Free Eye of the Wolf by Margaret Coel Page A

outlined in the dull morning light, standing outside the door on the concrete stoop, hunched forward, as if she weren’t sure whether to try the door or flee down the steps. Parked in front of the building was a blue Ford sedan with a dented passenger door and a side-view mirror suspended from a tangle of wires. The woman’s head jerked around as he approached. She backpedaled toward the railing, black boots skidding over the snowy concrete.
    â€œCan I help you?” Father John started up the steps. The first parishioner of the day, he was thinking, dropping by— Father, do you have a minute? I have to talk to somebody. Except that she wasn’t a parishioner. She wasn’t anyone he had ever met, and she was younger than he’d realized at first, probably no more than twenty. A girl more than a woman, her straw-colored hair brushing the collar of the gray coat thatstrained against the front buttons, as if it were a size too small for her slight frame. She squinted along the railing at him. A small circle of metal glinted in one nostril.
    â€œYou the Indian priest?” she said.
    He felt a jolt of alarm. The mechanical voice clanged through the fog in his head. This is for the Indian priest .
    â€œSome people call me that,” he said, holding his place halfway up the steps. He was thinking that he spent more time with Indian people than with white people. His parishioners were Arapahos. Days passed when the only other white person he talked to was his assistant. But it was the whites in Lander, the town that abutted the reservation, and in Riverton—encircled by the reservation—who had given him the name. The girl probably came from one of the towns.
    â€œI’m Father O’Malley.” He nodded toward the door. “Would you like to come inside?”
    â€œYeah.” The girl gulped at the word, watchful eyes still observing him—observing the Band-Aid on his cheek, he realized. She stood very still, arms dangling at her side. Her hands were bare and raw looking. The gray coat had a belt that looped in front, and for the first time, he noticed the little bulge below her waist.
    Father John took the last two stairs, opened the door, and led the girl across the wide corridor crisscrossed with shadows and arrows of light from outdoors. He pushed open the door to his office and motioned her inside. She hesitated for a couple of seconds, then hurried past him and planted herself in the center of the room, her gaze taking in the desk piled with papers and folders, the old leather chair with the gray tape that he’d plastered over a small tear in the middle, the side chairs that he kept for visitors, the file cabinets topped with books and papers, the bookcases with shelves bowing under the double stacks of books.
    â€œHow about a cup of coffee?” The phone started ringing. He decided to let it go to the answering machine.
    â€œWater would be okay.” The girl shrugged.
    â€œMake yourself at home.” Father John hung his jacket over the coattree, then took two Styrofoam cups from the little table that held a coffeepot and jars of coffee, sugar, and powdered cream and headed down the corridor for water. When he returned, the girl was sitting on a side chair, rubbing her hands together and staring into the center of the room. He handed her one of the cups, pulled the other side chair around, and sat down facing her.
    â€œSuppose you start by telling me your name,” he said.
    â€œEdie.” It was little more than a whisper. Then she added, “Bradbury.” She was very pretty: startling blue eyes and wide cheekbones, lips a slash of red against her pale skin. He could see the faintest line of blue veins in her temples as she sipped at the water.
    â€œEdie Bradbury,” he said, not meaning to sound surprised. He took a drink of his own water, then set the cup on the edge of the desk. Short for Edith, he supposed. A girl with an