Read Online The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) by Margaret Coel - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t think Indians had any rights, well neither did Indians. Not any she knew. They’d been living in a two-room shack on Pine Ridge after her mother decided to leave the Wind River Reservation and go find Ray, the Lakota she’d met barely two months after her father had been killed in that car wreck. She’d pushed Liz into the back of an old Pontiac with torn seats and trash littering the floor and said, “We’re gonna get us a new life.” Liz remembered singing to herself all the way to Pine Ridge, to keep from crying because Mom didn’t like crying. She always said, “You gotta be tough to be an Indian girl.” Liz had made herself concentrate on Grandfather and the trailer where they’d been living, and for a long time after Mom had taken her away, she’d put the images of Grandfather and the trailer in her mind at night so she could sleep when Mom and Ray were drinking and fighting.
    “Meeting tomorrow night,” Jimmie had said. He described the house off the road that ran south out of Wounded Knee. “You’ll see the cars parked out in front. There’s gonna be a lot of us. We’re goin’ to Washington, caravans of Indians from all over the country. Gonna pay a visit on our Great White Father.” He’d laughed at that, a deep rumbling noise that had bubbled out of his throat.
    Liz had laughed with him. She understood even then that there was no Great White Father.
    “You wanna come to the meeting? Might wanna join up?”
    “Why not?” she’d told him again.
    Something was moving at the edge of her vision now. Liz glanced over at the convenience store. The white man had come outside and was looking her way. He swung around, yanked open the door and strode inside. She saw him moving toward the cash register, dragging the phone along the counter, clamping the receiver to his ear.
    God. She had to get out of here. The white man would have the police here in a couple of minutes. They’d arrest her for loitering or trespassing or being Indian. She settled Luna back in the box, got behind the wheel and drove out of the lot, tires squealing as she pulled onto the asphalt. She headed onto Main Street, trying to remember the street they’d turned on when she and Ruth and Loreen had come to see Ardyth. The brick buildings looked eerie in the yellowish wash of the streetlights. Black plate glass windows looked like the entrances to dark tunnels.
    She took a right and drove into the darkness of a residential neighborhood, searching for some landmark, something to point the way. There was nothing.

7
    THE SUN BLAZED overhead by the time Father John drove into the mission, “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” blaring from the tape player on the seat next to him. He’d spent the morning visiting parishioners at Riverton Memorial—Molly Boggles and her new baby girl, Esther White Horse, still in intensive care after the automobile accident. He’d given the sacrament of the last rites to James Fox, eighty-one years old, body ravaged by diabetes and kidney failure, an old man waiting to die, and at peace about it. He’d thanked Father John for the sacrament. It made him feel better, he’d said, as if Father John were the one who needed to be comforted.
    The mission buildings around Circle Drive stood out in relief against the brightness: the administration building and the church, the museum, the two-story, redbrick residence. He parked the Toyota pickup in front of the residence, alongside the blue sedan that his assistant, Father Ian McCauley, drove, turned off the tape and got out.
    Walks-On, the golden retriever he’d found in the ditch after he’d been hit by a car several years ago, lay stretched on the lawn in a patch of shade, head framed by his front paws. The vet in Riverton where Father John had taken him managed to save his life, but not his hind leg, something the dog hadn’t seemed to notice, or had considered not worth noticing compared to the fact that he was still alive. Father John had brought