The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Read Free Page A

directions, trying to picture the location: Gas Hills Road, east of Highway 789, just beyond the border of the Wind River Reservation, nothing much out there. He’d been at St. Francis Mission on the reservation now for almost ten years, seven years as the pastor—longer than the Jesuits usually left a man in one place, for which he was grateful; he could find his way blindfolded down the asphalt roads and the narrow dirt tracks and across the vast emptiness by the feel of the wind, the sound of the old pickup’s tires thumping on the hard-packed earth. He was familiar with the wild, remote areas around the reservation. So many times he’d hiked into the wilderness to think and pray and draw near to the silence. God was in the silence.
    Whenever a body had been found in the wilderness—a rancher or a hiker spotting something protruding from the earth, something that didn’t belong—the phone had rung at St. Francis. And on the line, the Fremont County sheriff, the local FBI agent, the Wind River police chief or one of the Arapaho elders: “You might wanna come, Father.”
    “Coroner’s out there now,” Thomas Whiteman had said. “They’re gonna be moving the bones pretty quick.”
    He’d told the elder he was on his way, then he’d walked down the wide corridor in the old administration building to the office of his assistant, Father Ian McCauley. He’d found the man curled over a stack of papers on a desk marked by the rings of countless coffee cups that had rested on the surface through the decades. The sun bursting through the window gave a yellow cast to the other priest’s scalp beneath his thinning, sandy-colored hair. Father John told him he’d be out for a while.
    “Emergency?” Father Ian hadn’t looked up.
    “Dead body out in the Gas Hills.”
    “Jesus.” He’d looked up then and shook his head. “I’ll hold down the fort,” he’d said, which had struck Father John as ironic. His assistant would handle the phone calls from the Arapaho parishioners and visit with anybody who happened to drop by—“You busy, Father? Got a minute?” In the Old Time, white men had defended the forts—held them down— against the Indians.
    Father John had made his way back down the corridor, past the framed black-and-white photos of the past Jesuits at St. Francis, dark eyes trained on him through wireless spectacles perched on prominent noses. He’d jogged across the mission grounds to the old pickup parked in front of the redbrick residence. Years before he’d come here, somebody had donated the pickup to the mission; for some time now, the odometer had been stuck at one hundred and twenty-two thousand miles. He’d driven around Circle Drive, tires squealing, past the old gray stone building that had once been a school and was now the Arapaho Museum, past the white stucco church with the stained glass windows in the geometric symbols of the Arapaho and the white steeple that seemed to sway with the cottonwood branches shading the roof, past the two-story yellow stucco administration building. He’d turned down the tunnel of cottonwoods and headed east for 789, a route he’d taken so often that he half suspected the pickup could find the way on its own.
    Now he could see vehicles parked ahead in the gulley. Sheriff’s deputies in tan uniforms were milling about with men in blue jeans and dark shirts, sleeves rolled to the elbows, wind plastering the shirts against their backs. Father John parked between a white SUV with Fremont County emblazoned on the sides and the gray pickup that Thomas Whiteman drove.
    “Hey, Father.” Gary Coughlin, detective in the sheriff’s office, looked up from the carton he’d been rummaging through in the back of a van. He ducked his head through the strap of a black camera.
    “What do you have?”
    “Not much left but a skeleton.” The detective beckoned with his head as he started around the van toward the group of officers in a half circle near the base of the