THE RIVERTON LIBRARY, a single-story expanse of red brick and peaked roofs, sprawled on the corner of a neighborhood of bungalows set back from tree-lined streets. Blue shadows crept across the lawn in front of the library. Father John parked at the curb and walked up the wide sidewalk to the entrance. It was quiet inside, except for the low voice of a woman reading to a small boy on a bench near the door. He crossed to the desk in the center of the large room. Book stacks fanned around the desk like the spokes in a wheel. The librarian, an attractive woman with dark hair and lively eyes—the same librarian who usually helped him when he came in—was already on her feet, watching him approach.
“Another research project, Father?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he said.
“What? You know you love researching the past. Once a history professor, always a history . . .
“High school teacher,” he said, finishing her sentence.
“All the same. I have to confess . . .” She paused and laughed, shaking her head. “Not that I really intend to confess any sins . . .”
“I’m sure you don’t have any.”
“Exactly. Not having any sins, I can only confess to sharing your love for history. Finding a new research project is like setting sail on an unknown sea. Where are you sailing today, Father?”
“Back to 1907,” he said.
“Ah, a very popular year.”
“How so?”
“The curator from your museum—what was her name? Christine something came in to look through the newspapers for 1907. I saw in the Gazette that she’s missing. My goodness.” The woman lifted one hand, as if to ward off an invisible evil, and glanced about the library. There was comfort in the rows of books, the certitude and quiet. “I hope she’s all right.”
“Did Christine say what she was looking for?” The same thing he was looking for, he suspected. An explanation of what had happened in the Curtis village.
The woman shook her head. “I’m afraid I didn’t ask, Father. She seemed very . . .” She hesitated. “I remember that she raced out of here after she finished her research.”
“When was that?”
“Let me think.” She studied the space above his head a moment. “Early last week, I guess. Sorry, I can’t be more help.”
He smiled at the woman. It was possible that Christine had found the names she was looking for. A connection to the dead woman and the dead warriors, someone else to talk to, someone she might have been on her way to meet Monday night.
He said, “I think I’ll take a look at the newspapers.”
“You know where they are, Father.” He was already heading across the room for the door to the basement. “Light switch is on the left,” she called.
He flipped the switch and plunged down a flight of stairs into a maze of shelves stacked with thick, leather-bound books. He could smell the dust and the old leather—familiar odors coming to him—as he worked his way past the shelves. In the far corner was a reading table with books stacked along the side and, next to the table, a copying machine. He stopped in front of a shelf of tall, thin books, a patchwork of shadows falling over the early editions of the Gazette. His gaze ran over the gold-embossed dates on the spines. 1890s, then 1900s. 1905. 1906. The next space was empty.
He walked over to the reading table. Next to a sign that read LEAVE MATERIALS HERE was a stack of books, and on the top, a black leather book with golden numbers on the spine: 1907. He found a chair around the corner, sat down at the table, and opened the book in the middle. He smoothed the brittle, yellowed pages, feeling the old book begin to relax in his hands. He was thinking that Curtis had photographed the village in good weather. Cloudless sky. No snow on the ground. Which meant about a six-month window, from mid-May to mid-October. He eased the pages forward until the date at the top read May 16, 1907. His eyes hunted down the narrow columns, looking for a headline about the murder of a chief’s daughter or the deaths of three Arapaho men.
Nothing. He kept turning the pages, working faster now, settling into a familiar rhythm from the hours he’d spent in archives, searching out obscure facts that made sense out of a small part of the past. The type was crabbed and hard-to-read. There were no photographs, only an occasional illustration to break up the small print. He had reached mid-September when he spotted a small announcement. Seattle photographer Edward S. Curtis expected on the Wind River Reservation some time in the next weeks. He has informed the agency that he will require an assistant while in the area. Indians who can read and write may wish to apply for the position.
He slowed the tempo, scanning each page until he’d reached the middle of October. There, on the front page in the lower right corner, a small headline: RESERVATION MURDER. He scanned the inch-long article that said an Indian woman had been shot to death while the photographer, Edward S. Curtis, was taking pictures of an Indian village. “There will likely be moaning and gnashing of teeth on the reservation, since it appears the woman was the daughter of the famous Chief Sharp Nose. Mike Fleming, the agent on the reservation, is conducting the investigation into the death and talking to many witnesses.”
Father John flipped through several more issues to a front-page headline that ran across three columns: INDIANS GUILTY OF MURDER IN DEATH OF CHIEF’S DAUGHTER. Below the headline were illustrations of three Indian men. Thunder was on the right, dimples etched into his cheeks. Father John read through the article. Three Indians were found guilty of murdering an Arapaho woman and sentenced to be hanged at the Fort Washakie agency. The murder occurred while the photographer, Edward S. Curtis, was taking pictures of a mock attack on a village that resembled an actual Arapaho village. Many witnesses testified that Thunder, posing as a warrior, rode close to the woman with his rifle just before she was found shot in the chest. The other so-called warriors, Ben Franklin and Alvin Pretty Lodge, were also in the vicinity.
Father John followed the article to the next page where there was a large illustration of a log cabin next to a small tent at the foot of what looked like a mountain slope scattered with pine trees. The caption read: LODGING PLACE OF EDWARD S. CURTIS. THE VILLAGE STOOD NEARBY.
Below the caption, the article continued: After hearing the witnesses’ testimony, the magistrate had no choice but to find Thunder guilty of first-degree murder and the other two Indians guilty of being accessories to the heinous crime. The executioner has been sent for and should arrive by train on Tuesday next.
Father John glanced over the paragraph again. Something was missing. The magistrate had pronounced the men guilty and sentenced them to death, but . . . there was no mention of any defense lawyers.
He let out a long, slow breath and read on: The murdered woman was Bashful Woman, the daughter of Chief Sharp Nose, much revered among the Indians. She married a white man from Nebraska, Carston Evans, who runs one of the area’s biggest cattle operations on his ranch southwest of Thermopolis. Mr. Evans said that his wife was a good wife and mother to their two-year-old daughter. He said that his wife lived the Arapaho Way.
Evans. Father John leaned back against the chair and stared into the shadows of the stacks. Senator Jaime Evans operated a large cattle ranch that the man who was probably his grandfather had started. And his grandfather had been married to an Arapaho. They’d had a child. He wondered if the senator was also descended from Sharp Nose, then discarded the idea. If the man had any Indian blood, he would have made the most of the fact. Especially Senator Evans. He always portrayed himself as a man of the people, a Westerner, an ordinary rancher. Never mind that his ranch rode on top of an ocean of oil.
Father John closed the book and pushed it to the edge of the table, trying to work out what Christine Nelson might have made of the articles. She’d found the names of the other two warriors, Alvin Pretty Lodge and Ben Franklin, but Eunice Redshield had said that neither man had any descendants on the rez. Still, Christine had found illustrations to prove their identities in the Curtis photograph. But there were no illustrations of Bashful Woman, nothing to prove which woman in the village had been murdered.
And Christine had found something more: Senator Evans’s grandfather had been married to an Arapaho woman, the daughter of Chief Sharp Nose. Random pieces of history that might add up to nothing, he realized, except that Denise Painted Horse was part of the Sharp Nose family, and it was possible that Denise had owned a Curtis photograph, perhaps a portrait of Bashful Woman.
He made his way back along the stacks and up the stairs. When he flipped off the lights, a well of darkness opened below. For a brief moment, he felt as if he were standing over an abyss, like the past itself. He walked out into the library and waited while the librarian checked out a couple of books for a gray-haired woman.
Finally, the librarian came along the counter toward him. “Any luck in the dusty archives, Father?”
“What do you have on the Evans family?” he asked, dodging the question.
“Senator Evans? You mean the next president of the United States? He’s coming home to announce his candidacy in Cheyenne next Monday. Imagine having a Wyoming rancher in the White House. Are you a supporter?”
“He’s scheduled a visit to the mission,” he said, still dodging.
“Oh!” She nodded, as if that explained why he’d asked about the Evans family. “I think we have what you’re looking for.” She stepped around the corner and made her way down a row of shelves, her gaze traveling over the spines of books. Finally she pulled one free and walked back. “This should tell you everything you’d like to know,” she said, handing him the large book with a photograph of cattle grazing on the plains. “I had the pleasure of meeting the senator last year. He’s certainly a nice man. I can tell you, he has the support of everybody around here. After all, he’s one of us.”
Father John gave the woman a little smile and took the book over to an upholstered chair. He sat down and turned to the index. The Evans Ranch was listed on page forty-four. He thumbed the pages backward until he came to a full-page color photograph of a two-story frame ranch house with the peaked roof and wide front porch of another era. It looked as if other rooms had been built on through the years, attached to one side, then the other, stamping their own era onto the house: 1930s, 1950s.
On the next page, inside a box marked with thick, black lines, was the Evans family tree with the names Carston Evans and Matilda Hunter at the top. Other lines dropped to the names of three children: James, Mary, Barbara. It looked as if neither daughter had married, but James had fathered one child: Senator Jaime Evans.
Father John skimmed through the chapter on the family history. Carston Evans, raised on a farm in Nebraska, had come to Wyoming in 1904 looking for opportunity. Starting with a few head of cattle, he had built the Evans Ranch into one of Wyoming’s largest cattle ranches. Ten years after he began ranching, the elder Evans had discovered oil seeping into the pasture. Today the ranch is one of the state’s major oil producers. The Evans family has been active in local politics. Carston Evans’s son, James, served twenty years as county commissioner, and his son, Jaime Evans, continuing the family’s commitment to public service, was elected to represent Wyoming, first in Congress, then in the United States Senate.
There were photographs taken through the years. A head shot of Carston Evans: medium height and slight build, with a long face and prominent nose under a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. Casual photographs of his son and grandson posing on the front porch. And a full-page photograph of Senator Jaime Evans surrounded by a crowd of people on a stage, arms raised in victory, banner stretched overhead with large black letters that read EVANS FOR U.S. SENATE.
Father John closed the book. There was no mention of Bashful Woman. It was as though any image of the murdered Arapaho woman had been erased, as if she had never existed.
He considered this for a moment. If Christine wanted to identify the murdered woman in the Curtis photograph, she’d had to look elsewhere for a likeness.
Father John carried the book over to the desk and waited until the librarian uncurled herself from the computer and swiveled toward him. “Find what you were looking for?” she asked.
“Any chance that Christine Nelson looked at this book?” He tapped the cover.
The woman held his gaze a moment. Finally, she said, “I remember pulling the book for her. She sat over there”—a nod toward the chair he had just vacated. “She seemed disappointed.”
“Disappointed?”
“I don’t think she found what she was looking for.” She leaned toward him. “You didn’t, either, did you?”
“Not yet,” he said.