Ghost Dance (15 page)

Andie made as if to give chase, but her legs would not support her and she had to hold on to a tree. Time slowed to the trickling of blood through Gallagher’s jeans.

‘He—he tried to kill me,’ Gallagher stammered. ‘Oh, man, I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding!’

Andie scrambled to his side. And then she had her arms around him, telling him that he was going to be all right. Gallagher closed his eyes and believed her.

She got him back up against a pine stump and took out a knife to cut a long slit up his jeans so she could inspect the wounds. Gallagher felt far away, almost watching himself. The nine pellets under his skin looked like peppercorns in Tabasco sauce.

‘You’re going to be sore and bruised, but you’ll live,’ Andie announced. ‘We’ll get you a doctor. I’ll call Kerris and the game warden to see if they can find that asshole.’

She was all business now. And it occurred to Gallagher that if Andie Nightingale was a bird with a broken wing, she was an eagle with a broken wing.

She helped him to his feet. Gallagher wobbled as adrenaline gave way to the weakness of shock, and that faraway feeling deepened. Andie wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She was a deceptively strong woman and they managed a reasonable pace until reaching the cut cornfield that lay between the pine forest and her farmhouse. The hard, relentless rain of the past few days had turned the field soil gooey and sucking.

Halfway across the field, Andie halted. A series of ten-inch puddles, alternating left and right, cratered the mud straight across to where the stubble corn met her lawn.

‘Oh, God, no!’ she cried, wrestling herself out from under Gallagher’s weight. She sprinted through the muck toward the house, leaving him to hobble after her.

When Gallagher limped into the kitchen, Andie was hunched over the table, hysterical. ‘He got both crosses, the pouch, the hair, all of it!’ Her mouth gaped in disbelief and her hands slapped at the pockets of her rain jacket. ‘Olga’s pouch! Where’s Olga’s pouch?!’

Gallagher’s thighs felt as if cigarettes had been stubbed out on them. ‘It’s out there,’ he mumbled woozily. ‘When you dove, it landed in that brush pile where the trails met—’

Andie was already sprinting out the door and Gallagher realized he had just survived a face-to-face encounter with the madman behind the Charun drawings. He lurched toward the kitchen sink, gagged, then released his mortal awareness.

When Andie crashed back into the house, Gallagher was sprawled in the easy chair by the woodstove with towels draped across his thighs. The despair plastered across her face said it all: the killer had circled back and stolen Olga Dawson’s pouch, too.

Andie went straight to the cabinets, tugging the doors open, slamming them shut. Furious, she spun and pointed at Gallagher. ‘Where’s that bottle?’

He flashed on an image of himself at fourteen with his mother screaming the same way, for the same reason. Deflecting these scenes was like riding a bike, an easy, instinctive act once you learned how, he thought. You just imagined thick bulletproof windows that roll up around you. With the windows come distance, separation, refuge.

‘I poured it out,’ he said.

Andie turned and dug back through the spices until her fingers closed around the cooking sherry.

‘It answers nothing,’ Gallagher said.

‘You’re wrong.’ She held the bottle before her as if it were a baby. Tears boiled and ran down her face. ‘Sometimes it answers everything.’

She twisted the cap and gazed down the open bottle’s throat. Her tongue wetted her lips. For an instant Gallagher himself fantasized about tearing the bottle from her hands. Instead he got up and staggered to the door.

Outside, the raw wind slapped him alert, made him believe he could get back to the cabin and to his truck and to the hospital alone. Thirty yards up the driveway, his legs went to rubber. Gallagher toppled and lay stupefied in the wet gravel, wondering what the hell he was going to do.

‘Gallagher!’

He got up on all fours and looked over his shoulder at the porch. Andie took a step toward him and poured the sherry into the bushes.

G
ETTING INVOLVED WITH A
drunk, even one in recovery, means an inevitable snaring in a web of lies. But because she chose sobriety in a crisis, Gallagher went against his instinct to flee and agreed to Andie’s request not to report to the police the loss of the journals or the encounter in the forest.

‘I’ve been thrown off this case,’ Andie explained as she raced him to the hospital. ‘To get the department to believe, we need hard evidence. Those pouches were our evidence. Now we have nothing to prove they even existed. We have to find something tying together the murders, the killer and the journal, or my lieutenant won’t believe.’

In his hazy state, it sounded logical. Especially because he needed the evidence, too. Gallagher needed something concrete to convince Jerry Matthews that this story took precedence over that of Father D’Angelo.

As they turned in to the Lamont Powell Memorial Clinic, which looked more like a sprawling Cape Cod cottage than a hospital, Gallagher agreed, but with two reservations: one, if she drank he would leave; and two, the second they found proof linking the journals to the killings, they would tell Bowman everything.

Andie pursed her lips, but nodded.

Bill Wilson, the emergency room physician, was an intense little man with curly brown hair and a bow tie. He gave Gallagher injections of antibiotics, Novocain and a general painkiller, then dug the shots from his legs.

‘We’ll need to report it,’ Wilson said.

‘I already have, Bill,’ Andie reassured him. ‘I’ve taken Mr Gallagher’s statement myself.’

Her concocted story had Gallagher wandering through the early-morning woods with his fishing pole in search of a remote riffle on the Bluekill River, only to wander into the shooting lane of a turkey hunter lined up on a spring gobbler. The hunter saw Gallagher hit the ground, panicked and ran.

‘Any idea who this joker was?’ Dr. Wilson asked. He plucked a bit of shot from under Gallagher’s skin with scalpel and forceps. It made a clanking noise dropping into the tray.

Andie was very cool. ‘Only that he was trespassing on my land.’

The painkillers made everything soft and warm for Gallagher. He thought of the bronze bust of the hospital’s namesake he’d just passed in the hospital lobby.

‘Lamont Powell, is he related to the mayor?’ he asked the doctor.

‘The better question is, who isn’t?’ Andie replied.

‘Lamont was the current mayor’s grandfather,’ Wilson said. He dug out another bit of shot. ‘Small town like this, most people are related one way or another.’

‘Like who?’ Gallagher asked dreamily.

Wilson cocked his head in thought. ‘Chief Kerris, for one. He’s the mayor’s nephew. I think that’s right, isn’t it, Andie?’

Andie tightened and looked away, but nodded.

‘Are you related?’ Gallagher asked Andie.

‘Absolutely not!’

Wilson said Gallagher had a choice to remain overnight in the hospital or go back to the cabin under Andie’s supervision and rest. He chose the latter; Gallagher never liked hospitals. Wilson said he’d likely run a fever. But if it lasted longer than twenty-four hours, Gallagher was to return. The doctor prescribed a course of painkillers and powerful antibiotics and told him to stay off his feet at least for the next few days.

But it wasn’t until Gallagher had struggled on crutches from his truck back to the cabin, crawled into bed and swallowed the pills Andie handed him that he relived the horror in the woods. Gallagher had directly confronted the black wall he had always anticipated at the end and seen zero, not even a short rehash of his own life. Have I meant nothing? he asked himself. Would my death matter to someone? Has life meant nothing to me? Gallagher understood the melodramatic tone to his questions and did not care. Shivers tore through him. He curled into a ball and pulled the thick blankets around his chin.

Andie came up the narrow staircase with a butterfly quilt under one arm. She wore a green-and-yellow University of Vermont sweatshirt, pants and wool socks. Her hair now rioted about her shoulders like river rapids. She sank exhausted into the chair in the corner with the quilt across her legs. Tess the cat padded up the stairs and curled on the floor between them.

‘Go to sleep now,’ Andie whispered. ‘I’ll be right here if you need me.’

Gallagher tried to sleep, but his shivers would not stop. Andie got out of her chair and climbed on the bed to lie tight behind him on top of the blankets, the butterfly quilt over the both of them.

No words were spoken. Her body heat and woman’s odor worked with the slow drift of the painkillers, massaging his spine, comforting his head with a muggy embrace, and Gallagher slept.

Gallagher’s fever peaked and broke three times during the night. Each time Andie changed the sheets, then bathed his face and chest with a hot washcloth before feeding him more pills and crawling back under the butterfly quilt.

An hour before dawn, he wrestled with the fever as it surged a final time. The steady, warm headache where his neck met his skull crept forward until it was like a cowl, provoking dreams of Emily …

They sat in a café just off the Boulevard St Germaine des Près in Paris. Gallagher ordered a bottle of wine.

‘I’m not drinking,’ Emily said. She’d been distracted for days.

‘It’s our anniversary,’ Gallagher protested. ‘Four years ago today, we found the temple.’

She played with the cuff of a leather jacket she’d bought earlier in the day. ‘I’m pregnant, Pat,’ she said.

His head began to thrum. His vision swayed. He held onto the table, understanding he could not have stood had he wanted to. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘When?’

‘You know how and when!’

Other patrons in the café were watching. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know, Pat,’ she said ‘What are we going to do?’

In Gallagher’s dream it was suddenly night and the Boulevard St. Germaine became a river of oil. The bodies of Hank Potter and Olga Dawson drifted on the surface, spun round and round in an eddy. The eddy picked up speed, turned into a whirlpool and sucked the bodies down.

He went with them, drowning in the river of oil. Somewhere in the pure liquid night around him he heard the shake, shake of a gourd rattle against a wooden flute’s delicate whistle and a woman’s clear and proud singing in a language he did not understand.

Which startled Gallagher awake. Or at least halfway awake. He was no longer dreaming now, but adrift in that strange realm of knowing between sleep and alertness. He sensed fuzzily that he was still upstairs in the cabin, that Andie dozed behind him and that he’d been asleep for many hours. There was a vague awareness of the blankets around his shoulders, of the rug’s mildew odor and the rain beating on the roof.

Then, out of the darkness, came a hot ball of light, a prismatic beacon discharging spasmodic hues of violet, rose and daffodil. The shake, shake of the rattle sounded more constant, like radio static. The ball of light widened. The beams of color broke up into pixels. Each pixel became a new source of charged radiance and within the electric swirl of colors, Gallagher beheld the kaleidoscopic, barely discernible image of a woman. Her body was at an oblique angle. Her face pointed away.

It was like one of those pointillist paintings that, under scrutiny, seems a mishmash of dots, but from a distance suggests a dynamic figure in motion. Only her image was in his head as if on a screen, and each pixel seemed to spark with a random energy that leaped from hot point to hot point, obscuring the exact nature of her features.

Now the swirl of colors slowed to suggest a flowing blue skirt, plain black boots and a robe of thick brown buffalo fur around her shoulders. Her blouse was handwoven cloth, blood-red and embroidered with indigo symbols of the moon and stars. The pixels swirled and lost color, until they dazzled like a blizzard. The woman held the reins of a saddled horse in her hand. She trudged head-down into the whiteout. The horse crabbed sideways against the gale, then rose on hind legs, fighting against the reins.

The woman held on, turning her face to look right at Gallagher. Her voice echoed as if from across a desert canyon. ‘Help me,’ she pleaded. ‘Help me to go on!’

Gallagher bolted upright in the bed, drenched in cold sweat, flailing his head from side to side, searching in the gloomy room for he knew not what. Andie stirred at his thrashing and got up beside him. ‘Lie down,’ she soothed. ‘It’s the fever again.’

‘No!’ he gasped. Then stopped for a moment with his mouth agape. ‘I had a dream. But not like any I’ve ever—’

The cabin seemed suddenly charged with hidden meaning. ‘She lived here, didn’t she? Sarah? Right here in this room. That’s her in the etching downstairs next to the medium, isn’t it?’

‘It could be, but I don’t know,’ Andie said in the sort of voice one uses with a three-year-old. ‘Those pictures have been in the cabin forever. Lie down now.’

‘You said Caleb haunted this place,’ Gallagher fretted.

She smiled ironically as she pressed him back into the pillow. ‘Why? Did you see the ghost?’

Wings fluttered in his stomach. A ghost? Impossible. He didn’t believe in ghosts, or in any sort of afterlife, for that matter.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘It must have just made sense to me that she lived here once.’

Dawn had come and with it an orange sky that filtered through the window and spoke of yet another spring storm’s approach. Andie went down to the kitchen and soon there came the thump and bang of the woodstove being lit; and then, on the warming air, the smell of eggs frying. Gallagher stared out the window at the pine trees and the river, unable to shake the dream. He tried to explain it as his subconscious digesting the events of the previous five days. To be expected.

But the texture of the experience—that was inexplicable. Sarah Many Horses had appeared not as a body in any recognizable sense, but more as a gathering of excited electrons that had somehow touched down inside his mind. He wondered whether he was going crazy.

Andie came to the doorway with breakfast. She put pillows behind his back. In order to lay the tray across his lap, she had to lean close. She no longer smelled of booze, but of an intoxicating mix of sleepy woman and greenwood smoke. The wings in Gallagher’s stomach fluttered faster still and for an instant he imagined that her skin had broken up into shimmering pixels.