CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In the refuge of Dexter Springs Public Library’s reference section, Bernard Gilfoil sat crisply in a hard-backed chair at a long table punctuated with dividers. He’d just left city hall, where he’d officially met the new marshal—though he’d already seen her at the tribal council meeting earlier that week. And, thanks to his long practice of eavesdropping, he’d learned that a body had been found.

He’d seen the grainy pictures of a missing rez woman on tacked-up flyers, same as everyone else in town. Now he was scanning the local newspaper.

“Bernie! B-Man!”

Bernard cringed at the sound of his high school nickname, something he’d left behind the day he graduated. That had been ten not-long-enough years ago, before a series of low-level city-government jobs stymied by a now-rotten economy had propelled him back to Dexter Springs with all the subtle force of gravitational pull. Six months ago he’d completed the final course for a master’s degree in public administration, and six weeks ago he’d taken the first managerial job he’d been offered. His orbit around Dexter Springs felt inescapable.

Bernard didn’t need to glance at his watch to know his morning break was nearly over. He was new to the city-manager role, but already he excelled at the work—the puzzle of bringing together funding sources and engineering plans, the specific skill of soothing a city council. He understood the rhythm of his day.

When he left Dexter Springs after high school, Bernard thought he’d never come back, and in the interim he’d worked hard to cultivate a different life for himself. In the decade he’d been gone, he had transformed from high school burnout to buttoned-up professional, even if it felt like a costume he stepped into every morning.

Still, history followed him.

History was, in fact, now tromping through an aisle between shelves, whispering his name more loudly than if she’d just spoken at a normal volume.

“Bernie!”

And there she was, rounding the corner, having entirely passed Biographies E–M on her left and the How To section on her right: Mitzie Gatz, who’d been the singular source of scandalous activity in his high school class.

“Oh, Bernie, I thought I saw you. Did you—”

He held up his hand like a stop sign. “I will not be in attendance.”

“But you got my text?” Mitzie said. “I ran into your mother and she gave me your number. I thought, of course you’d like to see if any of the old crowd was still around. Paul and Stacy are gonna grab a pony keg and—”

She turned and crouched as a toddler tumbled from behind a shelf, dangling a book by one side of its cover.

“Dang it, Paisley girl,” she said, and glanced around for the librarian. “Gimme that.”

When she knelt with her back to him, Bernard could see right down the gap of her jeans. A crimson thong the shade of their high school mascot—the Fighting Cardinal—stretched across the horizon of her hips.

She stood and faced him, giving him a long, hard look.

“Well, I sure didn’t think I’d find you here, in this dusty ol’ place. Don’t you know how to google?” she said.

But Bernard was too careful for that. Not that he was up to anything, really. He just liked to keep the different parts of his life in clean, separate compartments, everything in its own neat little box. He used his city computer for work-related tasks only. Everything he did on it was subject to public scrutiny, so he liked to play it safe. Sure, he had a personal laptop, but that he kept quarantined for his off-duty pursuits. Looking up hiking trails, mostly. The outdoors was a good antidote to life under fluorescent lighting. And he considered himself a bit of a naturalist, so he also used it to look up the interesting rock specimens he came across, which he had been assembling into a collection.

Since his return to Dexter Springs he’d taken to trails on the reservation. He enjoyed mapping the reserve in his mind as he walked, connecting it to what he had once known of the area. Although, he had to admit, a decade ago he’d been less interested in hiking and more dedicated to binge drinking.

And getting close to the rez girls. Like the beautiful woman he’d seen in the crowd gathered around the fighting men at the tribal council meeting. The man next to him said she could be Deer Woman. At first he’d thought it was a title awarded to a gorgeous rez girl, kind of like Rodeo Queen but for the Saliquaw Nation, but then he’d decided that probably wasn’t right. She looked more like an influencer in that fine coat she’d worn. He couldn’t get to the bottom of it on his own, so he’d come to the library to search Glenna’s Indigenous lore collection. At least he’d have something to talk about if he had the pleasure of seeing the woman again.

“You sure look different,” Mitzie said. “Clean-cut and all. Like a real city manager, I guess. Who would’ve thought?”

Bernard had developed a penchant for sand-colored slacks with sharp vertical creases and had tamed his fuzzy blond curls into a straight and severe style parted to the left. He wore a pair of glasses with thick black rims.

Bernard didn’t like the way she studied him, so he concentrated on the veneer of a nearby card catalog.

The Dexter Springs Public Library card catalog contained alphabetically organized drawers full of ancient three-by-five index cards, and Bernard found them orderly and soothing. Often, as he thought about how to integrate all the parts of himself into one cohesive personlike assemblage, he ran his fingers across the handwritten titles and synopses that were the divination of that first librarian.

Bernard could picture her, following the rules of proper conduct in a time when men wore hats and women carried clasp-top purses.

He eyed Mitzie’s crop top and said, “The city’s launching its first major infrastructure project in fifteen years, and I’ve been brought in to manage it. We’re constructing a new highway that will run from here through the west end of the reservation.” He hesitated, then added, hopefully, “It’s the kind of project that makes a city manager’s career.”

Mitzie, who’d lifted the child to her hip, slowly shook her head.

“Bernie, you’re just the man for the job,” she said. “Sounds like it, anyway.”

He agreed. With any luck, this road project would propel Dexter Springs into the future. It would put a win on his résumé, so he could get hired in a larger city. Larger, and far away from here.

“Earth to Bernie,” Mitzie said, waving a hand in front of his face. “B-Man, you’re an odd duck. C’mon. Just come out for a few minutes. See the gang. We could use a—”

“It’s Bernard now,” he said. “Bernard. Not Bernie, not B-Man. Bernard.”

She ignored him, reaching into the pocket of her jeans for a stick of gum.

“Did you hear another girl might have gone missing from the rez?” she said, her face turning serious.

She popped the gum into her mouth and rolled the wrapper between her thumb and forefinger, then furrowed her brow at a smear of marker on her forearm. She put the balled-up wrapper in her pocket and licked her thumb to rub the smudge off.

“Shoot, forgot about my spray tan,” she said, more to herself than to Bernard. “So scary. I just can’t believe another girl has gone missing.”

Mitzie held up one finger to pause the conversation and set the toddler back down.

“Anyway,” she resumed, “these missing girls. It’s terrifying, right? What is that, seven in the last decade? Actually, I think it’s up to nine since we graduated. Remember Loxie, from high school? It’s like when she disappeared it kicked off some kind of curse. This is terrible to say, but”—she leaned in close; Bernard could smell the mint of her gum—“I’m glad it’s not happening in town. I mean, all these missing girls have been from the rez, but still…I don’t go anywhere at night without someone with me, especially when I have this little one.”

She turned to smile at the toddler, who was lying on her belly halfway under the table, gnawing on a book she’d pulled from a shelf.

Bernard looked blankly back at Mitzie, his face a disinterested mask. Of course he remembered Loxie. Of course he’d heard about the missing girls. He wasn’t stupid.

“Can’t be too careful,” he said, finally.

Bernard eyed the library’s entrance, thinking of escape. He noticed the marshal entering, tall enough that she nearly had to duck the doorframe. He watched as she removed her cap and bent the bill like he’d seen farmers do when they were breaking in free hats from seed dealers.

Mitzie followed his gaze.

“Oh, her? Yeah, that’s the—Oh, Pais, get out of there. I mean it!—that’s the new marshal from the rez.”

Bernard watched as the marshal looked around to get her bearings. He imagined the impression the library made. The ornate ceiling, the marble floors, the shelves filled with volumes of material no one needed anymore: dictionaries, reference manuals, three different sets of encyclopedias. Beside them, more shelves, with dog-eared paperbacks that, judging by their covers, contained stories of windswept lovers—some on land, some at sea, others inexplicably on mountaintops. He knew that from her vantage point she couldn’t see the children’s section but could hear it: the little chirps and staccato outbursts of toddlers that echoed off the limestone walls.

As announced by the date carved above its door, the stone building that housed the library had been erected on the corner of Main and Birch in 1888. It had served as the Dexter Springs Bank for half a century before sitting empty so long that a colony of bats took up residence in the attic. Briefly, it was used by the dwindling number of members who belonged to the local Masonic lodge, who did nothing about the bats. Then, at the behest of concerned citizens who, in 1968, raised money through bake sales, car washes and a father-daughter dance at the Methodist church, it was turned into a library.

There had been only two librarians. Mrs. Crabtree, a former substitute teacher with a reputation for sending kindergartners to the principal’s office, had lasted longer as a librarian than anyone had expected. She considered it a lifetime position, like being appointed to the Supreme Court, and approached it with all the seriousness of an undertaker. For the first two decades of the library’s existence there were strictly enforced late fees and a code of conduct for all who entered.

Glenna Mossman had been a welcome change when she became the next librarian, in the late 1980s. She had white hair and was of indeterminate age—she could be fifty or seventy-five—and she was not only the librarian but the town’s unofficial historian and an avid genealogist. Most days, she wore blue jeans, sneakers that still looked new and a shirt with Genealogy: organizing the dead and confusing the living emblazoned on its front. She seemed never to tire of the joke.

Bernard watched as the marshal’s gaze settled on the circulation desk and on Glenna, who was inspecting due dates stamped on the forward interiors of returned books and sorting them into categories so volunteers could shelve them for future readers.

He strained to hear the marshal’s conversation with Glenna over Mitzie’s continued chatter.

“We were all surprised when we heard you came back,” Mitzie said. “It was a real shame the way you just dropped off the earth….”

Bernard was focused on the marshal, on Glenna. What could they be talking about?

“Bernie?”

Mitzie brought him back to her.

“What? Oh,” he said. “Yeah, a shame.”

Glenna walked briskly toward Bernard and Mitzie, the marshal following, taking in the library—not like a tourist but like someone used to looking at a crime scene and committing it to memory.

Bernard could see the patch on the front of her uniform. Starr looked him in the eye and gave him a nod as she passed. A shiver crawled over him. He thought of ride-alongs in official police vehicles, of watching her work a case. It awoke within him that early fascination with law enforcement. The methodic learning and filing of details would have suited him.

“And here you’ll find what you’re looking for,” Glenna said, walking the marshal to a carousel of weathered hardbound books. “This one will give you a bit of the history of the Saliquaw Nation, although as you can imagine, it also has plenty of omissions, considering that there are few written records directly from the nation’s members. Here you’ll see a few of the Indigenous maps in our collection. Go back far enough and you’ll see the size of the reservation after their forced relocation to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, and over there is an official compilation of the area’s family histories—mostly white, since that was obviously more important to the city’s founding fathers.”

Starr nodded stiffly and shifted from one foot to the other.

“Relax,” Glenna said, looking at her. “Local humor. Unfortunate, to be sure, but pretty accurate. You’ll have to forgive me. With the genealogy I do, including my own, I’ve come to realize that anyone part Native like me has half her family’s history written down by white folks and the other half lost to the wind. Unless an elder remembers it, but there aren’t many left now. I’ve been working for years on the library’s collection of Native authors and I’ve recorded some of the oral stories of the reservation. Real doozies. Magic, really.

“Anyway, here’s what you need, and if you can’t find it here, or if you can’t find the maps you need, then check the vault,” she said. “Welcome to Dexter. Let me know if I can help you find anything else.”

The vault was where the library kept its archives and its most delicate historical documents, but copies of them were alive in Glenna’s head. The vault also doubled as a storm shelter, where patrons and townsfolk sought refuge from tornadoes—like the most recent one, which had skirted most of Dexter Springs but touched down briefly in a pasture, picking up one of the Nixons’ Jersey milk cows and depositing her relatively unscathed in front of Lynwood Drug.

Bernard watched Starr log the details of the small collection. When she got within a foot of him, her gaze stopped roaming and locked on his. He smiled nervously.

“Really, Bernie, you wouldn’t believe our last class reunion,” Mitzie continued. “Hardly anybody showed up. I was one of the officers when we were seniors. Maybe you don’t remember, but officers have to plan the reunions, so if you don’t want that job, steer clear of getting elected, I tell the kids. Well, not my Paisley girl—she’s too young to understand all that. But I do tell the ones I run into, like her babysitter, or the carryouts at the grocery….”

Her voice droned on as Bernard’s fountain pen, a turned-wood masterpiece and the most expensive thing he owned, weighed heavily in his shirt pocket and put pressure on his heart. He could feel it thump, thump, thumping, heating up. Blistering the pen, the ink, his skin.

The marshal looked through historical Indian Territory maps from the library’s archival collection, then turned her attention to a current topographical map of the region. Was the marshal’s research related to the missing girl? Or maybe she was an outdoors enthusiast, like him. Bernard scanned the marshal’s firm backside.

They could go for a hike together, he told himself.

The fire that had sparked the rabbit thump of his heart had spread to his hands. He swiped his sweaty palms across his khaki pants, where they left dark, wet blotches. He smelled smoke, but how could that be? Maybe it was coming from inside; he was combusting.

A bead of sweat broke loose from Bernard’s hairline and traveled across the terrain of his morning shave, taking a final dive off the cleft of his chin. He looked around the library and his vision became brighter, his eyes clearer from the anxious liquid of his tear glands.

Bernard made himself stare down at the newspaper in front of him. Keep it together, man. Keep it together. It was a plea, not a command.

He stood, folded the newspaper and placed it back on the library table.

“Yes, well, I’ve got to head back,” Bernard said. “It was, uh, nice to see you.”

Bernard started moving toward the exit, Mitzie’s voice still ringing in his ears. He felt like he’d forgotten how to walk.

“Um, okay, bye,” Mitzie said, and shook her head. She glanced at the marshal and smiled, then retrieved Paisley and went to the circulation desk.

“You seeing this?” Mitzie said to Glenna.

Through the library’s picture windows overlooking Main Street they watched Bernard run across the street without looking, a horn sounding as he raced in front of a car and toward city hall.

“He was always a smart one,” Mitzie said, “but a little weird. I think he might have a crush on the new marshal.”

“He did get a little worked up,” Glenna said, “but he’s always wound too tight, if you ask me.”

“He is kinda cute, though,” said Mitzie.

“Interesting guy, from what I understand. Keeps the city’s projects organized, or at least that’s what they tell me. Comes here about every day on his morning break. I keep a list of questions patrons ask about the city and he answers—explains, more like it—and I pass it on.”

“Yeah? I think all these projects have folks curious. We’re finally getting some things done around here, progress people can count on.”

“Me, I only count by generations,” Glenna said, then shrugged. “Takes all kinds.”

Mitzie nodded and perched the child atop an old wooden cabinet. The library now had a digital circulation system to track due dates, but Glenna had retained the depository with its many drawers full of checkout cards for their history: signatures penned over decades—impermanent promises to return.