Ghost Dance (13 page)

At 2 a.m., she bolted upright and grabbed Andie’s arm with terrifying strength. Grace told her daughter to go home right then and find a loose fieldstone in the chimney in their basement and bring back what she found behind it. Andie tried to hush her mother, but that only made the old woman more frantic.

‘ “Go right now, Andie,” ’she had pleaded, Andie said.

‘ “I never wanted you to have it, but there’s no one else. You got to go now!” ’

Alone, in the middle of night, Andie found the pouch in the chimney. She held the lock of hair. She read what Gallagher had read.

‘I’d always thought of my mom as this simple, honest person who’d suffered more than her share of tragedies,’ Andie said. ‘When I found the bundle in the chimney, it was like she’d led this secret life and I didn’t know her any more.’

Gallagher scooped coffee into a French-press maker. The kettle whistled and he poured the steaming water into the glass vessel. He filled two mugs and handed her one. Her hands shook from the booze and sparked images of his parents nursing their hangovers before breakfast. Gallagher swallowed, then asked: ‘When you took the pouch back to the hospital and showed her, what did your mother say?’

Andie’s lower lip trembled. Relief at speaking at last. ‘She said her father gave it to her and my great-grandfather had given it to her father. It’s part of a diary kept by a Sioux woman who supposedly lived here in Lawton a long time ago.’

Anticipating his next question, Andie said she did not know how a Sioux had come to be in Lawton. Her mother said it was all about something awful that happened in Lawton more than a century ago, something ‘unholy.’

Gallagher leaned forward. ‘What do you mean, unholy?’

Andie took an unsteady sip of the black coffee. ‘My mom was a strict Catholic. She saw everything in terms of her religion. She called what was in this pouch “evidence of an abomination.” ’

‘That’s all she said?’

‘No, that’s not all she said,’ Andie responded testily. ‘But with the drugs in her, most of it didn’t make sense, except that a long time ago, some people in Lawton wanted the Sioux woman’s story to be preserved, but they didn’t trust just one person to preserve it. So they divided the journal.’

‘Who has the other pieces?’

‘My mother said there were six others, maybe more, but she didn’t know who. Neither did her father or her grandfather. It was almost like it was planned that way.’

‘By who?’

She shrugged. ‘I wish I knew. Maybe then I could save the others.’

‘You think Charun is killing the people who hold the journal?’

‘Yes, but I can’t prove it. I called Paula Potter and asked her if she’d ever seen anything like the pouch. She didn’t know what I was talking about.’

Gallagher squinted at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant about all this back there in the barn? Why don’t you call her up and tell her now?’

‘You don’t know anything about me, do you?’ she stated wistfully.

He did not reply. Andie pressed her fist to her lips. The cat came strolling across the kitchen floor and leaped into Gallagher’s lap. It purred and rubbed its head under his chin. Andie noticed and her eyes widened, then softened.

‘Tess doesn’t like anyone,’ she said, puzzled.

‘Nobody, huh?’ he asked, scratching the cat behind the ears.

‘Well, she likes me, too,’ Andie said.

‘You know, I can’t say that’s a surprise.’

Andie reddened and lowered her head at his teasing, but she allowed herself a smile.

She admitted that there was a history of alcohol abuse in her family. Her father farmed and logged in the winters. When Andie was seven, he was alone in the woods when a tree fell and pinned him by the leg. He dug his way out from under the tree and crawled out of the woods. He lost his leg below the knee but was back at work in six months.

But when her older brother, Billy, died in Vietnam, her father’s legendary toughness cracked. He drank himself to death in seven years.

‘My mother was able to do it in five,’ Gallagher said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For you, too.’

They were silent for a long time.

Andie went on to say that she had had a drinking problem as a teenager, but had been sober for nearly ten years when her mother died. Two months after Grace’s burial, Andie decided a screwdriver at lunch was a good way to dull the pain of loss. Soon there were screwdrivers at breakfast.

A year after the drinking began, she was called in on a double murder in Newport, along the Quebec border. She caught the Canadian dope dealer who had pulled the trigger, but mishandled the evidence. The defense attorney forced her to admit she’d been drinking at the crime scene. The doper walked. Andie was put on suspension, went through a rehab program and hadn’t had a drink in nearly two years, until last night. She hadn’t worked a real homicide case in that long either. Bowman kept her away from murder, assigned to cases where little old ladies fell down the stairs and died with no witnesses.

‘That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell her about the pouches—’

‘Because I lost it, okay!’ she shouted. ‘Have you ever just lost it? I found that cross on the ground and realized Olga must have had a piece of the journal. Then you found that second drawing and it was like all these voices started chattering in my head, telling me to do this, don’t do that, say this, don’t say that. It got so I couldn’t hear what I was saying. Then Brigid told me to go home. Did you know that the worst thing you can tell an alcoholic on the verge of a pickup is to go be alone?’

‘Call her right now,’ Gallagher said. ‘Get it off your chest.’

She shook her head violently. ‘I didn’t tell her right off about the drawing left at Hank Potter’s because I was trying to show her I could be a good homicide detective. That almost got me thrown off the case. If I come forward and tell her I did it a second time and was drinking, too … well, I can kiss this job goodbye. This job is my life.’

Her predicament hung between them, like a shroud.

‘There’s only one thing you can do,’ Gallagher said, mustering bravado. ‘Figure out who Charun is, then haul him in just like they do in the movies.’

‘Easier said than done,’ she said, but she smiled again and almost laughed. She got out a Kleenex and blew her nose.

‘I’ll help you,’ Gallagher blurted out, surprised at the offer.

Instantly there was a wariness about her. ‘Why would you do that?’

Gallagher felt himself immediately wanting to back away from the offer. What was he thinking? Part of him wanted to get up and leave. He’d had enough of the convoluted lies drunks conjure up to last a lifetime. But there was the mysterious allure of the drawings and now this journal of the Sioux woman. And one thing more.

‘Because I get the sense you and I are very much alike,’ he said. ‘And you need help.’

‘Have you been a drunk?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he replied levelly. ‘But I was raised by drunks. Both died of it. And I understand the urge to block out pain. My ex-wife liked to say I used the accumulation of information the way my parents used booze—as an insulator from the raw nerve endings of life.’

She stared at him for the longest time and then actually laughed. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you talk really strange?’

‘You’re not the first.’

They grinned like idiots at each other for ten seconds; then Gallagher broke the spell by asking, ‘You must have some theory as to why Charun is killing for the journal of a Sioux squaw.’

Andie nodded. ‘He said in both of those letters that he was after something that was stolen from him. He must believe the pieces of the journal belong to him.’

‘Then he could be Native American,’ he said, ‘a descendant of the Sioux woman.’

‘Possibly,’ Andie agreed.

‘Is there a record of her death here in Lawton?’ Gallagher asked.

‘After my mother’s funeral I looked at old newspaper clippings and county death certificates, but I never found any record of a Sioux,’ she replied. ‘Then again I didn’t even have a name to go on.’

‘Did Olga ever tell you she had the journal?’

Andie shook her head. ‘Never. But I think she was trying to tell me the last time I saw her. She was talking about bears and secrets and I was too damn preoccupied to listen.’

‘So did Olga drop the cross in the meadow or did the killer?’

Andie chewed at the inside of her cheek. ‘There’d been so much rain, all the tracks were washed away. And the mud on the surface of the cross marred any chance at fingerprints.’

‘Let’s say it was her, so where’d she go that night? Toward the woods?’

‘She was weak. I can’t see her doing that,’ Andie said. ‘Unless … unless she was really scared.’

Gallagher tried to imagine it: the stricken old woman leaning on her cane, going through the tunnel to the barn to get her boots and her rain slicker; then, with the cat, struggling through the high grass of the meadow where the tangles—

He snapped his fingers, ‘Okay, she was scared. Let’s say she gets to the field and she trips and falls. And when she does, she drops that cross. If she kept her pouch the way you did, then …’

Andie’s jaw dropped. ‘When she fell she was carrying her piece of the journal! She was trying to hide it!’

‘The question is, where?’

Andie pressed her fingers into the tabletop and gazed at the grain of the wood as a seer might a crystal ball. Then she jumped up from the table. She dodged into a closet and there was a great clatter and she emerged wearing knee-high rubber boots and holding a powerful hand-held spotlight. Her jaw was set and her eyes flashed with anticipation. ‘Get your stuff. We’re going to see if the bears are still in their dens.’

I
N THE LAST BLINDED
hours of night, the wind surged after a low pressure system fleeing toward the gulf of Maine. The moon came, left and came again among the swiftly moving clouds. Rain had heaved the soil and now the scent of moldering decay hung in the woods. Scraggly dead leaves beat themselves against beech whips crowding the abandoned logging road that climbed a steep, forbidding slope toward the peak of Lawton Mountain. It was nearly four-thirty in the morning when Andie and Gallagher fought their way through the whips by flashlight. They crossed through an overgrown apple orchard before clawing up a series of benches where shagbark hickory grew in meadows of still, pale grass. An hour of steady climbing found them emerging from a pine break into a meadow choked by low junipers.

There was no talk as they climbed. And the sharp evergreen odor in the darkness reminded Gallagher of a group of children and their parents herding goats up a narrow mountain path in Lebanon. As he climbed, he saw him and Emily lolling in the late-afternoon sun on a ledge above a path in Lebanon, breathing the cedar air and staring out toward Beirut and the sea.

Emily’s sandals were drawn up against the hem of her khaki shorts. She had her Red Sox baseball cap turned backward and looked very tired. They had been on the go for nearly two years, husband and wife, lovers and partners. Gallagher did the field research and partnered with Jerry on the writing. Emily had become their cinematographer. India, Tokyo, Tanzania and now Lebanon. Gallagher had been to Beirut before while researching the series on children of war that had won him the Pulitzer Prize. They were back ten years after that series to find the same children and put together a documentary on what had become of them.

‘I want kids,’ Emily announced out of the blue.

The sun dropped behind the mountain and the ledge was cast in shadow. Gallagher looked down at the little boys and girls walking up the mountain path and was filled inexplicably with dread. ‘I like our life the way it is,’ he replied.

‘I do, too,’ Emily said, tugging on her sweater. ‘But I can’t help feeling a little empty sometimes. We’re voyeurs, Pat. We watch people do life.’

‘I don’t feel empty,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you.’

Emily snuggled up next to him. Her tanned skin glowed against the white sweater. As the goat herders moved over the ridge, Emily said, ‘It’s just a feeling I get now and then.’

Andie snapped on a flashlight and shone it upward so Gallagher would avoid an overhanging branch. In the glow, her face was yellowed with hangover, and he could still smell the vodka in her sweat. She noticed that he noticed and turned away. Her light came to rest on an orderly pile of slate. The field had been a potato farm a century or more ago; all that was left was the slate foundation, a landmark that had once helped Olga Dawson show a bear’s den to a little girl.

They skirted the foundation and angled to the field’s north corner. Here the terrain turned into a series of steep-faced ledges and they traversed east until the footing became reasonable. Andie groped downhill along the seam of rock face and earth for one hundred and twenty-five feet. Gallagher slid along behind her, falling twice.

Their flashlight beams licked the trunks of the mountain ash, cherry and spruce trees, made their trunks glossy against the withered ferns that cowered on the flat below the ledge. An owl hooted at dawn. A grouse drummed. And from far down the slope, a turkey shock-gobbled.

They were standing on a rock shelf that jutted out from the cliff. Andie pushed her way into a maze of wild raspberry. The brown, thorny stalks that tore at their rain jackets eased to reveal a wide, oval cave mouth. ‘This is where Joshua and Caleb Danby used to hold their seances in the summer,’ she said. ‘There’s a tunnel in there that leads to another, smaller cave Olga called the bear’s den.’

Sure enough, at its entrance the cave was perhaps eight feet high and fifteen feet wide for the first ten feet, then it lowered and narrowed dramatically to a tube about twice the width of Gallagher’s shoulders. Andie shone her flashlight around the interior of the outer cave. There was nothing but sticks and leaves and bird feathers quivering in the dank breeze that blew along the cave floor.

Andie got down on her hands and knelt before the tunnel. Her flashlight blinked twice and died. Gallagher got down next to her with his torch. The beam cut back into the gloom, revealing that after fifteen feet the tube doglegged to the left and widened into a grotto. Andie crawled in first. The roof of the grotto was tall enough to allow them to stand. She took his flashlight and cast it around the rough granite walls and along the ceiling and floor. There were pebbles, twigs and leaves but no pouch.