Ghost Dance (3 page)

‘These are unusual,’ Gallagher said.

‘The albino’s name was Caleb Danby,’ Nightingale replied, as if reciting an often-told story. ‘He cut this cabin off the side of his brother Joshua’s house across town before the turn of the century. The Danby brothers were mediums who made Lawton a center of spiritualism in the 1890s. They held seances during which ghosts were said to have materialized. Then, for reasons no one is quite sure of, the brothers had a falling-out, the seances came to an abrupt halt and Joshua Danby disappeared. Caleb moved the cabin down here by the river. He lived in it for a year before committing suicide by plunging a butcher knife into his heart.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’ Gallagher said, rubbing his chest.

‘People in my business don’t kid about things like that,’ Nightingale replied coolly. She turned as if to go and he realized he’d soon be alone in the cabin.

‘You related to them?’ he asked, trying to get her to stay a little longer. ‘The Danbys, I mean.’

She shook that mane of auburn hair. ‘The last Danby left Lawton a long time ago.’

‘And the Indian?’

Nightingale hesitated at that and her face took on a pained expression. She looked out the window toward the forest on the far side of the river. ‘The Indian’s a mystery.’

Amused by her sudden soberness, Gallagher asked, ‘So which one haunts the place?’

‘Huh? Oh, Caleb, I guess,’ she replied with a forced flip of her hand. ‘I’ve never paid much attention to that old story.’

She answered several more questions that he had about the cabin and where in town he might buy groceries and linens. Then she said she was late for her shift and left. Gallagher watched her drive off and realized again that he had been strangely buoyed by Andie Nightingale’s presence. She was beautiful. If his reaction was purely hormonal, so be it. He felt better than he had in a long time.

But as Gallagher unloaded his fishing rods, luggage, camera bag and computer, the rise in his spirits drained away. By the time he had his gear all stored inside and had cleaned up the place a bit, he was acutely aware of the silence of the cabin ringing in his ears. Like an addict searching out his next fix, Gallagher looked out the window to the river to provide white noise, to drown out the silence. But the rain was falling hard again. The Bluekill River seethed in full boil, much too dangerous for fishing.

For nearly an hour before total exhaustion forced him upstairs onto the bare mattress under a pile of dusty wool blankets, Gallagher sat in an Adirondack chair on the front porch of the cabin, watching the Bluekill flow and trying his best to avoid an examination of the shards in the midden mound of his shattered life.

G
ALLAGHER SLEPT TEN FITFUL
hours, waking shortly after dawn to what sounded like the gentle shake of a gourd rattle and the far-offbeat of a leather drum, oddities he managed to dismiss as the vestiges of a fading dream. Outside, the storm still howled. The Lawton radio station announced the worst would be over by midday. To kill time before he could go to the river, Gallagher drove into town, ate breakfast, bought groceries, sheets and towels, then called St Edward’s Church and reconfirmed his interview with Monsignor McColl for Monday morning.

Around noon the rain stilled to a drizzle. Gallagher double-knotted his wading shoes, adjusted the gravel cuff on his waders, then took up the graphite six-weight rod and reel and hustled toward the Bluekill River in an effort to fend off the hot point of a migraine headache that had been threatening all morning. As if the hypnotic pulse of the rushing water could loosen the emotional screws tightening in his head.

The river was high and turbulent still, but he did not pause at the water’s edge. Gallagher used the spiked wading staff to feel his way out into the surging current. Twice he stumbled, barely managing to keep his balance against the insistent force that pummeled the backs of his knees.

At last Gallagher obtained stable footing on a sandbar and tied on a bright red streamer. The only bleak hope for a strike in the roiled water. Then he played out line and drew the rod back to one o’clock before stiff-arming the tip forward and halting sharply at ten. In the chill mist, the line straightened on the backcast, looped at the braking action, then unfolded neatly and plopped into the cinnamon water against the opposite shore. He stripped line quickly until the crimson streamer reappeared, raised the rod and cast again. The repetitive, flowing movement emptied his mind as a mantra might a Buddhist monk’s.

After a half hour with no strikes, Gallagher tied on a yellow marabou, a lure more suited to western rivers, cast it, then watched his fluorescent orange sinking line course rapidly downstream. His thoughts turned sourly to his predicament. He was turning forty, alone in a cabin in rural Vermont. His ex-wife, Emily, was remarrying today. It was an exercise in extreme self-pity, but Gallagher did not care, and he was prepared to wallow fully in the feeling as the spool on the reel began to turn, playing out more line on the frothy water.

The fly line snaked and danced hypnotically. It became every fishing line Gallagher had ever cast, a line that arced over his head and splayed itself in the muddy waters of the Ganges River. Six years before.

The ghat, the grand stone staircase that formed the river’s bank, was packed with men, women and children waiting to bathe. Goats blatted. A cow lowed in the late-afternoon sun. Six half-cremated corpses lay on the stair at the Water’s edge, waiting to be taken to the center of the holy river and released into eternity.

Gallagher ignored the looks his fishing gear generated, then waded off the ghat toward the current. He wasn’t expecting to catch a thing. But it had been a long day of travel and he needed to feel the water around him. After a half hour of casting and stripping line, he had fallen under the Ganges’ spell.

‘Orvis comes to Allahabad,’ a husky woman’s voice called. ‘I’ve seen it all now.’

Gallagher stopped mending line to glance over his shoulder. The voice belonged to a big-boned woman with a thick blond pigtail that jutted out from under a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. Her freckled face was angular around sparkling black eyes, a pert nose and an expression of perpetual bemusement. She wore round wire-rimmed sunglasses and a red batik skirt she’d hiked up and tucked in at her hips. Her plain white T-shirt strained against pendulous breasts. A Leica camera hung around her neck. A camera bag was slung off her shoulder. She waded out, looked Gallagher up and down and barked out a laugh.

‘Some friends grabbed me in the street up there to tell me a crazy American was throwing red feathers on an orange string into the Ganges,’ she said. ‘Call me wacko, too, but I just had to see it.’

‘Providing merriment for the locals is just part of the job,’ Gallagher quipped.

Before she could reply, a throng of hundreds appeared at the top of the stone staircase, singing and carrying purple flowers. Thousands more appeared at the adjoining ghats that curved away along the bank to the north. Ten by ten, they cast their flowers into the river, then waded in and started bathing. Within minutes they were surrounded by a multitude of people and floating wheels of purple flowers spinning in the twilight. The woman snapped pictures. Gallagher could not keep his eyes off her, especially her thighs, which were powerful and tanned a nut brown.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Do they take a bath like this every day?’

‘Once a year they come to wash away their sins,’ she replied, still shooting. ‘In the next ten days half a million people will bathe along this half-mile stretch. Hindu scriptures say the festival dates back to the origins of the earth when gods and demons squabbled over who got holy nectar.’

Gallagher watched as hundreds poured water over their heads. ‘And the holy nectar does what?’

‘A single drop guarantees immortality,’ she said.

‘So we’re all here scrubbing up for immortality?’

‘I suppose you could put it that way.’

‘Then I have a chance at immortality?’

She shook her head, grinning wickedly. ‘I don’t think the waters of eternity penetrate neoprene waders.’

‘Oh,’ he said and his face burned. For some reason it seemed important to him that he impress her, and he was failing miserably.

She snapped another picture. ‘So who are you? What are you doing here?’

‘Patrick Gallagher. I’m filming a documentary on the spread of Hinduism, using the construction of the ancient temples to tell the story.’

‘Really?’ she said, putting her hands on her hips. ‘I just published a book of photographs on the temples.’

‘You’re Beckworth?’

Emily Beckworth was legendary for going native in various cultures around the world, then using her insider status to take intimate portraits. In the past ten years she’d published award-winning books on Japanese Zen monks and their monasteries, aboriginal tribes in Australia’s outback, the Yak herdsmen of Outer Mongolia and the Stone Age peoples of Papua New Guinea.

‘I am,’ she said. She cocked her hips to one side, which triggered a strange busing in Gallagher’s head.

‘You wouldn’t be interested in acting as guide and commentator, would you?’ he managed to croak.

‘Depends on what the pay is.’

A flash on the coppery surface of the Bluekill startled Gallagher from the memory.

It is rare, but during big runoffs, lunker brown trout will sometimes leave their carrying positions behind rocks and under banks to flare up to seize grubs, worms and even mice that have been swept into the rivers and churn at the surface. Gallagher cast twenty feet below the flash and stripped line. Instantly there was a surge, then a series of twitches as the hook rattled along the protrusions of a bony mouth. He let the fish chew on it for a count of two, then jerked his wrist back to set the hook. Gallagher’s rod bent nearly in two.

Monster! he thought. Bluekill monster brown trout! A fish like this could salvage a fortieth birthday if not erase the memory of an ex-wife!

Gallagher tried to play the fish on the six-weight line, but he felt twelve, fifteen pounds. Maybe more! He would have to wait until the beast tired to have any chance at landing him. The spool gyrated. The line screamed through the ferules. The fish headed straight downstream toward a silver ash tree that had crashed into the river during the previous night’s storm.

If the fish swam into the submerged branches, the tippet might snap. Gallagher stumbled forward, trying to close the gap, fingering the line like some voodoo priest preparing for exorcism.

The rod bent again, then suddenly snapped back, and the line lay limp on the water.

‘You’ve got to be shitting me!’ Gallagher shouted and slapped the water in disgust. ‘Damn it!’

You wait a lifetime to hook a fish like that. Gallagher knew it. And the lost opportunity made him want to sit in the shallows and cry. He stood there for a long time just staring at the cupped water surface before sighing and starting to reel in the line. Somehow the fish had shaken the fly free of his jaw, or he’d gotten his teeth into the leader and sawed himself free. Gallagher had brought in perhaps eight feet of the slack when the line tightened again and a great weight rolled toward him, caught the current, then tugged away.

He was still on! But very sluggish. Had he become tangled? Was he swimming in slower and slower circles around a hidden branch as a dog might wind a chain around a tree?

With the wading stick Gallagher eased his way forward, stopping every few yards to reel in the coils until he came to the end of the floating line. The butt section of the tapered leader disappeared under the caramel water just in front of the half-submerged ash.

Gallagher ignored the image of a big brown’s razor-sharp teeth, put his hand around the leader and followed it down under the water knot by knot to where it met the tippet. The line was as strained and vibrating as struck piano wire. His fingers found the streamer’s hackle, then groped forward, searching gingerly for the hook and the slick flesh of the fish.

Gallagher’s fingers brushed what felt like stiff cloth and he startled and jerked back. His heart pounded. He reached down again to feel what lay beyond the hook

It was stiff cloth.

Gallagher grabbed a handful of the fabric and pulled, feeling that weight roll toward him, catch in the current and jam back into the limbs of the downed ash. He wedged the cork butt of the fly rod tight among the exposed limbs of the tree, then crouched in the chill water. He reached deep, got hold of the cloth with both hands and pulled upward with all his might. The weight came up. It turned over just below the surface, and as if through an opaque, rust-stained shroud, a face appeared.

G
ALLAGHER WAS SCREAMING EVEN
before he was aware he was screaming and he let go of the green fabric. The head and upper body of the corpse slipped back under the water, bumped against him, then disappeared. Gallagher dry-heaved, choked and spun, his only thought to get away from what was in the river. He tried to sprint toward shore, flailing at the surface with his hand and the wading stick.

But the current caught him and dashed him face down in the rapids. Gallagher flipped twice, then surfaced, gasping at the sudden immersion. He stumbled to his feet only to vomit up the brackish water he’d swallowed. The shell-shocked numbness that had surrounded Gallagher for nearly a year had been swept away in an instant. Now every nerve cell in his body fired nauseatingly hot. The white birches around the cabin in the dim woods ashore stood out like frozen flashes of lightning.

Gallagher swallowed at the sobs that threatened to strangle him and struggled toward the birches, unable to shake the crimson vision flooding through his mind. The man had been mutilated. The wounds to his body were frequent, deep and oblong-shaped. Gallagher tripped his way into the shallows and crawled up the bank before taking off in a mad sprint across the muddy cut cornfield toward the River Road and Andie Nightingale’s house.

The detective was working in her garden, pitching compost with a fork. She wore knee-high green boots, tattered jeans and a tan barn coat. Gallagher staggered out of the field and across the road into her yard, only to fall to his knees short of the garden and gag at the aluminum taste of the adrenaline surging through his mouth.