Nothing much for me to do on a rainy Sunday except watch the morning NFL game on TV. In the middle of the first quarter Ella called. First time she’d bothered in a month. She’d been reading about the murder and everything, did I know any of the people involved? Gossip hound, like her mother. I cut her short on that subject, so then she started in with the kids’ lives and her own. Jason said this, Kim did that, she’d heard this really funny story at the salon but it was kind of risque so maybe she’d better not tell me over the phone, and all the while she was jabbering I could hear an unfamiliar male voice in the background, jabbering with my granddaughter. Somebody she’d just met, no doubt, and he’d spent the night like all the rest. My daughter, the slut. Try to raise your only kid right and this was what you got, a slut who was raising her daughter to be the same and her son to be a dope fiend. Jason had already been arrested once on a marijuana charge. I didn’t even ask her about “the new man in my life,” as she’d have put it; I said I got to go, the Packers were about to score another touchdown, and hung up on her.
The Packers scored, all right, and no sooner did they kick off to the Cowboys than I had another interruption. Chief Novak, to pester me again. I heard the bell go off on the front desk and thought it might be an early guest and went out to find him and his bruised and bandaged face. Nobody with him today. And looking about as hangdog as I felt. Tense, too, as though there’d been some new development that hadn’t set well with him.
“What’s up, Chief?”
“I’m looking for Audrey Sixkiller.”
“That so?”
“Have you seen her last night or today?”
“Nope.”
“Any idea where she might be?”
“Nope.”
“Anyone mention her name to you recently?”
“Nope. You think we have mutual friends, Chief?”
“I don’t think anything,” he said. “I’m grabbing at straws. I’ve been trying to find her all morning, all over town.”
“How come? She do something?”
“Personal matter.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you know how Indians are.”
“... What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Never around when you want ’em, always off doing what pleases them. They’re not the same as us.”
That touched off a scowl. He said snottily, “Don’t like Indians much, do you, Harry? Or anybody with a different skin.”
“You saying I’m a racist? Me?”
“Oh hell no, not you.”
“Look here, you don’t have any call to insult me just because you can’t find your woman.”
“She’s not my woman.”
“No? Somebody’s woman, that’s for sure.”
He laid his hands on the counter and leaned toward me, so suddenly that I couldn’t help stepping back. “Don’t play games with me. You have something to say, spit it out.”
I spit it out, all right. Might not have — might not’ve even thought of it — if I hadn’t been in such a low-down mood and if he hadn’t started throwing his weight around and accusing me of being a racist. As it was, I felt like sticking it to him a little. Sticking it to somebody the way it’d been stuck to me by the media. So I did. And I put a little twist on it, too, that hadn’t even crossed my mind until that minute.
“You been over to Nucooee Point?” I asked him.
“Nucooee Point? No, why?”
“Might be where she’s at. Her and her somebody.”
“What the hell’re you getting at?”
“She landed that boat of hers at the Point yesterday morning. I happened to see her, and that’s sure enough where she went. Nothing down there but the old lodge and a lot of privacy. No reason for her to go there all by herself unless she was meeting somebody, now is there, Chief?”
Audrey Sixkiller
“It’s noon, John,” I said. “Whoever you’re waiting for isn’t coming.”
“He’s coming, all right.”
“Then why hasn’t he been here by now?”
No answer.
“Suppose he doesn’t come. What then?”
No answer.
“You can’t walk away from here, you know that. And the two of us can’t stay here indefinitely. You know that, too.”
“Okay, I know it.”
“Let me go, and give yourself up, John.”
“No.”
“It’s the only way you have a chance.”
“It’s the only way I don’t have a chance.”
“I’ll testify for you. I’ll tell them what you did for me last night—”
“That won’t stop a jury from convicting me of murder.”
“You won’t be tried if Mateo Munoz is guilty. Please listen—”
“I’m through listening, Audrey. I don’t want to hear any more. Either you shut up or I’ll put tape over your mouth. I mean it. You want your mouth taped shut?”
I didn’t; I shook my head.
“All right, then. Be quiet.”
He was pacing again, as he’d done most of the morning. Earlier it had been for exercise and to work off nervous energy; he’d slept some, too, and he seemed stronger. Now the pacing was the result of tension and frustration. As I watched him I thought again of how warriorlike he was at times, even dressed in slacks and shirt and an old corduroy jacket that was too small across the shoulders and chest. The Ruger automatic inside his belt added a renegade touch. John Faith: warrior, renegade, misfit. A man apart, a man shunned.
Nearly five hours of exhausted sleep had renewed my strength as well. The headache and throat soreness were mostly gone; only a stiffness in my legs and lower back bothered me, discomfort that would’ve been worse if John Faith hadn’t let me unbind my ankles and walk for a short time. He’d also given me milk, and bread and cheese to eat. Until these past few minutes, there had been little conversation between us. The night had invited as much intimacy as a man and a woman with too many fundamental differences and too few similarities could share. The pale morning light that seeped into the lodge caused us to pull away from each other. In a sense it was like a one-night stand between strangers: closeness and urgency in the dark, and in the morning, distance and embarrassment at having opened yourself up, even a little, to someone you didn’t know.
“John,” I said, “I’d like to walk again.”
“No.”
“My toes are starting to get numb.”
“Tape’s not that tight. Ankles or wrists.”
He’d bound my hands more than an hour ago, in front of me as he’d promised. I lifted my arms; with my fingers splayed away from one another and the tape joining the wrists, my hands looked like an obscene caricature of the Christian symbol of prayer. I lowered my arms again, clasped my fingers between my drawn-up knees.
Something creaked and scraped in another part of the lodge, the dining room or beyond, at the side. John Faith heard it, too; he stood still with his head cocked, listening. The sounds weren’t repeated. Rats, probably. They were everywhere in the old building, in the walls and under the floors; now and then you could hear them scurrying, gnawing. He’d been wise to put the food up next to him while he slept. The candlelight alone wouldn’t have been enough to keep hungry rats away.
He said, “Going to take another quick look outside.”
“He’s not coming, John.”
“Couple of minutes is all I’ll be gone. Don’t try taking that tape off your ankles.”
“I won’t.”
He moved off through the archway, into the dining room. Enough daylight penetrated so he could make his way without using a flashlight. Only one candle still burned, the one on the chair near where I sat. Through its guttering flame I watched John Faith meld with the shadows beyond the archway. I leaned forward then, reached down to my ankles, but not to try picking at the tape. It would be foolish to disobey him at this point. All I did was rub the insteps in an effort to improve circulation—