MADNESS! WHAT HAD she been thinking? Vicky lay very still, the sheet tangled about her, watching the daylight move past the curtains. It must be mid-morning. God, what had come over her? She’d seen dead bodies before. She’d seen people shot and beaten, but T.J. . . . The sight of him had unhinged her, and she’d fallen into Adam’s arms, as if the warmth of his body could banish the images.
She made herself turn slowly, trying not to tug at the sheet. Adam was gone. His side of the bedcovers thrown back, the pillow still bunched up around the indentation of his head. The scent of him still in the air. A wave of relief came over her. She’d have time to make sense of what had happened before she had to face him again.
A cabinet door cracked shut deep in the apartment. Metal pans clanked together. “No,” she said under her breath. Adam was still here. She crawled out of bed and rummaged through the dresser drawers for clothes, then carried her horde into the bathroom, like a thief escaping into the night, and turned on the shower.
Ten minutes later, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair still wet, she padded barefoot into the kitchen. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears as she slid onto the stool at the bar across from the stove where Adam Lone Eagle was scrambling eggs.
“Hungry, I’m sure,” he said, glancing sideways at her.
“Adam,” she began, stumbling for the words, combing her fingers through one side of her hair. “Last night was not a good idea. It shouldn’t have happened.”
Adam kept his eyes on the lumpy yellow eggs blossoming in the pan. Finally he laid the fork down, stepped over to the bar, and leaned down so that his face was level with hers.
“Wrong on two counts,” he said. “It was this morning. And it was meant to happen.”
His gaze was like a laser boring into her, and Vicky struggled not to turn away. “The wrong time and the wrong reason, Adam,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called you. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“I’m glad you called.”
“I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t myself.”
“I’d say you were very much yourself.” Smiling, tilting his head, as if she’d just said something ridiculous.
“We can’t work together and sleep together.”
“Does that mean you’re saying ‘yes’ to the partnership? I don’t see any reason why we can’t practice law and be lovers. We’re good at both.”
Now she looked away to keep from smiling at him.
Adam turned back and began dishing up plates of scrambled eggs, which he set on the bar. Then two mugs of coffee, a pile of toast, jam from the refrigerator, knives, and forks. God, the man thought of everything.
He pulled over another stool and perched across from her. “You should eat,” he said, waving his fork. “You’ll feel better.”
Vicky worked at her coffee and pushed the eggs around her plate for two or three seconds, wondering at the newness of the moment, like trying on new clothes and wondering how they might fit. She made herself take a bite of eggs.
“Would you like to talk about what happened to T.J.?” Adam asked.
Talk about it? She had to stifle a laugh. There was no talking earlier. She’d been crying, and Adam had been kissing her.
She said, “What they did to him was terrible.”
“I’m sorry you had to see it, Vicky.”
“I was sure T.J. was guilty, and all the time he was innocent.”
“You think you’re the first lawyer to have that happen?”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
She got to her feet, carried her plate over to the sink and turned on the water, watching the last trace of yellow egg wash into the garbage disposal.
A jolt of surprise. Adam’s fingers digging into her shoulders. She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. “Stop blaming yourself,” he said. “Someone wanted T.J. and his wife dead. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent what happened.” He led her back around the bar. “Councilmen have to make decisions that get a lot of people mad.”
Vicky crawled back onto her stool. “John . . .”
“John?”
“Father O’Malley thinks that T.J. and Denise might have had Curtis photographs that could be valuable,” she said. Then she told him about Christine Loftus, missing for four days now. How the curator had been looking for Curtis photographs taken at the same time that Curtis had shot the photographs of Arapahos in the museum exhibit. How she’d identified three warriors in the staged photograph of a village under attack. How she wanted to identify the woman who had been killed in the attack. “Her name was Bashful Woman,” Vicky said. “The daughter of Chief Sharp Nose.”
Adam held his coffee mug in both hands, his eyes watching her over the rim. “A chief’s daughter killed. The people must have been outraged.”
“All three warriors were hanged at the agency. Witnesses swore they’d seen one of them ride up to Bashful’s tipi before she was shot. The others were found guilty of conspiracy.” Vicky paused. “They claimed they were innocent, and none of them had a lawyer.”
“Whew!” Adam shook his head and stood up. He refilled their mugs. “That’s a lot of outrage,” he said, straddling the stool again.
Vicky sipped at the hot coffee a moment. “Bashful Woman was the wife of a white man, Carston Evans. Senator Evans’s grandfather, the man who started the Evans Ranch. It’s not what you think,” she hurried on, reading the conclusion in his eyes. “After Bashful was killed, Carston married a white woman from Nebraska. The senator doesn’t have a drop of Arapaho blood in him. What I don’t understand . . .” Vicky hesitated. “A chief’s daughter could have had her pick of handsome warriors on the rez. Why would she marry a white man?”
Adam laughed. “I’d call that a no-brainer, Vicky. She wanted everything that went with being a white man’s wife. He was a rancher. He knew how to raise cattle and grow crops. He knew how the markets worked, things that Indian men were just learning. A white man had rights and freedom. He could move about, do what he wanted, live anywhere. He didn’t have to worry about signs that read, NO INDIANS ALLOWED. He didn’t have to ask the agent for permission to leave the reservation to visit relatives somewhere else. Wherever the white man went, his wife could go.”
“She was still Indian,” Vicky said.
“And he was a squaw man. But if he knew how to make money, white people might’ve swallowed hard, but they would’ve accepted him no matter who his wife was.” Adam focused on his coffee a couple of moments before he said, “The real question is, why did Carston Evans marry an Arapaho woman?”
“How about, she was beautiful?”
“No beautiful white women around?”
“She came from a respected family.”
Adam got up and walked back across the kitchen. He set both hands on the counter and stared at the empty egg carton and the bowl with a yellow line of raw egg hardening on the side. A small blue vein pulsed in his temple. Finally he brought his eyes back to hers. “How did Evans get his ranch?”
“Probably purchased it from the government,” Vicky said. She felt her own muscles tense. “A lot of local ranchers purchased reservation lands after the Dawes Act allotted lands to Indians and allowed the federal government to buy the excess lands and sell them to outsiders. We lost a million and a half acres from the reservation at that time.”
“Forget the Dawes Act.” Adam walked back and leaned toward her again. “The Burke Act of 1906 modified the Dawes Act. Indians deemed competent by the federal government were allowed to own their allotments in fee simple. If they’d gone to school and could read and write, the government considered them competent. They could buy and sell land like white people. They could inherit land and pass it on to their heirs.”
Vicky stood up. She felt as if an invisible horror had invaded the space between them. “You’re suggesting that Carston Evans married an Arapaho woman for her land?”
“A chief’s daughter probably went to school. She was literate. Most likely she had her own allotment, and her father might have given her some land.”
“My God, Adam, what are you saying? That Evans hired the three men to kill his wife?”
Adam shook his head. “You said they claimed they were innocent, and they didn’t have a lawyer. Maybe they were innocent . . .”
“And Evans shot his own wife,” Vicky heard herself saying.
“What do you think went on in the West after the Burke Act was passed? White men saw a way of getting ranch land without laying out any money. All they had to do was court an Indian woman who’d been to school and convince her she’d have a better life married to a white man. It probably didn’t take much convincing. Do you think Bashful was the only woman to fall for a white man’s promises? There was an epidemic of Indian women who died mysteriously after marrying white men. An epidemic, Vicky. And what did the white authorities do? They believed whatever the white husbands said: ‘My wife fell off the porch. Fell off a horse. She was cleaning my gun when it went off.’ And all those white husbands inherited the lands allotted their wives.”
“Carston Evans testified that he saw Thunder shoot his wife. The magistrate believed him.” Vicky felt cold and nauseated, the way she’d felt last night after seeing T.J.’s body. She crossed her arms and, hugging herself, turned into the living room and started pacing. Back and forth between the front door and the bar.
Look at the moon sideways. Grandmother’s voice was in her head. You can sometimes see the face of a white man with bushy eyebrows and down-turned mouth. She stopped and found Adam’s eyes again. “My people have a legend,” she said. “In the time before the Old Time, a beautiful woman was sitting outside in the evening with her friends. She looked at the moon and said, ‘I wonder what it would be like to marry Moon?’ Moon heard her. He looked down and told her to climb into the sky, so she started climbing a lodgepole pine. The pine grew taller as she climbed, until she was in the sky. She married Moon. Soon she grew sad and longed for her people, but Moon refused to let her return to earth. So one day, she dug a hole through the clouds, found the tree, and started to climb down. Moon saw her. He threw a large boulder through the hole and killed her.”
In the quiet that engulfed the apartment, Vicky could almost sense the past—their past, hers and Adam’s—invading the space around them, as if it was always a part of the present but only revealed itself in brief moments. She closed her eyes a moment, the sense of Bashful Woman’s presence so real that it seemed she could reach out and touch her.
After a moment, Vicky walked back and sat down again across from Adam. “They had a child,” she said.
“What happened to the child?”
“God, maybe he killed the child, too.” Vicky had to look away from this new image flitting across her mind. “What if Curtis happened to take a picture of Evans shooting his wife? What would a photograph like that do to Senator Evans’s presidential ambitions?”
A couple of seconds passed before Adam said, “It happened a long time ago, Vicky. The senator isn’t responsible for anything his grandfather might have done. It might embarrass the senator if it became public, but he would apologize and say how much he hated his grandfather’s actions. The publicity might even help him.”
“The senator has Arapaho land, Adam. He has oil and gas that should have stayed with the tribe.”
“We’re speculating here, Vicky. We don’t know if Bashful’s land became the Evans Ranch. You said yourself that Carston Evans could have purchased the ranch.”
“Maybe,” Vicky said. “But now I know where to look for the truth.”