I got in the world.”

* * *