CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

When Starr pulled up to the Trading Post she could see Odeina inside, running an order to the only occupied table. The sight of food made her stomach growl and she realized the only things she’d eaten that day were Cheetos. It was nearly ten p.m., and even though the restaurant was open an hour later on Saturday nights, it would still be closing in a few minutes. Same as on Wednesday, when Starr had left Junior’s after watching him bury the dog, after hearing the sound of a distant party at the creek and before Chak had discovered Sherry Ann’s body less than eight hours later. If Junior was telling the truth about being with Odeina, that would steer the investigation in an entirely different direction.

Odeina looked up when the door chime sounded. She grimaced at the sight of Starr, and then walked toward her with an order pad.

“What can I get you? Or have you actually been doing your job and have something new to say?”

“Need to ask you a few questions about Junior. Won’t take long.”

“Junior? He hasn’t been here all day.” She looked back at the lone customer, who was biting into a cheeseburger. “What do you want with Junior?”

“Last Wednesday, were you working here?”

“Wednesday…” She looked to the ceiling, remembering. “I was. Worked a split shift, so I closed.”

“And what did you do, where did you go, after you left here?”

“Well, that would have been our meat loaf special, so I boxed a meal for Grandmother, and then I closed up at about eleven thirty and…Wait. I did see Junior when I was driving home. He’d been out picking up bottles.”

“Okay, good. And what happened after you saw him?”

“Well, I stopped to see if he needed a ride and then took him to my place. He slept on the couch until I dropped him at his cabin the next morning.”

“How was he? What was his, you know, state of mind?”

Odeina looked down at the order pad she was holding.

“Junior has a good heart. He’s rough, sure, but people don’t know him. If they would just give him a chance…”

“Did anything seem unusual about him at the time? Did he seem off?”

“I don’t think he even remembers getting in my car, to tell you the truth. He was in a bad way, and I could tell he’d been drinking. He was crying, saying something about Yella and I don’t know what all. I figured he could sleep it off and at least I’d know where he was, that he was warm. Left sand all over my car.”

“Sand? From where, did he say?”

“No, but it looked like he’d been down at the creek. He goes down there to get cans, bottles, recycling stuff. Kids are always trashing it.”

“But he was with you, the entire time, from eleven thirty Wednesday night until when the next morning?”

“Would have been about ten thirty the next morning, since I came here after that for the lunch shift.” She glared at Starr. “Don’t believe me? Ask Verlyn there.” She pointed to the customer dogging the burger.

“I can hear you,” he said, and gave Starr a thumbs-up. “I hitched a ride with her that night, helped her get Junior in the car and practically carried him to her couch. And that wasn’t easy, I tell you. I walked home from there. I guarantee you that after Junior’s head hit the pillow he wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Thanks,” Starr said, and turned toward the exit. “Be in touch.” The medical examiner put the time of death after midnight. If it wasn’t Junior, then who was it?

“Chenoa,” Odeina called after her. Louder: “Chenoa. Find her!”

Later, when Starr reached Dexter Springs and settled herself in the garage, wearing her bathrobe over her uniform, she lit a joint and thought about the party at the creek, about everyone who might have been there, about Junior tucked safely away at Odeina’s as Sherry Ann’s life had slipped away. Sherry Ann, who’d been days from her twentieth birthday.

Quinn would never reach that age.

Chenoa had, but only to have her future become a question. She was twenty-two, old enough to go where she liked for as long as she wanted, but practically still a child.

Starr stopped herself. Don’t go there. She could feel the tendrils of loss and shame tightening their grip.

She grabbed an old desk lamp protruding from a cardboard box, plugged it in and switched it on. She opened the three-ring binder she’d taken from Chenoa’s room and flipped through its contents. Pictures of beetles with red patches on their wing covers, a few with markings that verged into an OU crimson. Starr peered at a diagram that pointed out a protective plate between the beetle’s head and wings; the plate was covered with a Rorschach-looking patch of red.

She didn’t usually mind bugs, but these things were huge. Unsettling. In the binder she found a snapshot that had a ruler next to a beetle for scale. Two inches. A carrion beetle the length of her thumb, it buried itself in soil during the day and fed on small dead animals at night.

Starr flipped a few more pages, then stopped. She read part of a report, which Chenoa had gleaned from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s website:

American burying beetles are nocturnal. To prepare for reproduction, male and female pairs seek out a carcass under the cover of darkness, and then defend it against other burying beetles and competing scavengers. They bury the carcass in the soil, removing all fur or feathers from the body, and the female lays twelve to eighteen eggs near the carcass. When the eggs hatch, larvae feed on the carcass until they pupate and emerge as adults, approximately eight weeks later. American burying beetles are unique among insects in that they exhibit a large amount of parental care for their offspring.

Parental care. Starr recalled the silences her father would sink into, forcing her to spend hours alone. She’d wished for her mother then, even though her mother was long gone from depression or cancer or whatever ate her up when Starr was too young to understand and her father too drunk to tell the truth.

Starr closed her eyes and sounds turned to color. Something was clicking into place, but what? She was only halfway through the joint, but she unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Jameson and took a swallow. She knew that soon her shoulders would release the tension they’d stored all day. Another drag. A few more. A drink. She turned off the lamp and sat in the darkness. A thready thought made her chase its tail: night.

At night. The beetles are active at night. Odeina said Chenoa searched for them at night.

If there was a chance of finding her, it would require a plan that was the opposite of a search that needed daylight to succeed. Yes, that was it. She needed to find the girl at night. Quinn. No, not Quinn, Starr thought. Chenoa. She repeated the name in her head. Chenoa. Chenoa.

Starr flipped on the overhead light and stumbled around the garage, peering into boxes. Starr had seen an old trail on one of Chenoa’s maps, one that would veer into the reservation’s most remote areas and lead her to the Manitou caves. She remembered Odeina’s angry, condescending rant the day she’d showed Starr the map. She thought of the graffiti on her service vehicle. She would never feel like she belonged on the rez. There was a big difference between having enough heritage to get a rez job and being part of the community.

She imagined how quickly word would spread across the rez after she’d found the girl, saved her, how everything would be different then. She’d find Qui— She shook the cobwebs from her head. Who was she looking for? Chenoa. Chenoa, right.

Maybe she could win one. She’d find Chenoa, who, like the beetles, was out in the dark. Maybe she’d twisted her ankle or had some other small thing happen and she needed to be rescued. That would turn ’em around, Starr thought. Everyone on the rez would practically volunteer to scrub the spray paint off the Marshal decal on her service vehicle. There would be a celebration, and she’d walk down the potluck line filling a plate so high it would need sideboards to contain it all: fry bread like Winnie described, venison stew like the recipe that scented Odeina’s kitchen, buttery new potatoes that tasted faintly of the soil they were grown in. All the food her dad had ever made. What would it feel like to be home?