Joe shook his head, confused.
“Shenandoah’s grandmother got really sick, so she stayed on the reservation to take care of her. I think she was scared—there was so much pressure on her—and I told her that, but she said she would go to college and play basketball when her grandmother was better. Like all those schools would just wait for her.”
She looked up at Joe, moisture in her eyes. “I get disappointed to this day when I think about the potential she had and the opportunity she missed.”
Joe nodded, prodding her on.
Mrs. Thunder looked down, as if she didn’t want Joe to see her eyes, didn’t want to see how he reacted to an all-too-common story on the reservation. She said Shenandoah did, in fact, nurse her grandmother for a year, then two. Her devotion was extraordinary for a girl her age, she said, but didn’t entirely mask the fact that part of the reason she stayed was because of her fear of leaving the cloistered reservation for the punishing high-profile world of big-time college sports—or at least that’s what Mrs. Thunder surmised. Plus, there was the pressure from those she’d grown up with, her friends and family and coaches. Too many people lived vicariously through her, saw her triumphs as their triumphs. When she failed, they failed too.
“Kind of like me,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’m guilty of that as well. I think of a lot of these kids as my own, and I wanted her to do so well, to make us all be able to say, ‘I knew her when.’”
“Where did she go?” Joe asked gently, knowing where she ended up but not how she got there.
“Nowhere, for way too long, I’m afraid,” she said. “The time away from sports didn’t do her any good. She gained a lot of weight the way kids do when they’re used to playing sports all the time and they just stop. It was pretty obvious after a couple of years that it would be tough if not impossible for her to get a recruiter interested, even if they still remembered her. But that’s me speaking . . . I don’t even know if she tried.”
Shenandoah started running with the wrong crowd, she said, a bad mixture of Indians and town kids. She got involved with alcohol and drugs, and was arrested for dealing crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation as well as small-town Wyoming. Her grandmother died and Shenandoah drifted back and forth from the res to town. Mrs. Thunder said she’d hear of Shenandoah from time to time, that she worked as a barmaid, a waitress, even as a roughneck on a coal-bed methane crew. She hired out as a cook and a guide for elk camps as well, Mrs. Thunder said, raising her eyebrows as she said it.
Joe grunted. While there certainly were legitimate cooks for elk camps, there were also “cooks”—mainly younger women—who provided other services for well-heeled, mainly out-of-state hunters. Joe had seen and met some of the camp cooks in the mountains, and it was obvious few knew anything about making breakfast. He felt the same irony and sadness Mrs. Thunder conveyed as he imagined the scenario and looked at Shenandoah Yellowcalf ’s bold face and eyes in the yearbook. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-year-old Northern Arapaho “camp cook” they’d hired was once one of the greatest basketball players in the state of Wyoming, he thought. He searched his memory; there was something familiar about the story. Something about a young female Indian camp cook. Something he’d heard years before when he was a trainee working under the former game warden Vern Dunnegan . . .
But he’d sort that out later.
He asked, “Do you know if Shenandoah and Alisha were friends?”
Mrs. Thunder smiled. “They were best friends. I think Alisha did everything she could to help Shenandoah.”
“Did they keep in touch?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assume they did.”
Joe said, “Hmmmm.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I can tell you that Shenandoah is back and doing very well. I saw her recently. She looks good and she has a little baby. She’s married to a guy named Klamath Moore.”
It was obvious from Mrs. Thunder’s expression that she was grateful to hear the news but didn’t know who Klamath Moore was.
“I’m so happy to hear that,” she said, growing misty again. “That’s so good to hear. Please, if you see her again, tell her to come by the school. Tell her I’d love to see her again.”
Joe smiled. “If I get the chance, I’ll pass along the invite.”
“Tell her that old Alice Thunder wants to give her a hug.”
JOE WAS buoyed as he walked out into the parking lot. The best entree to Klamath Moore would no doubt be through his wife, Shannon . . . and Alisha.
If his friend was working on anything at all.
HE SAT in the pickup without starting the motor. His mind raced. What was it Vern Dunnegan had once told him about the Indian camp cook?
Vern told a lot of stories. He talked nonstop. Joe had learned to tune him out because the chatter was incessant and many of Dunnegan’s stories were mean-spirited. Joe had tried to forget everything Vern had told him once Vern showed himself to be a liar and a criminal eight years before; he’d done all he could to expunge Vern Dunnegan from his mind. But he tried to remember this particular story about the camp cook. He hoped he’d written it down in his notebook at the time, and he planned to locate his old notes to try to refresh his memory.
THERE WERE two messages on his cell phone and he punched in the access number to hear them.
The first was from Stella, saying Randy Pope was doing everything he could to meet with the governor to get his blessing to leave Cheyenne and take over supervision of the case. She was running interference, but she said she couldn’t hold him off forever. What, Stella asked, was going on?
The second was from Portenson of the FBI, saying Bill Gordon was prepared to meet Joe that night in the little town of Winchester. He said Gordon wanted to talk and he had something to say. Portenson said Joe was to be at the park promptly at eight. No earlier, no later. If Joe wasn’t there on time and alone, Gordon, Portenson promised, would flee. And if something bad happened—if Joe was late or Gordon smelled a trap—there would be no more meetings, because the informant couldn’t risk them and, frankly, he had no idea if Joe could be trusted in the first place.
