Mask of the Deer Woman

Chapter One

FIVE DAYS EARLIER

Carrie Starr stepped out of the Ford Bronco held up by mismatched tires that she'd just cajoled into lumbering across the Saliquaw Nation. It was her official service vehicle, and apparently the one perk afforded her by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because the cinder-block building that served as her office sure didn't qualify.

It was Wednesday, her third day as tribal marshal, the result of a new federal statute meant to stem the tide of missing Indigenous women, and already she had the junkyard truck and an office that doubled as a storeroom. There were no deputies or dispatch, no crime-scene techs or ballistics experts-none of the human capital she'd had access to in Chicago. There was a working landline, which was a bit of a surprise, but it rang to a heavy seventies-era handset that reassured her that low expectations could always sink a bit more. The one call she'd gotten on the avocado green throwback had been from a woman screaming down the line. At first she'd thought it was a prank but had decided not to take any chances and kept the receiver to her ear instead of slamming it down.

The woman eventually began to make sense, and from what Starr had been able to gather, was demanding an audience with the new tribal marshal.

So here she was. Day three. Standing in front of a rickety mobile home on a dusty reservation where she didn't belong, working a job she didn't really want, sure she wasn't ready to face a fuming mother convinced her daughter was missing.

A wary brown dog trotted by like it was late for an appointment, sidestepping three men wearing different versions of the same flannel jacket and stoking a fire in a fifty-gallon drum. Behind them was a gray mobile home almost identical to the one she was about to approach. Rectangles of warped plywood staked to long handles listed against the faded siding. The messages were more of the same she'd already seen fastened to buildings, fences and telephone poles around the reservation.

NO PIPELINE was a popular one, but there were a few DON'T FRACK THE FUTURE signs, and even an outlier that made one side of her mouth lift a little: HIDE YO KIDS HIDE YO WIFE THEY FRACKIN EVRYBDY.

The men watched her read the signs. The fire smelled good, made her think of better things. She was just about to dip back into the driver's side of the Bronco and take a pull from the bottle under the seat when a door slapped open behind her.

"Odeina Cloud," the woman announced, sandwiched behind a sagging screen door. "You Carrie Starr? I called about my girl, my daughter, Chenoa."

Starr cringed. The only thing worse than being on the reservation where her father had been raised was being called by her first name. He'd been looking through the bottom of a bottle when he'd plucked Carrie's name from history, but it had been the wrong kind. Named her after Carrie Nation, a white woman who preached in an Oklahoma church and filled her wagon with bricks so she could smash saloon windows for selling the devil's drink. He'd made sure Starr carried a stranger's history instead of knowing her own. She made sure no one called her Carrie anymore.

"Marshal." Starr tapped the badge on her chest. "Marshal Starr," she said, turning to look at the men behind her.

"Well, isn't that fancy?" said the woman in the doorway. She looked Starr over. "You're a tall one. Just gonna stand there?"

Odeina Cloud had glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, and even from a distance Starr could see that her long hair had once been the color of coal but was now shot through with silver that framed her round face. She looked more like a middle school principal than anything, even though she was wearing a mustard yellow waitress uniform with wide orange lapels and matching apron.

Starr wondered whether the woman would be able to smell the alcohol on her breath, and reached into a side pocket of her uniform pants, which were the same unfortunate brown as her jacket and shirt, to retrieve a mint. No sense getting detention today, she thought, and shook her head. She hadn't come this far only to tell the same stupid jokes.

Starr shifted her weight, feeling the pinch of her new BIA-issued boots, as a blustery wind kicked up the trailer's loose skirting, creating an open maw that felt like an omen. The thought of being inside this tin can created a trail of goose bumps under her sleeves.

There was something about the rez, even with its expansive spaces, that made her feel claustrophobic. The unease had set in almost immediately, from her first patrol over acres of dust and prairie grass.

Quinn would have laughed at her reluctance, at how she planted her feet on a square of red dirt between the busted-up Bronco and the woman beckoning her into the trailer. Her daughter had been a force of nature, not afraid of anything.

Stop it, Starr thought. This is not the time.

"Good grief," Odeina said, "you need me to hold your hand and lead you over here?"

Starr heard laughter erupt from the men feeding the drum fire and glanced back at the Bronco. She could picture the whiskey stowed under the torn upholstery of the driver's seat but willed herself to walk away from it. Incentivize yourself, she thought. It will be here when you're done.

Starr's boots kicked up puffs of dust that the wind whisked away. They made a hollow sound on a trio of metal steps that ascended to the trailer door. The afternoon light filtered through a cover of low clouds that turned it flat and cagey; in the trailer's dim interior it was nearly impossible to make out any details. The woman had already retreated from the doorway to somewhere inside and was talking too fast, her sentences running together like a stream Starr wasn't ready to dip a toe into-much less leap.

Starr's right hand settled on her sidearm as she let her eyes adjust, taking in the open stretch of kitchen and living room. There were slim hallways at each end, which she presumed led to bedrooms. She liked to know where she was and what kind of space she was dealing with before she turned her attention to anything else. She'd been in too many off-kilter situations with agitated people not to get the lay of the land.

Odeina, still talking, closed the door behind her. Starr caught bits and pieces of Odeina's diatribe, but her mind was a sieve. Something about college and a van, but now there was a cell phone that rang and rang. "Rang and rang," Odeina said again. Starr's head felt thick and her mouth dry. She needed water. Or something stronger.

Starr was an inch above six feet, and the boots made her six two. She towered over Odeina, who for some inexplicable reason had started whispering through clenched teeth.

"Okay, first of all, let's get this straight. And I'll say it real slow for you. My. Daughter. Is. Missing." She took a deep breath. "I have already talked to the sheriff's office, but according to his deputy, the rez is out of their jurisdiction. So I called the police department over in Dexter Springs. Same runaround. Then I hear from my neighbor over there"-she motioned toward the trailer across the road-"that we have some kind of new . . ." She searched the ceiling for a word.

"Tribal marshal?"

Odeina snapped her fingers and pointed at Starr. "Yes. Tribal marshal. You, apparently. Some kind of BIA nonsense, but good grief, I hope it helps. And it's about time, since our daughters are . . ." She pulled a name tag from her shirt pocket and fastened it over her heart. "Okay, here's the thing. You're not here to learn about anyone else but my daughter. So listen."

A buzzing started in Starr's head, far away and getting closer. She looked at Odeina in her uniform with the carrot-colored apron. She took in the orderly kitchen. The entire place was deliberate. Spare. The only thing that stood out was a large flat-screen taking up one wall of the living room, which explained the satellite dish on the roof. Opposite the television was a drab couch under a display of carefully spaced artwork. Some kind of Indigenous thing, she guessed. In the far corner, near the TV, was a rocking chair covered in blankets.

"You been doing some cleaning?" Starr said. It wouldn't be the first time a frantic caller was the person she liked for a crime.

Odeina tossed her head back, exasperated, her hair splaying behind her, eyes shut tight.

"Chenoa goes out sometimes, like every kid her age. I get that. What I am trying to get across to you people is that there are certain things she would not miss." Odeina exhaled slowly, speaking so quietly Starr had to lean in to hear her. "For one, Chenoa said she was going to be here for her grandmother's birthday last weekend. She would not miss it, no matter what. But here it is, Wednesday. No Chenoa. She also wouldn't be gone for days without telling me where she was. And she would not ignore my calls. Not for days ignore them."

Starr was taking in the words at last, but there was something off about this scene. She could feel it. Some threat that hadn't yet materialized.

A few days was nothing out here. It took twenty-four hours just to figure out where you were on the rez, she thought, glancing out a dust-pocked window to the open horizon. Or why.

From the corner of her eye, Starr caught movement.

"Who else is here?" Starr asked, and scanned the living room. She quietly unsnapped the holster on her belt and curled her fingers around the grip of her sidearm. She could drop someone if she had to, but fuck, not her first week on the job. The rez was supposed to be a place to do penance, to limp along until she could get her career shored up, get her shit together. She couldn't afford to repeat what happened in Chicago.

The blankets on the rocking chair in the corner of the living room shifted, and Starr reflexively pulled her weapon.

Odeina screamed.

Starr ignored Odeina and trained her gun on the blankets, but Odeina wouldn't stop making noise. She turned the barrel toward Odeina instead, then oscillated between her and the blankets, unsure which target held the biggest threat.

"Are you crazy?" Odeina yelled. She motioned with both hands to the blankets, which had now gone quite still.

"Move," Starr said. "Over there."

Starr signaled a direction with her gun and Odeina sidestepped closer to the blankets, her hands still raised. Consolidate the targets, Starr thought.

Odeina gestured at the mass of coverings, as if to show that she would remove them from the chair.

Starr nodded affirmatively.

Odeina tugged a velvety-looking blanket, then a downy comforter, a crocheted coverlet and finally a heavy bearskin. Only the chair's occupant remained.

Chapter Two

Starr realized she was looking at a very old woman and lowered her weapon. There wasn't a threat. Not now, never had been.

Until this moment, she hadn't really thought she was a danger to anyone other than herself. Well, and that one guy she gunned down in Chicago. And probably her daughter.

Shut up, she told herself. The room went still. The only sound was a gale that swept over the prairie, persistently trying to buffet the trailer onto its side. She could feel the sway as if she were on a dinghy in Lake Michigan, right off Lake Shore Drive, cold spray stinging her face and icicles forming on her hair. It had been shorter then; she couldn't remember the last time she'd had a haircut. There were a lot of things she'd stopped doing after she was suspended.

"What is wrong with you? This is Lucy Cloud, my mother-in-law. Didn't you wonder why I was whispering? She was sleeping."

The fury in Odeina's voice brought Starr back to the present like an ice bath. There hadn't been a buzzing in her head after all; it had just been Odeina speaking low.

"Grandmother," Starr said. It was one of the few things she knew about this place from her father, that this was the respectful way to address a tribal elder. Even though he had never returned to his extended family, her father had carried that reverence with him the rest of his life.

Starr tried to slow her breathing. She hid the trembling of her hands by returning her sidearm to its holster and hooking each thumb into a side of her service belt. Fucking adrenaline, Starr thought.

"Right," she said, all business. "Anybody else in here?"

"I saw this already," interrupted the old woman, who began to make a terrible sound, pulling air into her lungs and then wheezing it out like leaky bellows. Starr realized it was laughter.

"Yes, yes. I'm sure you did." Odeina's eyes rolled toward the water-stained ceiling, but she cooed soothingly as she heaved the bearskin back onto the old woman's lap and tucked in the fallen blankets, returning her to her cocoon.

Helplessness made Starr uncomfortable, so she half turned to the living room's opposite wall, where she pretended to study the arrangement. She'd seen it as a mass of folksy art when she'd first scanned the living room, but now realized the display was composed of individual masks. Carved, mostly out of wood, she supposed. Maybe they were what had set her off-creepy enough-but there was something different about them now.

After she finished settling her mother-in-law, Odeina marched past Starr and into the kitchen, where she pulled a snapshot from under a magnet on the refrigerator.

"Here's a picture of my girl," Odeina said, "not that the tribal council is doing anything. Not that you're doing anything either. I'd go tell them you're an idiot, but knowing them, it wouldn't matter a bit."

Odeina drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly.

Starr's senses were coming back to her, and she could smell the contents of a large pot on the stovetop, steam escaping from the lid. When was the last time she'd eaten?

"I took this picture at her college graduation, right before she started classes for a master's degree." Odeina looked at the photograph. "Her hair is different now."

Starr walked toward the battered kitchen table as Odeina slid into one of the chairs around it, still holding the picture. Starr said nothing; she figured the least she could do was zip it long enough for Odeina to spill her guts, and in return maybe Odeina wouldn't report to the tribal council that Starr had pulled a gun on her. Starr lowered herself into a chair opposite Odeina but wished for a shot of whiskey or to light the joint she'd tucked into her shirt pocket. It was all too much. These women, this place. Girls who went missing.