The Story Teller (8 page)

“At peace. At peace.” The other woman moved backward, holding the door open, and Vicky stepped into a large room of white walls and polished wood floors, like a modern sculpture enclosed in brick. Sunshine
streamed through the bare windows and played across the white sofas and glass coffee table, the abstract oil paintings, the Indian rugs scattered about. In the far corner, an array of copper pans dangled above a kitchen island.

“Welcome to my space.” Marcy allowed one arm to flow toward the room, like the movement in a ballet.

“Where does Mike keep his easy chair?” Vicky asked. A mistake, she knew instantly by the startled look in her friend’s eyes.

“In his living room,” Marcy said, a lighthearted falseness in the tone.

“I’m sorry.” Vicky reached out and touched the other woman’s arm. “I didn’t know you were separated.”

Marcy shrugged away. “Separated is not how I prefer to think of our living accommodations. We have decided to find our own space.” A short pause, then: “Life is a stream, Vicky, rolling relentlessly onward. But there are eddies along the way. I prefer to think of my little house as an eddy, a place where I can emerge into the sacred space of the center.” She stopped, her eyes on Vicky’s. “Now, why am I telling you this? You came to Denver—what, thirteen years ago?—to find your center.”

Vicky gave the carry-on a little swing into the room. “Where would you like me to take this?” she asked, making an effort to conceal the prick of irritation. How easy Marcy made it sound, as if leaving Ben and moving to Denver had been nothing more than a swift glide over an iced-smooth lake, when it had been like cutting herself in half. She had never wanted to divorce her husband, had never meant to break her vows; she had only wanted him to stop hitting her.

Had they lived in the Old Time, she could have gone to her father and his brothers, who were also her fathers in the Arapaho Way, and they would have called Ben to
a council and told him, “No more. No more.” It would have stopped, or Ben would have been the one punished, and her family would have taken her away from him.

But it was not the Old Time. It was the modern time, and she had been forced to take herself away. Even now she was not certain of the exact moment she had known she must make another life for herself and the kids—Susan and Lucas were so young then. But lately, when she thought about it, it seemed the day had always been arriving, coming toward her like an arrow shot out of her own destiny, when she would have to leave.

She followed Marcy down the hallway on the right, the unbidden memories flooding over her: the long drive across Wyoming and into Colorado, the rush of students on the CU campus in Denver—a sea of white faces surging around her. And Marcy. Appearing from nowhere, chattering like a magpie. Sign up for this class, stay away from that one—walking her through registration. The first white person who had looked at her, talked to her like another human being, as if the differences between them, the shades of their skin, their different cultures, were no differences at all.

Later, when she’d admitted to herself she couldn’t wait tables, go to class, and care for her children, and had sent them to her parents on the reservation—when the earth had dropped out from under her—Marcy had been a phone call away. They’d been friends through the endless hours of briefing cases in the law library, the weeks of studying for the bar exam, and the three years at the firm. When she’d decided to return to her people, it was Marcy who had helped her pack up the Bronco. And now, if this fuzzy-headed woman in the flowing kimono had left her husband to find her sacred center, well, they were still friends.

Vicky followed her into a small bedroom. The afternoon sun filtered around the edges of filmy white curtains
and slanted across the bed piled high with ruffled pillows, the dresser and mirror, the little nightstand with a phone and digital clock. “May this be a small eddy for you,” Marcy said, extending one hand into the room. “I hope you’ll find this space comfortable.”

Vicky laughed. “I’d have to be dead not to.” She propped the carry-on on the bed, unzipped it, and began lifting out the few things she’d packed: another attorney dress, blue jeans, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of sandals. She wished she had brought a few extra changes of clothes. She’d be lucky to get home by the weekend.

Marcy was fitting the dress over a hanger she’d extracted from the closet, chatting about work: she’d left the firm, did Vicky know?

Vicky set her cosmetics bag on the dresser and stared at her friend in the mirror. She didn’t know. She had never imagined Marcy would leave the firm.

“A mutual parting of the ways.” Her friend wheeled around, hung the dress inside the closet, and shut the door softly behind her. “I like to think I have evolved to a higher consciousness,” she explained.

Vicky smiled. She remembered a client droning on about the lousy two mil he’d made when he would have made more if his partner hadn’t reneged on a deal, about how he wanted her to nail the bastard’s hide to the wall, sue him into next week. And she, wondering how she was paying out her life. It was such cases that had finally sent her to the one-woman law office on Main Street in Lander, buoyed with the hope her life might better be paid out helping her people.

Marcy was droning on: her new job at the West-Side Clinic, so spiritually rewarding. “Even if . . .” A wave encompassing the house. “I have to give up my space here. It depends upon the divorce settlement.” She gave a little shrug. “It’s a matter of simplifying your life,” her friend said, a solemn, earnest tone. “You must learn that you require much less in life if you are to continue evolving.”

Vicky stepped back over to the bed and lifted the rest of her clothes out of the carry-on. She wasn’t sure what to make of the changes in her friend’s life. She said, “I want to hire an investigator. Any suggestions?”

Marcy drew in a sharp breath at the abrupt change in conversation. She stared at Vicky a moment, as if trying to refocus her thoughts. Then: “Your old friend Pat Michaels is still the best. Hold on.” She brushed past the door, and in a moment she was back, snapping two business cards on the dresser. “Someone else would like to hear from you,” she said.

Vicky glanced at the black type on the pair of cards. One read
Pat Michaels, Investigations.
The other,
Steve Clark, Denver Homicide Detective.

“I ran into Steve yesterday,” Marcy was saying, “so I mentioned you were coming to town. Well, I wish you could have seen how his eyes lit up, although, of course, he tried to hide it. But he hasn’t forgotten you, Vicky.” She prattled on: Steve had given her his card in case Vicky wanted to call. Not that he expected her to call after all this time, but it would be good to hear from her. Talk over the old times.

Vicky slid the card under that of the investigator, a memory shooting past, like an old film on fast forward. Two outsiders. She, an Arapaho woman, divorced from her husband, separated from her kids, and handsome, cocky Steve Clark, fresh from a stint with the Navy SEALS. Compared with the other students at CU-Denver, they were grizzled veterans of life. And they were friends, that was all. She had just broken her marriage vows and ended the relationship she had thought would last a lifetime. She didn’t want other vows, another relationship. The last she had heard of Steve Clark, he had married a childhood sweetheart.

“He’s been divorced awhile,” Marcy said, as if she’d seen into the memory. “The marriage didn’t work out.
They were never on the same planet. You were the one he’d always hoped—”

Vicky held up one hand. “Thanks for the message,” she said.

“You’re not going to call, are you?” It was a statement. “He’ll be disappointed.”

“I’m not going to call.” Vicky turned toward the bed with the little pile of clothes beside the carry-on and began unbuttoning the front of her attorney dress.

“Well,” Marcy said, backing toward the door. “The pasta awaits.” Her footsteps made a soft, padded sound as she retreated down the hallway. Then: “Whenever you’re ready” floated back like the last stanza of a song.

Vicky shrugged out of the dress. She pulled on the clean, stiff blue jeans and allowed the soft cotton T-shirt to float over her shoulders. She slipped into the sandals, beginning to feel more relaxed, more like herself, without her lawyer clothes. Leaning toward the mirror, she removed the barrette at the nape of her neck and brushed her hair in long, smooth strokes. Her hair fell about her shoulders, thick and black, still shiny—her best feature, she’d always thought. She was not beautiful. No, she would not describe the face looking back at her as beautiful. It had always surprised her when some man insisted otherwise. She’d always felt she should argue, set the matter straight. Eyes as black as slate, set much too far apart, a too-long nose with that little hump, cheekbones too prominent, and lips much too full. She touched up her lipstick. No, not beautiful, but after seeing so many white faces today, the golden-brown face in the mirror looked . . . well, different, as if it belonged in some other place or time. She clipped back her hair with the barrette and turned away. She was who she was.

Picking up the top business card, she walked over to the nightstand, perched on the edge of the bed, and tapped out Pat Michaels’s number.

“Yeah?” The voice on the other end sounded raspy from too many cigarettes and cool nights hunkered down behind a steering wheel, watching shadows.

“Pat, it’s Vicky Holden.”

The line seemed to go dead. Then: “What’re you doing in town, beautiful Indian maiden?”

“Please, Pat.”

“Sorry, I forgot you never liked that stuff. Have to keep my thoughts to myself. So, talk to me.”

“I’m working on an agreement with the Denver Museum of the West.”

“Ah,” the investigator said, as if a picture had come into focus. “NAGPRA rears its ugly head. A disagreement, more likely, between the Arapahos and the museum. Tell me I’m right and bolster my confidence.”

“I don’t know for sure,” Vicky said. “I’d like to know more about the curator, Rachel Foster.”

Another “ah” came across the line, drawn out and nasal-toned. “A museum curator. One of the upstanding types. Always hardest to uncover anything interesting. No rap sheets. Police never heard of them, except maybe for a prowler call in their neighborhoods. What are you looking for? Anything specific?”

“Anything unusual,” she said. “Anything that might drive a museum curator to violate her trust.”

“You need the information yesterday, right?”

Vicky smiled. She’d always liked Pat—thirty pounds overweight in rumpled slacks and jackets that looked as if he’d slept in them, which, most of the time, he probably had. She’d worked with him on many cases during her years at the firm. Pat Michaels had always been straight with her. She said, “Yesterday would be fine.”

“Get back to you tomorrow,” he said. She gave him Marcy’s number before pressing the disconnect button. Then she pulled her bag across the bed and fumbled for the little pad on which Annemarie had scribbled the numbers. Flattening the pad on the nightstand, she
punched in the number of Todd Harris’s grandparents, Doyal and Mary. An intermittent buzzing noise was followed by a click. “Hello?” An old man’s voice.

“It’s Vicky Holden, Grandfather,” Vicky said. Then she launched into the usual pleasantries, the polite dance—how had they been? Fine, just fine. Finally the time was ready. “Have you seen Todd lately?” she asked, her voice calm.

“Not seen him for, oh, a couple weeks,” Doyal said, a slow drawl. “Todd’s real busy at school.”

Another round of pleasantries followed before Vicky ended the call, the sense of alarm growing inside her. She pushed it away. Why couldn’t she accept the obvious explanation Doyal had offered? Todd was busy at school, hunkered down in the stacks at some library, trying to finish his thesis. No wonder no one had seen him.

In the kitchen, she found Marcy dropping a wad of linguine into a pot of water. Steam curled up toward the copper pans dangling over the island that divided the kitchen from the living room. Vicky perched on a stool. A TV squatted on the counter behind the island, a newscaster’s voice droning softly through the bubbling water.

“Wine?” Marcy hoisted a long-stemmed glass half-filled with deep red liquid and took a long sip. “Or are you still a teetotaler?”

Vicky nodded. She had always been a teetotaler. Ben was the one who drank; she had watched the alcohol steal his soul. When he was drunk, he turned into someone she didn’t know or understand, not the man she loved. It was when he was drunk that he’d hit her.

Suddenly Vicky found herself focusing on the newscaster’s voice. Another homicide. Latino or Native American male. Early twenties. She was off the stool and, in two steps, in front of the TV. She turned up the volume. “Denver police say the body was found this morning near the confluence of Cherry Creek and the
South Platte River. Exact cause of death is unknown, but the police believe it is homicide.”

“My God,” Vicky said, half to herself. “I’ve been trying to reach a young man from the reservation. He’s not around. His fiancée is worried he’s in trouble.”

“This is the city.” Marcy shrugged. “People turn up murdered from time to time. Chances are the victim isn’t anybody you know.”

Vicky was already around the island. She hurried down the hallway, ignoring Marcy’s voice calling behind, “Dinner’s about ready.” In the bedroom, she found Steve Clark’s card on the dresser where she’d left it. She carried it over to the phone and tapped out his number.

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