Free The Thunder Keeper by Margaret Coel Page A

self-contained in the gray afternoon light. He came around a bend and pulled off into a clearing near a clump of willows. In the distance was the sound of thunder, as crisp as a drumbeat.
    It might have been here, he thought, getting out of the pickup, that Duncan Grover had waded into the lake, hands grasping at the willows for support, feet sinking into the sandy bottom. He had cleansed himself in preparation to meet the spirits.
    Father John tilted his head back and scanned the red sandstone cliffs above. The spirits don’t show themselves to everybody, the elders had told him. Only to those who are worthy.
    It was a couple of minutes before he saw the petroglyph: a large, white humanlike figure carved onto the flat face of a red sandstone cliff. The guardian—the keeper—of the valley. In the Old Time, an elder had once explained, the spirit had kept the deer and sheep in the valley so the people could find food. Now the spirit protected the valley from harm.
    Father John walked along the shore looking for the path up the mountain to the petroglyph. He’d gone about fifty yards when he spotted the depression in the ground, a mud-filled gully that meandered upward through the pines. The thunder crashed again, shaking the ground.There was a flash of lightning above the cliffs.
    He started uphill, walking fast. He didn’t want to be on the mountain during a storm. The path lay in shadow, disappearing at times, then reappearing. Pine branches grabbed at his jacket and scratched at his hands and face.
    He’d gained about three hundred feet in elevation, he guessed, when he stopped. His boots were caked with mud. He gulped at the thin air, his heart pounding against his ribs. Bear Lake floated in the shadows below, and on the cliffs across the valley, he could see other white figures emerging out of the red sandstone. Symbols of other spirit guardians: the deer, keeper of the animals; the eagle, keeper of the wingeds; the thunder, keeper of the atmosphere. In the winter, the elder had said, you could hear the spirits chipping out their own reflections in the cliffs.
    He resumed the climb, pacing himself now. The path was steep, and he had to dig his boots into the soft earth to keep from sliding backward. His calf muscles protested, and his breath came in ragged, painful spasms that punctuated the sound of the wind in the pines. At an outcropping of boulders, he stopped again and looked up.
    He could see the petroglyph clearly: squared body, arms extended in a kind of blessing. There were three fingers on each hand, three toes on each foot. An elaborate headdress fanned around the squared head. Large, round eyes looked out from the masked face. Below the petroglyph was a rock ledge that jutted from the cliff like the proscenium of a stage.
    He took in another gulp of air and started climbing up the boulder field, pulling himself hand over hand, jamming his boots into the cracks between the large rocks to keep from falling backward. Finally he hoisted himself onto the ledge. He’d been climbing for over an hour.
    The valley spread below, nearly lost in the blue-blackshadows creeping down the mountainsides. A sense of peace came over him, the peace Duncan Grover must have felt, he thought, as he’d lifted his pipe to the four directions and asked the spirits for the power to change his life. The same prayer he himself had made during his own retreat in Boston two years ago, he realized.
    He moved along the edge, his eyes sweeping over the drop-off, searching for the place where Duncan had fallen. On the far side of the ledge, the boulder field sloped onto the top of a perpendicular rock wall that dropped a couple hundred feet into the trees. Detective Slinger was right. If Grover had accidentally stepped off the ledge, the boulder field would have stopped his fall. He would have had to take a running jump to fly out over the field and fall down the wall.
    The boss killed him. Father John crouched