CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It was the birds that woke her, but when Starr reached for a pillow to muffle the sound all she felt was the torn bench seat of the Bronco.

“What the…” she mumbled, and shot upright, sending a bottle of whiskey onto the floorboards and her head into a tailspin. “Ooh. Fuck.”

Her neck was stiff; her bladder ached; her teeth felt furry. And as Starr pried open the passenger door to climb out, she realized she was in the same ditch as the night before. The incident with the deer. After the wreck she’d tried to call for a tow, but the cell reception was so poor that she’d finally given up and decided to walk the dirt roads back to the highway. Then she’d opened the bottle.

Starr held up her phone, checking service, and then tried the marshal’s office. It was early for Winnie to be there, but maybe…

“Good morn…Marshal’s…How can…serve you?”

Starr caught the gist, though the line cut out.

“Minkey. Listen. It’s Marshal Starr. Get the map to the Awiaktas’ from Winnie and drive the route. You’ll find the Bronco. Tow it. I’m walking in to do the notification, and I’ll call for a ride when I’m back out by the road.”

“What? You’re walking to the Bronco?”

Starr held the phone to her chest for a moment. She was going to murder this idiot sooner or later.

“Follow the map. From Winnie. I’m walking to the Awiaktas’.”

“Oh, Winnie. I’ll get a map from her. Got it. But, Marshal—”

The call dropped, so Starr stowed the cell phone in her backpack and rummaged for a bottle of water and something to settle her stomach. What had she put in here the night before?

The main track leading to the Awiaktas’ was impassable by car for weeks after every big rain because the reservation didn’t have the funding or heavy equipment to make repairs to the sections that washed out. The unmaintained road had become so chronically problematic that the Awiaktas had figured out an alternate path, which backtracked over prairie land, but that route was too complicated for Starr to follow, Winnie warned. “Easier if you walk.”

The morning was cool and bright, the air crisp, as Starr pulled a bottle of water and a bag of Cheetos from the backpack, glad she’d thought to bring supplies. Then she settled the backpack’s straps over her shoulders and set out to find the Awiaktas.

Starr knew from Winnie that a home in this remote area wouldn’t have a telephone line, and she’d learned for herself that cell reception wasn’t reliable. Her head ached for relief as she walked, stepping over the puddles of a nearly dry creek and taking in the pleasant, earthy scent that hung above them. She never broke the surface of the water, not if she could help it. It was a habit that had started in childhood, when her father told her about the Little People, elflike creatures who pulled disobedient children underwater. Starr now knew they were made-up bullshit. But women disappearing on the reservation? Too fucking real, she thought.

Starr knew the staggering national statistics that turned murdered Indigenous women into numbers, categorized by the types of violence they’d endured, illustrated only a fraction of the truth. Most reported cases involved women who did not live on reservations, which meant the crimes had been recorded by local or state officials and added to the Department of Justice’s limited data. Crimes against women who lived on the rez weren’t usually reported, and if they were, many potential investigations were quickly eclipsed by jurisdictional finger-pointing.

Starr had been sent to the Saliquaw Nation to make a difference, but she wasn’t sure she could. Here, no one asked questions about Quinn or avoided Starr’s eyes or offered glum smiles—because they didn’t know. Starr’s grief took on a vaporous quality that left her unmoored in this new place.

Sometimes, when she was exceptionally high, Starr had a queer feeling that Quinn had never existed. More often, Starr could feel how all seventeen years of her daughter’s weight had pressed against her own body in that last moment when she’d held her; how her daughter’s frame had slumped against her, the unnatural loll of her beautiful head.

It was a feeling Starr had worn like skin, until she’d crawled right out of it and landed with her gun trained on a fleeing man. She’d given him a Chicago six, emptying a half dozen bullets into his back.

The investigation into her actions had ended a job she was relieved to lose. The Indigenous blood she’d gotten from her father had given her an edge with the BIA, but not a future. There wasn’t room for possibility on the land of his people. Not the kind of possibility she needed. She needed to figure out where she would go next.

Ahead, caves and hollers had been carved out long ago, and within that vast space of the rez was the family of a murder victim. And maybe—just maybe—there was, as Odeina insisted, a missing girl recording the lives of coal-and-crimson beetles.

Starr still figured Odeina was wrong. Her daughter was probably a runner. Maybe it was a good thing, Chenoa leaving the rez for another life.

The rez spanned nearly fifty-eight thousand acres. Starr didn’t feel particularly hopeful about scouring the area even if she narrowed her search to the Manitou caves, the location Chenoa had noted.

Starr knew little about the terrain other than what a map could show her, but she knew that, as in many sovereign tribal nations, some of the land had been stripped and mined in the previous century, then returned to the tribe after the EPA shut down mining operations because of groundwater contamination. Now it was fallow, a wilderness crisscrossed with hundreds of game trails, home to predator and prey.

An hour after she’d started walking, Starr had finished the Cheetos and half the water. If she didn’t spot the Awiakta family home soon, she was going to lie down in the grass, with her backpack as a pillow, and rest. Maybe take a little hair of the dog, start on the whiskey again. Then, at the top of a distant rise bordered by prairie grass as high as her thighs, she noticed the dull shine of a single-wide trailer with a faded blue stripe running its length. When she closed in, Starr could make out other details: a maroon two-door Buick LeSabre with the hood missing; a half dozen riding lawn mowers that looked like they were used for parts; and a couple of dogs soaking up the morning sun. She hoped they were friendly.

They weren’t.

As Starr approached, the dogs—a gray and white husky and a smaller chihuahua mix—ran at her and barked furiously. She was enormously relieved to see they were chained, but then realized they stood between her and the front door. She skirted the dogs to go behind the trailer, and saw a man running an arc welder that spit sparks into the air around him. He jumped when he spotted her, then slowly flipped up his welding visor.

“Marshal Carrie Starr,” she offered, holding out a hand.

“What do you want?”

“Are you the father of Sherry Ann Awiakta?”

He nodded. She could tell by the way his shoulders stiffened that he knew it was bad. She waded in. There was nowhere to go but through—through the shock and fury and pain—and then she’d ask the questions.

By the time she’d clawed her way back, feeling as if she’d nearly drowned, Starr didn’t know more than when she started. There weren’t answers here. Yes, Sherry Ann had lived there—until she took off last year. No, he didn’t know where she’d been, or who she’d been with. Could Starr leave now? Yes, she knew the way.

The last of the morning faded as Starr set out, intent to trace her steps back to the Bronco, but somewhere in those first miles after the Awiaktas’ trailer she took a wrong turn.

She emerged from a thicket to find a blocky shape she could have sworn hadn’t been on the horizon when she’d hiked her way in. An abandoned house. The kind that lingers on the landscape, windows broken out, wildlife wandering in. She pulled off her backpack and walked closer, glass shards reflecting constellations around her feet.

Starr wondered why a family had left the house behind and how long it would stand before animals and earth broke it down into useful pieces. Dust to dust reverberated in Starr’s mind, and she thought about Quinn’s perfect body, formed inside her own. She had watched what was left of her daughter disappear under six feet of dark soil.

Starr circled the house. The metal roof was the best preserved part of this square structure that was hunkered at the top of a hill. It had probably never had electricity, she figured, being so remote.

She spied a well at the base of a windmill that no longer turned, and behind the house at a respectable distance, an outhouse. She stood for a long time staring at the door. It was partially open, and she wondered what she would find inside. Probably stuffed full of raccoons, she thought, and almost laughed at the idea. Raccoons playing poker. Rabbits tending bar. Deer…Better not to think about deer, she decided.

She was…not lost. She wouldn’t admit that. But she was off course. Maybe she could shelter inside the house, get out of the sun, get her bearings, get sober before starting off again.

Starr set one foot gingerly on the sill of the open door—the porch steps had given way long ago—and pulled herself up. She searched the front room, dim even in the daylight, with the beam of her flashlight before stepping all the way in. It was a simple foursquare, its rooms divided around a plus sign at its center, and there was nothing but what she expected: graffiti on the walls, a couple of busted chairs, empty beer bottles, an improvised pipe made from a Coke can, left-behind trash. She could smell urine and the musty stench of mildew. The house had the obvious look of a party hangout, but nothing seemed recent.

Starr was making one last sweep when her foot caught an edge and she went down hard on her hands and knees. At this new vantage point she was inches from a dark smear on the wall above a baseboard. Red, like blood. Like the mess that had been made of Sherry Ann’s scalp. Like the spotted beetles Chenoa sought. Like the color of murdered women. She took a pocketknife from her backpack and scraped a few flakes into an evidence tube. Probably nothing.

The ceilings, low and marred with water stains, were making her feel claustrophobic. She didn’t want to run into any meth heads who might pick today to start using the house again, or worse, wild animals that might see her as competition, so she stowed the tube in her backpack and hurried out the front door. She’d rather face whatever was waiting for her outside.

Starr drew a deep breath of fresh air, then withdrew a bottle from her front coat pocket. The familiar Jameson warmed her chest while she considered what to do next.

She consulted the cheap compass sewn onto a strap of her backpack. She had to be near the swell of granite she’d traced on the map. Generally, she knew she should be moving east.

Even with the sun at its zenith, there was a circle of moon in the sky as Starr walked across a great plain and opened another bag of Cheetos. She wiped orange dust off her fingers and onto her pants. Starr wondered if an uprise to the north was Manitou caves. If Chenoa was out there, did she really expect to find her? Would it be a recovery or a rescue?

She was always looking for a body; she wasn’t always sure whose.