Ghost Dance (12 page)

‘What’s that, Sergeant?’ Bowman asked.

‘He raped Olga, didn’t he?’ Andie groaned. ‘He raped her, then hacked her to death! And before he burned her, he used her blood to draw that—’

She rocked faster. ‘He’s going to rape us and kill us all and we won’t even know why.’

Kerris and Bowman exchanged glances. Bowman went over and sat on the bench next to her. ‘Andie, are you all right?’

The detective stared at them as if they were strangers. She held her head in her hands and moaned, ‘I don’t know! I just don’t know!’

They had a trooper drive Andie and the cat down the River Road to her house, under orders from Bowman to take two weeks off to rest. An evidence team accompanied Kerris and Gallagher to the cabin. The search lasted for four hours, but as Gallagher had predicted, they found nothing. The cabin was empty again around six.

Gallagher felt wasted by the day’s events. Starving, he cooked himself a steak, then for the second night in a row stumbled upstairs and flopped on the bed fully clothed. His sleep was deep and dreamless for several hours; then the horrible images of the day surfaced and whirled in that intuitive state on the edge of consciousness. He saw the charred body of Olga Dawson, the monster taunting him with his bloody phallus and Andie Nightingale’s sudden and puzzling collapse.

Then Gallagher’s mind zipped backward and he sat up alert, speaking to the darkness: ‘Andie never told Lieutenant Bowman about that gold chain.’

T
HE WIND OUTSIDE BLEW
hard. Gallagher’s flashlight played on the wet, swirling leaves along the two-track that led from the cabin out to the River Road and to Andie’s house. Through the hedgerow he could see a light burning downstairs. And he hurried, pondering this question: why had a veteran homicide detective kept secret a gold chain found near a murder scene?

Gallagher rapped at the back door, waited and then knocked sharply again. He heard a melodious, haunting noise in the wind behind him, frowned, turned and peered into the darkness. It sounded like a flute trilling against the shake of a gourd rattle, the same one he had heard when waking up a few mornings before. But almost immediately the sounds were swallowed by the wind.

Gallagher opened the door and stepped inside, calling softly, ‘Hello? Anybody home?’

There was no noise but the snap and rush of the fire in the undampened woodstove. No smell in the kitchen but of her, and when he drew closer, another scent, horribly familiar. The odor of Gallagher’s mother’s breath.

Andie had given in to it with her forehead nestled in the crook of the forest-green chamois shirt she wore with a pair of jeans. At her elbow, the lip of a tipped-over juice glass met the barrel of a fifth of vodka. Nearly a third empty. She was barefoot. Her right arm was stretched out across the table. A frail gold chain wove among her curled fingers. Attached to the chain and resting in her palm was a delicate crucifix. Above the intersection of the spar and standard was the chip of a tiny red jewel.

Next to Andie’s arm lay twin strips of forest-green cloth attached to a liver-dyed oilskin pouch, six inches long, ten inches wide, cracked with time. An exact replica of the gold chain and the cross with the tiny red jewel spilled from the jaws of the pouch, as did a bundle of yellowed parchment, ragged at the left edge and so brittle and translucent that Gallagher could make out the faint scrawl of handwriting even though the pages were folded inward.

The ancient pages stirred in his gut an inexplicable, shallow nausea. Gallagher’s attention traveled to the vodka bottle next to the outstretched arm, which aggravated the nausea until a flame crept up the back of his throat. He saw himself as a little boy wandering into a kitchen, finding his father the same way, trying to wake Seamus and crying because he was frightened he would not. Gallagher wanted to go right then, to leave Andie to wrestle with her demons as she saw fit.

But there was something about the yellowed papers that called to him, would not let him leave. Gallagher picked them up, sat in the overstuffed chair next to the woodstove and began to read:

NOVEMBER 3, 1893

They shall kill me tonight. I am sure of it.

But I am not scared because I have only to face it now. Then I shall dance with Ten Trees and Painted Horses, and the pale red dust shall rise under our feet into the warm air and the singing shall be like a tornado out on the plains.

I’ve got to close my eyes to hear it true, the stamp of feet joining a thousand, then ten thousand of my brothers and sisters, and our feet shall become like the thunder hooves of the buffalo come back. All of us dancing in a great circle around and around and around. Until Wakan Tanka hears the pounding of our moccasins against the land and the sky cuts open and we walk the earth again.

Grandfather, I am sending a voice. To the heavens of the universe. I am sending a voice.

I’ve been hiding here in the root cellar below the basement for hours. There are carrots, potatoes and gourds here, enough to feed me right for a week. And a bottle of oil for the lantern. And water running in the seep. I have Ten Trees’ pipe, the sacred stones and enough tobacco to finish the ceremonies
.

Then they shall come. As they always have. Out of greed. Out of spite.

They shall try one last time to make me teach them the sacred ways I learned from Ten Trees and Kicking Bear. But I shall be true to my word and not speak. And then the killing shall be done. Because I am a squaw. And they are white. Because they believe what I am is rightly theirs to take or toss away like a bone on a heap.

I am not fearful of them or death. Ten Trees always said to face death when it comes. He said you’ve got to go into death with open eyes to pass clean into what is yonder.

Ten Trees, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Big Foot, Painted Horses and now me, Many Horses. Sure enough, winter is the Lakota’s time for death. The first storm of winter came in last night, cold and mean like a wolf pack on a hunt. They are out in it, looking for me. I will kill some of them before I die.

When I think of my mother, Painted Horses, I think all of us shall come to be like the blizzard wind—icy, sharp-toothed and chasing after the fury of our lives.

I cut off a hunk of my hair and bathed it in the smoke of sweet grass I picked down by the Bluekill in August. I showed it to Heaven, to Earth and to the four corners of the universe. I wrapped it in buckskin like I was taught. This hair can free my soul.

But who shall guard my soul and my hair until I can be set free? Who shall kill the young cow buffalo for her robe? What woman shall care for my bundle?

What woman shall hang my soul on a tripod looking south and cover it with a buffalo hide and the feathers of a spotted eagle?

I am not scared to die. I am done now and ready for them. But I won’t go easy, like some scared deer caught in a pit trap. I shall run through the night in the snow to my secret place and dance there one last time. After the dance, let them come if they dare.

Grandfather, I am sending a voice. To the heavens of the universe, I am sending a voice.

A moist pressure built in Gallagher’s lungs as he read those final words. It was a piece of an old journal or a diary, though he had never read anything like it in all his years of research and travel—shattered, almost hallucinatory thoughts scribbled down under the threat of death more than a hundred years ago. Who was the writer? What had happened to her? Gallagher’s heart raced with the chance that this was a major anthropological find! He had to call Jerry.

The pouch shifted in his lap. A lock of jet-black hair about five inches long, sealed between two pieces of wax paper, spilled out onto his thigh. Several strands of the hair jutted free of the paper. Gallagher ran the tips of his fingers lightly over them, then jerked back at a mild stinging similar to the sensation he’d endured when fire ants crossed his hand in Africa years before.

‘That’s not possible,’ he whispered.

There was a chunking sound as the pistol action drove a cartridge into the chamber. Gallagher looked up from the hair. The muzzle of Andie Nightingale’s service pistol pointed dead at his chest.

A
NDIE ELBOWED HERSELF FORWARD
on the kitchen table with both hands wrapped tight around the butt of the gun only six feet away now and cobra-dancing in the air. One bloodshot eye peered above the tritium sights. ‘Put it back or I’ll kill you,’ she slurred.

‘What—?’

‘Do it!’

Jittery, Gallagher took up the wax paper so as not to brush the hairs again and placed it in the pouch. Then he folded the parchment pages and put them away.

‘Slide it across the table,’ she ordered. ‘Slow.’

All he could see was the black hole of the pistol barrel when he pushed the pouch toward her. She grabbed it, clutched it to her chest, then came around, the table with the gun still trained on him. ‘Who are you?’ Andie demanded in a thick-tongued voice. ‘What are you after?’

‘I’m not after anything,’ Gallagher stammered. ‘I saw you find that gold chain in the meadow behind Olga Dawson’s barn and wondered why you didn’t tell anyone about it. Then here you are—passed out with that journal and the hair and two gold chains and two crosses.’

She regarded him as a squirrel might a hawk, but did not respond.

Gallagher said, ‘The writer, she’s an Indian, isn’t she?’

In one motion, Andie flung the pouch on the table and dropped into a combat-shooting position. ‘How do you know about her?’ she rasped. ‘Tell me, or so help me God, I’ll shoot.’

‘Who do you think I am?’ Gallagher cried.

‘The sick bastard that mutilated my mom’s best friend and, before that, Hank Potter. Now you’re here for me and my pouch.’ She angled toward Gallagher’s chair in a predatory crouch, then ordered, ‘On the floor. Spread-eagle, belly down.’

Gallagher eased himself out of the chair onto all fours. Andie took a semi-drunken step toward him as if to push him down. Before she could, he swept his right leg through her ankles, then drove his left hand up to control her right elbow and get the gun out of his face. The middle knuckle of Gallagher’s right hand smacked her just below the rib cage at the kidneys. She made an
oomph
sound as she crashed backward through a stand of potted seedlings. Her gun spun crazily across the wide-planked floor. He dove on top of her and pinned her by the wrists.

‘Get off me!’ Andie shouted, squirming underneath him. ‘I won’t let you! I won’t let any of you—’

‘If I was Charun, you’d be dead by now!’ Gallagher roared. ‘Think about it!’

They stared at each other, gasping. Then Andie looked left and right at Gallagher’s hands against her wrists. She looked at his thighs pinned against hers and in a voice that wavered with effort, asked, ‘Please get off me, then. Please? Now?’

Gallagher stood up and backed away quickly. ‘Your gun’s under the desk.’

Andie blinked as if returning from a terrible memory, then got up onto her elbows. ‘Where … did you learn to fight like that?’

‘Tokyo,’ he said. ‘My ex-wife and I spent eighteen months there, studying and filming in an aikido dojo. The film shows up on cable now and then.’

Andie’s attention never left Gallagher as she sidled to the desk and retrieved her gun. ‘I want to know how you knew the hair and the writing are an Indian’s.’

‘Because she says she’s Lakota. But so what? There are New Age white guys from Westchester County who live out in Sedona, Arizona, and say they’re Lakota. What’s important is that phrase that’s repeated in the journal, “Grandfather, I am sending a voice.” I’ve heard it before.’

‘Where?’ Andie asked skeptically.

‘My first three years at graduate school, I had a job researching for a professor making a film about Sitting Bull—that’s how I got interested in documentaries in the first place. That line about the “Grandfather,” was in songs the Sioux sang around that time. Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, is also called Grandfather. She is Sioux, isn’t she?’

Andie nodded. Her hair was sweated and hung in her face. She pushed it back.

‘Now I want some answers,’ he said. ‘If that journal and those crosses are related to the killings, why didn’t you tell Lieutenant Bowman? Why are you withholding evidence?’

Andie glared at Gallagher, hating him, then brought up the gun and aimed it at his face. For a second there was craziness in her eyes and he thought he was going to soil his pants. Talk her down, he thought. Talk her down like you used to talk Seamus down from one of his tirades.

‘Forget about that for a second, Andie,’ he said in a soft, even tone. ‘I’m sure you had your reasons. But what you’re really upset about is that you picked up the bottle again. Am I right?’

Her grip tightened. Her finger closed around the trigger.

Gallagher swallowed, but went on. ‘You’re feeling guilty and angry and you’re afraid you’re heading back into the bottle full-time, aren’t you?’

There was a long moment; then her finger softened. ‘Yes,’ Andie whispered in resignation.

‘It’s just a slip, just one day. You don’t have to go down there again if you don’t want to.’

She let one hand come off the gun. ‘I’ve been trying so hard.’

‘The best way not to go back in the hole is by talking, right?’

She nodded.

‘Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant about the chain?’

Slowly the pistol faded to her side. She slumped into a kitchen chair, that bird with the broken wing, and said: ‘Because I promised my mother I’d keep it secret. And when I saw the crucifix lying there in the mud, I thought: Olga had a piece of the journal, too. And then you found the letter from Charun … and …’

Andie let her attention sweep to the vodka bottle, then held her head in her hands and sobbed. Gallagher stood, scooped the bottle off the table and walked toward the sink, where he emptied it with a sadly familiar motion.

‘Start at the beginning,’ he said, filling the water kettle and setting it on the stove.

She snuffled, then nodded and gazed up at the ceiling as if seeing a movie in the swirls of ivory plaster. Nearly three years ago, Andie’s mother fell off a ladder and broke her femur. Grace Nightingale lay nine hours on the kitchen floor until her daughter came home from work and found her. The death certificate reads that Grace died of pneumonia brought on by an infection she developed after the operation to fuse her leg bone. Grace was in glaring pain the last night of her life. Restless. Moaning. In and out of consciousness.