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  The heat inside the truck enfolded Lola like a blanket. She was not entirely sorry when Charlie slammed the door behind her. Bub stood up and braced his forepaws against the dash and balanced expertly on his single hind leg as Lola steered between drifts and wind-scoured earth, hard as bare rock. The road was not much of an improvement. Wind buffeted the truck. Snow slid across the blacktop. Lola drove down the middle, pulling into her own lane whenever a tanker truck blew past. This happened frequently. Lola stopped at a crossroads. Arrows nailed to a fence post indicated the county seat of Magpie in one direction, the Blackfeet Nation in the other. Lola dialed her cellphone.

  “Magpie Daily Express,” a voice of indeterminate gender warbled in her ear.

  “Hey, Finch.”

  The voice cooled considerably. “Lola. I’ll switch you over to Jan.”

  Lola began without preamble when Jan picked up. “They found Judith Calf Looking in the snow just past Deadman’s Curve. Charlie thinks she probably froze to death, but he can’t say for sure. So I can’t write the story.” Jan’s reply started loud and got louder. Lola held the phone away from her ear. “Yes. I know I never should have slept with him. Do we have to have this conversation again? Look, I’ll grab your town council meeting tonight if you cover this. Thanks.” She ended the call and looked at the phone. Its face had fogged in the heat of the truck. She rubbed it. It wasn’t yet four. The council meeting wouldn’t start until seven.

  “An eagle feather?” she said.

  The feathers were reserved for the most solemn occasions. Warriors received them upon returning from Afghanistan or Iraq. They might be presented to family members after the death of a person who had helped the tribe in significant ways. Or given to people for particularly significant graduations, or election to office. But not to a drugged-out teenager. Lola let herself wonder, for just a second, if Judith might have stolen the feather. Impossible, she knew. Feathers were so sacred that if one fell to the ground, only a veteran or someone specially designated could retrieve it.

  She turned the truck toward the reservation. It was only right that she pay her respects to Judith’s family, she reassured herself. And if she happened to glean some answers in the process, well, that would be just fine, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lola parked a block away from the Calf Looking home. Not much more than a couple of hours had passed since Charlie called the tribal offices, but news traveled the reservation with a speed that put the Internet to shame. Pickups—some new, most far from it—and sprung-suspension cars were already double-parked along the street in a signal that the multiday process of a reservation funeral had already begun. Lola urged Bub from the truck. He took two steps, tilted onto his remaining hind leg to pee, then hopped back in.

  “Back in awhile,” she told him. When winter first set in, she’d worried about leaving Bub in the truck. Charlie had pointed out the scores of cattle and horses that overwintered outdoors, as well as the ranch dogs who seemed to spend their lives in the beds of pickups, no matter what the weather. “He won’t freeze,” he’d reassured her. “And you do him no favors by having him spend too much time indoors. He’ll lose his winter coat. And he needs his just as much as you need yours.”

  Lola swung her legs wide in the best approximation of a jog she could manage in her swaddling gear and caught up with a knot of women entering the house. Inside, the air was tropical. By the time Lola had shucked out of her parka and kicked off her boots, adding both to the heaps by the front door, sweat slicked her face. The house, like all the reservation prefabs, was cramped at its best. On this evening, it had gone claustrophobic—at least to Lola, who had yet to grow accustomed to the crush of relatives at each and every occasion of note. At least as far as she could tell, everyone was related in some way to everyone else; it seemed as though the entire reservation turned out for each graduation, each military sendoff and each funeral.

  “It’s a pain,” Charlie had told her once, the affection in his tone belying the words. “As a kid, I could never get away with anything. Aunties everywhere. They’d feed you, sure, but they had their eye on you all the time.”

  Lola, an only child of only-children parents, couldn’t fathom such a total-immersion experience of family life. Would it feel protected, cocoon-like? Or smothering? “A little of both,” Charlie had allowed. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and stood on her toes and searched the crowd for Joshua.

  “Over there.” Josephine deRoche pointed with pursed lips. Lola knew Josephine from covering tribal council meetings. As treasurer, Josephine managed the budget as meticulously as she did her own appearance. But the twin assaults of heat and grief were too much for her, causing her normally shellacked beehive to list to one side. Mascara pooled atop plump cheeks.

  People clustered around a pair of easy chairs in the corner of the room where Joshua, who appeared to be the only man in a roomful of women, sat beside Alice Kicking Woman. He clutched a framed graduation photo of himself and Judith, star quilts draping their shoulders, waist-length hair flowing free beneath their mortarboards. Lola put a hand to her head, self-conscious as always on the reservation about her thin, kinked curls. Every head around her was topped with hair so strong and shiny and straight that it could have been featured in a shampoo commercial. Every head except Joshua’s, that is. His own hair, freshly shorn, stood up in clumps. Alice’s twisted frame curled toward him like a question mark. Deep grooves seamed her face, disappearing into the hollows of her cheeks, reemerging as vertical stitching around her mouth.

  Lola hesitated. Etiquette mandated that attention be paid first to an elder. But what happened when someone died? Would the bereaved then take precedence? She looked around for Alice’s great-granddaughter, Tina, a high school senior who’d recently declared herself a reporter in training. Lola allowed Tina to follow her around on stories and in return, Tina helped Lola navigate the swirling complexities of tribal custom. Lacking Tina’s guidance, Lola finally knelt between the chairs and took Alice’s hand in one of her own and Joshua’s in the other. “I’m so sorry about Ju—” A foot nudged her shin. She glanced up. Tina’s familiar ponytail switched back and forth as she shook her head at Lola.

  “No names now,” Tina mouthed.

  “—your sister,” Lola finished.

  Joshua gave no sign of having heard. Lola stood to make room for the next person, and followed Tina’s bobbing ponytail into the kitchen, where a fry bread assembly line was in progress. “What happened to his hair?” she whispered as they moved to join it.

  “He cut it as soon as he heard,” Tina said. “It’s a traditional sign of mourning. Give me your hands.”

  Tina dusted Lola’s palms with flour and then slapped a ball of dough into her hands. Lola began rolling and shaping it, her movements awkward compared to the swift, sure work of the others, and waited for the feeling of strangeness she always felt, as the lone white person in the room, to subside.

  “It’s so sad,” someone said. “First their parents and then their gran’mother. Those two practically raised themselves after she died.”

  Lola looked to see who’d spoken and put a finger through her disc of dough. It was Josephine’s married granddaughter, Angela Kills At Night. Lola rolled the dough back into a ball and started over. “When was that?”

  “Maybe five, six years. The twins were just starting high school,” Angela said. “They were a couple of years behind me.” She used a fork to flip a piece of fry bread from the pan and onto a stack of paper towels, which darkened instantly beneath it. She dropped her own circle of dough, paper-thin and sized perfectly to the pan, into the smoking lard. It puffed high and golden. “And half their relatives who are left, the men anyway, are working over in the oil patch. It’s going to be a problem getting them here for this.”

  “Because of the weather?” Lola asked.

  “Because they just started their three weeks.”

  Lola nodded, catching the reference to the fact that people commuted to jo
bs in western North Dakota’s Bakken oil field in multiple-week shifts.

  “I don’t imagine those bosses let anything, even a funeral, mess with their production schedules,” Angela said. “Bad enough we lose our men for weeks on end. Now they’ll have to worry about losing their jobs if they want to do the right thing.”

  Even Lola felt the way the air leaked out of the room. Especially in winter, when the seasonal jobs catering to tourists on their way to Glacier dried up, unemployment on the reservation often soared toward 70, 80 percent. Still, funerals took precedence over jobs. Everybody—all the local employers, at least—knew that. But would bosses nearly five hundred miles away understand?

  Josephine brought the subject back to Judith. “I hear she almost made it home,” she said. Lola knew Josephine was past sixty, yet her skin remained unlined and her hair gleamed like obsidian. Lola, only in her mid-thirties, was acutely aware of the silver already threading her own tangled chestnut curls, the insistent etchings at the corners of her grey eyes. Josephine sat rounds of bread on a tray, beside a stack of the inevitable sandwiches of bologna and cheese on white bread. She wiped her hand on a dishtowel and dipped it into a plastic bag of powdered sugar. She sifted the sugar over the fry bread, toweled her hand again, lifted the tray and swung a hip against the kitchen door. The women waited until it closed behind her. “At least we know where Joshua’s sister is now,” Angela said. “Not like those other ones who ran away.”

  Beside Lola, Tina stiffened. But in a group of older women, it wasn’t Tina’s place to talk. Lola swiped her sleeve across her forehead again. “What other ones?” Sometimes there was an advantage being shaky on etiquette.

  Angela counted on floury fingers. “Let’s see. There was Maylinn Kiyo. She was the first. Carole Bear Shoe and Annie Lenoir, they ran away, too.”

  Jeannette Finley Heavy Runner dumped more flour into a bowl, added baking powder and salt, and rubbed in lard with her fingers. She was Salish, from the other side of the Continental Divide, but had married a Blackfeet man thirty years earlier and long since mastered the labyrinth of kinship and gossip. “And Nancy deRoche. Josephine’s husband’s nephew’s daughter. Josephine raised her.” The women looked toward the door.

  “I don’t know any of them,” Lola said.

  “They left last year. A few months after Judith, but before you got here. For a while there, it seemed like every time you turned around, another girl ran off.”

  “My sister didn’t run away.” Joshua stood in the doorway. The fat in the skillet hissed and popped, tiny explosions in the sudden silence.

  “Nobody ever heard from her,” Angela said finally.

  “That’s how I know she didn’t run away. She never would have just up and disappeared on me. She was doing so well. Those other ones, they were—” He looked around the room at the women, and dropped his voice—“using.”

  Lola thought of the tracks on Judith’s forearms, the angry brand. “I know that—” she caught herself just as her lips began to shape the name “that your sister had her struggles.”

  Joshua’s eyes were veined red, his voice raw. “And she beat them. That time in rehab last year, that did the trick. We got her into a program that uses traditional healing. They gave her an eagle feather when she completed it. She was so proud.”

  Lola saw again the dark feather clutched in Judith’s frozen hand, swiveling like a weathervane with each snowy gust. Her hands stilled.

  Angela took the dough from her, worked it briefly, and dropped it into the hot lard.

  “Have you talked to Charlie yet?” Lola asked.

  “No. Tribal police is all. Why?”

  “Just talk to him,” Lola said. And turned away to avoid the question in Tina’s wide eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The numbers on the clock glowed one in the morning when Lola heard the front door open. A candle burned on the nightstand. Its flame crouched low before the rush of cold through the house, then leapt high as the door closed, rendering Charlie’s shadow monstrous as he crept into the bedroom in stocking feet. Lola watched in the wavering light as Charlie reversed his morning routine, standing on one leg, then the other, to peel off the layers of socks, the pants and the long johns, the wool shirt and sweater.

  “You’re going to burn the house down someday with those damn candles of yours.” His voice was fond.

  “I like them.” She’d never told him why. They were a reminder of her years in Kabul and its unreliable electricity, when it was deemed better to use candles for light and save the generator’s precious power for the computers, the cameras, the satellite phones. She’d come to appreciate the way soft candlelight rendered spaces intimate, forced people to huddle close, threw up a barrier of darkness beyond that made the nightly pop-pop-pop of rifle fire—as likely from bandits as insurgents—seem insignificant and far away.

  “Go ahead. Get it over with.” Charlie didn’t mind the candles so much as the way she put them out.

  Lola touched her tongue to thumb and forefinger and positioned them on either side of the flame. She counted down slowly, moving her fingers closer together. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—ow!” She pinched out the flame and blew on her fingers as Charlie slid into bed in his T-shirt and shorts. “Your feet are freezing.”

  “Says the woman who plays with fire. Why such a wimp about cold? Besides, your feet would be cold, too, if you’d been standing out in the snow for the last few hours. Move over and give me the warm spot.”

  Lola nestled deeper beneath the layers of star quilts hand-stitched by Charlie’s grandmother. Their pointed crimson, orange and gold patterns reminded her of the candle flame she’d just extinguished. “Like hell. Make Bub move. You can have his spot.”

  “His spot? I was under the impression this was my bed.” He yawned and put icy soles to her calves. “It feels good in here. You feel good.”

  Lola turned on her side and he spooned against her, pressing his chest to her back, an icy slab slowly thawing. “Tough deal about Judith,” she said.

  “And the truck driver.”

  Lola didn’t much care about the man who’d died in the crash that had kept Charlie out much of the previous night. But she didn’t want to seem too eager about Judith. “What about him? It sounded pretty straightforward. The truck went off the road in the storm, right?”

  “Looks that way. Impossible to tell. Snow filled in his tire tracks and then the wind played hell with everything. I called in the snowplow, but there’s no skid marks on the road. If it had happened on Deadman’s Curve, I could understand. But he was a few miles past it, on the straightaway. And then there was his neck. It was—” Charlie’s voice trailed off.

  “What about his neck?” She shifted, and felt him jerk awake.

  “Broken. Twisted clean around. I’ve seen plenty of broken necks in crashes, but never one like that. And there was a footprint.”

  Lola raised her voice to keep him from drifting off again. “I thought you said the wind blew snow all over everything.”

  “There was a lee spot, where the trailer jackknifed. One print there, clear as day.”

  “Let me guess. It didn’t match the driver’s shoes.”

  “Boots. Not even close.”

  “Maybe somebody stopped to see if he could help and left when he realized he couldn’t. Who called it in?”

  Charlie’s words came slow and sepulchral, dragged up from whatever small part of him was still awake. “Unidentified male. Said he was too busy trying to keep his own rig on the road in all that snow to give us any more than the location. Actually, what he said was, ‘all that fucking snow.’ ”

  The house shuddered within the wind’s renewed attack. Snow pinged like gravel against the windowpanes. These Montana storms were nothing like the gentle snowfalls of Lola’s childhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with their fat flakes seesawing lazily toward the ground, settling in soft sparkling heaps, clinging to each twig and bit of brus
h, creating postcard prettiness in tired oystering towns too far from Washington, DC, to have been revived by tourists. In Montana, the wind slammed snow against earth frozen hard as iron and then packed it tight enough to hold cattle on a surface so glazed and brittle that when the occasional steer broke through, it emerged with legs sliced and bloodied by the sharp edges.

  “I know how that guy feels. I hate the snow here,” she said to Charlie, trying to keep him awake, surprised when he responded.

  “What about Afghanistan? You said it was a lot like here in terms of weather. So the snow must have been the same, too.”

  “I was hardly ever there in the winter.” The various warring factions, made pragmatic by a quarter century of war with the Russians, then one another, then the Americans, generally put away their rifles and grenades and IEDs when winter fell. Ever wary of an underemployed reporter, Lola’s editors promptly sent her on the road to other war zones in a constant churn of travel that she’d complained about at the time, but now found she missed. Other than near daily trips back and forth to the reservation, she’d barely left Magpie since her arrival.

  Charlie’s breath puffed against her back, a prelude to the easeful snores whose rise and fall would compete with the wind’s low howl. A lifetime insomniac, Lola considered the finality of Charlie’s sleep a thing of wonder. She’d tried various experiments in their time together—turning on the light, the radio, even one memorable night running the vacuum cleaner across the floor—only to see Charlie pull his pillow over his head and plunge more deeply into slumber. She pressed her thumb and forefinger together, feeling the calluses of her nightly experiments with the candles. “That brand on her arm. It was creepy.”

  “Gang sign, I guess.” The words floated on a long, slow breath.