CHAPTER TWO

Starr realized she was looking at a very old woman and lowered her weapon. There wasn’t a threat. Not now, never had been.

Until this moment, she hadn’t really thought she was a danger to anyone other than herself. Well, and that one guy she gunned down in Chicago. And probably her daughter.

Shut up, she told herself. The room went still. The only sound was a gale that swept over the prairie, persistently trying to buffet the trailer onto its side. She could feel the sway as if she were on a dinghy in Lake Michigan, right off Lake Shore Drive, cold spray stinging her face and icicles forming on her hair. It had been shorter then; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a haircut. There were a lot of things she’d stopped doing after she was suspended.

“What is wrong with you? This is Lucy Cloud, my mother-in-law. Didn’t you wonder why I was whispering? She was sleeping.”

The fury in Odeina’s voice brought Starr back to the present like an ice bath. There hadn’t been a buzzing in her head after all; it had just been Odeina speaking low.

“Grandmother,” Starr said. It was one of the few things she knew about this place from her father, that this was the respectful way to address a tribal elder. Even though he had never returned to his extended family, her father had carried that reverence with him the rest of his life.

Starr tried to slow her breathing. She hid the trembling of her hands by returning her sidearm to its holster and hooking each thumb into a side of her service belt. Fucking adrenaline, Starr thought.

“Right,” she said, all business. “Anybody else in here?”

“I saw this already,” interrupted the old woman, who began to make a terrible sound, pulling air into her lungs and then wheezing it out like leaky bellows. Starr realized it was laughter.

“Yes, yes. I’m sure you did.” Odeina’s eyes rolled toward the water-stained ceiling, but she cooed soothingly as she heaved the bearskin back onto the old woman’s lap and tucked in the fallen blankets, returning her to her cocoon.

Helplessness made Starr uncomfortable, so she half turned to the living room’s opposite wall, where she pretended to study the arrangement. She’d seen it as a mass of folksy art when she’d first scanned the living room, but now realized the display was composed of individual masks. Carved, mostly out of wood, she supposed. Maybe they were what had set her off—creepy enough—but there was something different about them now.

After she finished settling her mother-in-law, Odeina marched past Starr and into the kitchen, where she pulled a snapshot from under a magnet on the refrigerator.

“Here’s a picture of my girl,” Odeina said, “not that the tribal council is doing anything. Not that you’re doing anything either. I’d go tell them you’re an idiot, but knowing them, it wouldn’t matter a bit.”

Odeina drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly.

Starr’s senses were coming back to her, and she could smell the contents of a large pot on the stovetop, steam escaping from the lid. When was the last time she’d eaten?

“I took this picture at her college graduation, right before she started classes for a master’s degree.” Odeina looked at the photograph. “Her hair is different now.”

Starr walked toward the battered kitchen table as Odeina slid into one of the chairs around it, still holding the picture. Starr said nothing; she figured the least she could do was zip it long enough for Odeina to spill her guts, and in return maybe Odeina wouldn’t report to the tribal council that Starr had pulled a gun on her. Starr lowered herself into a chair opposite Odeina but wished for a shot of whiskey or to light the joint she’d tucked into her shirt pocket. It was all too much. These women, this place. Girls who went missing.

“I thought she had gone back to the university for the weekend or that she was staying with friends, that maybe she’d forgotten about her grandmother’s birthday. There could have been some explanation,” Odeina said. “But this morning one of her professors, called himself her research adviser, rang to find out why she missed class and then a meeting with him. Had my number as her emergency contact. I don’t know, I tell him, but I do know she’s not here. So where is she these last”—she stuck up her fingers one at a time for effect—“one, two, three, four…now five days?”

Starr already knew what Odeina had yelled into the phone earlier. It was as if Chenoa had vanished into the night. Packed a few things into her van, prayed it would start and waved goodbye when it did. Find her, Odeina had said, over and over. Find her.

“That’s unusual, for her to be gone that long? She’s never done anything like that before?”

Odeina glared at her.

“She has a phone?”

“Been calling it,” Odeina said. “At first it rang and rang, wouldn’t stop ringing. Called it just before you got here, and it went straight to voice mail, like the battery’s dead.”

Starr didn’t blame Chenoa for not answering the call. She could imagine Chenoa seeing her mother’s number pop up and hitting Decline. It was a good sign that it rang at all. She’d probably had car trouble. Or stayed with a friend—maybe a boyfriend, maybe a girlfriend—longer than she’d meant to. Maybe she’d left the area entirely, not gone back to school. Kids dropped out of college all the time.

Starr figured that on the outside chance some harm had actually come to Chenoa, the phone would have lost its charge by now. Or maybe Chenoa was just hiding out at a friend’s house. Starr had been warned that this happened on the rez, young adults roving from place to place. Or gathering in packs at abandoned homes, turning up on their own days later.

It was part of what made tracing the disappearances of Indigenous women so difficult; it could be days, even weeks, before they were truly missed. Then a quandary: where to report them missing? Until Starr’s arrival, there hadn’t been a tribal police presence for years. As tribal numbers had dwindled on this reservation, the lack of on-site law enforcement created a gap that local agencies couldn’t fill, and they were quick to blame alcohol or drugs, runaways, sometimes prostitution. Even when a missing woman from the rez had last been seen in the county, the sheriff’s office simply countered that the reservation was not their jurisdiction and did nothing at all. Sounded like that was exactly what Odeina had heard from them.

Starr didn’t plan to waste her time looking for Chenoa either. She had her marching orders, which were to sift through dusty boxes of BIA cold-case files that had been sealed since who knew when. She guessed Odeina just didn’t want to admit the truth: Chenoa had taken off, and at twenty-two she had every right to do so—without telling anyone where she was going or how long she’d be gone.

An ad for a truck-driving school blared from the big TV in the living room, which Odeina had just turned on to keep the grandmother entertained. The old woman, tucked under a mountain of blankets and fur, stared off into space instead. She was surprisingly unruffled, Starr thought, considering she’d recently stared down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Why don’t I drive a semi? Starr watched the commercial, a manic announcer pointing to a number that flashed across the screen. Be my own boss, make decent money. Nobody screaming at me. Starr made a mental note to look up driving schools when she got home. Search for any other profession, actually.

She’d taken this job on the rez because it was the only offer she’d gotten, and that was only because she had Indigenous blood running through her veins. It was the one time something her father passed down to her had become useful.

“I don’t want to upset her,” Odeina said, returning to the kitchen. She and Starr watched in silence as the old woman pulled her bony hands from under the blankets and patted one with the other as if, after a lifetime of keeping them busy, they refused to rest. “The county sheriff was useless,” Odeina said. “He told me that because Chenoa vanished from the rez, he couldn’t set foot here without permission from the tribal council. So I went down to Byrd’s house—he’s chief of the tribal council—and he refused. Flat out refused. I could have strangled him.” She looked up at Starr. “I’ve been searching for her myself, but if I miss one more shift at the Trading Post I’m toast. I’ve asked everyone I can think of, and none of us know where she is.”

Odeina’s voice wavered. She slapped the glossy snapshot down on the table in front of Starr. Even with the TV blaring, it made a sharp sound that ricocheted off the thin walls.

“Who else do I tell? You?” Odeina said. “What are you going to do? You don’t even know the rez or know where to look, and now you’re sitting there, saying nothing, looking like you don’t even believe me. What good are you? Do you even know how many of our young women have disappeared over the years?”

Starr knew she should be paying attention. She could hear the fear swelling in Odeina’s voice, knew fear made people unpredictable, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the masks. She had learned to ignore the way reality had begun to shift sometimes, but still she could see something burning, alive, behind the ocher finish of a wooden face. The frozen curve of its mouth was turned up like a kept secret. Had it been that way before?

Atop the mask—no, not a mask anymore, she thought, real—the tines of velvet antlers began to sprout and grow. She felt the room tilt. Not in the way a thick blunt swirled her thoughts, but in a disorienting two-step that waved her mind one back, two forward, one back, two forward. A sickly bile climbed her throat. For one wild moment Starr believed she would vomit violently on her standard-issue boots. Her instinct was to get up, to run for the door, but her feet wouldn’t move, were fused to the thin linoleum that separated living from dining. Or living from dying. The idea was suddenly in her head, pushing itself into every nook, filling empty spaces, dulling other sounds.

Starr looked at the picture on the table between them. Chenoa wearing a graduation cap and gown, smiling out at her. Chenoa holding a college diploma in front of her heart, behind her a tree heavy with white blossoms.

“There is something you have to understand,” Odeina said. “When Chenoa started coming back on weekends, it was for a reason. To finish her research project. She wouldn’t say much about it, except that it was some kind of bug she wanted to find. I only know that much because she asked if I’d ever seen one”—she pointed her chin toward the old woman—“and especially if she had. All Chen did was drive her van into the wilderness area and go on these long walks. Then she’d hole up in her room to write everything down. A few weeks ago, she started staying out longer and longer.”

Starr raised an eyebrow, not sure she understood. Or cared.

“I am telling you, when she came home she wouldn’t stop talking about what she was looking for. She was obsessed with those bugs or beetles or whatever, and all she wanted was to talk about her research, wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise, asked me if anyone else had ever seen these particular bugs. She wouldn’t admit it—she didn’t talk much about what she was going to do after graduation—but I had the feeling she was…” Odeina turned her head and looked out the tiny window above the kitchen’s shallow steel sink for several seconds. “It was like maybe she’d figured out her future, like she found some answers out there.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is that she is not here and she did not run off.”

“Or maybe she did,” Starr said. “Got in with a bad crowd. Maybe drugs.”

Odeina’s shoulders stiffened.

“Possibilities,” Starr said, and shrugged. “Look. She’s an adult. She came home for the weekend after living on her own. It’s an adjustment. I get that. Maybe she forgets about the meeting with her adviser. Maybe she misses a day or two of class. Hell, maybe she’s here after all, with somebody you just don’t know. Or maybe she needed a change of scenery. Happens all the time. She’s twenty-two, so she has the right to go missing if she wants to.”

For a second Starr thought Odeina was going to leap over the table and attack her, but the woman kept her balled-up fists to herself, clenching and unclenching them on the table like she was furiously waiting for a meal. Starr could sense the old woman eavesdropping on their conversation, and glanced toward her, but the old woman remained motionless.

“Chenoa is missing,” Odeina said. “Do something about it.”