Wife of Moon by Margaret Coel Read Free Book Online Page B

bring him to your office this afternoon.”
    â€œSo, you’ll be with him?” There was something unsettling in the question, as if T.J. was going to need an attorney.
    â€œHe’s a friend, Ted.”
    â€œSee you at three,” Gianelli said.
    Vicky pushed the END key and looked back at T.J. “Do you have any fresh clothes?”
    The man nodded. “I keep some things here. Sometimes I stay with Vera.” He shrugged off any impulse he might have had to explain. “I want you for my lawyer, Vicky. I can pay . . .”
    Vicky put up the palm of one hand. “Wait in the Jeep. I’ll get your things,” she said, starting across the hard-packed dirt for the front stoop.
    From inside came the dull, staccato rip of voices. She rapped on the door, then stepped into a square living room filled with people. The faint odors of coffee and hot grease floated like a cloud over the room. Grandmothers clustered together around the sofa and upholstered chairs, elders on the straight-backed kitchen chairs pushed against one wall. Everywhere she looked—T.J.’s and Denise’s relatives. In the far corner was Max Oldman, Denise’s great-uncle, which made him her great-grandfather, in the Arapaho Way. Through the doorway to the kitchen, she could see Vera talking to a group of women.
    Vicky pushed back the impulse to cut through the crowd and go directly to Vera. It was the white way. She started across the room, greeting the grandmothers, holding roughened, blue-veined hands in her own. Nodding. Nodding. Yes, Denise had been a good woman, a traditional. In the compliments paid to the dead woman, she could sense the lingering disapproval of herself, a woman who had stepped ahead of the men.
    The elders were next, gray-haired, with furrowed faces and black, distracted eyes that might have been staring into another time, watching other scenes unfold. Max took hold of her hand, squeezing it hard, and she heard herself saying the empty words: so sorry, so terrible.
    â€œDenise kept the Old Time alive for the kids.” Max shook his head. He had black hair, threaded with gray and caught in two braids that dropped down the front of his denim shirt. He was probably inhis eighties, frail and bent with gnarled hands that extended past the wide silver bracelets at his thin wrists. Still there was a strength in the man that Vicky could feel with the certainty that she felt her own heartbeat. In the Old Time, Max Oldman would have been a chief.
    â€œDenise was all the time coming around,” he said, “wanting to know about Sharp Nose and what he did for the people. Now who’s gonna help the kids learn how the ancestors worked hard so the future generations could be happy? Denise thought a lot about the past. T.J., all he thinks about is the here and now. You gonna help T.J.?” The elder looked up at her, searching her eyes. For the briefest instant, Vicky thought she’d detected a note of disapproval in the elder’s question. She pushed the idea away.
    â€œI’ll do my best.” She smiled at the old man. It had been the elders who had seen that, when she became an attorney, she’d received power—magical gifts was how they looked at it—to help the people. She’d always had the feeling that, despite the grandmothers’ disapproval of the fact that she had left her husband and made herself into a lawyer, the elders were on her side.
    It was another few moments before Vicky could excuse herself and head into the kitchen. Vera was waiting for her.
    â€œT.J. said you’d come soon as you heard the news.” The woman had the same sleep-starved look that Vicky had seen in T.J. Exhaustion lay in the sloped shoulders and fluttering hands. “Some bastards brought a bottle over last night. They was drinking outside, T.J., too. Hasn’t had a drink in . . .” She glanced at the ceiling. “Fifteen years. I don’t