Winter's Child Read Online Free Page B

If her grandson’s car didn’t start, there was every chance she would stride out cross-country through the snow. He set the bowl and mug on the table, took his cell out of his shirt pocket, and called the housekeeper’s home. He told the young woman who answered—probably the wife of Elena’s grandson—that he’d be glad to drive over and pick Elena up. “Oh, they got a jump and she’s on the way, Father,” the woman told him. “She was anxious about you and the bishop not having breakfast.”
    He slid the cell back into his pocket and sat down across the corner from the bishop. “Elena’s on the way,” he said. In her seventies, maybe her eighties, he was thinking, but she would never admit it. She didn’t even admit to her seventies.
    â€œAnything wrong? Bad news was on your face when you came in.”
    Father John took a bite of the oatmeal. It had the taste of burnt toast. Picking up the coffee mug, he turned toward the bishop. “A lawyer from Riverton was hit by a truck last night in Lander. He didn’t make it.”
    â€œThe blizzard.” The old man shook his head and looked away. “We all hang by a very thin thread, I’m afraid.”
    â€œClint Hopkins. He handled some adoptions for people on the rez.”
    â€œAnother friend lost. Did you know him?”
    Father John shook his head. He wondered if it was Hopkins who helped his parishioners Jan and Mike Rivers adopt their niece last year. He made a mental note to give them a call, offer his condolences for the loss of a man they must have trusted.
    â€œOn a happier note, I’m looking forward to meeting your niece.”
    â€œSo am I,” Father John said. The last time he had seen Shannon, she was twelve years old. The woman stepping off the plane this morning would be someone else, a twenty-four-year-old doctoral student at the University of Chicago doing a dissertation on two sisters captured by Indians in the nineteenth century. There had been many white captives. Some had been rescued after a brief time, but others spent years with the tribes. Still others, like Cynthia Ann Parker, captured by the Comanches when she was a small child, had grown up with the tribes—become Indian—before being forcibly returned to their families. Those were the saddest cases of all, he thought after he’d read some of the stories. White women who no longer belonged in the white world, forced to live in a culture they didn’t remember or understand.
    Shannon had called a couple weeks ago. She was researching the lives of Amanda and Elizabeth Fletcher, captured in 1865 in a Cheyenne raid on their family’s wagon train. Amanda had been rescuedwithin months, but her two-year-old sister had had been traded to the Arapahos. She had lived out her life as an Arapaho. Lizzie Brokenhorn, as she was known on the reservation. “Think I could talk to one of Lizzie’s descendants?” Shannon had wanted to know, and he had told her he would do his best.
    He glanced at his watch, got to his feet, and carried his bowl with the half-eaten oatmeal and the mug still nearly full over to the sink. Bills to pay and calls to return, and only a couple hours before he had to leave for the airport. He thanked the bishop for a lovely breakfast.
    â€œMy pleasure.” The old man was beaming. “I decided this morning to take up cooking. I believe I have a natural talent, and it’s so relaxing and rewarding to make a meal for someone else. Yes, I do believe I’ll take up cooking.”
    *   *   *
    Riverton Regional Airport occupied a high plateau northwest of town. The wide, empty spaces of the reservation stretched into the distances with the Wind River Range rising into the Western sky. The music of Il Trovatore blared from the CD player on the center of the seat. A white world this morning, seamless and bright in the mid-morning sun. Father John