THE MUSEUM WAS warm and bright under the white fluorescent ceiling lights. The murmur of voices mixed with the sound of hot air whooshing out of the vents. From the entry, Father John could see a scattering of visitors in the gallery—moving along the walls, pausing in front of the photos, nodding, smiling. Catherine stood near the photograph of the village. She reached out and swept her hand across the glass, making a point to the three middle-aged white women beside her. He smiled at the image. The woman seemed to be enjoying herself after all.
The door to the office was open, and he went inside and sat down at the desk. Telephone on the right. The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S. Curtis on the left, and in the expanse of polished wood, a yellow notebook with two columns of names and telephone numbers on the top page. There were check marks next to the names. Parishioners. Catherine had probably been calling people, asking them to come for Senator Evans’s visit on Monday. Damien wanted a crowd.
He opened the center desk drawer. Pens, pencils, paper clips, all arranged in neat compartments. No loose notes with the kind of scribbled reminders that he had left to himself. He slid open the side drawer. A few file folders arranged in alphabetical order. Budgets, expenses, inventory. Ah, here was something. An agreement with West Wind Gallery, the Denver gallery that had loaned the Curtis exhibit. He pulled the phone over and punched in the number on the letterhead. It was a long shot, but maybe somebody at the gallery might know something about Christine Nelson. He tucked the receiver into his shoulder and listened to the buzz of a phone ringing somewhere in Denver, thumbing through the pages for a name. There it was, on the last page.
The buzzing stopped, and a man’s voice came on the line. Father John asked to speak to Linda Novak.
“Linda’s on vacation at the moment.” The words were precise and clipped. “Perhaps I can be of help to you?”
Father John gave the man his name and said he was calling about Christine Nelson, who had arranged for the Curtis exhibit . . .
“Yes, yes, yes,” the man interrupted. “Linda is in charge of our Curtis collection. I’m afraid you’ll have to speak with her. Shall I connect you to her voice mail? She sometimes checks her messages.”
Father John repeated what he’d said into the vacuum of a machine, then dropped the receiver into the cradle and got to his feet. Apart from the abrupt sound of laughter that burst from the gallery, the office was quiet, an unoccupied feeling about it. Books stacked in the bookcase across the room, a pair of chairs with worn brown cushions pushed against the side wall. There was nothing of Christine Nelson, nothing she might have left behind. The woman might never have walked into the office, picked up her briefcase, grabbed her coat from behind the door. It was as if she was being erased from the image he carried in his mind, disappearing, the way she’d disappeared Monday night.
Well, that was crazy, he told himself. Christine Nelson had to be somewhere, and chances were, whoever she’d gone to meet on Monday night knew what had happened to her.
He started across the entry toward the front door, the hum of voices floating around him like a familiar melody. He turned back and stepped into the gallery. Next to the door, on a small metal stand, was the guest book and a stack of brochures. He nodded at Catherine, who had thrown him a sideways glance before turning her attention back to the visitors. Then he picked up the book and a brochure and went back into the office. Settling into the chair he’d just vacated, he began glancing through the book, trying to make out the names scribbled down the left side of the pages. As indecipherable as hieroglyphics. The names of towns on the right were easier to read. Towns in Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, Colorado.
He hunted now for the local towns, checking the names next to Riverton, Lander, Fort Washakie, Ethete, Arapaho. Next to Arapaho, on the second page, was scribbled Eunice Redshield.
He stared at the name, another image beginning to take shape in his mind. Monday night, and the college students studying the photographs, jotting notes in notebooks, arguing. And the dark-haired young woman saying that one of the warriors was Thunder, her ancestor. Saying that her grandmother, Eunice Redshield, had told the curator.
“Here’s the pastor.” Catherine stood in the door, a group of women crowding around her. “These folks came down from Montana,” she said, tossing her head from one side to the other. “I’ve been telling them how Curtis could’ve been taking the photographs yesterday. Black Mountain looks just the same. Nothing’s changed. That old log cabin that Curtis stayed in is still there.”
“Good to have you here,” he said to the visitors, who smiled and nodded before flowing back into the entry with Catherine. He was thinking that, like the log cabin, descendants of the people in the photographs were also here.
He picked up the brochure and folded it into his shirt pocket. Then he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and headed for the front door, giving Catherine and the group of women a little wave as he walked past. Back outside, he pulled on his jacket as he hurried toward the pickup.