CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Starr had a name.

She’d been out cold in her camp chair, dreaming of paper trails and deer and missing women, when the cell phone on the card table buzzed her back into existence. In her confusion, Starr looked to the window for sunlight, but saw instead the pitch of night. Half past ten. It was Dr. Moore calling, the medical examiner, who’d run the victim’s fingerprints through the state database and gotten a hit.

Sherry Ann Awiakta.

The woman’s parents had not reported her missing; now Starr had to find them so she could tell them their daughter was dead. It took her several minutes to reach Winnie, who shouted into the phone over the noise of her grandchildren.

“Aye! Don’t touch that! Too hot! Hello? Oh, Marshal, what do you need?”

When Starr said the girl’s name, she heard Winnie’s sharp intake of breath.

“No.” She drew out the sound like the echo of ancestors. The receiver rustled. “Hush, you two! Go play. Leave me be.”

A few minutes later, the image of a hand-drawn map pinged on Starr’s cell phone. The Awiakta family lived on the reservation. Even though Winnie had repeated directions to their home, twice, Starr hadn’t been able to understand. Winnie spoke in landmarks, and Starr needed specific instructions.

She squinted at Winnie’s crooked pen strokes—a creek here, an abandoned house there, a lone oak where Starr needed to turn left. The route took her into a remote part of the rez, where unmaintained roads became impassable when it rained. She’d have to take the last stretch by foot. She’d have to say the words she’d once been felled by. Tell them their daughter was dead.

Starr didn’t close her eyes again as she sat in the chair. And she didn’t lie down on the bare mattress in the bedroom. Instead, she went to the garage, propped open the man door and stood among the boxes she doubted she’d ever unpack. The neighbor’s Australian shepherd yapped on the other side of a short yard behind her house.

The weak glow of a security light gave her an unrelenting view of the sagging wooden deck on which the dog was penned. The sliding glass door that led to the deck was covered with tacked-up blankets and a Confederate flag. Whenever she was at her duplex, day or night, the dog barked, a monotonous note boring into her brain.

When she noticed the air rifle leaning against cardboard, she picked it up, pumped it a few times, sighted above the dog’s head and fired into the night. It was a decent shot at sixty yards, the pellet pinging the siding of her neighbor’s house and momentarily shocking the dog into silence.

Starr ran her hand over the gun’s scarred wooden stock, her last name carved into it. She’d been so proud of the gift—the only one she could remember receiving from her father, even though they’d lived most of her childhood, just the two of them, in a four-story Chicago walk-up apartment building.

She set it aside and rifled through a welcome basket from the Dexter Springs Chamber of Commerce: a tattered library book that had been taken out of circulation, a coupon for the hardware store, an Avon business card stapled to a lipstick sample. She hadn’t expected much from this little town, except that it be within the thirty-minute response area the rez required, but this was disappointing. Why not throw in a few spirits, like those little airplane-sized bottles, or maybe a fifth of whiskey? Now, that would have been welcoming.

A dog-eared brochure, fallen to the bottom of the basket, summarized the origins of Dexter Springs: An Indian campsite next to iron-fortified natural springs that became a major battle scene in the Civil War. No mention of the displacement of the Indigenous people who’d lived here first, or their massive land loss, or the forced relocation of other Indigenous families to this region. No cheery paragraphs about starvation or the pre–Civil War massacre in which two thousand people were killed at the hands of the US government. Hell, she was the US government, wasn’t she?

Lucy Cloud’s words rang through her mind: When Indigenous women disappeared, they disappeared twice. Once in life and once in the news. Where was the news coverage of Sherry Ann Awiakta? She was as invisible as all the others had been.

Starr let out a long breath, opened the lid of an old metal coffee container to retrieve a new joint and felt in the pocket of her stained bathrobe for a lighter. The evening was cold enough for a coat, but she’d gotten used to wearing the bathrobe for warmth and to ward off the smell of weed. A wool beanie kept the smoke from her hair, overdue for a cut and still black like her father’s.

She needed to notify the Awiaktas, but she settled into a sagging lawn chair in front of a platform made of unpacked boxes. A persistent Kansas wind rattled the half-closed garage door, so she tuned the dial on her old radio to a jazz station out of Miami, Oklahoma. It began a run of songs, and she drew in long drags until each note was an isolated sound that unwound her coiled mind. She dropped her head between her elbows. Fuck. She didn’t know whether to cry or laugh.

How did she wind up in a place that held the history of her father? She’d had no other choice. The job was all she had.

Starr used her boot to push at a dead and dried-out June bug, a summer leftover still on the garage’s concrete floor. Thriving in heat, drawn by light, June bugs stuck awkwardly to screen doors and clothing and tangled in long hair. She’d once known a little girl who screamed every time one of these bugs got near her. Starr wondered if Quinn would still be scared of them today.

If…There was so much if that Starr could feel herself drowning in it.

Starr studied the June bug between drags and blew smoke out of the side of her mouth in slow, measured seconds. She had once lived a different life. Drank a beer or two, but only when watching the Bulls take the court. Felt disgust at a perp with a syringe or a bag of blow, or even a couple of pre-rolls. Shook down her daughter’s room if there was a whiff of weed.

Then Quinn was gone, and the pain came on so strong that it moved through every cell, made her retch into wastebaskets, filled her with madness. And there would be no cure. Not for her. She knew then that if she didn’t find some way to numb even a small part of the searing grief, she wouldn’t live long enough to find Quinn’s killer.

Starr knew who she was now, what she was capable of, what she required to see it through. She’d finish this joint and then start again on the whiskey. Get so fucked-up that her brain would turn off, so blasted that she’d fall asleep before her body even knew what was happening. And right before she lost herself there might even be a few moments when everything felt right again—or at least felt unavoidable in a way that released her from duty as she slipped into the long, aching night.

Or she could do what she’d been hired to do. What her sworn duty was. She could tell them. She left the garage and shed the bathrobe in the house, then added her cell phone to the backpack where she stored her scant necessities. Her Glock, now holstered on her service belt, offered a weighty comfort.

Starr stashed a bottle of whiskey under the driver’s seat and turned the Bronco’s ignition, bracing for the news she’d have to deliver and the terrain she’d have to cover in the process. The dark spaces of whatever was out there. Caves. Old mines. Her own mind.

She pulled on her seat belt and inched the Bronco onto the deserted roadway. Any heat that had been trapped inside the cab left through the open windows as she drove a route that crossed Dexter Springs from north to south, through an area where tourist guides still retold the story of Bonnie and Clyde robbing—twice in one week—Eden’s Grocery Store. Now Dexter Springs had a closed-down Walmart, a losing high school football team and 7,343 people probably wondering why they hadn’t taken off a long time ago.

Starr caught the fishy scent of the river that ran from Dexter Springs to the reservation. She wondered what it would be like to sink into the cool, rushing current until her lungs screamed for air and then pulled the water in.

I have got to get it together, she thought. Focus on the road.

She trained her eyes on the asphalt illuminated by waxy headlights, the pitch so faded that the white lines no longer showed. The glow of the city dimmed in the rearview mirror and no other vehicles were in sight, so she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel and concentrated on keeping between the ditches. She lit another joint and stowed the lighter, blowing smoke out of the open window. When she passed the signs announcing her departure from Kansas and arrival in Oklahoma, Starr honked the horn for good measure.

Side roads clicked by, there and then gone in the dark. Without the benefit of street signs, it was difficult to know when to turn onto any of the dirt roads that intersected the highway. Starr slowed when she saw a sign, impossible to read because of damage from shotgun pellets, that marked the reservation turnoff. She was close to the remote west end of the reservation, so she steered the Bronco onto the dusty shoulder and then veered left onto the next dirt road.

The transition was so severe that it jolted the lighter out of her shirt pocket. Starr kept one hand on the wheel and felt with her other along the coarse twill of the torn bench seat for the lighter, then took a right at the next corner. Even in her muddled state, she knew this road was worse than the last one, if it was maintained at all.

Starr glanced at the road in front of her to make sure it was clear. “You little fucker,” she said, stretching across the seat and wrapping the fingers of her right hand around the lighter. She sat up behind the wheel, happy to have won a battle for once.

She squinted through the windshield, unsure where she was. A road? Lake Michigan? A dream?

Suddenly, in what had been the space of headlights tearing weakly into an abyss, two eyes shined yellow. Driving! She put both hands on the wheel. She was driving. The pulse of her heart drummed in her neck as the road rose into the distance as if it went only up and up and up, into space. Starr’s mind began to register that the yellow eyes belonged to an animal, but her hands were already moving, cranking the wheel to the right. This monster’s too big for a direct hit. The thought came to her from a distance.

Starr punched the brake with both feet as the Bronco careened into a steep ditch carved out by a road grader under a thick hedge of trees. The right front wheel came to a hard stop on the far bank and Starr felt a sickening lift into air. Then gravity whipped her back to earth.

Starr sat shocked, her mind playing catch-up. She reached a hand up to rub the side of her head where it had smacked against the doorframe. Her head felt loose on her neck, unstable.

Through the open window she could see in the peripheral glow of the headlights that the yellow eyes belonged to a deer, the antlered creature still on the road. It stared at her, frozen in place.

Son of a bitch, she thought. Fucking son of a bitch.

Fury rose, and ached for the satisfaction she hadn’t given it since Chicago. The familiar rage flushed through her, lighting neurons with flash fires that sent her body into action.

Starr pulled the Glock from her side and aimed it at the deer, her finger on the trigger. She sighted, but the deer had come to its senses and was already in motion. Down the barrel of her gun, Starr watched the deer turn its slender neck to the future and bound into the darkness. The only target left for her to see was the upright flag of its white tail swishing back and forth as it faded into the distance.

Starr put the gun in her lap, thumped her forehead against the steering wheel until she felt the pain cut through. She felt for the ignition and turned the key. There was a reassuring noise…and then silence. She tried again. The engine didn’t catch.

She turned the key once more, knowing she risked running the battery down. Nothing.

Around her, the noises of night insects whirred. Starr reached to the floorboard and pulled her backpack to the seat, then unzipped it and searched her phone for the sketch from Winnie. How far was she from the end of the road? Maybe she was already there? If she could find the right access point, she could go ahead on foot. But nothing on the map made sense. She reached under the seat to open the whiskey bottle.

A rangy, hardscrabble bug lured by heat and light climbed the backpack next to her. Starr reached for her flashlight to kill it, then looked at it closely. No red patches. Nothing endangered about this one. She swept the beetle into her hand and dropped it out the window. For a long time she stared out the windshield and into the branches of the hedgerow that scraped the hood of the Bronco in the November wind. She leaned her head out the open window. She’d forgotten the night sky could look like this, with stars so close she could graze them with her fingertips. More stars than she had ever seen. She tried to find constellations. She pointed at the Big Dipper, or maybe it was the Little Dipper. Everything was a mystery.

She was so far from home. And so far from telling Sherry Ann’s family the truth.