The Ghost Walker by Margaret Coel Page A

you have to say.” Vicky felt the old wariness gathering inside her. She didn’t want to be alone with him.
    “It’s about Susan.”
    She stared at her former husband. He always knew how to get what he wanted. He only had to mention one of their children, Susan or Lucas. She turned around and, after fumbling to insert the key in the keyhole, pushed the door open. She flipped the wall switch inside, and the lamp on the table sprang into life, illuminating the gray carpet, the blue-flowered sofa, the coffee table with its neat stack of magazines and her favorite pottery bowl, the dining table and chairs in the alcove beyond the living room.
    “Nice place,” Ben said, closing the door behind them.
    Vicky dropped her bag and briefcase on the sofa, then slipped off her coat and hung it inside the small closet next to the door before facing him. He had already tossed his hat and gloves next to her things, and was pulling himself free from the sheepskin coat. She felt a kind of shock at how much he was like that sense of him she carried inside her. Just over six feet, straight as a lodgepole pine, with powerful shoulders and chest and long, slender fingers. His hair was still black, but flecked with gray now, and combed straight back until it ran along the collar of his tan chamois shirt.
    Laying the sheepskin over the sofa, he smiled at her. Years in the outdoors had imprinted squint lines at the corners of his eyes, which glistened like black pebbles in a mountain stream. She knew the contours of his face better than her own—the strong jaw and high cheekbones,the noble nose of her people, the confident mouth. She had fallen in love with him the summer she’d graduated from St. Francis High School. He’d been out of high school for four years, and had been in the army and gone to Germany. He talked for hours about the outside world, a world she knew nothing about. He spun a fantastic web of words, and she got caught in the web. He was everything she wanted. She was seventeen.
    She forced her thoughts to the present, the Time Being. “What about Susan?”
    “What about the coffee?”
    Her eyes locked with his a moment. He had driven sixty miles on snow-crested roads, in plummeting temperatures, across the reservation from the Arapaho ranch up north where he was the foreman, and had waited in the truck two hours. She could throw herself upon him and beat against his chest, but he wouldn’t tell her why he was here until the time was ready.
    She walked past him into the shadowy alcove. Moonlight filtered through the sliding glass doors that led to the patio, which was mounded in snow. She turned into the small kitchen and flipped on the overhead fluorescent light. A white glow suffused the wood cabinets and cream-colored countertops.
    Ben leaned against the edge of the counter as she measured out the coffee grounds and poured water into the Mr. Coffee. “I was going to scramble some eggs,” she said.
    “Sounds good.”
    She felt his eyes on her as she broke the eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork. After pouring the thick yellow liquid into a frying pan, she dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.
    “Just like the old days,” Ben blurted, as if his thoughts would no longer be contained.
    “Don’t, Ben,” Vicky said, pushing the lumpy eggs across the pan.
    “Sometimes at night, I lie awake in my bunk and watch the pictures in my head. You and me and the kids back on Lean Bear’s ranch. They’re good pictures, the way it used to be.”
    “You used to hit me, Ben.”
    Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shift against the counter. “I try to see that, too, Vicky, but the picture’s blurry. The drinking times are big black holes.” He was quiet a moment, then said, “I haven’t had a drink going on six years now.”
    “It’s no longer my business,” Vicky said, dishing the eggs onto two plates. She laid a slice of toast beside the eggs and, skirting around him, avoiding his eyes,