Winter's Child (3 page)

“I've found someone
for you to interview,” Father John said. They drove off the plateau onto the straightaway that led into town, through the traffic light, a few cars and pickups in the two lanes. “Di tale amor” was playing softly. Snow alongside the road had melted into streams that splashed the windshield. The wipers in the old Toyota pickup operated on a hit-and-miss basis, and he had to lean sideways to see through a cleared space.

“
Il Trovatore
,” Shannon said.

“You like opera?” He glanced over at the girl in the passenger seat, one elbow braced on the window frame, the backpack on her lap. She seemed at ease, almost at home, as if she knew the road well and had driven it many times.

“Doesn't everyone?” She gave him a wide smile. “I never doubted you'd find someone for me to interview. You've been on the reservation so long, you must know everybody. One of Lizzie's grandchildren, I hope.”

“Wilbur Horn, a great-grandson.”

Shannon let out a yelp. “Fantastic. How old is he?” Gloved fingers strummed the straps of the backpack. He could almost smell the excitement emanating from her.

“Probably in his sixties. Hale and hearty.”

“The closest I can get, I'm sure. Lizzie had five children who would be centenarians now. Wilbur sounds perfect.” When he looked over again, she was smiling. “It's a good place to start. People send you on, you know. Wilbur could remember other family members who might have different stories”

It was true, Father John was thinking. It had taken only a couple phone calls before he found that Wilbur Horn, one of his own parishioners, was descended from Lizzie Brokenhorn. He had gone out to Wilbur's ranch and over a cup of coffee explained that his niece was writing her dissertation on his great-grandmother and her sister. Stories were private, Father John knew; they belonged in families, defined families, gave them understanding, courage, and strength. They weren't for students who could never grasp—feel—the importance. They weren't meant to be scattered to the winds as if they were nothing.

“You say she's your brother's child.” Father John had nodded. In the Arapaho Way, his brother's child was also his child. Wilbur had nodded with him, a silent agreement struck.

Now Father John smiled at the exuberance in Shannon's voice and the truth of what she said: “I never know where the road will lead, but I know it will lead to something I couldn't have anticipated or even imagined from reading the old records.” She shifted toward him and plucked at the straps of the backpack again as if she were playing a melody on a guitar. “The history books, the old records and archives, only tell part of the story.”

Father John met her smile for a moment. Her blue eyes crinkled in the bright sunlight. “And sometimes the records are wrong.” How many times since he had been with the Arapahos had he come face-to-face with the way that stories passed down by people who had lived through the massacres and the terror in the Old Time contradicted the official reports accepted by historians? If it was written down, it must be true, historians believed.

“They do tell us a lot, of course,” she said. “You can't ignore them.”

“Of course not.” Not if you want to get your doctorate.

“They give you the outline of what happened. A good starting point. Take the women I'm concentrating on. Amanda Mary Fletcher, Lizzie's sister, in a Cheyenne camp for seven months. Elizabeth Fletcher, never rescued. Lived her life as an Arapaho.”

Shannon was still leaning toward him. He could feel the intensity of her concentration. “What I'm looking for, Uncle John, is the outside of history, the details and feelings never written down. What happened to these women? How did they live out their lives? I've interviewed five of Amanda's descendants. What was it like for her when she returned home? Did she continue as if nothing had happened? Just a little blip in her life journey? Questions like that. And what about Lizzie? Changed from being white to Indian in a matter of minutes. What did that mean? How did that determine the woman she became?”

“I'm proud of you,” Father John said. She was going after the lost parts of history. Going for the whole, or as much as she could find. Not just the accepted truth. She was doing what he should have done twenty-five years ago, back at Boston College, when he'd been studying to become a history professor. Before his own life took a path he hadn't anticipated. After graduation, he had joined
the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, and eventually taught history in a Jesuit prep school, doing research for a doctorate. All those records and archives to plow through, and the loneliness and the terrible thirst that had taken him over. The crash had come hard.

He turned right and drove south toward the reservation. Set-back storefronts and snow-gripped parking lots started to give way to warehouses, liquor package stores, and the edges of trailer camps. A passing semi splashed snow and gray slush over the windshield, blinding him for a moment until the wipers surged into action. It had led him here, all of it, to an Indian reservation in the middle of Wyoming.

Shannon was saying something about starting with the records, and he tried to concentrate. She was so much further ahead than he had been at her age. So much wiser. “Take Elizabeth Fletcher,” she said. “The records tell us all about how Jasper and Mary Ann Fletcher set out from Illinois in 1865 for the California gold fields with their five children. They had joined a train of seventy-five wagons on the North Platte River trail through Indian country, all of their belongings piled inside two wagons.”

She went silent a moment, gazing out the window as if she could see the family and the wagons. After a moment, she went on: “Jasper made a big mistake. Instead of staying with the large train, he pulled ahead. Northwest of what is now Cheyenne, he stopped the wagons so the kids could wade in the river, cool off, and have a little lunch. That was when a band of Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Sand Hill attacked. Wounded Jasper, left him for dead, and killed Mary Ann. The three young sons ran back for the wagon train. The Indians were busy ransacking the family's wagons, so they let the boys go. But they took Amanda Mary, who was seventeen, and her baby sister, Elizabeth, who was two years old.
Tied their feet and arms, threw them on horses, and rode away before the large train could arrive. For the next thirty-five years, Amanda Mary feared her sister had been killed, but she never stopped looking for her. In the early 1900s she learned that Elizabeth was living on the Wind River Reservation. So that's it, the story outline. I'm here to fill in the blanks.”

“How far along are you?” Father John turned right into the reservation. Empty white spaces stretched around them, broken here and there by blocklike houses and ponies nodding in corrals. The melting snow had turned Seventeen-Mile Road into a creek. The sun shimmered on the hood of the Toyota pickup.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Shannon shrug. “Two weeks in Michigan and Iowa interviewing Amanda's descendants. A variety of stories, little glimpses of truth in each one, I suspect. The problem is, her story changed over the years. She was a prolific writer, not shy about recounting the horrors of her experience with the Cheyennes. At the time she was rescued by a white trader, she said the Cheyennes had treated her well and that Sand Hill's wife had been good to her. As the years went by, she began filing claims against the government for her family's losses. Anyway, with each filing, the amount of losses grew and so did the horrific sufferings she claimed to have undergone.”

“You don't believe the claims.”

“You said it: records can be wrong.”

“What did her descendants say?”

“They were all over the map. A couple of great-granddaughters recited all the horrible things that had happened to her: beatings, starvation, struggles to keep warm, lack of sleep, being treated like a slave. Pretty terrible, and straight out of the reports Amanda had filed with the government, which made me wonder if the great-granddaughters
really had heard any stories at all. Other descendants—further removed, I grant you; great-greats—claimed their parents and grandparents had heard Mary describe her captivity as filled with hard work. But all the Indian women worked, and she had to work alongside them. In times when food was scarce, everybody went hungry. Most of their buffalo-hide tipis had been destroyed at the Sand Creek Massacre the year before, and their canvas tipis barely kept out the cold.”

“So you have to make sense out of it.” Framed against the blue sky ahead was the large blue and white billboard with the words
St. Francis Mission
splashed across it.

“Our job as historians, right?” She let out a long sigh. “What Amanda wrote makes it harder to zero in on the truth.”

“You're saying what she wrote could be unreliable?”

“Historical records.” She shrugged again and shook her head.

Father John slowed for the left turn onto the road that ran through a tunnel of cottonwoods. Globules of snow dropped off the branches and splattered the windshield. The rear wheels shimmied on the slush.

“So this is the mission.” Shannon sat forward, craning toward the windshield as he drove out of the tunnel and onto Circle Drive. “Let me guess. Your office is over there.” She nodded in the direction of the administration building, yellow stucco and two stories high, easily the largest building on the reservation, a ghost from the past. “The church over there, just like your Christmas cards. Seems as if the steeple floats in the sky. The gray stone building must be the old school you turned into the Arapaho Museum.”

Father John took a left into the alley that ran between the church and the administration building. Past Eagle Hall, where the social activities took place. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Sunday morning donuts and coffee, the women's social committee, the Ladies Altar
Society, the Men's Club, Alcoholics Anonymous, the New Moms group.

Shannon had shifted herself partway around and was staring out the back window. “That redbrick house over there must be where you live. I don't see the baseball diamond.”

“Behind the redbrick house,” he said. Lost in the snow, he was thinking. A wide-open field of snow.

“And I will be staying in the guesthouse.” She was bubbling on, all of it a new adventure. “Your e-mail said you've put up a lot of famous people in the guest house. Name one.”

“Everybody who stays there has a claim to fame.” He slid to a stop near the front stoop.

“Because they stayed there?”

“Something like that.” He got out and started through the wet, melting snow to the passenger side, but Shannon O'Malley was already off her seat. She slammed the door behind her and gripped the backpack to her chest.

“Let me help you.” He reached for the backpack again, and this time she let him take it. She spun around. “I feel like I know this place. Every year I confiscated your Christmas card and tacked it up in my room over my desk. It was the first thing I saw every morning. After a while I had five or six, all lined up in a neat row. Each one with a different photo, and all those photos formed a big picture of the mission. I took my collection with me when I left for college, and every Christmas I added the next card. Tacked up in a whole series of dorm rooms and apartments with a lot of roommates and”—she swallowed—“boyfriends wanting to know where those cards came from. Africa? The Serengeti? Some other exotic place? Oh, you'd be surprised by the exotic places they suggested. I guess that's what the Christmas cards meant to me, a
grand adventure in an exotic place. You were my hero because you got away. I mean, nobody else I knew when I was a kid ever got away.”

Father John pushed the front door open, gestured her inside, and wondered what he had gotten away from. Family? Home? What he had found again, here. He set the backpack down on the worn sofa, which sloped sideways and its pushed-up springs bit into your thighs when you sat down. Better than no sofa at all, he reckoned, and none of the guests ever complained. “This is it,” he said. “I've stocked the kitchen with some essentials: coffee, cereal, milk, fruit, sandwich meat and bread, in case you get hungry while you're working.”

Shannon brushed past him into the alcove that served as a kitchen. She thumped the top of the old oak table. “Perfect place to set up my laptop. It's sure quiet here.” She rolled her head around, as if she expected to detect noise somewhere. “I'm not used to so much quiet.”

“You get used to it.” It was one of the best things about being here, the infinite quiet. “Bedroom's in back, extra blankets in the closet. Make yourself at home and let me know if you need anything at all.”

Father John turned toward the door, then looked back. “Lunch at the residence promptly at noon; dinner promptly at six. I'll drive over and get you.”

“No. No. No. I love to walk in the snow.”

“See you in a little while.”

“Oh, Uncle John,” she called as he stepped outside and started to close the door. “Are you always prompt?”

He glanced back. Her eyes were dancing with mischief. How had she figured out that, despite his best intentions and promises to
change, he seldom made it to meals on time? Something always intervened. He and Elena had reached what he thought of as a good working arrangement: he promised to be on time, and she pretended to believe him. “I'm afraid I'll have to take the Fifth Amendment,” he said, pulling the door shut behind him.

Vicky made her
way through the white faces in the Hopkinses' living room. A comfortable, lived-in room with overstuffed sofa and chairs, small tables piled with magazines, and a bookcase crammed with books. Mullion windows framed broken pictures of the snow-heavy trees in the front yard and the cars passing in the street throwing up fountains of snow and slush. She didn't recognize any of the faces—Clint's colleagues, family, friends. She was an interloper, an intruder on private grief.

“I'm a colleague,” she told the woman with the not-unfriendly face and the taut look of someone who spent hours in a gym. She had light hair with dozens of colors in it that brushed the shoulders of her light blue dress.

“Oh, you must be Vicky Holden.” She peered at Vicky with wide, blue eyes behind small, wireless glasses that gave her the mock studious look of a seventh grader.

Vicky recognized the high-pitched, childlike voice of Clint's secretary. “Are you Evie?”

At this, the woman—she looked like she was in her mid-twenties—produced a tissue and began dabbing her eyes. The glasses jumped upward, riding along her nose at a precarious angle. She adjusted them and bit into her lower lip. “I've been with Clint since I was seventeen, just out of high school. I needed a job bad, with my dad out of work and Mom sick and my two brothers still in high school. Clint was struggling to get his practice going. ‘I don't know if I can pay you,' he told me. ‘I don't even know if I'll have any clients.' Well, it was better than nothing, which was what I had. I found out later that Lacy has plenty of money, so money wasn't a problem. Plus Clint was good at what he did.” She went back to dabbing the tissue at her eyes, the glasses stuttering about. “Lacy will be glad you came by.” She swiped her eyes a last time and adjusted her glasses.

Vicky followed the woman through the gauntlet of white faces. She could feel the laser heat of eyes on her back. Did they all know? How Clint had gone to the meeting in a blizzard to meet her? How he had started across the street alone? She had tossed about all night, half-asleep, half-awake, going over and over those last minutes. If she had crossed with Clint, would the truck have roared out of the snow?

“Lacy, Vicky Holden is here.” The secretary leaned over a small woman with sandy hair and red-rimmed eyes who sat, shoulders hunched, on an armchair. “The Arapaho lawyer from Lander,” she said, stepping back and beckoning Vicky forward.

A hush dropped over the living room like the quiet fullness of a rodeo stadium when a bronco rider flies into the air, just before he hits the hard-packed earth. There was a faint sound of water running from a faucet somewhere. The coffee smell was so strong,
Vicky could almost taste it. A woman sitting next to Lacy got to her feet and Vicky took the chair. She leaned sideways, but Lacy was staring across the room at something only she could see with a distant look in her expression, as if the people milling about had vanished.

“I came to tell you how sorry I am about Clint,” Vicky said.

Lacy did not respond. Still staring off into space, a private movie in her head. A moment passed before a girl who looked about nineteen, with long dark hair and lively eyes, stepped over to the armchair. “I'm Julie,” she said, looking at Vicky. “We've had a terrible shock.” Her mother's hand lay in her own like a dried leaf as the girl leaned forward. “This is one of Dad's colleagues, Mom.”

Something inside Lacy seemed to switch on, and she made a slow, robotic turn toward Vicky. “Thoughtful of you.” She spoke in a whisper. “I don't know why Clint went to the meeting last night. Do you? It was a terrible night. No one should have been out.”

“I'm afraid he wanted to give me some papers about a case he wanted me to cocounsel. We had arranged to meet this morning . . .” Vicky stopped. This was not a road she had intended to start down. At this very moment, Clint Hopkins should have been seated in her office. They should have been discussing the efforts of a couple named Myra and Eldon Little Shield to adopt their little girl. Instead she was seated in Clint's living room across from his shell-shocked wife.

She hurried on, making a futile effort to cover up what she could see in Lacy's eyes: an acknowledgment of what should have been. “Clint wanted me to read through his notes before we met.”

Lacy was shaking her head. “Yes, of course. It was an adoption case. I begged him not to go out, but he said it was important. All the adoptions were important. Every child was Julie looking for a good home. He took every case personally. Carried it around like
precious baggage. Brought it home, dropped it in the middle of the living room, carried it to the dinner table, took it to bed. Every case, the most important in the world. Naturally, if he wanted to talk to you about a case, he would go out in a blizzard. He would have gone to hell and back for some kid because that kid was always Julie.”

She was sucking in rapid gulps of air, moisture blossoming at the corners of her eyes. “Did you see what happened?”

Vicky nodded. “We had walked out of the restaurant together. Clint started across the street where he had parked his car. I saw the . . .” She hesitated, picking through the minefield of words. “I saw what happened.”

“You saw him die?”

“There was nothing anyone could do, it happened so fast. I ran over and knelt beside him.” Vicky could feel the tears pressing in her eyes. “I'm so very sorry. I didn't get the license plate number.”

“The driver didn't even stop.” Julie sat down on the armrest, pulled her mother close, and kissed the top of her head.

Vicky didn't say anything. The driver. A man who had wanted to run down someone. A murderer. “I'm sorry,” she said again. “If I can help you in any way . . .” She left the thought hanging between her and the two women huddled together. What a flimsy gesture. What could she ever do to lessen the pain and the horror? She felt light-headed as she got to her feet and started for the door.

The living room was more crowded now. People jammed together in little groups, sipping coffee in Styrofoam cups, glancing over at Lacy and Julie and shaking their heads. “Do you have a minute?” Vicky realized that Evie had fallen in beside her and was guiding her toward a side door.

“We can talk in here,” the woman said, depositing her in a small
room with the look and feel and smell of a study. A masculine study, where Clint Hopkins had sat at the desk, file folders upright in a metal rack and a laptop computer, open as if Clint had just stepped away.

“Do you really believe it?” Evie closed the door against the hum of conversation and the odor of coffee.

“Believe what?”

“It was an accident.”

“I don't know.”

The woman turned partway toward the window and looked out, clasping and unclasping her hands. The blue dress clung to the curves of her hips and calves. “It's just that . . .” She faced Vicky again. Her glasses looked smudged and cloudy with moisture. “I've been worried about Clint. He spent the past two weeks working on the Little Shield case. He wanted you to come in with him. I've never seen him so obsessed. Oh, Clint was always obsessed with whatever case he was working on, but this was different. I could see it taking a toll.”

“Did he say what was he worried about?”

Evie shook her head. “He was never one to blab about a case, but he talked to various people and did research on the internet. The more information he collected, the more uptight he became. When I heard what happened last night, I got a sickening feeling. What if he'd stumbled onto something he wasn't supposed to know?”

“Have you told the police?”

She dropped her head into both hands for a moment, then looked up. She straightened the little wireless glasses. “All I have is a strange feeling. I guess I'm just looking for a rational explanation, and the truth is, there isn't any. All Clint cared about was getting little Mary Ann legally adopted by the people who loved her. The last thing he
would want is for me to start stirring up trouble. If I went to the police with my crazy feeling, they'd open an investigation. I can't do that to the Little Shields.” She held out a hand as if she were soliciting alms. “I went into the office this morning to contact a few of his associates. Make sure the file drawers were locked, the computers locked. I canceled his appointments. Tidying up, I guess, because I didn't know what else to do. The phone was ringing off the hook. Eldon called the minute he heard about Clint. I could tell by his voice how upset he was. He trusted Clint. He wanted to know what they should do now, so I told him Clint wanted you to cocounsel the case. I suggested he call you.”

Vicky remained quiet a moment. If her instincts were right—if the secretary's instincts were right—she could be stepping into whatever had gotten Clint killed. If he was murdered, he must have been apprehensive about what he'd uncovered. Still, he had gone forward because of a little girl.

“Clint gave me some notes to read over,” she said. “There's nothing in them he hadn't mentioned when we spoke.”

The secretary drew in her bottom lip again, a habit, Vicky thought. It made her look like a child, except for the pencil lines that formed on her forehead. “I'm afraid he was somewhat paranoid. Kept very sparse notes and put very little on the computer, you know, in case somebody hacked it. He kept everything in his head, and he was very thorough. I hope you can help the Little Shields.”

“I can talk to them. I don't know if I can help.”

Evie looked startled, as if Vicky had thrown out an idea she hadn't considered. “Clint was sure you would know how to handle the case.”

“If I take it on, I'll need his records.”

“I told you: he didn't keep records. Everything is in his notes.”

“There was nothing helpful in the notes.”

“Well, Clint was thorough but concise. I'm sure he would have filled you in on the details when he came to your office.” She took a moment before she went on: “I can check his computer, but I don't expect to find anything else.”

“Perhaps some other case Clint was working on that might have worried him?”

Evie shook her head. “He spent all of his time recently on the Little Shield case. He interviewed a lot of people.”

“And didn't make notes?”

This stopped the woman, as if a brick wall had descended. “Like I said, I can check his computer in case he left something else.”

“I'll speak with the Little Shields,” Vicky said. “I can't agree to anything until I hear what they have to say.”

Evie nodded. “They're good people, and little Mary Ann has a happy home.”

Vicky left the woman standing in the small office surrounded by the items that had belonged to Clint, the space permeated by his presence. She made her way across the living room, visitors shifting about, new visitors coming through the front door that closed with a sharp thwack.

She let herself outside and, hurrying down the sidewalk to the Ford parked at the curb, checked her text messages. One message from Annie: “Vince's mother called.”

Vicky slid onto the driver's seat and started the engine. Cold air blasted out of the vents. She pulled her coat around her, found Betty White Hawk's number and pressed the call key. Five rings on a cell phone somewhere on the reservation, then a voice said: “Hi, this is Betty.”

Vicky was waiting for the familiar
leave a message
when the voice went on: “Vicky? I've been waiting for you to call.”

“Have you heard from Vince?” Vicky checked her watch. Still several hours before the time she had promised to deliver Vince to the sheriff.

“Not yet, but I've left messages all over the rez. He's got a lot of no-good friends, but they'll tell him to call me. I have to give them that—they don't want a lot of cops creeping around their places looking for him.” The faint sound of hope broke through the weariness in the voice. “Soon's he sobers up, I'm sure he'll call and tell me where he is.”

“Call me as soon as you hear anything.” Vicky was about to end the call when she said, “If you talk to Vince, it might be best not to mention that I will come by to pick him up wherever he is.”

“I got it.” The voice was faint with apprehension.

Vicky pulled into the lane, turned onto Federal, and drove south toward Lander. She was coming around the bend past Hudson when the cell rang. Annie again. “You just got a call from Eldon Little Shield. He wants to see you right away. I told him you'd work him in this morning.”

Clint Hopkins wasn't dead twenty-four hours yet, and the Little Shields wanted to talk to another lawyer. “That's fine,” she told Annie before she hit the end key. It was the way it was. No matter the horror of what had happened, the Little Shields wanted to adopt their little girl, and nothing would prevent them from trying.