Ghost Dance Read online

  The Norman Rockwell façade continues where Main Street splits around a three-acre village green. A colonial-style rail fence borders the park. The center of the green is dominated by a gazebo painted bright white with forest trim. There are more restored homes on either side of the park as well as a library, a summer-stock theater and The Lawton House, a luxury inn Conde Nast Traveler has called one of the best in New England.

  Beyond the green is Lawton’s thriving commercial center, where brick sidewalks lead the tourist to art galleries, sundry shops, bookstores and trendy restaurants.

  But that day Lawton’s streets were almost deserted. The tourists and the townspeople had been driven inside by the ferocity of the storm. The courageous few men and women who had ventured out into the harsh weather were hunched over, pale-faced and grimacing at the chill, driving rain.

  Two miles north, he came to the Otterslide General Store. It is the single hub of activity at the sparsely settled north end of Lawton, a long, gray shake-shingled affair that caters T-shirts and maple syrup to the out-of-state travelers and basic supplies to the locals not up to the trip downtown.

  Gallagher pulled into the gravel parking lot, shut off the engine and gave himself a quick look of appraisal in the rear-view mirror. Six feet two inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, reasonably fit. Short-cropped coppery hair. Faded freckles. A smirking, high-eyebrowed mug more man a few women had found handsome, aged by wrinkles now and streaks of gray that showed plainly at the temples. Sacks of loose skin hung under sunken, bloodshot green eyes twisted into that addled perception soldiers call the thousand-yard stare.

  ‘What’s the point, Pat?’ he asked himself. ‘What’s the fucking point?’

  Gallagher sat there helpless for many minutes, watching the truck’s wiper blades lose the fight against the pelt of rain. At last he got up the energy to zip up his oilskin jacket, tug down his Yankees baseball cap and climb out of the truck. His legs tingled with a cold, prickly sensation after the six-hour drive from Manhattan.

  After several minutes of standing in the downpour, he had enough feeling return to his extremities to walk unsteadily toward the store. The door opened and a middle-aged man and woman dressed in yellow rain slickers stepped out. Their talk abruptly ended when they saw Gallagher. Clear expressions of distrust flitted across their faces.

  The door creaked as he entered. Propane lamps hanging from the ceiling dimly lit the store’s interior. He realized the storm must have blown out the electrical power. A woman in jeans and a green rain jacket placed a quart of milk and a half-dozen eggs on the counter before a big-bellied man with oily black hair and a scraggly beard. The woman turned, her finger tapping at her lips as if she had forgotten something.

  Even in the shadowy light she was stunning—five-ten, trim, with sleepy oval eyes, wide and prominent cheekbones and a riot of auburn hair that cascaded around her shoulders and put Gallagher in mind of the blues diva Bonnie Raitt. She glided away from the counter with the powerful elegance of a trained athlete. She glanced at Gallagher as she entered the bread aisle and for the briefest instant his heart raced. It was a reaction that surprised him. It had been a long, long time since he’d felt much of anything. But in the next instant he shrugged off the sensation as the sort of hormonal blip any mature male might exhibit if he’d been celibate for nearly eighteen months.

  ‘Help ya, sir?’ the fat man at the counter asked in the thick, almost Cockney accent of the Vermont hills. His skin was unnaturally waxy. His eyes were slate gray. They shifted from side to side, unwilling to meet Gallagher’s.

  ‘I’m new in town,’ Gallagher began.

  ‘Can see that,’ the man said, scratching at his beard skeptically.

  ‘I’m looking for a place to stay and fish for a while,’ he continued. ‘Are there any cabins to rent locally?’

  The man curled his lip as if he’d tasted something rancid, then shook his head. ‘Nah. Nothing like that in Lawton.’

  ‘I have a cabin for rent,’ came a soft, throaty voice.

  Gallagher turned to find the woman appraising him. His heart raced again. Up close, her nose was gracefully upturned, her lips plump and her eyes a deep emerald green. But she had not colored the premature gray in her hair. Nor had she bothered to lay makeup over the emerging lines about her face. She was in her mid-thirties and a wholesome beauty, but there was a veil of melancholy about her demeanor that made her seem older, as if she had seen a lot of the rougher side of life and been on the blunt end of it more often than she deserved.

  ‘Great,’ Gallagher said, throwing an annoyed look at the storekeeper, who was now scowling at the woman.

  ‘I don’t believe it myself,’ she said, ‘but a lot of people who’ve stayed in the cabin say it’s haunted. I tell that first thing to anybody who’s interested because they’ll hear it sooner or later from some idiot in town. Am I right, Bernie?’

  The store owner’s face reddened and his scowl deepened. ‘You say so, Andie.’

  ‘How close is it to the Bluekill River—the cabin, I mean?’ Gallagher asked.

  ‘Fifty yards.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  She scrunched up one eye in bemusement. ‘Why don’t you follow me and take a look before you go writing any checks, Mr—?’

  ‘Gallagher. Patrick Gallagher.’

  She brushed past him and put a loaf of bread on the counter. ‘I’m Andromeda Nightingale. Most people call me Andie.’

  ‘Bernie’s a jolly, helpful guy,’ Gallagher said, nodding back in the direction of the store as Andie Nightingale loaded her groceries in the front seat of a rusty-blue Toyota pickup. The rain had lulled, but the wind had set the rusting metal Coca-Cola sign hanging off the Otterslide General Store to wailing at its braces.

  She shrugged. ‘Vermonters don’t take to strangers right off, especially guys like Bernie Chittenden,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Follow me. The cabin’s a couple miles up the River Road.’

  Gallagher jogged back to the Explorer and started it. She waved at him out the window, then jerked the pickup into gear. They went east and the paved thoroughfare quickly gave way to a muddy, rutted road. They passed several homes before the road curved south and wound for two miles through a flat of beech and maple. Gallagher figured they were looping around and behind the town. Sure enough, when they emerged from the hardwoods there were farm fields on both sides of the road, and several hundred yards off to the west he could make out the Bluekill River. They passed a tidy white farmhouse and barn on the east side of the road. A quarter acre of soil, a garden, lay freshly turned over in the front yard. The faded lettering on the mailbox read ‘Nightingale.’

  But they drove past her driveway a hundred yards before turning right and bouncing down a little two-track road that ran parallel to a hedgerow beside a cut cornfield. Two hundred yards farther on, the field and hedgerow gave way to a glen of electric-white paper birches. Amidst the trees squatted a bizarre-looking cabin.

  The right side of the structure had the classic lines of a late-nineteenth-century post-and-beam farmhouse, complete with wraparound porch. But the left side was unnaturally canted: from ten feet off the peak of the slate roof, the wall plunged abruptly to the ground. There were no windows and no doors on that side. The clapboards were warped and weather-grayed.

  Andie Nightingale got out of her pickup, climbed up on the swayed porch and fumbled with a ring of keys. There were two locks on the door. As she worked on the padlock, Gallagher asked, ‘You and your husband are farmers?’

  ‘Not married, not a farmer,’ she said, spinning the combination. The lock whined, then clicked open. ‘I lease the land out to farmers to cover my taxes. I’m a sergeant with the state police, Bureau of Criminal Investigations. We investigate death in Vermont.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, looking at her with deeper appreciation. ‘I make films—documentaries, actually.’

  She gave him a look of deeper appreciation. ‘Like a reporter?’

  ‘Somet
hing like that.’

  ‘I don’t like reporters,’ she said, sliding a skeleton key into the lower lock. The tumblers rolled and the wind gusted and the door blew open. Cobwebs ripped free in the doorjamb. Musty air boiled back and they both coughed and sneezed. In seconds the rank air had dissipated.

  Except for a pantry and a mudroom, the entire first floor of the cabin was a kitchen. There was a red-handled pump in the sink, a simple gas stove, a venerable Ashley wood-burning stove and a rough-hewn table with mismatched chairs.

  ‘What you see is what you get,’ she said. ‘Bedroom’s upstairs. It’s a hundred fifty a week.’

  ‘I’ll take it for a month,’ Gallagher said, reaching for his checkbook.

  ‘You’re going to fish for a month?’ she asked, incredulous.

  ‘And research Father D’Angelo for a possible documentary,’ he said. ‘You know anything about him?’

  Nightingale shrugged. ‘Just that he supposedly performed miracles here and that the church has begun the process of sainthood. Monsignor Timothy McColl at St Edward’s Church is who you’d want to talk to. He’s the expert.’

  McColl’s name was already in Gallagher’s notebook Jerry had called ahead and arranged for him to interview the priest on Monday morning.

  After writing her a check, Gallagher noticed two framed etchings on the wall at the foot of the staircase. One was a portrait of a puffy-faced man slumped in a ladder-back chair. He was completely bald and corpulent. He had a pancake nose and the albino’s unnatural strain about the eyes. In the second etching, a group of people with their backs turned sat before the mouth of a cave. An Indian stood on a cliff above the cave, hand stretched toward the crowd. A full moon hovered in the sky above the Indian’s headdress.

  ‘These are unusual,’ Gallagher said.

  ‘The albino’s name was Caleb Danby,’ Nightingale replied, as if reciting an often-told story. ‘He cut this cabin off the side of his brother Joshua’s house across town before the turn of the century. The Danby brothers were mediums who made Lawton a center of spiritualism in the 1890s. They held seances during which ghosts were said to have materialized. Then, for reasons no one is quite sure of, the brothers had a falling-out, the seances came to an abrupt halt and Joshua Danby disappeared. Caleb moved the cabin down here by the river. He lived in it for a year before committing suicide by plunging a butcher knife into his heart.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Gallagher said, rubbing his chest.

  ‘People in my business don’t kid about things like that,’ Nightingale replied coolly. She turned as if to go and he realized he’d soon be alone in the cabin.

  ‘You related to them?’ he asked, trying to get her to stay a little longer. ‘The Danbys, I mean.’

  She shook that mane of auburn hair. ‘The last Danby left Lawton a long time ago.’

  ‘And the Indian?’

  Nightingale hesitated at that and her face took on a pained expression. She looked out the window toward the forest on the far side of the river. ‘The Indian’s a mystery.’

  Amused by her sudden soberness, Gallagher asked, ‘So which one haunts the place?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, Caleb, I guess,’ she replied with a forced flip of her hand. ‘I’ve never paid much attention to that old story.’

  She answered several more questions that he had about the cabin and where in town he might buy groceries and linens. Then she said she was late for her shift and left. Gallagher watched her drive off and realized again that he had been strangely buoyed by Andie Nightingale’s presence. She was beautiful. If his reaction was purely hormonal, so be it. He felt better than he had in a long time.

  But as Gallagher unloaded his fishing rods, luggage, camera bag and computer, the rise in his spirits drained away. By the time he had his gear all stored inside and had cleaned up the place a bit, he was acutely aware of the silence of the cabin ringing in his ears. Like an addict searching out his next fix, Gallagher looked out the window to the river to provide white noise, to drown out the silence. But the rain was falling hard again. The Bluekill River seethed in full boil, much too dangerous for fishing.

  For nearly an hour before total exhaustion forced him upstairs onto the bare mattress under a pile of dusty wool blankets, Gallagher sat in an Adirondack chair on the front porch of the cabin, watching the Bluekill flow and trying his best to avoid an examination of the shards in the midden mound of his shattered life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SATURDAY, MAY 9

  GALLAGHER SLEPT TEN FITFUL hours, waking shortly after dawn to what sounded like the gentle shake of a gourd rattle and the far-offbeat of a leather drum, oddities he managed to dismiss as the vestiges of a fading dream. Outside, the storm still howled. The Lawton radio station announced the worst would be over by midday. To kill time before he could go to the river, Gallagher drove into town, ate breakfast, bought groceries, sheets and towels, then called St Edward’s Church and reconfirmed his interview with Monsignor McColl for Monday morning.

  Around noon the rain stilled to a drizzle. Gallagher double-knotted his wading shoes, adjusted the gravel cuff on his waders, then took up the graphite six-weight rod and reel and hustled toward the Bluekill River in an effort to fend off the hot point of a migraine headache that had been threatening all morning. As if the hypnotic pulse of the rushing water could loosen the emotional screws tightening in his head.

  The river was high and turbulent still, but he did not pause at the water’s edge. Gallagher used the spiked wading staff to feel his way out into the surging current. Twice he stumbled, barely managing to keep his balance against the insistent force that pummeled the backs of his knees.

  At last Gallagher obtained stable footing on a sandbar and tied on a bright red streamer. The only bleak hope for a strike in the roiled water. Then he played out line and drew the rod back to one o’clock before stiff-arming the tip forward and halting sharply at ten. In the chill mist, the line straightened on the backcast, looped at the braking action, then unfolded neatly and plopped into the cinnamon water against the opposite shore. He stripped line quickly until the crimson streamer reappeared, raised the rod and cast again. The repetitive, flowing movement emptied his mind as a mantra might a Buddhist monk’s.

  After a half hour with no strikes, Gallagher tied on a yellow marabou, a lure more suited to western rivers, cast it, then watched his fluorescent orange sinking line course rapidly downstream. His thoughts turned sourly to his predicament. He was turning forty, alone in a cabin in rural Vermont. His ex-wife, Emily, was remarrying today. It was an exercise in extreme self-pity, but Gallagher did not care, and he was prepared to wallow fully in the feeling as the spool on the reel began to turn, playing out more line on the frothy water.

  The fly line snaked and danced hypnotically. It became every fishing line Gallagher had ever cast, a line that arced over his head and splayed itself in the muddy waters of the Ganges River. Six years before.

  The ghat, the grand stone staircase that formed the river’s bank, was packed with men, women and children waiting to bathe. Goats blatted. A cow lowed in the late-afternoon sun. Six half-cremated corpses lay on the stair at the Water’s edge, waiting to be taken to the center of the holy river and released into eternity.

  Gallagher ignored the looks his fishing gear generated, then waded off the ghat toward the current. He wasn’t expecting to catch a thing. But it had been a long day of travel and he needed to feel the water around him. After a half hour of casting and stripping line, he had fallen under the Ganges’ spell.

  ‘Orvis comes to Allahabad,’ a husky woman’s voice called. ‘I’ve seen it all now.’

  Gallagher stopped mending line to glance over his shoulder. The voice belonged to a big-boned woman with a thick blond pigtail that jutted out from under a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. Her freckled face was angular around sparkling black eyes, a pert nose and an expression of perpetual bemusement. She wore round wire-rimmed sunglasses and a red batik skirt she’d hiked up and tucked
in at her hips. Her plain white T-shirt strained against pendulous breasts. A Leica camera hung around her neck. A camera bag was slung off her shoulder. She waded out, looked Gallagher up and down and barked out a laugh.

  ‘Some friends grabbed me in the street up there to tell me a crazy American was throwing red feathers on an orange string into the Ganges,’ she said. ‘Call me wacko, too, but I just had to see it.’

  ‘Providing merriment for the locals is just part of the job,’ Gallagher quipped.

  Before she could reply, a throng of hundreds appeared at the top of the stone staircase, singing and carrying purple flowers. Thousands more appeared at the adjoining ghats that curved away along the bank to the north. Ten by ten, they cast their flowers into the river, then waded in and started bathing. Within minutes they were surrounded by a multitude of people and floating wheels of purple flowers spinning in the twilight. The woman snapped pictures. Gallagher could not keep his eyes off her, especially her thighs, which were powerful and tanned a nut brown.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Do they take a bath like this every day?’

  ‘Once a year they come to wash away their sins,’ she replied, still shooting. ‘In the next ten days half a million people will bathe along this half-mile stretch. Hindu scriptures say the festival dates back to the origins of the earth when gods and demons squabbled over who got holy nectar.’

  Gallagher watched as hundreds poured water over their heads. ‘And the holy nectar does what?’

  ‘A single drop guarantees immortality,’ she said.

  ‘So we’re all here scrubbing up for immortality?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it that way.’

  ‘Then I have a chance at immortality?’

  She shook her head, grinning wickedly. ‘I don’t think the waters of eternity penetrate neoprene waders.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said and his face burned. For some reason it seemed important to him that he impress her, and he was failing miserably.