“One more . . .”
I stood there and listened to their laughter. The Bear had laughed at me for leaving the groceries, for wanting to solve all mysteries, but he had done so gently. Virgil White Buffalo, Crooked Staff, Crazy Dog Society was out there somewhere, and maybe Henry was right in not telling me exactly where.
He knew that our tracks were not that dissimilar. We’d both run as far as we could from the war to the fringes of our separate societies, but Vietnam had overtaken us again: circumstance, two desperate girls, a very bad man, a battered photograph, and a faded letter had seen to that.
Maybe it was not so much that we were haunted, but how and when we chose to deal with these reverberations in our lives that would be the sign of our individuality. Perhaps the battle that I had chosen to fight in Vietnam had marked me. It was a legacy that had tied me to the dead more than the living. It was, as Ruby had said, my failing.
Their voices continued to echo down from above. “No, two more . . .”