Loe raamatut: «Arrowpoint»

CHAPTER ONE

IT HAD RAINED all night, but by the time Renata Meyer saw the sign that said Tyler, Three Miles the sky was only dripping, a misty remnant of the deluge she’d left an hour ago in Milwaukee. It wasn’t quite summer yet, but for the past month it had already been so hot that this cooling thunderstorm was more a relief than a burden, especially considering where Renata was going to spend the weekend. Her Milwaukee apartment had a feisty air conditioner that kept her chilled most of the time, but the old family homestead north of Tyler had poor insulation, few windows and only one ancient oak tree for shade. The improvements made since her great-grandparents’ time had been minimal. Air-conditioning was not one of them.

As a free-lance artist, Renata didn’t have a lot of income, but she did have a lot of freedom as to where and how she spent her time. She lived on the periodic sales of her paintings and her more frequent free-lance commercial assignments, which embarrassed her artistic pride but kept a roof over her head. At this point she found that being in the city—where she could brush shoulders with gallery owners, better-established artists and sympathetic art-buying friends—was a tremendous help to her fledgling career. But living in the thunderous rattle of Milwaukee wore her down from time to time, and it was always a relief to know that there was somewhere to go to renew herself. When life got to be a bit much, she turned north and headed back to Tyler like a homing pigeon, even when she hadn’t received a summons from an old friend.

Alyssa Ingalls Baron wasn’t a friend in the intimate sense of the word; she was more a fixture of Renata’s tiny hometown. She was of Renata’s mother’s generation, though the two had not been particularly close. Everybody knew Alyssa, at least by name, and everybody liked her, even if they were a bit jealous of her family’s wealth. Renata’s family had been in the area just as long, but since for the past four generations they’d unpretentiously run a farm that barely broke even, nobody had ever paid much attention to the Meyers. The Ingalls clan, on the other hand, had the Midas touch. They owned land and a thriving business, and kept a guiding hand in local politics. Fortunately, Alyssa wasn’t snooty about her wealth and power—she was a sweet and gentle person—but when she suggested, as she had to Renata, that a Tylerite “volunteer” to do something for the good of the town, it somehow felt like an order.

Renata had loved the warmth of her hometown as a child and hated it as a teenager. She hadn’t been Tyler’s wild child as a girl—Alyssa’s younger daughter, Liza, had sewn up that title—but she had been a bit eccentric in the town’s eyes.

Renata had always been more interested in painting than pom-poms. When the rest of her high school classmates were swimming in the summer or skating on winter ice, Renata was alone at her easel. Kicking local tradition in the teeth, she had skipped the junior prom, the senior homecoming game and one of the Ingallses’ Christmas parties—by accident—when she’d started painting after dinner and forgotten about the world till after midnight. Tyler people still teased Renata about her early paintings and her dramatic choice of clothes. She couldn’t wear her paintings, so she tried to make a statement with fabric art whenever she could. And when she couldn’t do that, she usually found herself wearing a paint-spattered T-shirt and watercolored jeans.

There had been times when she’d found herself in such bad straights that she’d had to return to live in Tyler for several months—once it was a whole year—but Renata had never been poor enough to consider selling the old place. Regardless of the demands of her ambition and her art, she took deep comfort and joy from the knowledge that twelve acres of lush farmland had remained in her family’s hands for nearly 150 years. Granted, the house was old and drafty—a two-story box with a pair of upstairs bedrooms, one bathroom with a hand-held shower, an old-fashioned parlor and a kitchen that hadn’t been updated since World War II. Every time she came home, Renata vowed to start remodeling the old place, but she was never there long enough to justify the expense. Someday she knew she’d want to come home for good, but at the moment it would be too inconvenient to live in Tyler full-time.

And too lonely.

She pulled up at the mailbox and rolled down the window of her old red truck before she remembered that one of the Hansen kids picked up her mail once a week when he checked over her house, watered her roses and mowed the lawn. She couldn’t really afford to pay him, but his mother, Britt, was so strapped since her husband’s death that Renata hadn’t been able to turn Matt down when he made the offer. Even knowing that the mailbox ought to be empty, Renata felt a twinge of sadness to find it that way. When her parents were still living, a mound of good tidings and junk mail had arrived every day.

Before she had time to get maudlin, Renata was startled by an eerie, distant sound. At first she thought it was merely the whisper of the storm, but it almost sounded like humming. No, it wasn’t humming. Not exactly. But she couldn’t exactly call it singing, either. It sounded human. Well, not human so much as not-animal. Sort of other-worldly.

Heyeh, heyeh, heyeh, hiyayayayayaya, heyeh, heyeh. It was a chant of some sort, a weird, eerie chant that made Renata’s flesh crawl. It was soft, which either meant it was loud at the source and very far away, or else...or else it was coming from just up the road.

And the only house up this deserted gravel road was Renata’s.

Maybe it’s just the rain, she told herself stoutly. Sometimes the trees creak in a high wind and sound like someone moaning.

It was a reassuring notion, but Renata didn’t really think the noise had anything to do with the weather. Someone—friend or foe—must be up at her place, expressing himself or herself in some kind of bizarre mantra. But the sound of one voice didn’t mean that there was only one person. It could be one of those devil-worshiping cults! Renata hadn’t been home in a long time, and everybody who lived in Tyler knew it. What better place for weird cult gatherings than an isolated spot like this?

But what kind of a cult gathers at nine a.m. in the rain? a more rational voice asked. Maybe it was just Matt Hansen, humming whatever was hip among the high school crowd these days.

In the end her curiosity overcame her apprehension. After all, Renata prided herself on her acceptance of new things. She’d always been a bit of a radical, moving through life at her own pace to a drumbeat of her own. She wasn’t a rebel, in that she didn’t fight society anymore; she just ignored it when it got in her way. Renata sought her own brand of happiness, and she pursued it with joyful glee every day of her life. She wanted no less for the people around her, but she never tried to force her ways on them.

As she drove on toward the house, she realized vaguely that it was starting to rain more heavily. But she didn’t care. She was too consumed with curiosity to roll up her window. Curiosity tinged with a tiny bit of fear.

Concern and awe washed away the fear the instant she pulled into the gravel driveway and got a good look at her front lawn. Renata had to blink a couple of times. She couldn’t believe what she saw.

Under the shaggy oak tree sat an old man—a very, very old man—hunched cross-legged on a tattered blanket that was drenched and saturated with watery mud. He was wearing buckskin leggings, moccasins and some kind of beaded deerskin shirt. He wore several strands of bones and shells—bears’ teeth, maybe?—around his wrinkled, leathery neck. Feathers dangled from the two long braids that hung halfway down his chest.

Renata knew that Tyler had once been part of the hunting grounds of the local Indians—she couldn’t recall which tribe—and she knew that her grandfather had loved to tell stories about running into them now and again as a child. He even had a collection of old Indian artifacts he’d found on the property; it was still somewhere down in the basement along with the beading loom kit Renata had fussed with as a child. But in Renata’s lifetime, Tyler had been virtually devoid of Indians. She knew some native people in Milwaukee, of course—had taken art classes with more than one—but they were, for all practical purposes, assimilated. She couldn’t imagine any of them sitting on a blanket in buckskin in the rain, chanting to...well, to whatever deity this leathery-skinned Methuselah was probably directing some sort of tribal prayer.

Renata did not particularly care that the old man was trespassing. She wasn’t even dying to know what he thought he was doing or why he’d chosen her place. At the moment her thoughts were more practical and pressing. This old fellow looked as frail as parchment and he was obviously soaked to the bone. There was no telling how long he’d been here, but it took no genius to realize that he was in danger of getting pneumonia. She had to get him dried off and warmed up at once. And that meant she had to get him inside.

His eyes were open and he was more or less facing her way, but he showed no sign of seeing Renata. She wondered if he might be blind. She wondered if he might be crazy. She wondered how on earth he’d gotten here without a car. Surely nobody would have left this old man out here all alone!

She took a few steps forward, then crouched before him. The lawn was saturated now and the rain was lashing the ground again. She knew that if she didn’t move him soon, she’d end up drenched as well.

“Excuse me, sir,” Renata said quietly, afraid to startle the spooky old fellow. “I’m Renata Meyer. I live here. I’ve got warm blankets inside and I can have some hot coffee going in no time. Wouldn’t you like to come in and dry off?”

The chanting continued. His eyes showed no sign that he knew another person had joined him. Could he be deaf and blind? she wondered. Or was he in some sort of trance?

Uneasily, she moved closer and risked laying one hand on his arm. It was a thin arm, devoid of muscle, but it didn’t even twitch.

“Please, sir. Maybe you don’t care about the rain, but I do. I’m getting cold. Can’t we go inside and talk?”

The chanting changed pitch then—higher, more eerie. It occurred to Renata that maybe the old man didn’t speak English. She had heard that there were old Indians who still spoke their native tongue. And this one looked old enough to have ridden against Custer...or maybe Columbus.

Renata bit her lower lip and tried to decide what to do. She felt absolutely helpless. She still remembered her own dear grandfather, who’d died at the age of ninety-six but hadn’t recognized any of them at the end. If somebody had found him wandering around, befuddled and confused, she would have wanted them to take care of him.

She knelt in the mud right before the old fellow, put both hands on his shoulders and tried one more time. “Please, sir. I know this is important to you. But getting you warm and dry is important to me. Can’t we go inside now? Later, when the rain stops, you can come back and finish. Or you can even chant in my living room.”

This time his eyes flickered over her in what almost looked like sympathy. He brushed one hand in her direction, as if to say, “You go inside. Don’t worry about me.” But he did not stop chanting. And he did not rise.

It was pouring by now. Renata couldn’t see herself forcibly dragging the old man into the house even if she’d had the physical strength to do it. There was a dignity about him that made her feel awkward about calling some authority to take him away. But she’d rather have him mad at her than have him die of exposure right here on her lawn.

“Is there anybody I can call?” she asked. “Do you have family or friends near here?”

It occurred to Renata that Timberlake Lodge was a stone’s throw from the back of her property, and it was feasible that he’d hiked here from there. When the lodge had belonged to the Ingallses, Liza and Amanda had sometimes walked over to her place to visit, and since Edward Wocheck had turned it into a resort, she’d encountered a few tourists nosing around on their morning meanderings. But Edward’s resort catered to a ritzy crowd. Renata couldn’t see this wilted old guy as a typical guest or morning jogger. He seemed more like a candidate for Worthington House, the convalescent center in town.

Relieved that she’d finally thought of a few leads to check out, Renata said, “I’m going to try to find out where you belong, sir. If you change your mind while I’m gone, just come on in and I’ll fix you some breakfast. I’m going to put on some coffee.”

He kept on chanting as she turned and headed for the house, oblivious to the thunderous new cloudburst that nipped at her heels.

* * *

“COME IN, BRICK,” squawked the radio in the police car. “I’ve got a message from the captain.”

Under other circumstances, Michael Youngthunder would have grinned. He remembered when he’d first met Lieutenant Brick Bauer, a kind, decent man struggling to pretend he wasn’t madly in love with his female precinct captain. Beautiful Karen Keppler—they called her “Captain Killer” now—had ruled the station house with an iron hand, but she’d been kind to Michael and his elderly grandfather. Now she was married to Brick, publicly admitted she adored him and actually allowed her dispatcher to convey messages to her husband when he was on duty without using the complex county police code that was more trouble than it was worth in such a small town. Everybody knew everybody else’s business anyway.

Michael had no interest in Tyler’s business, and he would never have come to Tyler at all if his grandfather had not begged him. Last winter Grand Feather, as he’d affectionately called the old one since childhood, had heard about the proposed expansion of Timberlake Lodge near Tyler around the same time he’d heard that some Native Americans in other parts of the country were reclaiming sacred bones from white museums and preventing development on traditional burial grounds. Tyler, the old one insisted, had been built near the site where his ancestors were buried...on land “stolen” by white people 150 years ago.

Michael, the manager of a busy Katayama Computers retail outlet, had better things to do with his time than root through the countryside searching for nonexistent Indian bones. But the suit and tie he wore to work each day could not totally obliterate the part of him that was still Winnebago, and the nice paycheck he earned could never compete with his love for the old man who had raised him. So six months ago he’d come to Tyler, talked with Captain Keppler and Lieutenant Bauer, who’d been kind enough to spend a day driving Grand Feather to all possible sites for the burial ground, which allegedly could be identified by a horseshoe of oak trees. They hadn’t found anything and that had been the end of it.

Until last night. Until news of the scheduled ground breaking of the new wing of Timberlake Lodge Resort had been broadcast on the only Madison station that his grandfather’s puny television picked up in Wisconsin Dells. An hour later Michael had received a call from his uncle, who now owned a tiny remaining piece of allotment land near the old shack where Grand Feather still lived and where Michael himself had grown up. It broke Michael’s heart to see the old man live in such squalor, but Grand Feather would not be moved. He said he’d lived as a true Winnebago on that patch of land back when the old ones still taught ancient rituals that they’d learned from their foreparents before the arrival of the whites. He was born a Winnebago, he had lived a Winnebago, and he would be buried as a Winnebago when the time came. More than once he’d claimed that he was ready to die and could not rest until he knew he would not be buried among white strangers.

Although Michael lived in Sugar Creek, a good hour and a half from Wisconsin Dells, the family always called him when there was a problem with Grand Feather, partly because they knew that nobody loved the old one more and partly because Michael was the best equipped of all of them to deal with white people in the outside world. He was the only one with a college degree and a VCR, the only one who stood out like a sore thumb whenever he went home to visit. His cousins called him a half-breed, even though he wasn’t, and treated him like a white, even though his heart was still Winnebago. At least he thought it was; he knew he wanted it to be. Most of the time he was too busy to think about it, a condition that was easier to handle than was grappling with his tangled cultural roots.

This morning he was too tired to think, but he had never felt his Indian status more keenly. For twelve solid hours he had been trapped in this police car, searching for Grand Feather in the storm-soaked farmland surrounding Tyler. It was an all night walk here from the Dells, and a long hike even if the old one had caught a bus or hitchhiked to Tyler proper. And it had been raining all night long. Michael’s fear was a living thing, a serpentine rope of nausea that threatened to choke him. He knew he’d disappointed his grandfather terribly by choosing to follow the white man’s road, but he worshiped the old one and would have done anything, anything at all, to protect him.

“Go ahead, Hedda,” Brick Bauer said into the radio.

“Captain K says she got a call from CeCe Scanlon at Worthington House that might relate to your search for the old Indian. Apparently Renata Meyer is in town for the weekend and called over there to ask if they were missing anyone. They’re not, but later CeCe heard your grandma talking to your aunt about how you’d been up all night looking for somebody, and it occurred to her that there might be a connection.” Brick’s eyes met Michael’s as the dispatcher continued, “It occurred to the captain that one of the places you took the Youngthunders before was out to the Meyers’ old place. Renata’s line is busy, but Captain K thought you might want to swing by there.”

Michael took a deep breath, relief and fear twisting his innards into tiny knots. “It’s my grandfather, Lieutenant,” he told Brick Bauer. “I know it.”

To the radio, Brick said quickly, “We’re on our way.”

* * *

RENATA HAD ALREADY MADE a dozen futile calls by the time she heard a car pull into the gravel driveway behind her own. A quick glance outside told her the police had arrived, but she wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. She’d deliberately avoided calling the Tyler substation because she didn’t want to get the old man in trouble. Somebody else must have, or else their arrival here was just coincidental. Either way, she was at her wit’s end, and she was grateful that there was some authority she could turn to.

As Renata hurried outside, wet and shivering, she felt a flash of relief as she recognized the policeman getting out of the black-and-white cruiser. Brick Bauer wasn’t a close friend, but she was on good terms with him—or had been the last time they talked, a few years ago—and she knew she could count on him to be gentle with the old man.

“Hi, Brick!” she called out, pulling on a jacket to fight off the worst of the rain. “I heard you got married!”

Brick smiled back, both dimples deepening, looking a little bit embarrassed and terribly pleased. “It’s true, Renata. Married my boss. Finally found a woman who could keep me in line.”

It was during this brief exchange that Renata realized somebody else was bolting out of the car, somebody in a rumpled suit and loosened tie who was sprinting toward her so fast it was frightening. She only got a glimpse of him—young, dark, good-looking—before his gaze fell on the old Indian. He slammed to a stop, clutching the side-view mirror of her truck for support. The sight of his painful swallow filled Renata with a great ache for him. Love for the old man was written all over his face.

It was a magnificent face, the kind any artist would love to use as a centerpiece of a painting. But Renata knew at once that it wasn’t the artist in her that responded so keenly to this man’s barely veiled virility and passion. He was tall and lean, with dark brown eyes and thick lashes and a strong jaw. His bronze skin and handsome, angular features hinted strongly at some sort of Indian ancestry.

But Renata only had time to register his compelling good looks and his panic before Brick said softly, “Renata, this is Michael Youngthunder. We’ve spent the whole night looking for his grandfather.”

Brick was wasting his breath. Michael Youngthunder didn’t even see Renata; he certainly didn’t hear Brick or respond to his courteous introduction. Every nuance of his attention was directed toward the old man.

Under other circumstances, Renata would have resented being so totally ignored. But she had loved her own grandfather, and she understood the anguish in Michael’s bloodshot eyes. Even without Brick’s explanation, she could have guessed by his haggard demeanor that he’d been searching for the old man all night.

Instinctively, Renata stepped toward him and laid one hand on his arm. “He’s all right,” she said quickly, even though she knew Michael could see it for himself. “I found him about half an hour ago and begged him to come in. He won’t budge, but his voice isn’t getting any weaker.”

Michael’s well muscled arm was tensely knotted beneath Renata’s fingers, but a mighty sigh of relief escaped his invitingly full lips. For the first time he glanced at Renata, but even now she didn’t think he really saw her. Habit more than conscious thought seemed to prompt him to murmur, “I’m sorry for the intrusion. It may take me a few minutes to persuade him to come away.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she assured him. “Just let me know what I can do to help. I draped a rain slicker around his shoulders—” she gestured toward the yellow vinyl garment sprawled across the grass “—but he just let it fall to the ground.”

Again Michael’s beautiful mahogany eyes met hers. “Thank you,” he repeated in a choked voice.

When she felt the ripple of tension in his biceps, Renata realized belatedly that she was still holding on to him. Abruptly she let go. But Michael wasn’t paying any attention to Renata. His gaze was once again on the old man, who was still chanting. Not once had his eyes even flickered toward his grandson.

“I tried everything I could to make him come in and dry off,” Renata explained apologetically. “He acts as though he doesn’t see me. Doesn’t hear. I think he’s in some kind of a trance.”

“Trance?” Michael repeated, as though the single word alarmed him.

“Well, I don’t know what else to call it. It’s as though he’s gone somewhere that I can’t reach.”

Michael closed his eyes, shook his head, then whispered, “I’m not sure I can reach him, either.”

At that point Brick joined them, laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “This is like talking down a jumper, Michael. I’ll speak to him if you want me to. I would if you weren’t here.”

Quietly Michael said, “Thanks, Lieutenant, but this is something I have to do myself. If he doesn’t finish, he’ll find a way to come back here later. The best thing for me to do is to hurry him along a little.”

“Finish?” said Renata. “He sounds like he’s just repeating the same thing over and over again.”

This time Michael’s gaze focused on her face for a long, dark moment before he turned away. For some reason she could not fathom, Renata knew she’d disappointed him.

Hugging herself for warmth, she stood beside Brick and stared at Michael as he crossed the lawn to join his grandfather. They couldn’t have looked more different: young, old; business suit, Indian clothes; utterly contemporary, locked in another space and time. Still, there was a family resemblance, or at least a tribal one, in the coppery skin and straight, masculine nose. The old man’s hair was very long and braided, already thin and gray. Michael’s black hair was longer than average—thick and straight as it flowed over his broad shoulders—but it was such a magnificent mane that a proud display of it didn’t strike Renata as peculiar. In her arty crowd, lots of people cherished eccentricities in their appearance. None of her Milwaukee friends would have looked twice at Michael’s hair even if he’d worn it in feathered braids.

“I met Michael when Edward Wocheck came back to town and started talking about expanding Timberlake Lodge,” Brick explained sotto voce. “Old man Youngthunder’s got some idea that there’s a sacred burial ground around here. We drove through your property before but the ‘spirits’ didn’t speak to him.”

Renata was astounded. People were right when they said truth was sometimes stranger than fiction! The only burial ground nearby was the family plot out toward the barn, and nobody had been buried there in seventy or eighty years.

“So why do you think he came back here this morning?” she asked Brick.