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

bluff.
    Standing inside the circle was the gaunt figure of Thomas Whiteman, a black cowboy hat shading the elder’s wrinkled, brown face. With both hands, he slowly lifted a pan toward the sky. A thin wisp of smoke trailed out of the pan into the wind, leaving behind the faint odor of burning cedar.
    Heito’eino’hoowuciixxokuno’. The old man’s voice punctured the noise of the wind. Woow heetneechoohun. The Arapaho words seemed to hang in the air around the circle of officers standing with heads bowed. Father John understood some of the words; he could guess at the rest: Your relatives are nearby. Now you can go home.
    The elder finished the prayer, then nodded at Father John. The half circle began to pull apart, the officers glancing back, waving him forward with their eyes. It was then that he saw the ocher-colored bones protruding through piles of brown dirt, as if they had been laid out. Except that he knew that wasn’t true. Whoever had left the body had probably pushed it into a shallow, hastily-dug grave, and the piles of dirt were the remnants of that grave.
    The officers pulled apart to make a space for him, and he stepped closer. A raven rose from the side of the bluff and flapped away. The bones were small in diameter, yet long. Long femur, long humerus. Knobs of the long spine emerged from the dirt. The thin arm bones had been pulled back. Frayed pieces of rope were tied around the wrist bones. He could see the breaks in the bones. The skeleton was face down, so that the back of the skull was visible, and on the left side was a small, round bullet hole. And something else: a long rope of braided hair still attached to a piece of dried scalp. The braid wound over the spine, disappearing into the earth, then protruding again. It was black hair, faded with the brown dust of the earth.
    Father John swallowed hard against the horror that rose inside him, the bitterness of bile. He got down on one knee and made the sign of the cross over the bones. “God have mercy,” he said out loud. “God, have mercy on this woman.” That it was the skeleton of a woman, he was sure. The delicate bones, the long black braid, and some inexplicable sense that this had been the body of a woman. Indian men wore braids, but there was something about the hair. It looked fine; it might have been silky once.
    It struck him then, not for the first time, that God was not limited by time—by minutes and hours and days that passed into years. That God was eternal, and all time was present to Him. “God be with this woman,” he said again, praying for her then , when she had died this terrible death.
    He noticed the debris scattered about, poking from beneath the bones—pieces of leather, faded scraps of calico and denim, the heel of a boot, pieces of metal that might have been buttons or snaps or rivets. The detritus of a life, he thought.
    “Coroner agrees,” Detective Coughlin said, moving next to Father John as he stood up. “Skeleton’s most likely a woman.”
    “How long has she been here?”
    Coughlin shrugged. One of the other officers was pointing a camera toward the scalp and adjusting the lens. A series of clicking noises cut through the buzz of conversation and the whoosh of the wind, and for the first time, Father John was aware of the wind gusting. It didn’t surprise him; the Arapahos said the wind always blew when a body was disturbed.
    “Forensics might be able to ballpark a date. Depends what they can get from the pieces of clothing and boot. Not much left. All we know for sure is that she was a homicide. Nobody ties his arms behind himself and shoots himself in the back of the head. Animals been digging here. Coyote or fox, maybe a wolf, dragged a femur about a hundred yards down the gulley. Couple of rock hunters come along this morning looking for rocks and arrowheads. One of ’em had a dog that got hold of the femur, and the men went looking for the source. Came upon the grave and called us.”
    That