Ghost Dance (2 page)

The river gnawed at its banks in sight of the under-construction second homes of the flatlander wealthy who were making Lawton their latest weekend getaway enclave; it boiled past Lawton’s old millworks that now housed designer outlets and trendy curio shops before sluicing under a red covered bridge and once again charging out through forest and on by a meadow where Patrick Gallagher sat and brooded in his black Ford Explorer.

He let his eyes roll with the river’s wild, violent movement, like so many serpents coiling around each other, like the writhing of a woman’s body, like a whirlpool sucking him into the unknown. Rivers had always been Gallagher’s place of mystery and solace. Rivers are like myths, he believed, capable of carrying us beyond ourselves.

Gallagher’s cell phone rang. It rang again. And a third time. And then a fourth before he picked it up.

‘Pat? You in Lawton yet?’

‘Morning, Jerry,’ he said dully. ‘Yes, and I am safe after my all-night drive. Thanks for asking.’

Gallagher’s best friend and partner, Jerry Matthews, grunted in frustration. ‘We’ve got a lot riding on this, bud, but I figured you still knew how to drive.’

‘I can see the Lawton town sign and its perfect little covered-bridge entrance from here,’ he replied.

‘A covered bridge?’ Jerry snapped. ‘That means there’s a river.’

‘It usually does.’

‘You are an A-one asshole!’ Matthews shouted. ‘You didn’t say anything about a river. You said Vermont. You said a film about this priest D’Angelo, who’s up for sainthood. You said nothing about a river.’

‘The Bluekill just happens to be here, Jerry.’

‘Bullshit!’ he roared. ‘You’ve blown three projects in the past year standing in rivers like some catatonic, trying to fly-fish his way into the asylum. We have to deliver a documentary in three months, Pat. Three months. You’ve got to work. You can’t fish or our partnership is over. Do you understand? Over.’

The sky was cast in shades of slag and ash. The river looked numbingly cold. ‘Are you going to the wedding—tomorrow?’ Gallagher asked.

‘Ah, Jesus, I’ve told you a thousand times, get over it, forget about Emily,’ Jerry groaned. ‘Molly Francis at the Discovery Channel says they won’t be funding us any more if we don’t deliver this film on time. Dick Howard at
Geographic
won’t even return my calls. A completed project is what we need. Any project, Pat.’

‘Are you going?’ Gallagher asked again.

‘Yes, I’m going,’ Jerry snapped. ‘An old friend asks me to her wedding I go. By the way, I better cut this short. I’m due at the church in Charleston by four. I’ve got to catch a flight.’

Gallagher slumped against the steering wheel. A wisp of fog trailed under the covered bridge and lazed over the rapids. ‘A church?’

Jerry’s voice softened. ‘Yeah. Ironic, huh?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘What’s ironic is that tomorrow, the same day my ex-wife gets remarried, less than a year after she leaves me, I turn forty.’

‘Rat-fucker, huh? But hell, shit happens to the best of us. We’re born crying, we age disgracefully, we kick the bucket.’

‘And then what?’

‘That’s the big mystery,’ Jerry said. ‘Go to work Pat. For both our sakes.’

The line clicked. The rain fell in sheets and the river turned a torrent bank to bank piling on itself in slabs of burned foam. Gallagher put the truck in gear and headed toward the bridge. He hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours and was in desperate need of a bed. The floorboards of the Lawton covered bridge rapped, clanked and grumbled under his tires. He caught a flash of movement high in the rafters, slowed and was astonished to see a large barrel owl glaring down. The bird blinked, puffed up its wings, men flared open its ebony beak. It alighted from the beam and dropped like a bomb toward the windshield. The owl extended its talons, curling its tongue and snapping its beak.

Gallagher slammed on the brakes. There was a screech like diamonds cutting glass when the claws struck the windshield.

That disturbing event stayed with him long after he exited the bridge and took a hard left on Main Street, traveling toward Lawton Center. The so-called ‘south-town’ of Lawton is a residential area of almost precision quaintness. All the homes within that twelve-block area are either stone-faced with black shutters or white clapboard with green shutters, many of them finely restored structures from the Federalist era. Every ten yards a wrought-iron gas lamp glows. Every twenty yards there is a wrought-iron park bench next to a planter.

The Norman Rockwell façade continues where Main Street splits around a three-acre village green. A colonial-style rail fence borders the park. The center of the green is dominated by a gazebo painted bright white with forest trim. There are more restored homes on either side of the park as well as a library, a summer-stock theater and The Lawton House, a luxury inn
Conde Nast Traveler
has called one of the best in New England.

Beyond the green is Lawton’s thriving commercial center, where brick sidewalks lead the tourist to art galleries, sundry shops, bookstores and trendy restaurants.

But that day Lawton’s streets were almost deserted. The tourists and the townspeople had been driven inside by the ferocity of the storm. The courageous few men and women who had ventured out into the harsh weather were hunched over, pale-faced and grimacing at the chill, driving rain.

Two miles north, he came to the Otterslide General Store. It is the single hub of activity at the sparsely settled north end of Lawton, a long, gray shake-shingled affair that caters T-shirts and maple syrup to the out-of-state travelers and basic supplies to the locals not up to the trip downtown.

Gallagher pulled into the gravel parking lot, shut off the engine and gave himself a quick look of appraisal in the rear-view mirror. Six feet two inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, reasonably fit. Short-cropped coppery hair. Faded freckles. A smirking, high-eyebrowed mug more man a few women had found handsome, aged by wrinkles now and streaks of gray that showed plainly at the temples. Sacks of loose skin hung under sunken, bloodshot green eyes twisted into that addled perception soldiers call the thousand-yard stare.

‘What’s the point, Pat?’ he asked himself. ‘What’s the fucking point?’

Gallagher sat there helpless for many minutes, watching the truck’s wiper blades lose the fight against the pelt of rain. At last he got up the energy to zip up his oilskin jacket, tug down his Yankees baseball cap and climb out of the truck. His legs tingled with a cold, prickly sensation after the six-hour drive from Manhattan.

After several minutes of standing in the downpour, he had enough feeling return to his extremities to walk unsteadily toward the store. The door opened and a middle-aged man and woman dressed in yellow rain slickers stepped out. Their talk abruptly ended when they saw Gallagher. Clear expressions of distrust flitted across their faces.

The door creaked as he entered. Propane lamps hanging from the ceiling dimly lit the store’s interior. He realized the storm must have blown out the electrical power. A woman in jeans and a green rain jacket placed a quart of milk and a half-dozen eggs on the counter before a big-bellied man with oily black hair and a scraggly beard. The woman turned, her finger tapping at her lips as if she had forgotten something.

Even in the shadowy light she was stunning—five-ten, trim, with sleepy oval eyes, wide and prominent cheekbones and a riot of auburn hair that cascaded around her shoulders and put Gallagher in mind of the blues diva Bonnie Raitt. She glided away from the counter with the powerful elegance of a trained athlete. She glanced at Gallagher as she entered the bread aisle and for the briefest instant his heart raced. It was a reaction that surprised him. It had been a long, long time since he’d felt much of anything. But in the next instant he shrugged off the sensation as the sort of hormonal blip any mature male might exhibit if he’d been celibate for nearly eighteen months.

‘Help ya, sir?’ the fat man at the counter asked in the thick, almost Cockney accent of the Vermont hills. His skin was unnaturally waxy. His eyes were slate gray. They shifted from side to side, unwilling to meet Gallagher’s.

‘I’m new in town,’ Gallagher began.

‘Can see that,’ the man said, scratching at his beard skeptically.

‘I’m looking for a place to stay and fish for a while,’ he continued. ‘Are there any cabins to rent locally?’

The man curled his lip as if he’d tasted something rancid, then shook his head. ‘Nah. Nothing like that in Lawton.’

‘I have a cabin for rent,’ came a soft, throaty voice.

Gallagher turned to find the woman appraising him. His heart raced again. Up close, her nose was gracefully upturned, her lips plump and her eyes a deep emerald green. But she had not colored the premature gray in her hair. Nor had she bothered to lay makeup over the emerging lines about her face. She was in her mid-thirties and a wholesome beauty, but there was a veil of melancholy about her demeanor that made her seem older, as if she had seen a lot of the rougher side of life and been on the blunt end of it more often than she deserved.

‘Great,’ Gallagher said, throwing an annoyed look at the storekeeper, who was now scowling at the woman.

‘I don’t believe it myself,’ she said, ‘but a lot of people who’ve stayed in the cabin say it’s haunted. I tell that first thing to anybody who’s interested because they’ll hear it sooner or later from some idiot in town. Am I right, Bernie?’

The store owner’s face reddened and his scowl deepened. ‘You say so, Andie.’

‘How close is it to the Bluekill River—the cabin, I mean?’ Gallagher asked.

‘Fifty yards.’

‘I’ll take it.’

She scrunched up one eye in bemusement. ‘Why don’t you follow me and take a look before you go writing any checks, Mr—?’

‘Gallagher. Patrick Gallagher.’

She brushed past him and put a loaf of bread on the counter. ‘I’m Andromeda Nightingale. Most people call me Andie.’

‘Bernie’s a jolly, helpful guy,’ Gallagher said, nodding back in the direction of the store as Andie Nightingale loaded her groceries in the front seat of a rusty-blue Toyota pickup. The rain had lulled, but the wind had set the rusting metal Coca-Cola sign hanging off the Otterslide General Store to wailing at its braces.

She shrugged. ‘Vermonters don’t take to strangers right off, especially guys like Bernie Chittenden,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Follow me. The cabin’s a couple miles up the River Road.’

Gallagher jogged back to the Explorer and started it. She waved at him out the window, then jerked the pickup into gear. They went east and the paved thoroughfare quickly gave way to a muddy, rutted road. They passed several homes before the road curved south and wound for two miles through a flat of beech and maple. Gallagher figured they were looping around and behind the town. Sure enough, when they emerged from the hardwoods there were farm fields on both sides of the road, and several hundred yards off to the west he could make out the Bluekill River. They passed a tidy white farmhouse and barn on the east side of the road. A quarter acre of soil, a garden, lay freshly turned over in the front yard. The faded lettering on the mailbox read ‘Nightingale.’

But they drove past her driveway a hundred yards before turning right and bouncing down a little two-track road that ran parallel to a hedgerow beside a cut cornfield. Two hundred yards farther on, the field and hedgerow gave way to a glen of electric-white paper birches. Amidst the trees squatted a bizarre-looking cabin.

The right side of the structure had the classic lines of a late-nineteenth-century post-and-beam farmhouse, complete with wraparound porch. But the left side was unnaturally canted: from ten feet off the peak of the slate roof, the wall plunged abruptly to the ground. There were no windows and no doors on that side. The clapboards were warped and weather-grayed.

Andie Nightingale got out of her pickup, climbed up on the swayed porch and fumbled with a ring of keys. There were two locks on the door. As she worked on the padlock, Gallagher asked, ‘You and your husband are farmers?’

‘Not married, not a farmer,’ she said, spinning the combination. The lock whined, then clicked open. ‘I lease the land out to farmers to cover my taxes. I’m a sergeant with the state police, Bureau of Criminal Investigations. We investigate death in Vermont.’

‘Really?’ he said, looking at her with deeper appreciation. ‘I make films—documentaries, actually.’

She gave him a look of deeper appreciation. ‘Like a reporter?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I don’t like reporters,’ she said, sliding a skeleton key into the lower lock. The tumblers rolled and the wind gusted and the door blew open. Cobwebs ripped free in the doorjamb. Musty air boiled back and they both coughed and sneezed. In seconds the rank air had dissipated.

Except for a pantry and a mudroom, the entire first floor of the cabin was a kitchen. There was a red-handled pump in the sink, a simple gas stove, a venerable Ashley wood-burning stove and a rough-hewn table with mismatched chairs.

‘What you see is what you get,’ she said. ‘Bedroom’s upstairs. It’s a hundred fifty a week.’

‘I’ll take it for a month,’ Gallagher said, reaching for his checkbook.

‘You’re going to fish for a month?’ she asked, incredulous.

‘And research Father D’Angelo for a possible documentary,’ he said. ‘You know anything about him?’

Nightingale shrugged. ‘Just that he supposedly performed miracles here and that the church has begun the process of sainthood. Monsignor Timothy McColl at St Edward’s Church is who you’d want to talk to. He’s the expert.’

McColl’s name was already in Gallagher’s notebook Jerry had called ahead and arranged for him to interview the priest on Monday morning.

After writing her a check, Gallagher noticed two framed etchings on the wall at the foot of the staircase. One was a portrait of a puffy-faced man slumped in a ladder-back chair. He was completely bald and corpulent. He had a pancake nose and the albino’s unnatural strain about the eyes. In the second etching, a group of people with their backs turned sat before the mouth of a cave. An Indian stood on a cliff above the cave, hand stretched toward the crowd. A full moon hovered in the sky above the Indian’s headdress.