CHAPTER FOUR

Starr knew she’d have to go through the motions, look like she was doing all the right things, gathering all the necessary information. Problem was, the BIA sent her to the rez to figure out some answers for all the girls and women who were actually missing. The faster she cleared a few cold cases, the faster she could get out of here. She needed a drink.

Odeina led Starr through the living room, past the old woman and down a short hallway to the doorway of Chenoa’s small, square room, the walls an eggshell color that shifted with the sun. There was a twin bed, a dresser, a closet with mirrored sliding doors. One of the mirrors had a crack that ran diagonally from top to bottom, forming peaks and valleys like a ridgeline.

“I’ll just take a look around,” Starr said. “Anything gone? Something that might have been important to your daughter?” She’d never been the studious type, but decided to hazard a guess. “Books, laptop, anything?”

Starr noted clothes slung over the bed frame, as if waiting for Chenoa to wear them. A stack of unpacked boxes towered against one wall, labeled in loopy cursive marker: textbooks, kitchen stuff, summer clothes.

“Everything’s still here, far as I can tell,” Odeina said.

A three-ring binder lay open on the bed, a serious contrast against the pink and green gingham of the coverlet. Starr could see that it contained a stack of reports. She drew a pen from her shirt pocket, careful not to disturb the joint she was saving for the ride back to the office, and flipped a few pages. Some charts. Printouts of news stories.

Beside the binder there were photographs, taken from several angles, of a black bug with four fiery red patches on its back. Starr turned to the desk and skimmed a cut-out newspaper article that detailed a new agreement between the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Oklahoma Department of Transportation requiring developers to purchase credits to offset disruptions to protected habitats. In the margin Starr could see a handwritten note, presumably made by Chenoa: Manitou. Was that a person? A place? Hell, for all she knew, it was the name of a beetle.

The research materials stood out against the room’s remnants of childhood: a music box on the dresser, movie posters of alabaster-skinned vampires taped to the walls. A tiny circle of wildflowers braided together that was disintegrating next to a collection of interesting rocks on a shelf. A handful of science fair ribbons awarded by a local school. Starr sifted through sketches that had drifted across Chenoa’s desk, taking in the delicate muzzle of a paint pony, a likeness of the old woman, a rez dog sleeping half in and half out of shadows. Tacked to a corkboard was an invitation, faded construction paper strung with tissue-paper ghosts over a crooked scrawl: Hey Boo-tiful! It would be specter-tacular if you would go to HOCO with me.

Chenoa’s interests had outgrown the room, but it didn’t look like she’d made big changes since coming back every weekend. Temporary digs, Starr thought, picking up a framed photograph of a younger Chenoa and a couple of friends, their arms around one another’s shoulders, each of them wearing a necklace of cobalt, white and coral beads. The girls knew nothing of what lay before them, the large and small heartbreaks they’d face in the years ahead.

Starr placed the picture frame face down on the dresser. So many youthful possibilities in their smiles. Too much hope, so much life. She thought of Quinn and quelled a rising panic that threatened to set her adrift. The question that had been riding her all week popped again into her mind: How was she supposed to save these girls when she hadn’t even been able to save her own?

Starr searched dresser drawers, the back of the closet, between the thin mattress and the box spring, and felt her way under every stationary surface.

No drug stash, no hidden bottles. No laptop. No diary filled with entries about lovers or escape plans.

The only clue was the girl’s research, serious and reflective, laid out on the bed as if it were a detective’s desk. I’ll probably have to treat this like a missing person case just so this lady leaves me alone, thought Starr. If Chenoa was missing, like Odeina believed, Starr knew the crucial forty-eight-hour clock had already run out; leads had dried up; evidence had been wiped away by weather.

“Is there a place called Manitou on here?” Starr said, leaning toward Chenoa’s bed and pointing at the kind of map you can still find at travel centers.

Odeina nodded, opened the map and smoothed the stiff paper across part of the bed that wasn’t taken up with the three-ring binder. She followed trails with her finger until Starr understood the most direct route to Manitou, a series of naturally occurring caves at the far edge of the reservation’s vast wilderness area. Odeina gave Starr the names of the other girls in the framed photograph she had found, listed a few other friends the girl might have visited, suggested other areas on the reservation to search and showed Starr the parts she’d already covered.

Talk about pissing into the wind, Starr thought. Even with the recent push to investigate a rash of disappearances on tribal land, the BIA had only budgeted for two marshals to patrol a nearly fifty-eight-thousand-acre reservation—most of it wilderness—when there should have been twenty, maybe more. Starr was tasked with hiring a deputy marshal, but there’d been no time yet to look at the résumés that had come in.

Starr was the entirety of the tribe’s law enforcement.

She tried to refold the map as she thought about what to say to the girl’s mother. She had to strike the right balance. Not too concerned, but not negligent either. By the time Starr had walked from Chenoa’s room and down the short hallway carrying a backpack of her research, she’d wrangled the map and decided her next move. One deftly handled wrap-up was all she needed. She could feel the old woman watching her, and she nodded an acknowledgment, eager to be out the door.

“Deer Woman,” said the elder, pointing to a carved wooden mask on the wall. Starr eyed its oblong ears and long face slit horizontally by sharp carved teeth. How had she not seen those teeth earlier? “She can shift from one world to another, from a woman to a deer. Alert and cautious, delicate and deadly, she tramples people to death. Vengeance.”

Starr walked closer to the mask, and turned to face it so neither Odeina nor Lucy Cloud could see her expression. She knew Deer Woman all right. It was one of the strange names her father spoke in the dark as if he watched home movies through the bottom of a whiskey bottle.

“Deer Woman is a protector known to many tribes,” said the old woman. She looked out the window for a long moment. “Not so many years ago I knew a young man who was hunting alone in our woods. It was bitterly cold and he was discouraged, not having seen any game. All at once he came upon a clearing, and before him stood a beautiful woman in traditional dress. Farther still was a cabin, warmly lit from inside, the smoke of a fire billowing from the chimney. The cabin looked inviting in the cold dawn, and the woman motioned to him. Come to the cabin with me, she seemed to say. Her eyes, he later told me, were the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen, and when she looked at him it was as though they pierced right through him, clear to his spirit, to the secret part of him he shared with no one. He started to follow her. Until he remembered a warning from his grandmother: Never go with Deer Woman. She will take your spirit. Could this be Deer Woman? he wondered. He began to walk away, but he could not resist turning back for one last look. When he did, there was no cabin and no woman. Just a deer standing in the wood.”

Bullshit, Starr thought. Fairy tales. They were no more real to her now than they had been as a child, but a shiver still ran up her arms.

“You see, don’t you? Deer Woman can judge a man by not only his actions but his secret thoughts. If he would have been lured to her, she would have killed him. Trampled him with her hooves. Gored him with her antlers.” The old woman wheezed with laughter. “Deer Woman is a solution or a trap. Whether she takes a life depends on the man. He respected his grandmother, so he survived.”

Starr turned toward the door, toward a way out.

Odeina rushed to Starr and held out the commencement photograph. “Take this picture of Chenoa. Memorize it. Find her.”

Starr watched as the old woman withdrew her hands from under the mound of coverings and, like the thin talons of a prey bird, ran them through her hair to the top of her head until they were, fingers outstretched, like antlers.

It was as wild a thing as Starr had ever seen. Not in the way wilderness is untamed—sentient or not, moving toward survival—but a wildness all the same.

The truth of this filled the space as clearly as the scent of venison simmering in a stew pot not three feet away. Surrounded to the east by prairie and to the west by ravines choked with trees, the reservation resisted progress.

Why wouldn’t Chenoa want to get away? she thought. Maybe permanently. It was what Starr wanted to do, and she’d only just arrived.

“Chenoa’s not going to hurt herself, not her,” said the old woman, as if she could read Starr’s thoughts. “Not run off either. But you? What are you going to do?” Her rheumy eyes took Starr in. “Only one of us wants life, and that’s the girl.”

Starr took the photograph, corners bent and curling, from Odeina’s outstretched hand. She meant to give it a cursory glance to satisfy Odeina; instead, it drew her in. The white cap and gown were a contrast to Chenoa’s sun-kissed skin, but her smile made her face come alive. Starr studied Chenoa’s features and noticed two eyeteeth curving into her bottom lip. The effect was both endearing and disturbing.

“She’s the one missing,” said the old woman, “but they’re all twice gone. Once in real life and once in the news.” The caw of her laughter filled the trailer until it reverberated. Then, as quickly as she’d become animated, her face went stone still.

Starr’s eyes settled on Odeina, who held her elbows in her hands as if doing so was the only thing standing between her and assaulting a marshal. Then, as the old woman started flapping her arms, Odeina turned away from Starr.

“She gets confused sometimes,” Odeina said. She went to the old woman and made soft noises as she settled her arms back under the blankets. Like a starling tucking in its reticulated wings, thought Starr.

“Chenoa?” the old woman said suddenly, looking around. “Chenoa?” Her gaze roosted on Odeina’s face, who shook her head no. It was something the old woman seemed to understand in an instant, her head slumping forward, heavy on her thin neck.

“We’re all one moment away. One.” Lucy Cloud held up a thin crooked finger and directed it at Starr. “You would trample someone who came after your child.”

“Yeah, well…” Starr said, tapping Chenoa’s graduation photo against the palm of her hand. “I’d better go.”

The women’s faces turned toward her, and the sharp angle of their necks made Starr take an involuntary step backward toward the door.

“I’ll borrow this and see what I can do,” she said, holding up the picture. The light outside the mobile home’s cramped windows had the peculiar glow of late afternoon. Starr had been there much longer than she’d realized.

Odeina clamped her lips together. “She would not just leave us. She would not.”

Starr slipped over one arm the backpack she’d borrowed from the girl’s room. She could feel the weight of Chenoa’s notebooks and papers and hoped Odeina would feel like Starr was taking some sort of action. The old woman raised her voice in Starr’s direction.

“Deer Woman walks between worlds. She has caught your scent,” she said. “The blood of our people runs through your veins, and it is not something that can be hidden the way you hide it from yourself, Carrie Starr. You will see.”

Starr nodded to the women, and stepped through the open door and down the steps, eager for firm ground. She felt a disorientation that she could compare only to the constant shifting of waves.

One look at the old Bronco, still where she’d parked it on the dirt track that ran between the mobile homes, and her senses righted themselves. “Damn it,” she cursed under her breath. The Bronco wore a fresh stain of red spray paint, still dripping down the exterior of the driver’s-side door. Colonizer was crudely graffitied over the vehicle’s faded Marshal decal. Starr walked to the passenger side and found fresh paint there too.

The message was clear: No one wanted her here. Except the BIA, which had appointed her with little direction and even less oversight. But the tribal members, the tribal council, no one—except maybe Odeina—thought they needed her help.

Starr looked down the road one way, then the other, searching for any kind of movement. She saw no one. Not the men she’d seen earlier by the signs protesting fracking. Not even a rez dog. There was only a fire slowly burning itself out in a fifty-gallon drum in the cold, dry Oklahoma twilight.

So much for a warm welcome.