Ghost Dance (5 page)

P
AULA POTTER LEANED AGAINST
the doorway to the barn, face into the coarse northwest wind that roared down off the ridge of Lawton Mountain, where winter still ruled and the hardwood trees remained barren of buds. She gaped at a pewter sky tattooed with a stream of purple oval clouds.

Ordinarily, the reedy brunette was talkative, vivacious in gesture, smart and opinionated. Now she rested mute with curled hands jammed into the pockets of the gray wool jacket she wore over a denim dress, knee socks and blue wool clogs. She was blinking and had been blinking for nearly three minutes, ever since Andie Nightingale had told her that her husband’s body had been found in the Bluekill.

At last Paula broke the silence. ‘Lenticular clouds,’ she said.

‘Excuse me?’ Nightingale said.

‘Those tiny purple clouds are called lenticular,’ Paula explained. ‘Hank was a weather freak. Vermont and all the hunting he did, you know? He used to say lenticular clouds came in on turbulence a mile high in the atmosphere. Lenticular clouds are like omens riding before storms. But the storm’s already here, isn’t it?’

With that, whatever control Paula Potter possessed escaped her. Her jaw stretched wide to the impossibility of her loss and she tried to cover her mouth with her right hand even as she lurched wide-eyed across the uneven barn floor. Nightingale caught the woman and pulled her close. Over Paula’s heaving shoulders, she watched the lenticular clouds arcing at the horizon.

Now a red Jeep Cherokee roared into the driveway and halted under the naked limbs of the gnarled elm that dominated the Potters’ front yard. An older version of Paula jumped from the driver’s seat. Ellen LaVacque hurried, ashen-faced, to her sister.

Ten minutes later Paula said, ‘I should go inside and tell my boys now.’

‘It’s going to be hard,’ Ellen said. ‘They’ll think their lives are over.’

‘I won’t let them think that,’ Paula said resolutely. ‘He’ll always be with us. Won’t he?’

The question hung in the air for so long that Nightingale winced. ‘Paula, I have to ask you some hard questions.’

Paula snuffled, but nodded. ‘I figured you would.’

‘Did Hank have any enemies?’

‘Enemies!’ Ellen cried.

‘He had no enemies,’ Paula said firmly. Then she faltered and began to sob. ‘That I knew of anyway.’

Nightingale took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry to ask this, but did you have any suspicion he might have led a secret life?’

‘No!’ Paula cried.

Her sister piped up. ‘Hank was the hardest-working, truest man I’ve ever known.’

There was silence following her outburst. Paula worked the handkerchief in her hand, then asked meekly, ‘What kind of secret life?’

‘Financial, sexual, emotional, anything you can think of,’ Nightingale said.

Paula looked at her sister, then shook her head. ‘When he wasn’t working, he was either working in the yard, playing with our boys or out hunting and fishing.’

The sergeant nodded. ‘What would Hank’s routine have been this morning?’

‘He would’ve followed his plan,’ Paula said. ‘He always had a hunt plan, where he’d go and what he’d do first thing in the morning.’

‘And this morning?’

‘With the weather like this, he decided to hunt close to home, up Lawton Mountain on the other side of the river,’ she said, gesturing vaguely to the west.

‘Okay,’ Nightingale said encouragingly. ‘Beyond the plan, what would he have done this morning, first thing?’

Paula thought about it, then said, ‘Up at three-thirty. Dress in long underwear and socks. Eat. Then come straight out here to his hunting locker. Get his clothes, gun, turkey vest, decoys and his pack. If he was going to cross the river, he would have used the footbridge he rebuilt last fall. It’s down there in the forest beyond the orchard.’

Nightingale looked across the field toward the woods. The glossy black trunks of the hemlocks against the tawny, dead high grass of the orchard looked like India ink that had been spilled across fine stationery. The dormant apple trees in the foreground resembled the jagged metalwork of busted umbrellas a winter’s gale had stripped of fabric.

‘Go talk to your boys,’ Nightingale said. ‘And, Paula, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

Looking for tracks, Nightingale padded out through the high grass of the apple orchard toward the hemlocks. With every step the river’s roar became more deafening. And with every step Lawton Mountain loomed larger above her.

In the shadowy light under the hemlock canopy, Nightingale found a pair of camouflage trousers that matched the jacket Hank Potter was found in. She discovered a pair of high rubber boots tossed in a raspberry patch. She used her flashlight to look for tracks in the soft, wet soil. But the storm had obscured all the footprints, made them indistinct and indecipherable.

On the steep bank leading down to the footbridge, she came across shallow troughs in the mud that suggested heels had slipped down the bank. But there were no clear tread marks she could have used to say positively that Potter or his attacker had continued this way before dawn.

The bridge footings were thick, discolored steel set into a granite ledge fifteen feet above the level of the river. New two-inch cables had been tied into the old footings and pulled taut across the thirty-foot chasm. Planks had been hooked to the cables with U bolts. Rope railings ran parallel to the cable.

Nightingale walked out on the bridge above the rushing water. It swayed in the wind and she was forced to grip the ropes for balance. The bridge’s movement was greatest at the middle of the span, where she stopped and peered over. Black whirlpools swirled between the ledge walls. Knife-edged rocks slashed the river surface. She was about to turn when she noticed discoloration on the wood planking near the far shore.

Blood. And more blood on the rope railing and splattered there on the exposed rocks below. If the blood matched, Hank Potter had been killed on the bridge that spanned the Bluekill.

Nightingale hurried up the bank, through the hemlock grove and out into the apple orchard, where it was now dusk. She heard a cry. A door slammed. A towheaded boy of about eight raced pell-mell across the yard. He reached a makeshift ladder nailed to a white pine and climbed it toward a tree house. The wind raised water in her eyes and her stomach yawned.

Paula Potter came out of the house looking for the boy and Nightingale went to her. ‘Paula, I have to ask you and your sons to go to Ellen’s house,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bring in evidence technicians.’

Paula stared blankly. ‘Did you find something?’

‘Enough that I want to bring in help.’

‘Oh,’ she said, wringing her hands. ‘I … I was looking for Nathan, my oldest’

Nightingale pointed to the tree house. ‘He’s up there. I’m sorry, but before you go to him, could you let me see the hunting locker you mentioned?’

Paula looked from the tree house to the detective, then nodded uncertainly.

The wind picked up again as they crossed back to the chicken coop, and they bent to it in silence. Inside, Paula went straight to the double-padlocked door. ‘That’s funny,’ she remarked, as she reached toward the locks unhasped in the rings. ‘Hank would never—’

Nightingale grabbed Paula by the wrist. ‘Don’t touch.’

She got out thin latex gloves from her pocketbook, then picked the locks out by their hasps. She flipped on the light and eased the door open.

The locker smelled of cedar and was the size of a large walk-in closet. On the right, hard by the door, were high and low racks of various hunting clothes. Then a built-in, eight-slot, glass-faced gun cabinet filled with three scoped high-powered rifles, a .22 rifle, a synthetic-stocked muzzle-loader with a stainless-steel barrel, a double-barreled shotgun, and two pump-action shotguns, one wood-stocked with a blued barrel, one synthetic-stocked and camouflaged. A single steel cable about a quarter of an inch thick ran the length of the case through the trigger guards of all the guns. Below the glass case were pine drawers and cabinets lined with cedar wood. Beyond the case was a boot rack and pegs on which hung various hunting calls, a set of hip waders and a pair of Gortex chest waders. At the far end of the closet was a low pine cabinet.

‘Did he have more than one turkey gun?’ Nightingale asked.

‘No,’ Paula said. ‘Why?’

‘Because he never got the gun from the cabinet,’ she replied.

‘Then he met his killer before getting here,’ Paula said. She began to cry again.

Nightingale held her until she settled down, then asked, ‘Besides the locks being open, does anything else seem out of place?’

Paula blinked, blew her nose and studied the room. ‘No, it looks like it always does. Except—’

She gestured toward the pine credenza. ‘The bottom cabinet door is open. Hank kept his ammunition in there. Locked. He was always preaching gun safety with the boys.’ She paused, her chin quivering. ‘Did you hear that? I’m already talking about him in the past tense! Andie … I’ve got to go find my son. He needs me.’

‘I’m being tough on you,’ Nightingale soothed. ‘I apologize again. Go.’

When Paula had left, Nightingale went over to the credenza and slid it open. Inside were four heavy-duty, black, padlocked ammunition boxes. On one the lock was loose. She drew that lock from the hinge, eased open the box, which was filled with boxes of shotgun shells, then let her eyes drift toward the inside of the lid.

Taped to the inside of the box was a piece of plain white sketch paper. On it was drawn an intricate illustration of a creature rowing a boat across a river.

The creature had the physical structure of a man, except that he possessed the nose of a vulture, pointed animal ears and snakes growing on his head instead of hair. His eyes were solid black voids. His mouth was sewn shut with string. The creature and the boat had been etched in precise, delicate black lines. That part of the illustration had the quality of a drawing in an ancient book.

The water below the boat and the creature, however, was rust-red and crudely depicted with the blunt stroke of a child’s finger painting. Puzzled, Nightingale tugged at the gold stud in her left ear. Why would Potter put this macabre drawing in an ammunition box? Was he the artist? If there were other drawings here, she’d have to reconsider the psychological dimensions of the dentist and refigure the path of her investigation.

Something about the medium of the drawing bothered her as well. Nightingale reached in and tugged out the box. She set it on top of the credenza, then adjusted the overhead light to better examine the illustration. She peered closer at the river.

Her head felt suddenly leaden and pressurized. Icy sweat bubbled to the skin at the nape of her neck and dribbled down her back.

The river had been finger-painted with blood.

A
SECOND VIOLENT STORM
swept in over the Green Mountains just after dark, snapping branches off the birch trees and rattling the blown-glass windows of Gallagher’s cabin. The feeble structure creaked and moaned with every gust. Dank brown leaves swirled and settled in the tracks left by the police cruisers, the ambulances and the medical examiner’s van that had carried Hank Potter’s body from the river.

Over the years Gallagher had taught himself to lock those sorts of horrors away in the mental equivalent of a vault. But the memory of Potter surfacing from the depths of the Bluekill refused entombment. It followed him as he tried to read the pile of research on the Catholic process of canonization his partner, Jerry Matthews, had shoved into his hands before he left Manhattan. The image of Potter goaded Gallagher as he made the bed upstairs and organized his fly box. It taunted him as he tried to cook an official welcome-to-middle-age birthday dinner of store-bought trout.

Why Potter and not me? Gallagher asked himself as the butter melted in the pan. What matrix of forces had aligned themselves to say that this day was his last while my life goes on? And then Gallagher asked the question he had been avoiding all day—what matrix of forces had caused his wife to leave, for him to be forty and alone?

He went through the motions of preparing and eating the trout, but took no joy in the taste. For want of something to do, he looked at the etchings of the Indian standing above the cave entrance and of the albino medium Caleb Danby slumped in his trance. There was something about his slouching posture that reminded Gallagher of his father.

Seamus Gallagher was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of an alcoholic stonecutter and devout Catholic who spent his life carving religious statuary for churches across the Northeast. For reasons Gallagher never fully understood, by the time his father was a teenager, he had rejected God and his father’s stonecutting trade. Seamus attended City College of New York at night. He got his law degree from Fordham at twenty-seven. By thirty he was a vocal labor attorney and a stalwart of the ACLU and the American Communist Party.

Gallagher’s father was a stocky man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard, a slick bald head and intense eyes that peered out from behind black polymer glasses.

He met Gallagher’s mother, Agnes Flanagan, in 1958 at a party for
The Progressive Magazine.
Agnes was one of the staff’s best writers, a thin, severe woman with a pinched face who chain-smoked Kents and wrote elegant, acerbic essays attacking the capitalist establishment. In her, Gallagher believed his father found the personification of the mainstays of his life—leftist ideals and booze.

On their first date, they went to Coney Island, flew a kite and got shit-faced on the beach. Gallagher was born some nine months later. ‘A mistake of too much sun and too much vodka,’ as his father would describe Gallagher when he was in one of his black moods, which became more frequent the older Gallagher got.

Seamus was rarely home at night, more often at a rally or a meeting of some committee he chaired, followed by a long sojourn at the local pub. He was most vocal as an atheist, and when Gallagher was eight his father was chief litigator and spokesman for a group that successfully sued the New York school system to outlaw prayer in the classroom.