Ghost Dance (26 page)

Someone had leaked the fact that Andie’s team was calling the killer Charun. The glib, blow-dried reporters were eating it up. WBZ-TV in Boston had led with a story about the ‘Myth Killer of Vermont.’

Andie had gone before the cameras at noon to warn that anyone else holding the journal of a Sioux woman accompanied by a tiny gold crucifix was in terrible danger. Since then, the Bethel command center had received more than three hundred calls and tips from people who said they knew where a piece of the journal could be found.

So far, detectives following up the leads had uncovered three Civil War-era diaries, the letters of two spinster sisters in Richmond, Vermont, the journal of a missionary who’d worked among the Apache, four Hopi kachina dolls, several black-and-white photographs of the Sioux medicine man Black Elk, three arrowhead collections and an offer by a Burlington medium to track down the last two pieces of the journal for a small fee and the rights to the story.

Andie was spending fifteen minutes of every hour performing criminal triage, deciding which tips had to be run down immediately and which ones could wait. One team of detectives had been sent to follow Chief Mike Kerris discreetly. A second team would report on the activities of Monsignor Timothy McColl.

She glanced at her watch. Seven-fifteen p.m. In forty-five minutes she was scheduled for another live stand-up before the cameras. She grabbed a cup of coffee, then told the dispatcher: ‘I’ll be in interview room A. Don’t disturb me unless it’s urgent.’

‘I know,’ Shaddock moaned. ‘If they get a piece of the—’

‘Not just the journal,’ Andie interrupted. ‘If a man named Patrick Gallagher calls, put him through immediately.’

Shaddock’s head popped up like a periscope. ‘We don’t have a Pat Gallagher in Vermont BCI,’ he said slyly. ‘FBI? State’s attorney?’

Like most compulsive gossips, the plump redhead had a honed instinct for novel information. Indeed, Andie had long suspected the dispatcher might be the source of media leaks on high-profile cases handled out of the Bethel Barracks.

‘It’s personal.’

‘Ohhh!’ Shaddock replied. He grinned at her wickedly. ‘Andie Nightingale, I’ve taken your calls for nine years now. I don’t recall any personal messages…from a man. And there were some who thought you strolled on my side of the street.’

Andie reddened and covered a smile with her fingertips. ‘Just put him through, Shaddock, okay?’ she said.

‘So it’s official?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you and this Patrick?’

Nightingale’s face fell slightly. ‘No, it’s not official.’

‘Have hope,’ the dispatcher said conspiratorially. ‘That’s what life is—hope!’

Andie nodded uncertainly, then turned and plucked Libby Curtin’s pouch off her desk before heading down the hallway. In the interrogation room—a spartanly furnished affair with a mirror on the wall—she located the phone and moved it onto a metal-topped table next to her.

From the pouch she got out the pages of Many Horses’ journal. She positioned a yellow, legal-sized pad next to the phone and wrote, ‘Does the journal hold the answers to Many Horses’ fate? Does it hold the answer to why a man thinks he’s the incarnation of a mythological creature and is willing to kill for it?’

AUGUST 1893

Two years now since we rode the wagons into Lawton. And in two years I have seen Joshua Danby become like McGloughlin, the Indian agent at Standing Rock. McGloughlin believed he was God above us, that he could order us to stop singing to our Great Mystery, that he could order us to stop dancing, that he could tell his men to kill my uncle and we would not fight or run neither.

There are people living here with us now who believe Joshua has the power to raise the dead, like he’s Wovoka.

Joshua’s heard the talk enough times that I think he believes that’s what he is. A prophet. And I am right fearful because when folks commence to believing that they are more than what they are, the spirits beyond always strike back.

I better put it down the way it has all come to be.

Joshua and Caleb got more than the farm when their ma passed on. She left them and their three sisters, Alice, Karen and Edna, and their little brother, Bobby, a passel of dollars. They gave the cows and the crops a go, but you could see right off neither man had the gumption to take on the farm as their life. Six months after we came to Lawton, Joshua called all of us left from the Spectacular show—me and Caleb, the Dimitris, Mr and Mrs Small, Mr Cosotino and his wife, Isabella—into the front parlor room.

Joshua said he’d had a vision, which made me sit up and listen. A vision is not something you ignore, even if it comes from someone like Joshua Danby.

Joshua said a voice in a cloud told him to take the money his ma left and rebuild the farmhouse as a temple. Joshua said the cloud told him that people would come to listen to him and Caleb summon spirits like they did at the Spectacular.

Joshua’s sister Alice is yellow-haired and pinch-faced. She did not like the idea, seeing as how she and her sisters had been the ones who’d stayed with her ma all those years, but Joshua stared at her with those eyes like the last week of the moon and he told her to join up or scat. Alice is twenty and mean as a badger, but she’s got no place to go like the rest of us. She and her sisters and little Bobby stayed.

We commenced to building the next week. It took two hundred dollars and all of April and May to finish. Joshua had how it should look figured out on paper. First they built a stairs around the chimney going up from the kitchen. Then they put a wall around the
s
tairs. On the second floor they added what Joshua called the ‘seance room.’ It’s got low ceilings, a stage and a black wooden box smack against the chimney. On the box we painted an eye with lightning bolts. We cut a door between the box and the chimney stairs that you could not find and open from the inside even if you tried. Someone’s got to work the latch from the chimney side.

The box is for Caleb to sit in and be sent into a spirit trance by Joshua. It does not appear so, but that box is big enough even Cosotino can get by Caleb and out to the stage.

When every lick of the scrap wood left over was burned and raked away, we had our first seance. Joshua let the word go out that since he and Caleb came back to Lawton, the spirits talked to them again just like when they were boys. He told people there was nothing wrong with talking with the spirits, that it was a good thing and he and Caleb would show people they could do it, too.

Ten people came the first night, all of them town folk, including the mayor, a right sad man named Powell. He lost his wife in a carriage accident last year.

Andie lifted her head, excited. ‘She knew him,’ she said out loud. ‘She knew Mike’s great-great-grandfather.’

Before reading on, she picked up the pen again and jotted these notes: ‘Death of Lamont Powell’s wife=his insanity? Where Kerris now? Mayor Powell?’

Joshua figured out just where to put the seats for the people to watch the seance and where to put the one kerosene lamp in the room so they see just what he wants them to see. And he had them all drink from his elixir, which he told them would relax them enough to witness the spirit world. Ten Trees and Painted Horses used to call potions and spells that called on the dark side ‘spider medicine.’ And that’s what I started calling the elixir.

Joshua came on stage in a red robe Isabella made for him. He didn’t say a word, but crooked his finger at Caleb, tied him up, stuck him in the box, drew the curtains and raised his arms toward the heavens. It got quiet. We commenced to whispering through holes drilled in the walls. I pounded a drum. Isabella blew a flute. Cosotino stuck his hands through a black curtain at the left side of the stage and played a tambourine. Dimitri and Maura were next to Cosotino, waving with gloves that had been dipped in phosphorus.

In the low light it musta looked like ghost hands because people commenced to bellering and carrying on even before Mr Small popped out of the top of Caleb’s box wearing raggy clothes and a wig that Alice sewed from horse-tail. Mr Small jumped around like a rabbit with a busted back leg. He conjured all sorts of noises of no sense.

The town folk that weren’t screaming were straining forward in their seats like drivers when a team of galloping wagon horses sees a snake in the road and quits hard.

I came out next, dressed in my Sitting Bull’s Dangerous Daughter outfit, got up on the box and spoke in Lakota. Darn if one woman didn’t faint dead away! The nicest thing about the seances is I don’t have to take my shirt off no more.

Afterward, Joshua turned up the lights and told them all how life did not end with death, that we was everlasting, Joshua invited the mayor and another man from town to open the curtain and look at Caleb. He was laid up against the wall, sweating and drooling spittle. He’s right good at that.

The next night twenty people came. And the next forty and the night after that Joshua turned ten folks away. Pretty soon there was people up to the Danby farm from far away as California and Europe to drink the spider medicine and see the spirits.

Lots of folks, mostly the rich ones who been here a long time, think Joshua’s got the power to talk to the dead and make the spirits what he calls ‘materialize.’ Miss Mary Parker would call that a fool’s dream. The only way you can talk to the dead is by following the ceremonies to let your spirit break free, walk and cry for visions. Not Crazy Horse, not Sitting Bull, not even Wovoka could make the dead walk, far as I know.

But like I said, there are people who believe Joshua can do it. And they treat him like he’s the Great Mystery itself. Mayor Powell comes almost every night, expecting his wife to appear from the box. Mrs Effington’s a hook-nose rich lady from New York City that done lost her husband and son to pneumonia ten years back. She wears a different hat to the seance every night and, like the mayor, has gotten right fond of the spider medicine. Mrs Effington comes every night with a fat, gray-bearded man named General Talbott, who says he served under General Custer in the Civil War.

General Talbott wrote a story for a newspaper in New York City saying he surveyed every inch of the Danby temple and found no explanation for the Lawton occurrences. He also wrote that the elixir was a ‘mystical quaff that promoted a harmonious spirit’ and that the recipe had been passed directly to Joshua by the people from the other world. Way I figure it, General Talbott knows that Mrs Effington wants to believe in Joshua and he don’t want to disappoint her.

Same with all the other folks worshipping Joshua Danby. It’s like they want to believe so bad, they don’t want to look too close. There are fifteen or twenty people just from Lawton who stopped going to the church. They follow everything Joshua says, especially that there’s another way to think about the life after this one other than what them priests say. He says they should not be scared to pass on.

Which is true. But Joshua don’t know a thing about it. He’s just feeding off what other people want to see in him. But I’m alive and safe and got a roof over my head and food to eat, so I don’t say a whole lot.

There was a sharp knock at the interrogation room door. Andie lifted her head. The door opened and Peter Frawley, a stocky, bald-headed detective, peered in. ‘Can’t find Kerris, Andie.’

‘What do you mean you can’t find him?’ she demanded. ‘Doesn’t his office know? Phil Gavrilis? His wife?’

‘His wife and his deputy say he was seriously pissed off when you booted him and the mayor off the Curtin crime scene,’ Frawley replied. ‘He told them if Lawton was going down the tubes, he wasn’t going to hang around and watch. Said he was taking a few days off, going fishing.’

‘Fishing where?’

Frawley shrugged. ‘They didn’t know. They said he’s real secretive about his fishing, that he takes off at all sorts of odd hours. Sleeps in his truck.’

Andie bit at her knuckle, then said, ‘Get his Suburban’s license plate number from Gavrilis and send it out over the wires with a request not to approach if spotted. In the meantime, one of you watch his house. The other wait near the Lawton police station.’

Frawley nodded and shut the door. Andie picked up the pen for the third time, flipped to a fresh page, then wrote: ‘Kerris—six years Chile. Enough time to become a killer?’

F
IVE HUNDRED MILES AWAY
, Jerry asked Harold a second time: ‘What kind of talent did you recruit?’

The old man pursed his lips gracefully. ‘I am retired now, insolent pup. Everything about Pluto has been carefully expunged from the record. What I was, at least as far as the public is concerned, will remain nothing more than the rambling fantasies of a senile old man.’

‘I don’t care if I ever prove and publish it,’ Jerry insisted. ‘I’m over that now. What kind of talent, Harold?’

Harold batted his lashes again. ‘Why, violent talent, of course.’

They never got the entire story. Harold avoided particulars whenever he could. But this much Jerry and Gallagher learned: Harold first discovered Danby when the boy was nineteen and newly graduated from boot camp. Terrance had achieved exceptional scores on the U.S. Army’s physical and intelligence tests, but failed to graduate at the top of his class because of several fighting incidents. Always on the training field, always cruelly accomplished. He snapped one man’s wrist with his bare hands and broke another man’s jaw with his foot.

Subsequent psychological testing by the Army revealed Danby as a fierce, cunning loner, which is how his file came across Harold’s desk. He went to talk to Danby at Fort Benning.

‘A brilliant autodidact,’ Harold recalled, relishing the memory. ‘You knew it within moments of speaking with him. His thinking patterns did not fit the Western norms—extremely creative, wide-ranging, thought-provoking. And gifted physically. He could take tremendous punishment. A sociopathic mind in a gladiator’s body. A rare, rare talent.’