The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Read online

  Liz waited for the rest of it.

  “Don’t come back, Liz. I don’t need this stuff. I left it all behind.” She pushed herself off the door and started past. The pink robe hung open over a white tee shirt that stopped at her knees, the belt dangled at her sides. She glanced down at the baby. “God,” she said. “You got the baby in this, too.”

  “I have to talk to Robert,” Liz said. She was thinking about what Ardyth had said. There had been a snitch in Washington. Whoever it was could be on the rez. It was the snitch who had given up Brave Bird’s hiding place, not her. She had to tell Robert. “He’ll know what to do,” she said.

  “What? What’s he gonna tell you? Jump in your car and go back to the rez? Go back to AIM? Keep marching and demonstrating? Find some caravan of Indians going God knows where, lookin’ for the old buffalo days, thinking the Great White Father’s gonna give ’em back? Wake up! The buffalo days are gone, all the AIM members in the world can’t bring ’em back. You got to forget about Robert and get away from here, get yourself a job, take care of your baby. Yeah…” She drew her lips into a tight line; a red mark spread across her neck like a rash. “Be a white woman. What the hell difference does it make? Stay alive, Liz. That’s all that matters.”

  She started for the door, then placed her hands against the jamb and shoved herself backward. She turned around. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?” she said, a softer tone.

  Liz waited until the footsteps had padded across the living room and she heard Ardyth settling onto the cushions of the sofa. Then she went over to the phone. She lifted the receiver and set it on the counter. Cradling Luna in one arm, she leaned close to the phone to muffle the noise of the keys and dialed Robert’s number. She listened to the buzzing in her ear, shivering, the chill running into her bones. She let it ring a dozen times before she hung up.

  22

  VICKY FOUND HERSELF watching for the silver sedan. Driving south on Highway 287, down Main Street, through the intersections. Glancing at the side streets wondering if it was there, parked at a curb, waiting for her Jeep to pass. She pulled into the parking lot next to the office building and got out, still looking around—a habit now, she supposed. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the silver sedan was somewhere close. Listen to the danger, Grandmother had said. It will tell you when it approaches. Listen and be ready.

  She took the stairs that rose alongside the window that framed part of the parking lot and part of the street with pickups and SUVs crawling past. The outer office was vacant when she stepped inside. The minute she shut the door, Annie emerged from Roger’s office, holding a thin stack of file folders.

  “Phone’s been ringing all morning,” she said, waving the folders toward the desk. “I been here alone. Roger’s over at the jail. Two Raps picked up on disorderly and disturbance in Riverton last night, but Roger says he’ll have ’em out today. Couple of whites also involved. Funny thing, nobody arrested them.” Annie walked over and stared down at the phone, as if it might ring again and she wanted to be ready. “Had to let some calls go to voicemail. Word’s spread about the shooting last night. People want to know if you’re okay. You’d better call your Aunt Rose. You sure you’re okay?” She hurried on before Vicky could do anything more than give a quick nod. “Oh, and you got a call from that law office in Denver.” She handed Vicky a small sheet of paper with a name and telephone number written on it.

  Vicky glanced at the name of the prominent criminal attorney in Denver: Marshall Owens of Owens and Lattimore. This was about the assault in the alley again. The man wasn’t wasting any time mounting a strong defense for his client. She folded the sheet and stuffed it into her pocket. “What about Diana?” she said.

  Annie shook her head. “I’m sure she’ll call back, except…”

  “Except what?”

  “She sounded kind of scared, I guess. Didn’t want to leave her number, and the caller ID was blocked. Like she doesn’t want anybody knowing the number, even you.”

  Diana was scared, all right, Vicky thought. She walked over to the door on the right, let herself into her private office, and sat down at her desk. Anonymous, threatening calls in the middle of the night. Of course Diana was scared. She wouldn’t blame her if she never came back to the rez.

  And what would that be? Another woman intimidated, running away.

  She tapped at the keys on the computer until the morning’s phone calls appeared on the screen. She scrolled through the list: Aunt Rose—she would have to call her right away, reassure her; two members of the tribal council; two elders, two grandmothers, a couple of people she hardly knew—family friends, people she’d gone to school with. All of them worried about her. She stared at the names. Odd how black type on a computer screen, words as flimsy as air, could have such an effect, make her eyes brim with tears until the words themselves melted before her. This was home; this was where she belonged. No one could make her run away.

  She picked up the phone and called Aunt Rose, clearing her throat before she could speak when she heard the old woman’s voice. “I’m fine,” she managed. “Please don’t worry about me.” Then, before Aunt Rose could issue the usual warnings, she said, “We know the girl’s name. Liz Plenty Horses. She was Arapaho, but she’d lived at Pine Ridge. Did you ever know the family?”

  “Plenty Horses.” The name seemed to roll around Aunt Rose’s tongue. “Old man by that name, lived in a trailer. Had a daughter named Mona, kinda wild, you ask me. Drinkin’ and runnin’ around, not taking care of her kid. Little girl, I recall. Then one day, the daughter and her kid were up and gone. Ran off with a Lakota that come through here. Darn near broke the old man’s heart, ’cause they were all the family he had. Died a few years later. I heard he left the trailer to the kid.”

  The kid was Liz, Vicky was thinking, and she’d come home with her own baby, because she had a place where she could live. “What do you know about the kid?” she said, realizing Aunt Rose was waiting at the other end.

  “Don’t know I ever heard what became of her. Guess I always figured she stayed at Pine Ridge. Vicky, you be careful. Hear me?”

  Vicky said she heard and hung up. Then she dialed the number for Owens and Lattimore and waited through the ringing, the receptionist, the secretary. She asked to speak to Marshall Owens. Finally, a male voice booming down the line: “Howdy, Ms. Holden,” he said. “I’m representing Theo Gosman, the man you believe assaulted a young woman last week. We’d like to interview you and the other witnesses about what you think you saw. We’ll be talking to your son, Lucas, tomorrow. We can send a lawyer to Lander, if you prefer.”

  What she preferred, Vicky was thinking, was that Theo Gosman was brought to trial, convicted and sent to prison as soon as possible. “I’ll come to Denver,” she heard herself saying, and it hit her that maybe she was running, too. Away from the silver sedan, from the half-truths and silence, from the sound of crying in her dreams. She would spend a couple of days with Lucas. And she wanted to see how the girl in the alley was doing. She told him she’d drive to Denver tomorrow.

  “Wonderful!” Owens said, as if he’d been prepared for a struggle. “We’ll expect you at our office at ten o’clock the day after tomorrow.”

  “How is the girl?” Vicky said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The victim. I believe her name is Julie Reynolds.”

  “I don’t believe that’s relevant…”

  “Oh, it’s relevant, all right.”

  “I see. I’m afraid I don’t have that information,” Owens said. Then he was thanking her for her cooperation, the usual niceties before the call ended, leaving a deadened buzz, a background noise to the phone ringing in the outer office.

  She pressed the off key, still gripping the receiver, not taking her eyes from the closed door. It was a couple of seconds after the ringing stopped that the door cracked open and Annie’s head poked around the edge. “It’s Diana,” she said, almost a whisper.

  Now the phone key: “Di
ana? Are you okay?”

  “I’m at my sister’s.” The words came in a rush, breathless and shaky. “Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

  Vicky told her not to worry.

  “I been checking my messages at home,” Diana went on. “There’s gotta be a dozen calls. Most hang ups, but some of them…”

  “A man’s voice?”

  “Same as before. Warning me off. God, Vicky, what if there’s a chance he’s the same guy that killed that poor girl?”

  There was every chance, Vicky was thinking. She was about to tell Diana to stay at her sister’s as long as possible, when Diana said, “I got another message from some woman. She saw one of the flyers we put up around the county, had my telephone number on ’em. Said she knew Liz. Didn’t leave a name, but she left her number.”

  Vicky was already pulling a notepad out of the desk drawer, searching for a pen. She jotted down the number Diana gave her.

  “I’m scared to call her,” Diana was saying. “What if she’s not for real? What if she and the guy leaving the messages are working together and she just wants to lure me into some kind of trap?”

  “I’ll call her,” Vicky said, but she could feel a sharp prick of uncertainty. Diana could be right. The call might be nothing more than a trap set by the man in the silver sedan for two women—her and the woman on the other end of the line—determined to get justice for a girl murdered a long time ago.

  She told Diana to stay at her sister’s and hung up. Then she dialed the number she’d printed out on the notepad. Four, five rings. She waited for an answering machine to kick in, but it was a woman’s voice, tentative and questioning, that came on the line. “Hello?”

  Vicky gave her name, and said she was a lawyer in Lander and that she was returning the call about the flyer. “Did you know Liz Plenty Horses?” she said.

  “I’m not coming to the rez.” A familiar note had worked its way into the woman’s voice—the shrill note of fear.

  “Where are you?” Vicky said. “I can come to you.”

  “Casper.”

  Vicky glanced at her watch. Almost two o’clock. “I can be there about four,” she said.

  The woman gave her an address, apartment eleven, she said. Vicky scribbled the numbers onto the pad. “Who am I looking for?”

  “Mary.” She stopped, as if she were considering whether to give the rest of it. A tapping noise—a pencil or pen drumming against a hard surface—sounded at the other end. “Hennings,” she said. “I used to live in Lander.”

  THE APARTMENT BUILDING was a two-story blond affair, with a brick façade and black-trimmed windows that gaped onto the quiet street running past. Vicky left the Jeep near the entrance and found the name Hennings and the number 11 above one of the mail slots in the foyer. There was a glass door that opened when Vicky pulled on the knob. She walked down the carpeted corridor that had a smell of newness—new carpet, new paint—glancing at the black metal numbers on the doors as she passed; 9, 10. She was about to knock on the door with a number 1 and a faint space where the other numeral belonged when the door inched backward.

  “You Vicky?”

  It surprised Vicky. She’d expected a white woman with the name of Mary Hennings, but the woman was Arapaho, sixtyish, thin with bony cheeks and long, bony fingers laid against the door frame. She had a beaked nose, dark, squinting eyes, and a long neck that rose out of the collars of a blue dress. Her hair was gray and thinning. Vicky could see the white traces of scalp. “I heard you coming,” she said, swinging the door into a small, tidy living room.

  Vicky stepped inside. “Thanks for calling,” she said. “Women on the rez want to see Liz’s killer held accountable. The elders feel the same.”

  “What makes you think they’re still around?”

  “They?”

  The woman nodded. “There were two of them. I just made some coffee.”

  Vicky said a cup of coffee sounded good, and the woman made her way around the sofa and small table with a place setting for one, positioned in front of the television, and went into the kitchen. She looked even more angular from the back: sharp, squared shoulders, shoulder blade lines that protruded through the blue fabric of her dress, flat, sticklike legs. There was the clap of a door shutting, the clink of glass. She came back carrying two mugs with steam curling over the rims. “Go ahead and sit down,” she said, the scolding tone of a teacher—or a nurse—and placed the mugs next to a stack of magazines on the table in front of the sofa. She headed back into the kitchen.

  Vicky took the end cushion and reached for one of the mugs. It had been a long drive, or maybe she was just tired from the lack of sleep last night. The coffee tasted like hazelnuts, and Vicky realized the only thing she’d eaten today was a breakfast bar she munched on this morning as she’d driven to Ruth’s.

  The woman was back, rearranging the magazines to make room for a plate of cookies. “Help yourself,” she said, dropping down onto the chair across from the table. She was breathing hard, as if the whole exercise had been strenuous.

  “What do you mean, there were two of them?” Vicky said.

  “They came to my house.” She lifted her mug and sipped at the coffee. “I went by Ardyth then,” she said. “Ardyth LeConte. After I got married, I started using my middle name, Mary. It seemed like a good idea to…” She took another drink, then traced the tip of the mug with a finger, considering. “Disappear.”

  “You were Liz’s friend,” Vicky said.

  “I always thought she got away.” The woman was shaking her head, a slow, sorrowful motion. “I guess I was hoping she got away. It was what I wanted, but in my gut…” She hesitated and took in a gulp of air. “I always knew they’d get her. I just put it out of my mind. I had to go on, you see. Got married. Got a new name. I wanted to put it all behind me.”

  “She came to you the night she was leaving?”

  Mary Hennings nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “Ruth Yellow Bull.”

  She gave a snort of laughter. “Surprises me Ruth told you anything. She was in thick with all the AIM people. We were friends for a while.” She leaned forward and set her mug on the table. “If you want to know the truth, I was part of the movement myself. Went to Washington on the march. What a farce. After we got out of the BIA building alive, I said that was enough for me. I was going to follow the white road, learn to do something, get myself a job. I came back to the rez. Liz, Ruth, Loreen, the rest of them went on to Pine Ridge. ’Course, I didn’t blame Liz. She had a baby coming, and what was she supposed to do? The guy she was with, Jimmie Iron—now he was a real good leader. Everybody trusted Jimmie. He got killed in an alley. Liz didn’t have any family. Robert promised to take care of her.”

  “Robert?”

  “Running Wolf. Another Lakota, if I remember right. One of the leaders of our bunch, along with Jimmie. A lot of ’em considered themselves leaders. You know, all chiefs, no Indians. Another one of ’em, Brave Bird, got shot in Ethete, and that pretty much left Robert and two or three others. Always acted like he was in charge anyway, Robert did. Didn’t like anybody else trying to run things. He was always doing the organizing—go here, march there, protest over there.”

  “Where can I find this Robert Running Wolf?”

  “I heard he left the rez that summer and went to Minneapolis, and I haven’t heard of him since. Could be dead, for all I know. Lot of ’em are dead now.”

  Vicky took another sip of coffee, then bit into one of the cookies. After a moment, she said, “What happened the night she came to your house?”

  “She was pounding on my door. She was crying. Had her baby, Luna, all wrapped up and in a cardboard box, holding on for dear life.”

  “Luna,” Vicky said, letting the name stay on her tongue a moment. The baby’s name was Luna.

  “You gotta help me, she says,” the woman went on. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t real glad to see her, ’cause I’d left that life behind. I was training for my LPN. They’d come ove
r to my place a few times, Liz and Ruth and some of the other girls, trying to get me to reconsider. ‘What’re whites ever gonna do for you?’ they’d say. ‘AIM’s helping people.’ And maybe there was some truth in it, I used to think. Maybe I never would’ve got into the training course if it wasn’t for the fact that the hospital didn’t want AIM demonstrating out in front. I let Liz in, of course. But I told her she had to leave in the morning. I’m not proud of it, but I was scared. Some of the AIM people were mean, and they were violent. I saw enough in D.C. If she was in trouble, I didn’t want them coming after me.”

  “They thought she’d snitched on Brave Bird and gotten him killed, but they were wrong,” Vicky said. Then she told her about the anonymous phone call to the Feds that had been made by a man.

  Mary was nodding, as if she’d already worked it out that it wasn’t Liz who had snitched. “Whole thing was a big misunderstanding, just like she said. That’s why she was trying to get ahold of Robert. Kept calling and calling, but he didn’t answer. She said Robert would straighten everything out. But they came to the house for her.”

  “Who came?” Vicky said. For the first time, she felt herself getting closer to the girl, as if she might reach out and touch her hand.

  “Jake Tallfeathers, you heard of him? Called himself Jake Walker when he come to the rez. Always throwing his weight around, acting like a big shot. Couldn’t lead an old mare to water. He was mean, though. Never understood what Loreen saw in him. Used to beat the hell outta her. Jesus, why’d she stay with him? I saw in the paper that he got run over by a truck in Rapid City. I didn’t think there’d be anybody crying over that.”

  “You said there were two of them who came after Liz.”

  “Other guy stayed in the truck. Never saw his face; didn’t want to look, tell you the truth. Didn’t want to know. Liz and the baby stayed in the bedroom. I thought I was going to throw up, I was so scared the baby’d start crying or Jake’d take it upon himself to search my little place. But he stomped out. He was drunk. The whole place smelled like whiskey after he left. I knew after he sobered up he’d be back. So did Liz. She wanted to leave then, but I convinced her to wait ’til dawn, cause they were probably cruising the streets looking for her car. She stayed, kept trying to get ahold of Robert, and that’s what happened. He finally answered the phone, told her AIM was looking all over for her. She was crying, I remember, saying that she hadn’t done anything. He told her it was going to take him a while to convince the others. She should go to the safe house in Denver. I gave her thirty bucks. It was all I had, and she and the baby left in the morning. I always thought she made it to Denver, stayed in the safe house awhile, then got away. Really got away. I used to imagine her in L.A. with a big singing career. She could really sing, that girl. Or maybe Nashville. She would’ve been good there. Raising her kid, marrying some nice guy that would look after her.”