Night of the White Buffalo (A Wind River Mystery) - Softcover

Coel, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425264661 ISBN 13: 9780425264669

Publisher: Berkley, 2015

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Margaret Coel returns to the Wind River Reservation with Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden and Father John O’Malley investigating a mystery overshadowed by a mythological miracle...

A mysterious penitent confesses to murder, and then flees the confessional before Father John can identify him. Two months later, Vicky discovers rancher Dennis Carey shot dead in his truck along Blue Sky Highway. With the tragic news comes the exposure of an astonishing secret: the most sacred creature in Native American mythology, a white buffalo calf, was recently born on Carey’s ranch.

The miraculous animal draws a flood of pilgrims to the reservation, frustrating Vicky and Father John’s already difficult investigation as they try to unravel the strange events surrounding both Carey’s murder and the recent disappearances of three cowboys from his ranch.

It could be coincidence, given a cowboy’s nomadic life, but Vicky doesn’t believe in coincidences. And at the back of Father John’s mind is the voice from the man in the confessional: I killed a man...

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Coel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of the acclaimed Wind River Mysteries featuring Father John O’Malley and Vicky Holden (Killing Custer, Buffalo Bill’s Dead Now, The Spider’s Web), as well as the Catherine McLeod Mysteries (The Perfect Suspect, Blood Memory) and several works of nonfiction. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENTS

1

Late June, the Moon When the Hot Weather Begins

THE CONFESSIONAL WAS warm and stuffy. The round light in the ceiling shone on the pages of the novel he was reading and radiated heat around the small area. He could hear the wind picking up outside, the June beginnings of the hot, dry winds that would scour the Wind River Reservation all summer. A cottonwood branch scratched at the corner of the church like an animal nibbling at the stucco.

Father John Aloysius O’Malley flexed his legs in the cramped space and checked his watch. Ten minutes before five. Confessions ran from three to five every Saturday afternoon, and the last penitent had left twenty minutes ago. He had heard the church door open and close, had felt the swish of fresh air wafting into the confessional through the slats on either side. Usually the same handful of parishioners came with a litany of the same sins. Got drunk. Yelled at the kids. Had impure thoughts about the next-door neighbor. Forgive me, Father.

He hadn’t heard anyone else enter the church, known as the new chapel the Arapahos had built at St. Francis Mission almost a hundred years ago, after the old chapel had burned down. He closed the Craig Johnson novel he was reading—Wyoming setting, people and places that seemed true and real—and switched off the light. Immediately the confessional felt cooler, or at the least not as warm. He had heard confessions at St. Francis Mission on the Wind River Reservation for more than ten years, longer than he had imagined he would be here. Six years was the usual assignment for a Jesuit, then on to a new place, new people, before a priest could become too attached, too set in his ways, too much at home.

He was at home with the Arapahos, a Plains Indian tribe he had once thought of as a footnote in a history book. Strange that he should be in this place. God worked in mysterious ways. Years of struggling with the thirst, in and out of rehab, stumbling through life teaching, or pretending to teach, in a Jesuit prep school in Boston. Then the assignment to an Indian reservation in the middle of Wyoming. He’d had to look up the place on the map. He had no idea where he was going. To the middle of nowhere, to the ends of the earth.

Father John got to his feet and was about to head out when the door to the penitent’s side on his left opened. He sat back down. In the dim light he watched the large, muscular figure folding himself downward on the other side of the screen. The kneeler creaked and groaned; a little tremor ran through the wooden confessional. The man wore a dark cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He propped his elbows on the ledge and dipped his face into his hands. He looked like an immense, dark shadow. Sharp smells of tobacco, whiskey, and perspiration trailed across the screen.

“You there, Father?” He had the roughened voice of a man who spent his days in the wind.

“I’m here.”

“Can’t remember what I’m supposed to do. It’s been a long time.”

“Start with what’s bothering you. What brought you here?”

The man didn’t say anything for several seconds. His breath came in quick, shallow spurts, as if he were trying not to cry. Finally he said, “I come for forgiveness.”

“What are your sins?”

“I committed murder.”

Father John felt as if he had taken a punch in the gut. On the other side of the screen, inches away, knelt a killer who wanted forgiveness. He thought he had heard almost everything in the confessional or in his office during counseling sessions. Adultery, robbery, theft, all kinds of violence against fellow human beings, even rape. He had heard it all. But no one had ever confessed to murder. “How did it happen?”

“I know what you’re doing. You’re looking for some way to forgive me. Defend myself? Defend somebody else? It wasn’t like that. I did it on purpose, what they call premeditated murder.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t have no choice.”

“We always have choices.” Father John tried to recall any recent unsolved murders on the rez. There weren’t any.

“Maybe in your world. I come from nothing.” The man was quiet for a moment, as if he had sunk into another time. “Lucky to get a bologna sandwich when I was a kid. Lived out of a truck. Dad always on the move trying to stay ahead of the law, until he took off. Left me and Mom and the truck, so Mom picked up waitress jobs, which wasn’t so bad. Least we got some food. Took off when I was fourteen, been on my own ever since. What I got I worked hard for. I been trying to hold on, and everything was gonna go away.”

“Did the man you killed steal from you?”

“It wasn’t nothing like that. Why did I think you’d understand?”

“I’m trying.”

“It was premeditated, okay? Get that in your head.”

“What do you expect from me?”

“I told you. Forgiveness.”

“Are you sorry for what you’ve done?”

“Sorry? Like I said, I had no choice. Why should I be sorry for something I had to do? Only one thing . . .” The man drew in a long breath and plunged his face deeper into his hands until only the crease of his cowboy hat was visible. “It’s like there’s no more sleep for me. I close my eyes and I see his face, the way he goes all pale when I lift the rifle, the way he tries to turn around, like he’s gonna run away from a rifle. I know the thoughts going through his head, like I’m thinking them myself. We could’ve been the same man, killer and victim.”

Father John waited a moment before he said, “There’s nothing I can say that you haven’t already figured out. You know what you have to do.”

The man was rocking back and forth, shaking his whole body. “No police.”

“You know it is the only way to help yourself.”

“Help myself to prison.”

“Acknowledge what you’ve done. And accept your just punishment. Ask God for forgiveness.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do. Tell me God forgives me. Go in peace. Go sleep. Say a Rosary or something. Isn’t that what confession’s all about?”

“Pray very hard for the courage and the strength to accept responsibility.”

“I don’t know why I come here.” The kneeler groaned as the man shuffled his weight back and forth. “It’s not like when Mom dragged me to some two-bit church in a flea-bitten town in Arizona or Nevada or someplace. She used her spit to wipe up my face and smooth my hair. ‘Tell the priest your sins and you’re gonna be forgiven and everything’s gonna be okay for us,’ she said, ‘’cause God knows we’re sorry for whatever we’ve done, like getting mixed up with that sonofabitch you think was your father and following that no-good all over creation. I’ll say I’m sorry for doing that, and you can say you’re sorry for back talking me all the time and being so lazy when I need you to help me out.’ So I’d go into the confessional and tell the truth. How I beat up a kid in the school yard, stole money out of Mom’s purse, smoked a joint. The priest said, ‘Don’t do that again. Make an act of contrition. Say three Hail Marys. Your sins are forgiven.’”

“Do you know about atonement?”

“What?”

“It’s not enough just to say we regret our sins.”

“I don’t regret what I had to do.”

“But you know what you did, taking a human life, was a terrible thing. Deep inside yourself you know that, and that’s why you can’t sleep. You are going to have to come to terms with what you did. You have to begin to regret it and acknowledge it.”

“How’s that gonna atone for anything? How’s that gonna make up? The guy’s still dead.”

“Until you acknowledge your guilt, you won’t know. But God will give you the grace and the strength to know what might be done.”

“God, what a bunch of crap. I never should’ve come. I’m outta here.” The dark figure on the other side of the screen started to rise, and the wood creaked and shivered. He swung around, as if he might burst through the closed door, splinter the wood, send it flying across the vestibule.

“Hold on.” Father John got to his feet and flung open his own door, but the tall, dark figure in blue jeans and dark shirt was already across the entry. Lifting his right arm, as if to block a tackle, he pushed the door open and plunged outside. The door slammed shut, rocking on its hinges.

Father John took the entry in a couple of steps and ran outdoors. He stopped on the concrete stoop, unsure of which way to go. The quiet of a Saturday afternoon suffused the mission. No vehicles about. Only smears of boot tracks in the hard-packed ground below the concrete stairs. The yellow stucco administration building on the other side of the narrow dirt drive, the old stone museum at the bend of Circle Drive, the redbrick residence on the far side of the field of wild grass, all looked like a still life painting. The wind scythed the grasses and whistled in the branches of the cottonwoods scattered about the grounds.

He took the steps two at a time and crossed to the corner of the church. The dirt drive that ran past Eagle Hall was empty. At the far end stood the thicket of cottonwoods, sage, and willows that bordered the Little Wind River at the edge of the mission. Clouds of dust and tumbleweeds rolled down the drive.

No sign of the big man in the dark cowboy hat. A killer. Blown away on the wind like a ghost.

2

August, the Moon of Geese Shedding Their Feathers

THE SUN HAD dropped behind the Wind River range two hours ago, but the day’s heat locked onto the blue shadows and the starlit darkness that spread over the reservation. Parallel flares of yellow headlights stretched ahead on Blue Sky Highway. Vicky Holden rolled the passenger window down a couple of inches. The moving air felt warm on her face. Adam had turned the air conditioner on high, but she preferred the fresh air with the familiar smells of sage and the gritty dryness of the blowing dust.

“You did a great job.” Adam turned his head in her direction, a quick, perfunctory movement, then went back to staring out the windshield.

Vicky wasn’t sure about that, but this handsome man, this Lakota lawyer behind the wheel of a new BMW, didn’t give out compliments freely, not even to her. Had she stumbled in her talk to the women students at the tribal college about careers in law for Native people, especially women, Adam would have been the first to tell her. She appreciated his honesty; it helped to ground her, keep her on track.

She had been late leaving the office in Lander this afternoon. An unexpected client had walked in the door, and she was unable—as Adam always told her—to turn away Arapahos from the reservation who happened to find their way to her office and venture inside, nervous, hands shaking, blanched looks on dark faces. Never been to see a lawyer before. Not sure of what to say or do. Only certain they had been caught up in the vast, impersonal, and rigid world of the white man’s law and knowing they needed help.

She had said, “Come in. Sit down. Tell me your name.”

The woman was Arapaho, in her twenties, close to the age of Vicky’s own kids, Susan and Lucas. She set an infant’s car seat on the floor and made her way into Vicky’s private office, cuddling a small infant in a blanket that looped around one shoulder into a big knot at her waist. A city Indian, as Susan and Lucas had become. Vicky had grasped that fact immediately. Married to a warrior from the reservation, learning the old ways, trying to connect somehow with an inscrutable past that was hers and not hers.

“Mary. Mary Red Fox. He’s cheating on me, my husband, Donald.” She had a low, breathless voice. “I need to get out. He says I can go anytime I want. Pack up, take what I came with, which was nothing except the clothes on my back, leave everything else. Leave my baby. He says that’s the way it was with the people. Kids go with the father, and he can have as many women as he wants.”

Vicky sat down at her desk across from the woman. The part about polygamy had some truth to it in the Old Time, usually for the chiefs and headmen who could afford more than one wife and needed several wives to handle social obligations: feasting the leaders of other tribes, feasting the white men invading the plains in never-ending streams of wagons. Donald Red Fox was wrong about the rest of it.

“In the Old Time,” Vicky said, pulling the memories out of the long ago—sitting around the kitchen table in her grandparents’ little house, listening to stories of how it used to be—“children belonged to their mothers and their mothers’ families. In any case, this is now, and no judge is going to separate you from your baby unless . . .” She left the rest of it unsaid. Mary Red Fox didn’t need to be told that if there were any evidence she was an unfit mother, the court would award custody to the father. The girl was upset enough. Forehead wrinkled, little beads of perspiration popping in the creases. She had left the reservation and driven to a small brick bungalow on a corner in Lander with a sign in front that said VICKY HOLDEN, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. It had taken courage.

Through the beveled-glass doors that separated her office from the reception area, Vicky saw the outside door open and close. Adam Lone Eagle paced back and forth, casting impatient, distorted glances through the glass. His boots made a swishing noise on the carpet.

“I wish . . .” Mary bit at her lower lip and bent her shoulders around the infant, who was making little mewling sounds. “I wish I didn’t still love him. It wouldn’t hurt so much, leaving him.”

“Any chance of working on your marriage?” Divorce was final, like a death that came after a long illness. What was left was guilt and wondering and second-guessing. The scars from her own divorce from Ben Holden felt like ridges of inflamed tissue deep inside her. “Have you tried counseling? Would your husband agree to go?” Probably not, she was thinking. An Arapaho warrior with a stranger, most likely a white man, telling him what to do?

“I don’t know.”

“Father John O’Malley at St. Francis Mission is very understanding and sympathetic. Practical,” Vicky added. There were cases when Father John had advised her own clients to get a divorce, for the sake of their lives, for the sake of their children.

“I can ask him.”

Adam was still pacing, still shooting glances through the beveled glass. It had taken another ten minutes for Vicky to explain that if counseling didn’t work, the woman should come back. They could start divorce proceedings. “Do you have family?”

“In Denver.”

“You might want to think about going to them before your husband is served with the divorce papers.”

Mary Red Fox had nodded, pushed herself to her feet with the precious bundle tied to her chest, and asked how much she owed.

“We’ll see how things go.”

*   *   *

NOW ADAM SAID, “Looks like somebody’s in trouble.”

Vicky stared beyond the headlights flashing over the asphalt at the dark hulk of a truck pulled off to the side of the highway. “Probably drunk,” Adam said, a musing, perfunctory tone in his voice. She realized that another truck—large and black—stood in the shadows beyond the parked truck.

Headlights burst into the dar...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0425264661
• ISBN 13: 9780425264669
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 304