The Ghost Walker Read Online Free

want to show us where you found the body, Father?”
    Father John lifted himself out into the blowing snow and walked between the police car and the ambulance to the side of the road, his eyes searching for the bootprints, the smudged area. Banner and the policeman fell in beside him, their boots scuffing the snow. Their breath floated in little clouds. Another BIA policeman came toward them, shining a flashlight along the ditch.
    “There,” Father John said, spotting the packed, smudged area. “I hope I didn’t disturb any evidence.”
    “Only need evidence for a crime,” said the policeman with the flashlight.
    “Dumping a body is crime enough.” This from the chief.
    Father John fixed his eyes on the policeman. “What are you getting at?”
    “If there’s a body out here, we can’t find it.” He waved the flashlight across the ditch.
    Father John moved close to the edge. The snow in the ditch looked even more trampled, but where the body had been was only a smooth indentation, like a narrow cot.
    “This the place?” Banner asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You sure—”
    “It was a body, Banner,” Father John said, irritated. “Somebody’s taken it.”
    Banner turned toward the other men. “Check the ditch on both sides, in case the body got thrown somewhere else around here.”
    Father John was lost in his own thoughts. There was one man who might have guessed he’d found a body on Rendezvous Road that wasn’t meant to be found. As he and Banner walked back to the police car, Father John said, “You might want to talk to a blond guy, early twenties, new to these parts, driving a gray Chevy pickup.”

3
    T he body preyed on his mind all night. Father John managed to snatch only a few intervals of sleep before getting up at about five. He alternated saying daily Mass with Father Peter Roach, the seventy-two-year-old Jesuit the Provincial had called from retirement six months ago to help out at St. Francis. This morning was Father John’s turn. He showered, dressed, and headed down the dark stairs. He flipped on the little light over the stove, which turned the kitchen into a blur of shadows.
    After brewing a pot of strong coffee, he poured some into a mug and sat down at the round wood table, going over last night’s events again in his mind. Everything about the body was unknown: the name, the face, the terrible fate that had brought it to the ditch, the disappearance. There were no explanations, only questions.
    A couple of times the three-legged golden retriever he’d acquired last fall—or who had acquired him, as Father Peter insisted—struggled off the rug in the corner and shoved a cold nose into his hand, then flopped back down and resumed snoring. Father John had named the dog Walks-on-Three-Legs. Walks-on, for short. He felt a kinship with this animal who had also arrived at St. Francis Mission not quite whole.
    At about six-thirty, he let Walks-on go out for a fewminutes while he filled the dog’s bowl with canned meat and rock-hard chow. The quiet of the house was broken by the sounds of the dog slurping and chomping his breakfast as Father John shrugged into his parka and pulled on his gloves. Setting his cowboy hat low on his head, he let himself out the front door and plunged into the frigid morning.
    The buildings of St. Francis Mission rose out of the snow around Circle Drive like a miniature village under a Christmas tree: the white stucco church, its bell tower floating among the ice-crusted Cottonwood branches; the stone administration building where his and Father Peter’s offices were; the cement-block Eagle Hall, half gym, half meeting rooms; the one-room guest house; the old school—the mission’s first building. He’d once suggested demolishing it, but the elders had raised such an outcry he’d ended up apologizing for the suggestion. St. Francis was like the reservation itself: What was here belonged here. It was a sacred space, enclosed by four sacred spaces: the Wind