THE NEXT MORNING, I’m up bright and early, drinking a tall glass of water and taking an Aleve for my headache. Carlos got up even earlier and went for a quick run, back in plenty of time for us to get ready and head over to Ysleta del Sur.
Ava is in the office when we get there, and we come bearing drinks: two cups of coffee for Carlos and me, and a lemonade for Ava.
“Just took a guess you might like this over coffee,” I say.
She takes a sip.
“Good guess,” she says with a smile.
The three of us sit down to discuss how to approach Isabella Luna’s interview. We don’t want to scare her, don’t want her to feel like we’re prying open old wounds. But if there’s anything she can remember, anything at all, it might help break this case open for us.
We decide to stand in the lobby so we don’t keep her waiting once she arrives.
“I think this is her vehicle,” Ava says, as an old Ford Bronco pulls into the lot.
Out steps a young woman with beautiful dark hair, brushed straight down and parted in the middle. She wears a short-sleeved blouse and jeans, along with sandals. As she walks through the parking lot, I notice the slightest hint of a limp—as if all the injuries listed in the police report never fully healed.
Ava greets her with a hug. She introduces Carlos and me, and the young woman looks up at both of us with anxiety she can’t quite hide.
“Texas Rangers?” she says, trying to force a smile. “This must be serious.”
“We think you might be able to help us with some cases we’re working on,” I explain.
“So this doesn’t have to do with what happened to me?” she asks.
“It does,” I say, and then promise to explain more inside.
We lead her to a small conference room, where we sit around a table. We don’t sit across from her, like it’s a three-against-one interrogation, but spread out so it’s more like four people just having a conversation.
Carlos starts by noting that her old police file suggests she couldn’t remember anything from the time of her disappearance until she was found.
“It’s been four years,” he says. “Has anything come back to you?”
Isabella’s nervousness seems to amplify. Her breathing has become more shallow.
“No,” she says. “I really don’t think about it very often. I try not to, honestly. I remember the ambulance. The hospital. But the week or ten days or whatever it was that I was gone are just blank. Like someone reached into my brain with a big eraser and scrubbed them out.”
“So you can’t remember how your leg was broken?” Ava asks.
She shakes her head.
“You were bitten by a snake, according to the file,” I say. “Do you remember that?”
“No,” she says. “Nothing.”
Carlos asks if anyone had been following her in the days leading up to her disappearance. If anything unusual had happened. Anyone who might have been upset with her.
“I only know what you already know,” she says, gesturing to the file folder sitting on the table next to Carlos. “The last time anyone could remember seeing me was at the powwow. This was at Franklin Mountains State Park. The Tigua hosted the powwow, planning to make it an annual thing if it went well. But I think because of what happened to me they just didn’t bother to put it on the next year.”
Ava explains that while she grew up on the Pueblo, she had been working for the highway patrol elsewhere in Texas at the time. She asks Isabella to tell us about the powwow.
“It was like any other,” she says, looking at Carlos and Ava. “You’ve been to them. There’s dancing and drumming. Lots of crafts and leatherwork and jewelry. Food stands with Indian tacos and fry bread.” She shrugs her shoulders. “It was just a powwow.”
I try to picture this young woman at the event. There would have been plenty of people there who knew her—it was practically in her backyard—and it no doubt would have been a happy occasion.
“You know,” she says, “my life is divided in two. Whenever I remember something in my life, I immediately categorize the memory as happening before it happened, or after—whatever it is, I’m not even sure. But I don’t actually remember anything between the powwow and being picked up on the highway. And I’ve made my peace with not remembering. To be honest, I don’t really want to remember.”
I can’t fault her for not wanting to remember. But maybe there’s something before her disappearance that could help us.
“Do you remember seeing any kind of eagle feathers at the powwow?”
She laughs, a strange sound considering how upset she is.
“There are feathers everywhere,” she says, looking to Carlos and Ava for confirmation. They nod knowingly. “Everyone’s decked out in their regalia. Lots of feathers on their clothes, their spears, their drums.”
She looks back and forth between us.
“What’s this all about?”
We glance at each other and—without speaking verbally—agree to give her some information.
“You disappeared on the solstice,” Carlos says. “In the years since, four other Native women have gone missing on the solstice from different areas of the Southwest. We believe those disappearances are related, and we think you might have been the first.”
Isabella is visibly shaken by the idea that there might be other women.
“You mean other women might have gone through what I did?” she asks.
“None of the others have ever been found,” Ava says.
This news seems to shock Isabella, who looks queasy.
“The most recent one has only been gone a few days,” I say. “Not as long as you were missing. If whatever happened to you is also happening to her, then she might still be alive. We might still be able to save her. Are you sure there’s nothing you can tell us?”