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lakeshore.
    What they said to each other, Spann couldn't hear, but eventually John motioned Voice to store the En-field hi the branches of a tree, then move to a position some distance away. George returned to the snowmobile to ask for Spann's Smith, which she withdrew from the holster under her parka.
    "Go to him," said Ghost Keeper, placing the pistol on the snowmobile's seat. "He'll answer questions about the body at the falls."
    Breath billowing like smoke signals, Spann tramped across the buried ice to the lakeshore. Up close, Moses John's stare was evangelical.
    "Who killed the man in the ice?" she asked.
    "Not us," said John.
    "Did you know the body was there?"
    "No," he replied.
    "The man was shot with an arrow. Any suspicions by whom?"
    "I may have spied his killer hunting in the woods. On the bluff above the falls in the twilight before the freeze."
    "Who?" pressed the Mountie.
    As the Indian stepped forward to meet her eye to eye, a blast of wind cleared the snowfall from sightlines to the sundance forest. The answer the sergeant thought she heard uttered was "The white man ..." But no sooner had the phrase escaped from the native's mouth than one side of his head exploded in a shower of blood and bone and brain.
    Voice ran for the rifle.
    Spann for the snowmobile.
    The wind opened and closed the snow in a series of curtain calls.
    Grabbing her pistol, Spann swung backward onto the seat, throwing an arm behind her to grip Ghost Keeper's shoulder. "Let's get out of here!" she cried and braced for acceleration, the jerk as they left yanking her gun arm into the air, and that's when she saw the Enfield's muzzle aimed at her heart.
    Voice pulled the trigger.
    The shot found its mark.
    And the force of the slug slamming her heart slammed Spann back against Ghost Keeper's spine.
     
     

 
     
     
    Suzannah
     
     
    Vancouver
     
    Round and round went the tape in the tape recorder playing on the desk. . . .
     
    ". . . but what I remember most of all is those rings piercing her lips.
    "Suzannah's lips.
    "Suzannah was my Mother.
    "It was Mardi Gras time in New Orleans. ..."
     
    Jazz was in the streets, where it wafted up on the warm night air, this musical mix of ragtime and bop and boogie-woogie and swing, drifting up over the heads of drunken revelers snaking through the French Quarter, up over the mingling of rich and poor, of black and white, of priest and libertine, higher up over the surging mob crowded eight deep, some on scaffolds, some on stepladders, some on the tips of their toes, higher still over parents who sipped pink spirits from hurricane glasses while pushing and jostling children toward the front of the line, children munching on popcorn and hot dogs and apples on a stick, everyone shuffling about on a carpet of confetti and broken bottles. Up rose the jazz over a maze of costumes and masks, "He-Shebas" dressed in drag as butterflies and snails, Comus with his goblet raised in parade to meet Rex, a King Kong here, and a Zigaboo there, and the Queen of Hearts with fig-leafed Adam and Eve. Up from the "Big Shot of Africa" and away from the Zulu King, up from the one-eyed cyclops and away from a cowboy garbed in white leather except his ass was bare, up and away from Royal Street with its banners and limp streamers, up to where the jazz slid softly through the wrought iron balcony to open French doors of Suzannah's House of Pain.
    Here the jazz gave way to Elvis on the radio singing "Don't Be Cruel" . . .
     
    ". . . I could hear Elvis through the keyhole between my prison and the main room. We lived in this old Lafon house in the French Quarter, the top floor of which was furnished in antiques. Bookcase, credenza, chiffonier, and desk by artisan Prudent Mallard. The clock on the wall su rrounded by masks a genuine Gus tav Becker. Here, during Mardi Gras, Mother made a fortune by torturing men. When we arrived from Canada, after she killed Dad, by poisoning him to watch him die before cutting a hole in