Eye of the Wolf (28 page)

It was a couple of seconds before the other priest said anything, and when he did, his voice was so low that Father John had to lean over the back of the sofa to catch the words. “I'll think about it,” he said, leaning forward, patting the surface of the coffee table. Finally, his fingers wrapped around the remote, which he pointed at the television. The news returned, a gray-haired man behind a desk, another story.

IT WAS ALMOST
noon by the time Father John drove out of the mission grounds and turned toward Riverton. The sky was gray, shot through with white streaks from the sun that lingered somewhere behind the clouds. It had stopped snowing sometime in the middle of the night, but it might start again; there was the feel of snow in the silence pressing over the trailers and warehouses that passed outside the pickup's windows.

He'd said the ten o'clock Mass and spent an hour over coffee and doughnuts in Eagle Hall, trying to calm the fear and worry in the eyes of his parishioners. There wasn't going to be any tribal war. Yes, a gang of Shoshones had gone on a rampage yesterday, but the police would arrest them. And the Sunday newspaper—the black, inch-high headline—had stated that the killer had been arrested. Last night, at a house in Sinks Canyon, Frankie Montana was taken into custody.

And all the time that he was assuring his parishioners, he'd tried to
shake off the sense that the truth was something else, that the killer was still walking around free.

He slowed into the rhythm of the traffic moving north on Federal. He wasn't sure where he'd find Edie Bradbury. A couple of miles back, he'd punched in her number on the cell. Three rings, then a mechanical voice at the other end: “The number you have reached has been disconnected.” He'd tossed the cell onto the passenger seat and headed west for the little house behind the Victorian.

“
WHAT'RE YOU DOING
here?” The voice was low and wispy. The door had slid inward as Father John was knocking, and now the girl was moving backward, pulling the door open. She reminded him of a child again, swallowed up in dark sweatshirt and baggy pants. There was a disheveled look about her: mussed hair, lips set in a thin white line, and dark shadows under eyes that looked hard and hopeless.

“I'd like to talk to you, Edie,” he said.

She took a half-step forward, craned her head around the door, and peered up and down the street. “Okay.” Still the wispy voice. Then she pivoted toward one of the webbed folding chairs with clothes and towels stuffed onto the seats and spilling over the armrests. Her sneakers made a scraping noise on the floor. Above the chairs, the oblong window with the crooked shade framed a view of the elm branches. There was a musty odor about the place—dirty clothes, spoiled food, and stale air.

“Sit down, if you want,” Edie said, giving a little wave toward the futon across the room.

Father John waited until she'd swept the pile of clothes from one of the chairs and dropped onto the seat, and then he perched on the futon. He took off his hat and, bracing his elbows on his thighs, leaned forward, holding the hat between his knees. “How are you getting along?” he asked.

“You come over here for that?”

“Partly.”

“Partly!” Her head started shaking, almost like an involuntary spasm. A faint red flush moved up her throat and into her cheeks. “I know what you want. You wanna help that Arapaho that killed Trent. Well, he's going to prison for what he done, and I hope he rots there.”

“I want to know how you're getting along, Edie,” Father John said.

She leaned into the webbed back of the chair, something new moving behind her eyes, as if she wasn't so sure now that the two realities fit together: the Indian priest sitting in her living room and the Arapaho arrested for homicide. “Jason's looking out for me,” she said finally.

“You and the baby?”

The girl looked away, her gaze traveling across the wall, the dark spots in the vinyl floor, finally moving to her hands clasped in the lap of her baggy pants. “He doesn't want the baby. You can't blame him none. I mean, an Indian baby. Everything's gonna be okay. I got an appointment at the clinic.”

Father John waited until she'd brought her eyes back up to his. “You don't have to stay with him, Edie,” he said. “You can come to the mission. You can come with me right now.”

She gave an abrupt laugh that sounded almost like a sob. “Then what? Where do I go?”

“You'll go on, Edie. You and the baby will go on.” He waited a moment, and then he said, “You know what Moses said?”

“You gonna quote the Bible to me now?”

“No.” Father John smiled at the girl. “Just Moses. When you have a choice between life and death, Moses said, choose life.” He let another couple of beats pass. The girl's face was rigid, her lips pulled again into the hard line, but her hand—he noticed her hand—lay flat against her belly. “Nobody knows where they're going in the future,” he said. “That's the thing about life. Life is full of possibilities.”

“I made up my mind.” She was staring again at the wall. “So maybe you oughtta go. Jason could show up, and he wouldn't like your being here.”

Father John got to his feet. “There's something else, Edie,” he said.

The girl tilted her head back and turned her face up to him, one hand still on her belly. “Did you know that Trent planned to go to Bates on the day he was killed?”

“What, so I could go out there and shoot him?” She started shaking her head again—another spasm. “You don't get it, do you? I loved Trent. I really loved him, and he loved me. So maybe he was pulling away; so what? Maybe he was scared about the baby. Maybe he needed some time to think. Everything would've worked out.” Her voice was cracking now, and she started to sob. She lifted her hand and pressed it over her mouth.

“Then he went and got killed,” she managed. The words were blurred and broken. “I wanted to go with him to Bates. The professor said we all ought to go, and I wanted to see the place. I would've gone if Trent had told me he was going. I would've been with him. I would've died at Bates, too. I wish I'd died there.”

Father John walked over and set his hand on the girl's shoulder. He could feel the tremors erupting from someplace deep inside her. “You're alive, Edie. You have your life, and your life is important and necessary. You must remember that.”

It was a moment before she nodded, wiping the palm of her hand over her cheeks, pushing away the moisture. When she looked up at him again, he said, “I know you loved Trent.”

She squeezed her eyes shut a moment and bit at her lower lip. “Frankie Montana killed him,” she said. “He killed all of them. He's the one tried to cause trouble over at the Cowboy Bar. Why don't you just forget it?”

Father John took his hand from her shoulder. “There were other students who came to the bar with you and Trent, weren't there?”

“Rex and Joe,” she said. “We all hung out together, until Trent started getting weird on me, saying go back to the house, he'd catch up with me later. I knew he was gonna go get a burger with the others and didn't want me around.” She shrugged. “So I just came back here, and I waited.”

“Anybody else?”

She lifted her eyes, as if the names were scrawled on the ceiling. “Different guys. I mean, it wasn't like we were some kind of exclusive club. Class got over just before five, and whoever felt like it would head for the Cowboy and something to eat.”

“What about the other girl.”

“Other girl?” Edie's head snapped back. “What other girl?”

“Another student. The bartender told me he saw both of you there a couple of times.”

“Oh, God.” She looked away and shook her head. “You had me worried for a minute. She isn't any student, not at the college anyway. I guess she's writing her dissertation. You mean Mrs. Lambert, the professor's wife.”

“The professor's wife hung out with students at the Cowboy Bar?” Father John could hear the incredulity in his voice.

“It wasn't like she was one of the gang.” The girl laughed at this. “I mean, she helped out the professor a lot in class. Passing out papers, giving exams. You ask me, Professor Lambert's not in great shape, so sometimes she was looking after him, like if he was having a bad day. She'd be there, hovering over him. I mean, she'd look like she was ready to pick him up off the floor. So we got to know her, that's all, and she was real interested in the class. I heard she helped the professor write his book on the tribal wars. Couple times she showed up at the bar and had a hamburger with us. You ask me, she liked being with people closer to her own age once in a while. I mean, the professor's a great man and all, but he's so . . .”

She hesitated. “He's so old,” she managed, but in the way she said it, he knew that her thoughts had already jumped to something else. Her body seemed to stiffen as she gripped the edge of the chair and stood up. She barely came to his shoulder. She lifted herself on the balls of her feet, then stretched her neck until the top of her head reached his chin. She was staring up at him. “Mrs. Lambert's the reason Trent started getting all weird, isn't she?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Tell me the truth!” She spit out the words. “She got tired of the old man and got the hots for Trent. That's why he told me to go back to the house, so he could meet her at the bar.”

“Listen to me, Edie.” Father John placed his hands on the girl's shoulders. “The bartender said you were the one who was Trent's girlfriend. Obviously, he never saw anything to make him think differently.”

The girl seemed to take this in. He could feel her shoulders begin to relax. “Don't torture yourself,” he hurried on. “You said yourself that Trent would've come back to you. You knew him. Trust your own instincts.”

She started nodding, and for a moment, he thought she might break into tears again. He was barely aware of the sound of an engine cutting off. “You'd better go,” she said, throwing an anxious glance at the window.

Father John reached past his coat and withdrew the small notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. He flipped the pages until he came to a blank page; then he wrote down the mission's number, tore off the page, and held it toward to the girl. “If you change your mind,” he said, “call me. I'll come and get you.”

She hesitated, eyes darting between the small piece of paper and the window. Then her fingers closed around the paper. Keeping her gaze on the window, she lifted the bottom of her sweatshirt and stuffed the paper inside the band of her sweatpants.

Father John turned and let himself out the door. The white supremacist was coming up the sidewalk, making an arc around the elm. “What the hell you doin' here?” Rizzo stopped, blocking the way.

“I don't see that it's your business,” Father John said. The man was all leather, metal, and reddish brown head. His arms hung out from his sides, fists curled like clubs.

“I'm making it my business,” Rizzo said. “You stay away from her. She don't need no more Indians around here. You might be white but you're one of 'em.”

Father John started walking toward the man. He was close enough to
touch him—close enough to smell the odor of leather—before Rizzo stepped sideways, forming a narrow corridor between himself and the elm branch.

Father John slapped back the branch and kept walking. “I'd suggest you take good care of her, Rizzo,” he said as he passed.

He could feel the man's eyes boring into his back as he got into the pickup and plugged the key into the ignition. Then he made a U-turn and started back toward Federal, the man's eyes still following him. He could see him in the side mirror—one boot on the sidewalk, one in the snow, the elm branch slicing across his face.

A man who hated Indians, Father John was thinking. A man who might be willing to kill the people he hated. A sociopath. There was no guessing what a sociopath might do. Turn a rifle on human beings, pull the trigger. But . . . first he had to know where to find the victims, and Edie Bradbury didn't know when Trent and the others had planned to visit the battlefield.
I would've gone with him. I wish I would've died there.
If the girl didn't know, neither did Rizzo.

But somebody knew. He could picture Lou Crispin, propped on the straight-backed chair, drawing from his cigarette, grieving for his two sons, saying that Rex and Joe and Trent had gone to meet somebody at the battlefield on the day they had died. Somebody had planned to kill the Shoshones and pose the bodies to look like images in the old photographs of Indian battles. Somebody had wanted it to look like revenge killings—revenge for a massacre that happened more than a century ago.

The traffic was blurring past the side windows. The parking lots and storefronts and convenience stores, all were a blur. In his mind now was the image of Dana Lambert—the mass of curly black hair, the green eyes, and something in those eyes—an elusive quality, like a shadow passing through, that had struck him the first time he'd met the woman, as if she were watching the far distances that no one else could see. A young, beautiful woman married to an old man with a last chance at a best-selling book that could make them rich, watching, watching for a way to make it happen. What better way than to instigate a tribal war,
like the century-old wars in the book. Dana Lambert understood the Bates Massacre, the tribal feuds, the old animosities that her husband had written about.
She has been a great help to me.