The Spider's Web Read online

  Roseanne managed a nod. She was still pressing her palm against her mouth, fingers digging into her cheeks. Lionel pushed on the door handle and kicked the door open. She managed to open the back door and follow him outside, stomach churning, acid eating at the insides of her throat. A skinny guy with black braids and floppy arms lunged out of the shadows as Dwayne came around the hood.

  “Where’s Ned?” His voice boomed over the rift of drums. She recognized him the instant he stepped into a shaft of light. Mervin Oldman, Berta’s nephew. He looked up to Ned. He had begged him not to move to Jackson Hole. Then he had gotten Berta to try to talk him out of it. “They’ll eat you alive,” Berta had told him. “Rich folks’ll invite you to their big houses and show you off like some kind of artifact they stole outta a museum. Their own pet Indian. They’ll piss you off pretty bad.”

  Ned had laughed. “I’m gonna be wiring the big houses, so nobody’s gonna piss me off.”

  “Ain’t he here?” Lionel said. Roseanne spun about and watched the lies creep like shadows across his face. The sour-breath smells of whiskey and beer wafted over her. “Had to wait on Roseanne here to get herself together. Figured Ned and his white girlfriend was already here.”

  “Haven’t seen ’em yet.” Mervin shrugged his thin shoulders and headed back into the trees.

  Roseanne leaned against the side of the truck to get her balance, then started toward the house. She felt the hard pressure of Dwayne’s hand on her arm, yanking her backward. “Where you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going to the bathroom.” Roseanne tried to pull herself free, but his fingers were like a tourniquet compressing the muscles and bones in her arm. “Do I get your permission or do I pee on your boots?”

  He gave her a shove at that. She felt the knobs of her spine hit the hard surface of the truck, and for an instant she thought her legs would give way. She pushed herself off the truck and started for the house as fast as she dared, aware of the crunch of sage and dried grass under her sneakers. The image of Ned floated ahead in the darkness.

  She stumbled through the front door and into a living room lit by a white rectangle of TV light. Shadowy bodies lay sprawled over the sofa and chairs and curled on the linoleum floor. The sound of grunts and snores mingled with the close smells of beer and whiskey and ketchup and stale food. The music outside sounded muffled and far away.

  “Hey, Roseanne.” A hand rose up and swiped at her as she picked her way through the prone bodies. “Wanna beer?”

  She kept going. The kitchen was wedged in a corner between the dining area and the back door. An appliance light flooded the stove and spilled across the counter to the sink where a large, square-shaped woman was running water over a yellow plate, swiping at it with a brush.

  “Berta?” Roseanne could hear the relief in her own voice. She had been hoping Berta would be here. Sometimes she left when Mervin threw a party and pretended the party wasn’t going on. Mervin was her brother’s boy, but he was her own now, she always said, ever since a drunk had run down her own boy in Riverton, and he was just thirteen, starting to live. Mervin had been about eleven, and from then on, he could do pretty much whatever he wanted, as far as Berta was concerned, just so long as he stayed alive.

  Berta swung around, surprise flashing in her dark eyes. She was in her forties, with long black hair streaked with gray, caught in back by a beaded comb. A few strands spilled about her face. “Party too much for you?” she said, her eyes settling down.

  “Something’s happened.” Roseanne glanced toward the living room, half-expecting Lionel or Dwayne to show up. The shaking started again, and she clasped her hands together to keep them from flying away.

  “Yeah? What?” Berta threw her own look in the direction of the living room. “One of them jerks come on to you? They’re all drunk.” Disgust flared in her eyes, and she blinked it back. “I told Mervin, this is the last party. Trouble is, he’ll just find a party somewheres else. Least I can keep an eye on him here.”

  “It’s not that,” Roseanne said. Keeping her voice low, she told about going to Ned’s house. “Lionel and Dwayne came running outside. They said Ned was dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “It can’t be true.” She was crying now, the words choking out of her. “They said he was shot in the chest. He might still be alive. He could be ...”

  “You call 911?”

  “They wouldn’t let me.”

  “What?”

  “They don’t want to get involved. They think the fed will try to pin it on them.”

  “Ned the only one there?”

  Roseanne peered at the woman through the moisture in her eyes. Berta knew about the white girl; everybody knew. “The girl’s there,” she said. “Lionel said maybe she was moving.”

  “My God! We gotta report this.” Berta grabbed a towel and began drying her hands.

  “They’ll kill me if they find out I called the police.”

  “Go on back to the party,” Berta said. “Make sure they see you.” She tossed the towel onto the counter, walked over to the phone, and lifted it off the hook.

  FATHER JOHN PRESSED down on the brake pedal and steered the old Toyota pickup toward the flashing red, blue, and yellow lights. He could see the dark uniforms of the Wind River Police milling about the vehicles parked in front of a small, blocklike house. Lights flared in the windows and the opened door. A couple of officers bumped into each other in the doorway.

  He switched off the motor and got out. Nobody seemed to notice another pickup in the swirl of colored lights. The night was hot, as if all the heat of the day had compressed against the earth. The black sky was filled with stars. It was the first Tuesday in July, the Moon when the Buffalo Bellow, in the Arapaho Way of naming time. It could have been peaceful here. He wondered if that was ever the case.

  Another murder on the reservation. How many murders had he been called out on in the ten years he had been at St. Francis Mission? More than he could count, and all the calls the same: “Sorry to bother you, Father. We got another dead body. I’m sure the family would appreciate . . .”

  And he would go. John Aloysius O’Malley, Jesuit priest, Irishman from Boston, pastor of a mission church on the Wind River Reservation. Boston was so long ago—another life teaching American history in a Jesuit prep school and drinking himself senseless on the weekends—that he seldom thought about it. This was home now. The call from the dispatcher at the Wind River Police had come thirty minutes ago. A dead body in a house in Arapahoe. No positive ID, but the house was in the name of Ella Windsong. Father John’s heart had gone into overdrive. The last he’d heard, Ned Windsong, Ella’s nephew, had been staying at the house.

  He realized he had been hoping there was some mistake, but this was the same house he had come to last year to anoint Ella’s father, Albert, before he died. The Windsong family had been parishioners at St. Francis Mission longer than he had been here. He had known Ned since he was a kid, brown face and big teeth, playing first base on the Eagles baseball team. Ned had moved to Jackson Hole for a while, but then he’d come home. He’d stopped by the mission twice, something on his mind each time, Father John thought, but when he tried to ask, Ned had shrugged away the question. He was going to go into the Sun Dance, he said. Donald Little Robe, one of the elders, would sponsor him, be his spiritual grandfather, teach him the prayers and the rituals and help him catch up to the other dancers who had been preparing for most of the year. “I wanna get back to myself,” Ned had told him.

  “There you are, John.” Ted Gianelli, the local FBI agent, emerged out of the shadows and colored lights. “Coroner’s about to bag the body. You want to say a prayer first?”

  Father John fell in beside the fed through the tunnel of official vehicles—white Jeep, coroner’s van, three or four white police cars with BIA Police on the sides. Homicide was a federal case, he knew, but the rez police would assist Gianelli in gathering evidence. “You have a positive ID?” he said.

 
“Not official.” Gianelli was six foot two, a couple inches shorter than Father John, but there was bulk to the man—barrel-chested, thick-necked, and dark hair going to gray. Twenty-five years ago he had been tackling ballcarriers for the New England Patriots. He still looked as if he could stop a grizzly bear.

  He stopped and Father John felt the pressure of a mitt-sized hand on his arm. “Girlfriend says it’s Ned Windsong. Somebody shot him in the chest. We found the casing; looks like a .380 caliber. No weapon anywhere. I’m sorry, John. I know you knew the guy.”

  Father John nodded. The colored lights flashed in the blackness, the lights in the house glowed in the windows—a nightmare, he thought, something unreal and unholy.

  “You sure you want to see him?”

  “Yeah,” Father John said. He took a moment before following Gianelli into the house, across the living room, and down a short hallway. The house had been ransacked—drawers pulled open, chairs tossed about, cushions and pillows and clothes scattered on the floor. Police officers and technicians and a man in a yellow jacket carrying a camera parted as they approached.

  A couple of other technicians and a gray-haired man that Father John recognized as the Fremont County coroner huddled over the bed. The coroner looked around, then they all stepped back, and Father John walked over. Ned was in the middle, sheets and blankets bunched around his body. Eyes open, the frozen stare of a corpse; mouth half-open and rounded in surprise or, Father John thought, the beginning of a shout. Part of his plaid shirt looked sucked into the blood-crusted hole in his chest.

  Father John leaned in close. Making the sign of the cross in the air over the young man’s forehead, his mouth, his heart, he prayed out loud: “May God have mercy on your soul, Ned. May he take you to himself and show you his promise of everlasting life.”

  The room had gone quiet for a moment, then someone said, “Amen.” There were small sounds of footsteps shuffling behind him. Father John stayed at the bedside, praying silently, a part of his mind screaming: This cannot be. Ned Windsong, full of life, stopping by the mission, two weeks ago? Then again last week? “How are the Eagles doing? Need an assistant coach?”

  Father John had told him that he was welcome to help coach any time. But Ned hadn’t come back.

  It wasn’t long afterward that the white girl had arrived.

  “You said you talked to his girlfriend.” Father John stepped back and looked at Gianelli.

  The fed gave a short nod. “Ambulance took the girl to Riverton Memorial. She was roughed up pretty bad. Said two guys burst in here shouting for the money Ned owed them. Hit her a couple of times when she tried to get in the way. Pushed Ned into the bedroom and shot him. We found her on the floor in a fetal position.” He nodded toward the empty space between the dresser and a chair.

  “She called you?”

  “No.” Gianelli took a second before he went on. “She might’ve been unconscious. It was an anonymous call. Let’s get outta here.” He took hold of Father John’s arm and steered him through the door and back down the hall into the living room. “Marcy Morrison’s her name,” he said. “White girl, twenty-two, about five foot seven, blonde. Pretty enough. You ever heard of her?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of her,” Father John said. He could see the dark red pickup slowing through the tunnel of cottonwoods that led into the mission grounds and pulling around Circle Drive. Oklahoma plates. And the girl with blonde hair climbing out from behind the steering wheel. The white tee shirt that stopped above the top of her blue jeans, the three inches of exposed pink skin. “She came to the mission two weeks ago looking for Ned. Said he was her fiancé.”

  “Fiancé? And she didn’t know where to find him?” Gianelli kept his eyes steady.

  “Some misunderstanding,” Father John said. “I told her I’d make inquiries, but she didn’t come back.” Father John took a moment. “She told me her name. She seemed to think I should know who she was.”

  “Do you?”

  “No,” he said.

  3

  FATHER JOHN FOLLOWED the red taillights ahead. Every once in a while a gust of wind pitched the old pickup off course. The night was silver in the moonlight, and black windows gaped in the houses set back from Plunkett Road. “You want to notify the family?” Gianelli had said. There was no one to notify except Ella, Ned’s aunt. She had raised him from the age of two, after his mother died and his father took off for Denver or Oklahoma. Ned was a teenager when he heard that his father had been killed in a car wreck in Texas.

  Officer Henders, an Arapaho who looked about twenty-five, had offered to come along, and Father John was grateful. It was the hardest part of his job, knocking on doors in the middle of the night, bearing unbearable news. One minute, everything the same for the family, and in the next minute, everything changed forever.

  He followed the police car into a right turn across the borrow ditch and around the sagebrush that dotted the dirt yard. The image of Ned Windsong stretched on the bed, a hole in his chest, alternated with an image of the wide, trusting face of Ella. He had seen her two weeks ago when he’d stopped by Ned’s house to tell him about Marcy Morrison. Ned wasn’t home, so he had driven over to Ella’s.

  “Fiancé?” she had said, turning one ear toward him, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. She had let out a peal of laughter. “So that’s why he’s been acting so weird. Gonna marry a white girl? Well, that’s okay with me, long as it’s okay with him. I’m gonna have a talk with that boy,” she had said. “No sense in keeping secrets.”

  The house had looked normal then, gray siding, greenish roof, Ella’s pickup nosed against the front stoop, a white propane tank anchoring the clothesline on the left side. Now the house looked desolate, like a vacant dwelling adrift on the silvery plains. Father John parked next to the police car and headed for the stoop, Officer Henders’s boots scuffing the dirt behind him. He knocked on the door and wondered how many of these calls the young man waiting at the foot of the steps had made; it never got easier, he wanted to say.

  The door opened a few inches. Ella peered around the edge, shadows playing over her face. Her black hair was sleep-mussed; the hem of her white robe snaked past the door. She was still in her forties, but she looked older, worn down. He saw the picture that she was seeing: the priest and the policeman, the solemn looks plastered on their faces, and everything about them, he was sure, screaming the news. He watched the puzzlement in her eyes give way to understanding. She flung the door open wide. “No!” she screamed. She started backpedaling across the living room, crashing against a lamp that thudded onto the floor, glancing off the back of a chair, until she was pressed up against the far wall. “No! No! No!”

  Father John stepped inside, the officer behind him. He found a light switch on the wall that turned on a lamp next to the sofa. A dim circle of light fell over the rug in the middle of the room. “I’m sorry, Ella,” he said. “We have very bad news.”

  But she knew that already, doubled over now, both hands clasped against her mouth. “Oh, God, no,” she said, the words garbled in grief. “Not Ned. Tell me it’s not Ned.”

  Father John walked over and placed an arm around her shoulder. She was dead weight, leaning against him, her slippers skimming the surface of the rug as he led her to the sofa. She dropped onto the cushion, as if she had fallen from the ceiling. He sat down beside her and slipped his arm around her again, aware of Officer Henders standing just inside the door, gripping his cap against his stomach. “I’m sorry,” Father John said again. “Ned was shot tonight.”

  She snapped her head sideways and looked at him. Hope flickered in her eyes.

  “He’s dead,” Father John said.

  She dropped her face into both hands and seemed to pull inward, gathering herself around a new reality. The house was quiet. He could hear the in and out of the officer’s breath a few feet away, the faint creaking of boards and plaster in the night. “How did it happen,” Ella said.

  Father John told her that he was
shot inside the house. “His fiancée said—”

  “The white girl.” Ella gave him another sideways look, than leaned into the back cushion. Her hands curled in her lap, small and red against the white robe.

  “Two men burst into the house, shot Ned, and attacked the girl.”

  “She call the police?”

  “The girl was unconscious,” Officer Henders said. “Ambulance took her to Riverton Memorial. An anonymous call came in, and we’re checking the phone records.”

  “Out of nowhere, two men bust through the front door and kill him?” Ella lifted both hands, then let them drop back into her lap. “Ned never hurt anybody. He came home to pledge the Sun Dance. He was working hard, learning the prayers and ritual, running and fasting, making himself strong. Those two men”—she brought her lips together in a thin line—“they took his life from him. They took everything. They should die themselves.”

  Father John took her hands into his. “Can we call someone?” he said.

  “Call Ned.” She was sobbing, great expulsions of breath that shook her body. “Ned looks after me. Ned comes when I need something.”

  Father John let the grief play out a moment. He could feel the pulse throbbing in her hands. Finally she said, “Marie and Jerry. My sister and her husband. Jerry looked after Ned, hired him and his buddies on the ranch, seen they stayed out of trouble. Call Marie and Jerry.” She lifted a hand in the direction of the kitchen. “Number’s on the pad by the phone.”

  “I’ll make the call.” Officer Henders crossed the living room in three steps and vanished through an arched doorway, as if he welcomed something to do. A column of light burst out of the kitchen and swept the shadows into the edges of the living room. There were beeping sounds as he tapped out the number, then the officer’s voice, a muffled drone, low and serious.

  “It’s gonna be hard on ’em.” Ella turned toward him. Her eyes were wide and reddened, tears beading in the corners. “They treated Ned like he was their own. Jerry’s gonna want to know who did this. You know Jerry?”