I sat up straighter. “Dr. Cobel said you’re in Ethete?” I spun toward my computer and pulled up a map on the internet. When the virtual pin dropped on the town, I realized Wind River was an Indian reservation in Wyoming.
“Yes. I run a small museum in the Little Wind Casino here on the rez.”
The map showed a five-hour drive. Tomorrow was Saturday, and my schedule at the museum fell under regular business hours Monday through Friday. “I can be there tomorrow afternoon if that works for you.”
“I’ll be here to meet you,” she said. There was something in her tone that quickened my heart.
I had to receive permission from Annette, and I took the cradleboard with me to her office.
“It is odd,” she said, studying the cradleboard. “We are usually very careful about accessioning private collections. We receive a lot of requests, but most don’t fit within the Collection Management Policy. There was no paperwork with the collection you found?”
“None, and I searched back through the records from 2017. There’s no mention of this collection.”
“So we can’t know if there were any restrictions on the gift, and there’s no record of a donor to contact. It’s a beautiful piece. Such craftsmanship.” She fingered the pendants hanging from the laces. “I’ll approve the deaccession. Keep your receipts, and we’ll reimburse you.”
When I left work for the day, I carried the box containing the cradleboard with me, and I stopped at Ed’s mechanic shop on the way to the inn.
Ed was at his desk, and he doffed his ever-present trapper hat. “Ev’lyn. To what do we owe this pleasure?”
“My car isn’t ready yet, is it?”
“I’m afraid not. She’s on the lift in the shop. She’ll be ready for you next week, though.”
“In that case, I wondered if I might take your truck to Wind River this weekend,” I said. “I’ll pay you for the mileage I put on it, of course.”
His brow wrinkled. “The reservation in Wyoming?”
“Yes. I thought I’d drive through Yellowstone and the Tetons.”
“Can’t do that this time of year,” Ed said. “Roads are closed.”
“Oh.” The map application had not been that helpful when I had looked up directions. “I guess I’ll have to take the long way, then.”
“We’re supposed to get more snow tomorrow afternoon,” Ed said, voice hesitant. “You can take the Chevy, of course. But let me check her over and put some better snow tires on her.”
“I promise I’ll be careful with her, but I don’t want you to have to go to any extra trouble.”
“It won’t be any trouble, and it’s not the Chevy I would be worried about.”
The statement took me aback. It had been a long time since anyone had been worried about me.
“You have a few minutes to wait while I check her over and change out the tires?” he asked.
“I do.” I took a seat in the lobby after handing over the keys and dug into my purse for the next book club read. I flipped through the pages to chapter one, but before I began to read, something on the opposite wall caught my eye.
I set my book aside and crossed to it, reading the large print on one side of the banner.
HAVE YOU SEEN US?
Winona and Emma Lewis
Winona, 37 Years Old, 5’5”, 140lbs
Emma, 23 Months Old, 33 inches, 24lbs
Missing since Monday, October 13th, 2003
The sign went on to list where the pair had last been seen and a $50,000 reward for any information leading to their return. There were several phone numbers and a social media site listed. Half of the banner was dedicated to a photograph.
I stepped back to study the photo. The woman clearly had American Indian heritage with the structure of her facial features, her skin tone, and the lustrous fall of dark hair around her shoulders. She stared directly into the camera with a Mona Lisa smile. The toddler was a different matter. The woman held her on her hip, and the little girl had her mother’s dark hair. The child’s hair was fine and curly, though, her skin and eyes lighter. She rested her head against her mother’s shoulder and grinned at the camera, one hand stretched out toward whoever had been on the other side of the lens.
The sun through the windows of the auto shop had faded the banner. The red print and the photograph both had lost their crispness of color. But the woman’s gaze and the child’s smile held me captive for long moments.
I returned to my book across the room, but my gaze strayed frequently to the banner. Ed came back in with a gust of frigid air, rubbing his red, chapped hands together. “She’s all set.”
I tucked the book back in my purse and stood. “Thank you. I’ll pay you for the extra mileage.”
He waved me away. “You don’t need to do that. Take one of my cards with you. It has my number on it. That drive is a lonesome one. And Wind River…it’s bleak country.”
I accepted the business card he handed me and recognized the number as one listed on the missing persons banner. My gaze went to the woman and child.
“Have they never been found?” I could not help but ask.
“Not yet,” Ed said. “Not yet, but we don’t give up hope.” When I turned back to him, his gaze was fixed on the woman in the photograph, pain etched into his weathered features. He was a spry man from what I had seen. He had to at least be in his eighties, but he did not look it. Until this moment. Now, he looked frail to the point of breaking, withered by sorrow. His eyes came to mine, and his smile was tremulous. “Call me if anything happens along your journey. These empty roads are dangerous ones.”
I left the next morning before the sun was even up. Faye met me at the door with a thermos of coffee and a container of huckleberry muffins.
My backpack went on the floorboard, the archive box in the passenger’s seat. I cranked the truck and let the engine rumble and the interior warm while I ate one of the muffins. My headlights cut over the freshly fallen snow, and I put the old Chevy in gear and pulled away from the inn.
The miles passed, and I drove slowly and cautiously. Driving in the dark had always made me anxious. I had no memories of my parents, only those that had been passed down to me by my father’s parents. My own parents had been killed in a car accident in early morning hours, hit by a drunk driver on their way to the hospital when my mother was in labor with me. My father’s parents had been at the hospital as soon as the police informed them of the accident. I had been taken from my mother’s lifeless body and placed in my grandfather’s arms.
I never felt like something was missing from my life. My grandparents loved me as fiercely as if I were their own child. But I had grown up utterly doted on and rarely disciplined. I had been a spoiled little princess who turned into an absolute terror of a teenager.
My grandparents had been carefully noncommittal in their lack of reaction to the piercings, tattoos, and the phase of blue hair. When I staggered home drunk in the middle of the night, my grandmother simply bundled me into bed and left a pain reliever, a glass of water, and a waste bin beside my bed. They had not said anything when I partied my way through the first years of college they had scraped and saved for. They had not needed to say anything. I could see the disappointment on their faces.
And then I woke up hungover one morning and saw I had a dozen missed calls from my grandfather. When I called him back, he had tearfully told me my grandmother was in the ICU. He had tried to call me the night before when she first became ill but had not been able to reach me. Within twelve hours, Guillain-Barré syndrome had rendered my grandmother a quadriplegic. The odds of her surviving were slim.
I had left that old lifestyle behind at nineteen. I dropped out of school and moved back home. It was a long, hard year of hospital stays, rehabilitation, and therapy, but my grandmother survived and regained the use of her limbs. Weakened and never quite herself physically again, but still with us. Responsibility and discipline were things I had worked
hard to learn.
Eventually, I finished my undergrad work and pursued a masters remotely. My work at the historical society museum outside of Atlanta had been a dream come true for six years. Then it had become a nightmare.
I shook away the memories, and my white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel eased as the sky lightened and soon was aflame with the sun’s rise. Wind buffeted the truck as I drove.
I was almost the only vehicle on the two-lane road that wove amongst the hills and rocky outcroppings. A river followed my path south, and mountains hemmed my view to the west. Last night’s snow had left an unmarred swath of white across the land. It was frigid and bleak, wild and windswept. The occasional herd of elk or mule deer stood out on the stretches of white plains, and I gasped when I saw a creature standing beside the road watching my passing with avid eyes and pricked ears. I was not certain if it was a wolf or a coyote.
My grandfather had loved this area of the country. He and my grandmother had taken a cross-country road trip for their honeymoon seventy years ago, and they had loved Yellowstone so much they stayed a month and never completed the trek to Seattle. Every year after that until my parents died, they had made the trek to Yellowstone.
My grandfather had not known who I was in the last year of his life. Just before he slipped away from my entirely, his mind eaten by Alzheimer’s, I had crawled up into the attic one day and found his Brownie 500 movie projector, and the three of us had spent the day watching home films he had meticulously spliced over the years. The majority of the home movies were from their trips to Yellowstone.
The old films had brought about an increasingly rare moment of lucidity from him. I wish we had taken you to Yellowstone, he whispered when the film ran out and the projection on the wall stuttered. We’ll get there some day, I told him.
He had not been satisfied with that, and I could see the pensiveness on his face. He caught my hand between his own and said, You have spent good years of your life taking care of your grandmother and me.
Tears had pricked my eyes. He could no longer remember my name, and more often than not, he doubted the identity of the woman who had been his constant for so many decades.
Didn’t you do the very same for me? I asked him, squeezing those large hands that had done so much for me. I was not certain he remembered how much he had done for me.
I want you to promise me you’ll live the rest of your life for yourself. I had started to protest, but he would not accept anything but a promise. Live the rest of your life for yourself. And one day in your journeys, stop by Yellowstone and think of me.
I had promised him. In the end, once he was gone and my grandmother followed him within months, Medicare took everything. The house, most of his life insurance policy. There had been nothing left to stay for. That Brownie 500 movie projector had been the last thing to go at the final yard sale.
I crossed into Wyoming with little ceremony, simply a brief widening of the road and a change in the color of the pavement that had thankfully been plowed and salted. I reached Cody in the late morning and stopped at a diner for an early lunch. Two hours later, I entered the small town of Shoshoni and turned back to the west. A small green sign announced I was entering the Wind River Indian Reservation.
There was nothing to delineate the cross into reservation land. No fences, no change in the wide-open, craggy landscape. I crossed a reservoir black with cold and shined with ice. There was a sign for an RV park, but the flat, sparsely treed lot was empty. A herd of cattle were clustered together farther down the road, standing within a copse of cottonwood trees to seek relief from the wind.
It looked like any other desolate, winter-stripped space I had seen in the vast west.
I had researched Wind River last night. It was one of the most dangerous reservations in the country. A half dozen police officers patrol an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Life was grim here. The life expectancy was low, the unemployment and high school dropout rates high. Alcohol and drug abuse abounded. On one section of the reservation, people still had to boil their water before they drank it.
There was a long history of brutal homicides in Wind River. A two-year crime fighting initiative was enacted a few years ago at Wind River and three other reservations. People called it the surge. Crime was reduced at the other three reservations, but violent crime on Wind River increased by seven percent.
I stared out at the passing scenery. There was the occasional stack of hay bales covered in tarps and a blanket of snow and sporadic clusters of buildings off to the side of the road. It seemed so peaceful. Quiet and empty.
Many blamed the violence on the land being haunted. A massacre had taken place in the area in the mid-1800s.
The road seemed to stretch past the horizon, and I had been driving for almost an hour when I suddenly passed a red and cream building off to the left side of the road. I glanced at the sign as I sailed past.
I slowed, startled by its sudden appearance in the middle of nowhere. A glance in the rearview mirror confirmed the sign read Little Wind Casino. I performed a U-turn in the middle of the empty road.
There were a dozen vehicles parked in the lot of the windowless rectangle of a building. I parked and grabbed the box from the passenger’s seat.
The wind blew me across the parking lot and to the double doors leading into the casino. It was quieter than I expected inside. The handful of people sitting at the machines were silent as they pulled levers and pushed buttons, fixated on the screens. Music played softly on a speaker overhead, and even the tinny music from the machines seemed subdued.
The young man who greeted me pointed across the room when I asked to see Ohetica WhitePlume. A restaurant occupied one part of the building, and tucked into a corner through an open doorway was a small museum and gift shop.
The woman behind the counter turned when I entered, and her gaze immediately dropped to the box in my hands.
“Ms. WhitePlume?”
“Please, just Ohetica.” She was a lovely woman, and her grip when she shook my hand was strong and warm.
“Evelyn,” I said.
“Do you mind waiting here a moment? There is someone I’d like to bring in on this meeting.”
“Not at all.”
“He’s in the restaurant,” she said, gaze again dropping to the box with a tightening of sorrow around the corner of her eyes. “I won’t be but a moment.”
I made a slow circuit of the room while she was gone, studying the objects displayed. A drum, an eagle wing fan, a pair of moccasins with intricate quillwork, a parfleche, a pipe, and a rattle were displayed. In one glass encasement was a cradle, much like the one I carried, though there was far less quillwork decorating the one displayed.
I turned at the sound of voices, and Ohetica reentered the room with a man at her side. “Evelyn, this is Joseph Spoonhunter, the Tribal Police Chief.”
Unease pierced me, and I struggled not to show the tension that suddenly gripped me. “Police?” I forced myself to shake the hand he extended to me.
His features were stern, and his gaze assessing. “Ohetica called me yesterday because she recognized the description of the cradleboard. It may be an item that was stolen from the home of a family here on the reservation eight years ago.”
I placed the box on the counter and carefully unwrapped the cradleboard. “I don’t know if she told you, but I work for the Park County Museum. I’m currently undertaking a project to return cultural objects to their tribes. I came across this and knew it didn’t fit the rest of our collection.”
Ohetica leaned over the box and lifted the cradleboard carefully from the depths as the police chief drew a pair of reading glasses and a photograph from his shirt pocket.
“This was among a collection donated to our museum about two years ago,” I said. “It was never formally accessioned.”
Ohetica glanced at the police chief, who studied the photograph in his hand and then the cradleb
oard. “What information do you have on the person who donated the collection?” he asked.
“Nothing, I’m afraid. The records just say it was a private donation.” I looked back and forth between the two, taking in the grimness of his features and the tears welling in her eyes. “It does belong to your tribe, then?”
“It belongs to my family,” Ohetica said, and a tear spilled over her cheek. “This cradle was made by my mother’s great-great-great-grandmother. She only bore one child, and it was only after great struggle and much loss that she did so.” She fingered the three pendants hanging from the laces. “These were to signify her thankfulness for the fulfillment of her desire to bear a child.”
At the sheer emotion on her face, my own throat tightened. “I’m sorry it was taken from your family.”
The police chief removed his glasses and rubbed his face. “The thing is, Miss Hutto, this is not the only thing that was taken from the WhitePlume home eight years ago.”
“There are a number of other pieces in the collection. This was the only one I—”
“Marisa,” Ohetica said, voice rough with pain. “My twenty-two-year-old niece. She went missing that night as well.”
Part III
Remove the Stems that Cross
Seventeen
There is no comprehensive data collection
system regarding the number of missing
and murdered women in Indian country.
HECTOR
By the time the front crept over the hills and the snow began to fall at midday, we still had found no sign of Amanda Thornton. The cell phone company informed the department that her phone was either turned off or the battery was dead. There was no activity on her joint bank account with her husband.
Thirty hours of searching. Over seventy-two hours missing. I knew the statistics involved with timing intimately. And I knew from experience that women sometimes vanished and no trace of them was ever found again.
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