“FATHER, YOU’D BETTER get over to the museum right away.” Catherine’s voice stuttered down the line.
“I’m on my way,” Father John said. He slammed down the receiver and headed out the door, grabbing his jacket as he went, bunching it under his arm. He jogged around Circle Drive and mounted the steps to the porch. The wood creaked beneath his boots. The moment he opened the wood door, the warm air and vacant silence came at him like an invisible force.
“Catherine,” he called, heading into the office. He tossed the jacket onto a chair. No sign of the woman, apart from the impression she’d left in the worn leather chair behind the desk. He went back into the entry, his eyes searching the gallery ahead and the halls that ran to the left and to the right. No one. Two or three minutes ago, Catherine had been here. She couldn’t have disappeared. And yet . . .
Christine had been here, standing in the entry, talking to him, and in a few minutes, she’d disappeared.
Father John started down the hall past the office, opening the doors, looking inside: a lecture room, vacant except for the chairs in haphazard rows in front of a podium; a small gallery with exhibit cases pushed like coffins against the walls. Behind the glass fronts were displays of breastplates and headgear, parfleches, moccasins and leggings beaded and painted by Arapahos in the Old Time, silent images of the past.
He closed the door and reversed his steps past the main gallery, the Curtis photos mute under the wash of fluorescent light. Across the hallway the bathroom door was shut. He rapped lightly. “Catherine?” he called.
There was no answer. He tried the knob. It turned in his grip, and he moved the door inward about an inch. “Catherine,” he said again, leaning into the narrow opening. Silence, except for the drip drip of a faucet. He flung the door back. There was no one inside.
He’d started for the library at the far end of the hall when he heard a scuffing noise, like that of a heavy object being dragged across a rough surface. Through the opaque glass in the door he could see the shadow of someone moving about the room. He flung open the door.
Catherine was pushing a carton onto a shelf, and for a moment he thought she might drop it. He hurried over, took hold of the box, and shoved it into place.
“He was here, Father!” The woman exhaled the words.
“Who?”
“Christine’s husband.”
“Eric Loftus was here?”
“Twenty minutes ago. I thought he was still here looking at maps, but when I came to check . . .”
“Whoa, Catherine.” Father John held up one hand and walked over to the table. He pushed one of the round-back wood chairs toward the woman. “Sit down and start at the beginning.” He waited until she’d folded herself onto the seat before he dragged another chair over and sat down beside her.
Little beads of perspiration glistened in the furrows of the woman’s forehead. She pulled a wad of tissue from the pocket of the sweater she wore over a dark dress and began patting at the moisture. Finally she clasped both hands in her lap, the white tissue poking between her fingers. “I’m not good at this job, Father,” she said. “Being in charge of the museum isn’t what I thought I was gonna be doing at the mission.”
“You’ve been doing a fine job, Catherine.”
“I don’t want nothing to disappear. I been trying to watch everything.”
Father John set his hand on top of her clenched hands. They were like chunks of ice. “Tell me about Loftus,” he said.
The woman lifted her head and stared at the shelves, as if the cartons and rows of books might contain the image she was trying to conjure. “I was in the office when he showed up in the doorway. I never heard him come in. It was like he wasn’t a true person. ‘Did I startle you?’ he says, like he was hoping he did. I don’t mind telling you, Father, he almost startled me into my grave. He’s got them blue eyes that shoot into you like bullets. ‘Can I help you?’ I say, and I was wishing there was some visitors in the museum right then. How a smart woman like Christine could’ve ever married . . .”
Father John gently squeezed the woman’s hands. “What did he want?”
“He wants his wife back, Father. First thing he asks is have we heard from his wife. No, I tell him, and I’m thinking I hope she got so far away that you can’t ever find her and I hope . . . ” Catherine drew in her lips and lowered her gaze to the table. “Oh, God, Father. I been hoping all along that Christine is still alive. So I told him that.”
“You told him that you hoped his wife was still alive?” Father John smiled at the woman. She’d had the courage to say what he and Vicky had been thinking. And she’d said it to the man who might know the truth. “What did Loftus say?”
“Oh, she’s alive all right. We shouldn’t be worrying ourselves, he says. He knows his wife . . .” Catherine shifted sideways and looked at him, her eyes darkening with a new resolve. “He says, soon as things got hot, Christine went into hiding, just like he taught her. I remember him laughing and me thinking, what’s so funny? And he says she was the damned best student he ever had, but she wasn’t as good as her teacher. He’d talked to people on the rez, he said, and I’m wondering how many people was willing to talk to him. He says Christine was looking for old photographs, and the only thing she knew about the rez was the Curtis photographs, she being a stranger here.”
Catherine pulled her hands free and mopped at her brow again. “I don’t mind telling you, I was getting real jumpy all the time he was talking. Next thing I know, he stomps into the gallery, and I hurried right behind him because, you know, I didn’t know what he might do to the photographs. I mean, he might blame the photographs for making his wife go away, and I was thinking, if he so much as touches the glass on one of the photographs, I was gonna pick up a chair and hit him in the head.”
Oh, my God, Father John thought. He blinked back the image. Loftus, a killer trained to react out of instinct. The woman could have been dead before the man stopped to think.
“He marched right over to the photograph of the village,” Catherine went on. “ ‘This is the photograph my wife was trying to identify, right?’ When he looked at me with them blue eyes of his, Father, I started shaking. I told him it wasn’t none of my business what Christine was doing. ‘Oh, I got it right,’ he says. ‘My dear wife starts thinking that if anyone has Curtis photos of their ancestors, she can buy them on the cheap, sell them to a dealer, and get herself a plane ticket far away. Only problem, it could take a lot of photos to get some real money. Then I got to thinking. What if she happened on a few Curtis glass negatives? Well, that’s a different ball game. She would’ve looked everywhere for negatives. Would’ve gone out to the village site. It would’ve been like a treasure hunt. Looking in the brush and caves, hoping Curtis might’ve left something behind that nobody ever found.’ ”
The woman started laughing, a slow chuckle that gurgled out of her throat. “I don’t mind telling you, Father, I laughed good at that, and he got real mad. ‘You think that can’t happen?’ he says. ‘You think there wasn’t a trash pile at the site where Curtis tossed stuff he didn’t want?’ Then he says that somebody told him the village was out by Black Mountain, and he wants to know where that is.”
Catherine leaned so far forward that Father John thought she might slip off the chair. “I told him we got hundreds of acres of space here. You think I know every square inch? You think I know where things was a hundred years ago? But I been out there plenty of times, Father. My uncle ranched out there, and I rode all over that scrub brush land. Next thing he wants to know is if we have any old maps.”
“You did fine to bring him to the library,” Father John said. “You should have called me then.”
The woman was nodding. “I went back to the office thinking I was gonna call you, ’cause I didn’t want to be alone with that man. That was when the people from Idaho came in and started asking questions, and I had to take them into the gallery and tell them about the photographs. Soon’s they left, I went to check on Loftus, and he was gone. Up and gone, Father! It’s like the man can walk through walls.”
Catherine gripped the edge of the table and pushed to her feet. “I been checking the map boxes. There’s no way I can be sure he didn’t take something. I shouldn’t’ve left him . . .”
“It’s okay, Catherine.” Father John stopped the woman. “You handled things very well. What about Black Mountain?” he asked, trying to get hold of a memory moving in the shadows of his mind. “Any old buildings or caves or shelter?”
Catherine was shaking her head. “Nothing but the land. We could ride forever and never come across anything.” She drew in a breath and closed her eyes a moment.
“What about the old cabin?” he asked, bringing the memory into clearer focus now. What was it she had said—tossed off—three days ago about the cabin that Curtis had stayed in?
“Couple miles from my uncle’s ranch was this old cabin, the one that’s in the photograph. Still there, far as I know.”
“Who owns it now?”
The woman contemplated the top of the table for a moment, as if she were studying a picture of the site and the cabin. “That’s all tribal land, Father. I guess anybody can go out there and use that cabin to hunt and fish. I expect lots of people working at the tribal offices go there.”
“Christine could be hiding there,” Father John said. He was thinking out loud. He could see by the expression on Catherine’s face that she was making her own connections.
“I guess her husband could be right,” she said, her head bobbing up and down. “Maybe Christine went out to Black Mountain and walked around until she found the old cabin.”
Or maybe, Father John thought, T.J. told her about it. “How do I get there?” he asked.
The woman pushed herself to her feet, walked over to the desk near the door, and, leaning down, jotted something on a sheet of paper. Stepping back, she held out the paper. “You gotta keep watching for the turnoff soon’s you cross Sound Draw. Take the bridge over the Wind River and keep driving north. Don’t pay attention to the dirt roads going off in all directions, just stay close to the draw even after the road wears out. Keep going, and when you find a flat spot between the bluffs, bear east. You’ll see the cabin.”
He stood up and headed back down the hallway. He’d grabbed his jacket in the office and was already in the entry, about to open the front door, when Catherine called out from the library, “What’ll I do if Loftus comes back?”
“He won’t be back,” Father John called before letting himself outside. Pulling on his jacket, he plunged across the grounds for the pickup.