The Story Teller (10 page)

He climbed out of the Toyota and stamped his long legs against the asphalt, trying to work out the knots in his muscles. He’d driven five hundred miles across the endless stretches of Wyoming plains with the windows rolled halfway down to take the edge off the heat and
Rigoletto
blaring around him. He’d seen only a few more semis, some pickups, and several herds of antelope
until he’d looped past Cheyenne and started south toward Denver, traffic, houses, and shopping malls accumulating with the miles.

Exiting the highway, he’d followed the side streets to Regis, a route he always took when the provincial called the Jesuit superiors in the region to a meeting. Except he hadn’t been summoned to this week’s meetings. He had summoned himself.

He grabbed the overnight bag from the far side of the seat and slammed the door—a sharp
thwack
that set a dog barking somewhere nearby. As he strode along the sidewalk that flanked the building, he felt oddly confident, even though the provincial’s emissary had turned thumbs down on the museum. Father William Rutherford was a reasonable man. A Jesuit trademark—reasonableness.

He let his finger rest on the doorbell at the front entrance. From inside came a muffled buzz, followed by a slow shuffle of footsteps. The door inched open. An old man with cropped, graying hair, twinkling eyes, and a sardonic grin on his Irish face craned forward, peering through the opening. It was Timothy Butler, one of the last of the Jesuit brothers, the jacks-of-all-trades who looked after the thousands of details that kept everything repaired and running smoothly. How many times Father John had wished the Society of Jesus could spare a brother for St. Francis Mission.

“Ah, Father O’Malley. You’re looking the bloom of health.” Timothy Butler stepped backward, a jerky movement, pushing the door behind him. “Is it you’ll be gracing us with your presence awhile?”

“How are you, Timothy?” Father John asked, stepping inside. A soft amber light from the glass ceiling overhead flooded the small entry: the dark, tiled floor, the wooden bench flanked by two doors on the right wall, the staircase on the opposite wall. Quiet seeped through the residence.

“Is it the provincial you’re wanting to see?” A grin broke across the brother’s face. “We may be graced with yourself for some time, Father.”

Father John stifled a groan. He’d promised Geoff he’d be back for the weekend in time for his assistant to spend a couple days, at least, backpacking in the Wind River Mountains. His assistant needed some time off, he knew. He’d been working alone for a month. It wasn’t easy, running the mission alone.

Nodding toward the stairway, Brother Timothy said, “You’ll be wanting the guest room on the second floor.” He reached over and attempted to take the overnight bag Father John held in his hand.

“Save your knees for the races ahead, Timothy,” Father John said. He started up the stairs, then stopped, one hand on the wood railing polished glass smooth, and looked back at the old man caught in the circle of amber light. “Is the provincial in?”

Brother Timothy’s eyebrows knitted together in a long, thin line. “Well, now, I wouldn’t know, Father. His suite is on the third floor. Should I find the man for you?”

“I’ll find him.” Father John gave a quick wave. He hurried up the stairs and strode down the corridor on the left. Rows of closed doors marched along both sides, and from somewhere came a loud guffaw and the electronic noise of a TV. He let himself into the guest room. A thread of light spilled past the drapes at the window on the opposite wall. He found the light switch next to the door and snapped it on. A dim yellowish light glowed over a desk, bare except for a phone, a chair shoved into the well, a cotlike bed—white pillow, brown blanket stretched taut: a monk’s cell.

Just as he dropped his overnight bag on the bed, the telephone jangled, an impertinent sound in the quiet. He reached toward the desk and picked up the receiver,
hardly believing his luck. Brother Timothy must have called the provincial after all, and the provincial was in.

“This Father O’Malley?” A man’s voice, infused with the politeness of a Native American.

“Yes.” He stretched the cord across the narrow space and perched on the edge of the bed, his muscles tensing with apprehension. Something must have happened on the reservation.

“This here’s Petey Wilkins. Just come from over at old man Doyal’s house. You know him, don’t ya? Doyal Harris?”

Father John shifted his thoughts. The call was from Denver and had something to do with Todd Harris’s grandparents, the elderly Arapaho couple he always tried to see when he was in town. Good people. He admired them. After their own son and his wife had died in an automobile accident, Doyal and Mary had helped to raise Todd and his brother.

“Are they okay?” Father John braced himself for the reply.

“Wouldn’t say so, Father. Them victim’s assistance people just took ’em over to the morgue. Looks like maybe that grandson of theirs, Todd Harris—you know him, don’t you?—well, looks like he might be dead.”

Father John was on his feet. “Dead! What are you talking about?” The words burst forth like a gust of steam.

After a long silence, the voice said, “Looks like Todd might be the kid police fished outta the river today. I seen it on TV. Doyal seen it, too, and he said it give him a real bad feeling.”

It took a moment for the information to work its way into Father John’s mind, past the barriers he consciously tried to erect. Todd Harris was a graduate student at CU-Denver. He would be the director of the museum Father John had come to Denver to get approved. And Todd had been at the mission last Saturday.
He couldn’t be dead. “What happened?” he managed.

“Don’t know for sure, Father. ‘Cept the story I hear is it might be homicide, and some lawyer lady from the reservation went to the morgue and said it was Todd. So Doyal and Mary had to go give a positive family ID.”

Here was another piece of information Father John struggled to locate in the realignment of reality: Vicky Holden was in Denver. He’d spent the last month in Boston praying for the strength to keep his vows and keep her out of his mind. And now she was here. And she had identified Todd! Dear God, he prayed. Let it not be Todd. Let there be some mistake.

The voice droned on: something about Doyal asking him to call Father O’Malley so the priest could give the bad news to the rest of Todd’s family on the reservation. But when he’d phoned up St. Francis Mission, he’d gotten some other priest who said Father O’Malley was at Regis. So he’d called up here.

Father John thanked the man and put down the phone. He felt as if he’d just heard a story about someone he didn’t know—a character in some novel where the plot takes a strange and terrible twist. How could the story have anything to do with the kid who used to hang around his office after baseball practice and pester him about the past—the long-ago? What was it like before the gold seekers came to the plains? How come they took the land from the Indians? Wasn’t it their land?

He’d advised Todd to study history. There was no other way to satisfy the hunger for the past, the longing to sort out what had happened, as if sorting out the past might explain the present. Father John knew the hunger. He was about Todd’s age when it had begun gnawing at him. It had shaped his career. He’d spent ten years teaching American history in Jesuit prep schools back East. He’d been working on his doctorate, aiming to
ward a position at a Jesuit university, when the hunger had given way to the terrible, implacable thirst that had changed his life and sent him to St. Francis Mission.

There had been so many compensations. The people, the stories of the elders, and the spring day Todd Harris had slammed through the office door, waving a brown envelope and shouting, “I’m in! I’m in!” The next fall he’d gone off to the University of Wyoming and, four years later he’d started working on his master’s in Denver. Now Todd Harris was dead.

The phone screeched, jarring him out of the memories. Brother Timothy. It seemed the provincial had an engagement this evening and wasn’t aware of an appointment with Father O’Malley. “You had an appointment, did you not, Father?”

He did not. How unimportant it seemed: the long drive to Denver, the meeting with the provincial, the pleading and cajoling and reasoning that would take place. How unimportant, now that Todd Harris was dead. He thanked the brother and hung up.

*   *   *   

Vicky drove through Denver in the gathering darkness, struggling to hold back the tears of anger and grief welling inside her like thunderclouds building over the mountains. Once the tears came, she knew, there would be a flood. She kept the front windows rolled down, allowing the coolness of the summer evening and the noise of the city to wash over her, as if they might obliterate the picture she had snapped at the morgue and would carry forever in her mind.

She’d waited with Steve until Doyal and Mary Harris had arrived. Then she’d waited out front in the darkness of the evening while they viewed the body. Several cars and trucks had streamed into the parking lot across the street. The moccasin telegraph was alive and well in the city, Vicky had thought as she watched the men and
women tumble out of the vehicles and gather in shadowy groups, welded together in shock and grief.

Finally Doyal and Mary had emerged, and she’d offered to drive them home, but a young man—a spiritual grandson, perhaps—had bounded across the street and ushered the old couple toward a white sedan, the metal grille gleaming under the streetlight.

Now headlights danced toward her, bursting across the asphalt median on I-25. Her mind kept coming back to what Steve had said. Another drug murder. Somebody sells. Somebody buys. Somebody ends up dead. Fighting back tears, Vicky gripped the steering wheel and pointed the Taurus toward the taillights ahead. Todd Harris was not a drug dealer. But whoever had killed him wanted the police to believe otherwise. The killer had planted the drugs and pager on Todd’s body.

Why couldn’t Steve see that? He’d investigated dozens of homicides. “You get a feeling for what happened,” he’d once told her. “The minute you see the body, it’s like a film starts rolling, and you see it all just as it took place, and nine times out of ten you’re right.”

“Nine times out of ten.” The sound of her own voice surprised her. What if Steve was right this time? What if she was the one clinging to an idea, fixed and immutable in her mind, that Todd Harris was what he had always seemed? People changed. Maybe she was the one who needed to change, needed to stop being so stubborn.

Suddenly she realized by the green-and-white signs shining overhead that she had missed her exit. She took the next off-ramp, crossed the highway, and entered it again, this time heading north. At Alameda, she exited west onto the narrow, traffic-clogged street lined with warehouses and going-out-of-business furniture stores and empty squares where neighborhood groceries had once stood. She turned into a neighborhood of white frame houses with old trucks at the curbs and people
sitting on the sagging front porches—the Indian neighborhood of Denver.

She parked in front of the house where Mary and Doyal lived—a small, white bungalow—and waited a moment, taking some deep breaths, trying to get control. She’d come to pay respects to the old couple, to console them; she didn’t want to appear at the door and collapse into their arms in tears.

Finally she gathered her soft leather handbag and got out of the car just as a pickup backed into the space across the street. Headlights flashed over her, fixing her to the asphalt. It was a red Toyota, like the one John O’Malley drove. She caught her breath as the driver swung out—the long legs, the sure, athletic way he walked toward her. She knew him in the darkness.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as he reached her. Only this morning she had learned he was coming back to St. Francis, when for weeks she’d believed he had left for good, that she would never see him again. Now he was here, as if she had conjured him up out of her own pain, her own need.

He said, “I drove down today. I just heard about Todd.” He exhaled a long breath before adding softly, “I’m sorry, Vicky.”

It was then the tears came, hot and biting on her cheeks, salty in her mouth: tears for the young man on the gurney at the morgue, for the
Hinono eino
who were still losing the warriors—the best, the very best. She felt John O’Malley’s arms around her, his breath in her hair, the comfort of his heart beating close to hers.

After a moment he released her. She dug through her handbag for a wad of tissues and wiped up the aftermath of the flood. “I didn’t want to do that,” she heard herself explaining. “I wanted to be strong for Mary and Doyal.”

“I know,” he said softly, taking her arm. “Come on. We’ll go in together.”

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