CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

After walking in what she believed to be generally the right direction, Starr again crossed the creek bed with the puddles she’d avoided. She’d managed to escape the Little People. And there’d been no signs of Deer Woman, if any of that had been real.

She could see how growing up on the rez messed with people. It was isolated. Beautiful. Deadly. She’d done her terrible duty and notified Sherry Ann’s father of his daughter’s death. Now she couldn’t stop thinking about who was to blame, nor could she get Chenoa out of her mind. Chenoa, chasing forgotten beetles through the night; Chenoa who, like Sherry Ann, was young enough to have been her daughter.

When Starr reached the road where she’d left the Bronco, she could see that Minkey had been there. Inside the cab she found a note explaining that he’d pulled the Bronco from the ditch, then given it a jump start, and that he was running a basketball practice for the boys he coached but he’d come back if she needed anything. She was relieved when the Bronco roared to life. She’d done enough hiking for one day.

Twenty minutes later, when Starr pulled the old Bronco up to Chief Elmore Byrd’s house in the heart of the reservation, she could see the lawn was verdant despite the onset of autumn. There was a garden hose set out to water it, a sprinkler flipping lazily. A small herd of children waited, giggling and holding hands, then all at once plunged together through the cold spray. They shivered on the other side, their clothes dripping.

One of the children waved shyly, but the rest paid Starr no mind as she got out of the Bronco, settled the keys in the front pocket of her uniform pants and walked from the side of the dirt road to the cinder-block house. Its rectangular footprint wasn’t unlike that of the community center, but there were decorative plants holding on to life on either side of the front door, and there was a wreath dotted with tiny turkeys and tied with a faded orange ribbon. The children’s laughter as they ran through the sprinkler on the lawn, the Thanksgiving decoration on the door: It felt like too much joy all at once. The world’s gone mad, she thought.

“Ha-we,” Byrd said when he opened the front door. Starr knew it to be the nation’s word for hello, and returned the greeting.

Byrd looked past Starr at the children and smiled. “They’ll feel the cold one day,” he said. “Not today, but one day.”

He motioned for Starr to come inside and take a seat at a table stationed in the combined kitchen and dining room. He reached for a coffeepot on the counter and raised his eyebrows at her. Starr nodded, and soon they were drinking a strong black brew with generous amounts of heavy cream that would remain in her memory for the rest of her days. It was unexpectedly perfect. The peace she felt sitting at Byrd’s table was nothing like the feeling of being in Odeina’s scarred trailer with the old woman cackling warnings at her.

She still felt like an interloper. Not only because she was BIA sent, a reminder of the tribe’s contentious and traumatic dealings with the federal government, but because her father’s culture—his family—was so unfamiliar to her.

“You’ve come about our young women,” Byrd said finally, after they’d both sipped their coffee in comfortable silence. “And I want more than anything to help.”

This openness was rare on the rez. If she was going to get anywhere, she needed more people like Byrd. She needed history, anything that could help her learn what wasn’t in those files, both the old ones she’d pored over and the new ones she would have to make.

“But what I think,” he said with a sigh, “is that you are too little an effort, too late, and that, like everyone else, you are not enough.”

It was a punch in the gut, but it was at least familiar territory. She knew how fast people could go from the respite of welcome to straight-out rancor. Most of the people she’d met on the rez had skipped the welcome part.

“Look, I can imagine how you must be feeling,” she said, “but I can—”

He held up a hand and waved it, cutting her off.

“These missing girls,” he started to say, then corrected himself. “I call them girls, but really they are women. They slip through the cracks. All these law enforcement agencies—city, county, state, federal like you—spend days arguing over what to do and who should do it. Whose responsibility is it? Meanwhile, weeks, months, years pass without someone conducting even the most basic investigation.”

Starr opened her mouth in defense, but she knew he was right. Why should she try to say anything different? She knew, from the half-hearted research she’d done before the interview that led to this job, that on the 326 reservations in the United States, the disappearances of women were more frequent, less visible in the media and, ultimately, more difficult to solve than in other populations.

Territorial disputes between law enforcement agencies were largely to blame, with few tribes able to afford their own police forces. And because most reservations were in remote locations, neighboring law enforcement agencies were usually county sheriff offices, which did not have jurisdiction on the reservations. The pattern followed with municipalities, which was why a few days ago Starr had been stunned to see a Dexter Springs officer on temporary loan in her office.

Those weren’t the only issues, though. Alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, all the usual suspects that went hand in hand with violence against women, were in full force on the rez, so law enforcement dismissed concerned mothers and aunties. There was the standard Runaways come back. Or the classic Over eighteen? Yeah, they can be gone as long as they want to be. Starr had said it herself. To Odeina, just this week.

“We need something to keep our young people here, to keep them engaged,” Byrd said, and Starr realized she hadn’t been listening. “That’s why Blackstream Oil is so important to us.” He stood and walked to the kitchen window, setting his coffee cup in the sink. “Yes, yes, oil. Fracking. Everyone hates it.”

It was as if he was talking to himself now.

“But,” he said, returning to meet her gaze, “with this new deal with Blackstream Oil we can begin to heal. We’ll have money for school supplies and equipment, funding for a medical clinic—maybe even a permanent doctor—and we’ll be able to provide help for families who cannot find hope anywhere else. And”—he looked now at a wall of pictures behind her—“we can call home the spirits of our missing young people, their souls that are wandering and lost.”

Fuck, if he starts making antlers out of his hands and telling me about killer deer…Starr longed to light the tip of a big, fat joint. It was Saturday, after all. She thought of the bottle in her backpack, the inch that was left of its contents. It would bridge the gap in a pinch. All the new hope was dissipating.

In Byrd’s eagerness to partner with Blackstream Oil, a new danger was being introduced. Starr wondered whether he knowingly overlooked it.

Bringing transient workers to a remote setting, where they would likely live in temporary housing units called “man camps” on tribal land, would cause a new slate of problems. Their crimes, when they happened, would fall between jurisdictional cracks. They’d need more than just one BIA marshal on the rez when that happened. There would be more victims and more families without recourse.

Byrd began pacing from one end of the kitchen to the other. What had she wanted to ask him? Everything felt far away. It felt wrong now to be at his table, drinking his coffee, when she couldn’t focus on what he was saying. She wasn’t high. Not drunk. It was as if Deer Woman was in her head.

“Even in normal times, convincing people to come together, to share a ceremony for healing, is more challenging than it used to be,” Byrd said, walking to a framed picture and pulling it from the wall.

He handed it to Starr, who stared at the face in the frozen image. Dark eyes, dark hair. A face rounder than Chenoa’s, but like Chenoa’s just the same.

“That was our Loxie,” Byrd said. “She went missing ten years and two months ago.”

Starr rifled through her memory. Had she seen this face in an old case file she’d pulled from one of the BIA boxes in the marshal’s office? She couldn’t trust her mind right now, not when it was crowded by a beautiful woman with antlers. The vision smiled at her. Can deer smile? She was losing her mind. The room around her shimmered, charged with electricity.

“She walked out this front door one day and vanished right into thin air,” he said. “She was only seventeen.”

Quinn, Starr thought, and shook her head. She took a deep breath to ward off the panic building in her chest, the feeling of suffocation at her own helplessness.

“We were closer then, all of us, more of a community,” Byrd continued. “There were search parties. Relatives went out on horseback or took ATVs on all the roads leading into or out of the reservation. We set up a tip line. One caller said she saw Loxie get into a blue pickup but wasn’t sure when. It might have been the week before she went missing.”

He sighed.

“We searched. But look around us. There is so much ground to cover. How would we look over every hill, under each tree? You can’t imagine the futility.”

Starr nodded. She could imagine, actually.

“My cousin spotted a pink sweater in the ditch near the highway as he was driving into Dexter Springs. I thought it looked like something of Loxie’s. We asked—begged—for an investigation, but Dexter Springs said they didn’t have the capacity. Two years after Loxie’s disappearance, there was a vote to disband our tribal police force because we couldn’t fund it any longer. But I,” Byrd said, “never stopped looking.”

Starr swirled the dregs of coffee in her cup.

“My wife, though,” Byrd said, “she wasted away after Loxie disappeared, stopped taking care of herself. Refused her diabetes medications. Everyone became a suspect to us. Do you know how it is to think your friends, your family, your neighbors, even strangers you see in a store or on the street, may know something about your daughter’s disappearance?”

Oh, she knew all right.

“Anyone in particular?” Starr said.

“You were at the tribal council meeting,” he said. “The oil deal? And afterward, the fight? I warned you about Junior. After Loxie…” He took a deep breath, blew it out slowly. “After she was gone I learned that Junior bought beer and who knows what else for high school kids, just so they’d spend time with him. And Loxie was one of those kids.”

Byrd gripped the counter.

“I went after him,” he said. “I mean, I really did. I dogged him at every turn, sure he had answers.”

“And?”

“And I wanted to kill him with my bare hands, because he wouldn’t say a word. He holed up in his cabin, stopped coming around. Hell, first time I heard him speak in years was at the tribal council meeting. I couldn’t believe it had drawn him out.”

Byrd pulled out a chair at the dining table and sank into it.

“I was so angry. I knew after a while that I had to do something with that anger,” he said, “so I campaigned for tribal chief. Anything to escape that pain, right? I knew I had to stay busy, and I knew there had to be a way to get the resources we needed. I learned how to find government grants, how to apply for them, spent hours putting them together.”

“Grants,” Starr said. “Grants like the BIA offers? That’s how…”

“Yes.” Byrd nodded. “I’m the reason your job exists.”

Starr blinked. This was news. She’d always assumed Chief Byrd was opposed to a BIA presence on the rez, to outside interference. He’d kept her at arm’s length, separate from everyone, from everything.

She felt the room spin.

“But it’s only a Band-Aid, having a marshal on-site who can conduct an investigation. What we really need is to address what lies underneath. The poverty, the crime. Our unemployment rate is three times the state average. What do you think young people do if they have no hope?”

Starr knew. So did Byrd.

“Even if one of our young people finds work, guess what. The average annual income on the rez is less than seventeen thousand dollars. It’s the continued oppression of our people. Do I need to tell you the stories of our ancestors? The genocide? The residential government schools?”

Numbers danced in front of Starr’s eyes, somehow real in the dim interior light.

“I am going to pull this reservation into the future with oil money. I’m not selling mineral rights. Hope, Marshal Starr. I am selling hope.”

A child’s burst of laughter caught on the wind and pushed inside the house, through the cinder blocks and mortar, the insulation and drywall, the paint and pictures on the wall.