CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

While Minkey was keeping Junior busy in the workshop, Starr checked for signs of Chenoa along the tree line and peered through the windows of the cabin. Nothing. When she heard Minkey’s truck take off down the two-track she walked back to Junior’s workshop.

Inside, she found him absently spinning a pottery wheel with one hand.

“Where’s he going?”

“Don’t know,” said Junior.

Maybe there’s something in the water, thought Starr. Minkey was as unpredictable as the rest.

The sun was about to set on Junior and his junkyard. Starr corrected herself. Art. She leaned against a workbench and watched light play across the glass-bottle ceiling as Junior left the pottery wheel and began sorting wine bottles.

The art Junior created was extraordinary. As good as, even better than, anything she’d seen in an art gallery. Not that she haunted that type of fine establishment, but art had been an interest of Quinn’s. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me, she’d always said to her daughter, and that had fueled all kinds of new things.

Quinn had convinced her to take a kayak onto Lake Michigan and to volunteer to rehabilitate day-old kittens with on-the-hour feedings. Starr had been tired all the time, but those years had gone so fast. She would do anything to have them back now. A familiar ache welled behind her eyes and she shut them hard against it.

“You don’t remember anything about this place?” Junior said. “About the rez? From when you were little?”

“Yeah, not a thing. I didn’t even know my father had ever left me here until this week. Guess I was too young.”

“My mom, who lives with Odeina now, that’s who kept you. Her and me. We traded off for maybe six months. Then, one day, he just showed up, your dad. Took you back to Chicago and we didn’t hear another thing, except finally that he’d”—Junior hesitated—“died.”

“Why did he leave?” Starr said. No, that wasn’t the right question. She knew he’d enlisted in the army, been stationed in a war zone, then settled with her mother in the city. And that her mother didn’t like it when he talked about his family. “Why didn’t he ever come back?”

Starr thought about how different her life would have been if she had grown up here. Would she have fallen in love? Survived her teenage years? Would she have had Quinn, had other children? Been better off knowing her family? Even with her blood claim, the rez wasn’t open to her. Maybe there was nothing left to give. If Indigenous people were going to preserve their cultures, to some degree that would require separation from the rest of the world. And that included her, didn’t it?

“Who can say?” Junior fell silent. The wind picked up. It pushed against a south wall of the workshop, coming in through the cracks and tracing her face like fingers. “Why did you come back?”

“I need to know who I am.” It was her first honest response, probably in years.

“And who are you, Carrie Starr?” Junior stopped his work. His dark eyes looked into hers. They were so much like her father’s.

She broke his gaze. Who was she, indeed? She was broken.

Incredibly broken. But still here. Still standing. Still pulling herself up through the abyss that enveloped her daily. She’d been eaten from the inside like her mother. Stunned by booze like her father. But still she stood. On this land. With her own two feet, which were not lost to diabetes or any of the other ailments that plagued her people. She was alive. Mercifully, painfully alive. But she was surrounded by secrets. If she could find the monster responsible for Sherry Ann’s death…if she could find Chenoa…any of the missing girls at the center of those secrets, she could set them free. Maybe liberate herself too.

Junior turned toward her, outstretching his arms and putting a hand on each of her shoulders. For a moment she saw her father, with his easy laugh and wicked sense of humor, with his love for her and with his ability to hitch a ride on life’s ever-changing current.

“You,” Junior said, his voice filling the beautiful space he’d created out of discarded things. “You belong here too. We are all your family.”

Starr wept, her tears making tiny stains the old wood of the floor would absorb and keep, like a mother saving a lock of her child’s hair.

“There’s something else too,” he added as her crying waned. “Your father…we were like brothers. Once. A long, long time ago.” He scuffed the floor with his boot. “It was a different time then. When he didn’t come back…I didn’t even know about you until he dropped you off that day. So tiny. Whatever he hated about himself, he loved you. And I always hoped that he kept a place for me too. In here.” Junior tapped his chest, then turned away and looked through the stained glass, the light stippling his face.

“He had to leave. Part of me understood that, of course I did. Your mother hated it here. Loved him, but there was nothing she liked or respected or wanted from his life or the rez. And by the time she was gone, it was too late for him. Too much life had passed by, and he had cut his ties with us. At least, he must have believed so.”

An hour later Starr and Junior had left his workshop to sit in front of the shack he called home. The light was fading, the junk piles casting strange shadows. Junior was an artist. She still couldn’t wrap her mind around it.

There was something nagging at her too, something about Odeina or about the beetles. Plus, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Chenoa didn’t fit with the other missing girls, who seemed to have gotten involved with bad crowds or bad drugs or maybe bad men who then became worse. She felt the old detectives’ curse at work, the curse of a solution going unnoticed right under one’s nose. It had probably been there all along. If only she could make sense of it.

“You ever seen a beetle like this?” Starr scrolled through her phone, finding a clear image of a two-inch beetle marked with OU red.

Junior set down the beer he was drinking and studied the picture for a long time.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” he said, “but that white dirt you asked me about? I kept thinking about it and realized I’d seen that before. Pretty sure, anyway. There’s a whole deposit of it a few miles out from here.” He motioned vaguely behind them, to the wilderness area. “Might be the same, might not, but that’s what I seen.”

“You think you could show me the place if I had a map?”

Was the kaolin a dead end? Starr wondered whether it had any cultural significance, but little information about the rez existed in any kind of formal way. No books, no internet articles, no documentaries chronicling its history. The Saliquaw Nation wasn’t studied by anthropologists and it didn’t have the draw of Oklahoma’s 300-thousand-member Cherokee Nation. The only way she was going to learn the Saliquaw Nation’s history was to ask the people who belonged to it.

“I go through that area, where the white dirt is, when I’m hunting,” he said. “I’ve always been a hunter.”

Starr felt the weight of the BIA’s cold-case files at her office, at her home. She tapped her foot against the porch step it was propped on, then forced herself to stop. Patience. Everything on the rez unfolded at its own pace. Relevant information wrapped in unrelated stories.

“One thing most people don’t know, especially if they don’t dress their own game,” said Junior, “is that each body holds a history, and with enough practice, a person can learn to read it. Maybe not entirely. It’s not a thing to be fully known, but it is a story of a life—at least as much as we can understand of it. Shoot a duck, any kind of game bird, and butcher it. The second part of its stomach, called the gizzard, will tell you a story. Cut the gizzard open and you’ll find not only half-digested seeds, but the small rocks that help pulverize the food. From the seeds you know what the bird has been eating, sure, but from the rocks you know where it has been eating. They are a map that marks its route.” He looked at her, the corners of his mouth in a wry downturn. “Things you can’t know from a package of meat at the grocery store.”

“Right,” she said, “but what’s a duck got to do with—”

“That’s what I’m getting to. There is always more information than you think there is. At least, when you realize the things that can be understood.”

Starr shook her head. Although she’d been pleasantly surprised by Junior’s art studio, she was frustrated, and she was eager to learn something—anything—that could lead to answers. Across the open land, the wind shifted and chilled, a sign of the winter storm the radio had predicted.

“The council meetings? They’re like the meat you buy at the grocery store,” Junior said. “Packaged, efficient, a good presentation, but not the whole story. Not the whole story at all.”

Starr pictured the meeting at the community center. Chief Byrd with the gavel. The nervous-looking guy from Dexter Springs. What was his name? Bernard, that was it. And the tall, concise Norwegian named Antell who presented details on the contract between the reservation, the city and the oil company.

Seemed straightforward enough. People for it, people against it, the lure of fortune winning out in the end. Was there something more?

“Maybe I should talk to Chief Byrd,” she said, solely to watch Junior’s reaction. “Maybe Antell.”

Junior stared at an ant crawling over the top of his left boot.

“Went hunting once, came across a guy named Holder. Owned some land bordering the reservation,” Junior said. “Pshht.” It was a derisive sound that started in the back of his throat and escaped through his nose.

“Holder,” Starr repeated. “You mean Horace-Wayne Holder?”

“That’s the one. Well, I was tracking a deer I’d hit with an arrow, and the blood trail ended at an old barbed wire fence, with his land on the other side of that fence and the tree row. I doubled back, got the old pickup to start—which it don’t like to do when it’s cold—and drove to his ranch house. He’s nice enough, but I’m not the kind of fellow who traipses across land uninvited, so I figured I’d ask permission. He volunteered to help me, and we tried to pick up the trail until it got dark. Figured by then the deer had hunkered down somewhere. A shame too, because I knew by the time I found the deer—if I could find it—in the morning, the coyotes would already have had their fill. We parted ways, and I said I’d start early the next day.”

Junior looked into the distance.

“So, I walked over to his house the next morning, just as the sun was coming over the hill, and I saw him. He was out in his shed, bay doors open, and I thought, Great, he’s ready to go. Then I saw what he was doing. He had that doe trussed and half-skinned, hanging there. I could see the steam coming off her body. She was that fresh. He must have gone back without me and found her, and now she was bound for his freezer. Wasn’t right. Still ain’t right. I’d never trust a man who did something like that, no matter how good he seemed.”

Later, and for a long time, Starr would think of that moment; think of it a thousand times over, turn it in her mind until its edges were worn smooth like a river rock. It lived in her consciousness with Junior and the deer, with Chief Byrd and Blackstream Oil, with Chenoa and white chalk, with Holder and the burying beetles making houses out of the dead.