Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

Author:Laurie L. Dove [Dove, Laurie L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2025-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Starr had a name.

She’d been out cold in her camp chair, dreaming of paper trails and deer and missing women, when the cell phone on the card table buzzed her back into existence. In her confusion, Starr looked to the window for sunlight, but saw instead the pitch of night. Half past ten. It was Dr. Moore calling, the medical examiner, who’d run the victim’s fingerprints through the state database and gotten a hit.

Sherry Ann Awiakta.

The woman’s parents had not reported her missing; now Starr had to find them so she could tell them their daughter was dead. It took her several minutes to reach Winnie, who shouted into the phone over the noise of her grandchildren.

“Aye! Don’t touch that! Too hot! Hello? Oh, Marshal, what do you need?”

When Starr said the girl’s name, she heard Winnie’s sharp intake of breath.

“No.” She drew out the sound like the echo of ancestors. The receiver rustled. “Hush, you two! Go play. Leave me be.”

A few minutes later, the image of a hand-drawn map pinged on Starr’s cell phone. The Awiakta family lived on the reservation. Even though Winnie had repeated directions to their home, twice, Starr hadn’t been able to understand. Winnie spoke in landmarks, and Starr needed specific instructions.

She squinted at Winnie’s crooked pen strokes—a creek here, an abandoned house there, a lone oak where Starr needed to turn left. The route took her into a remote part of the rez, where unmaintained roads became impassable when it rained. She’d have to take the last stretch by foot. She’d have to say the words she’d once been felled by. Tell them their daughter was dead.

Starr didn’t close her eyes again as she sat in the chair. And she didn’t lie down on the bare mattress in the bedroom. Instead, she went to the garage, propped open the man door and stood among the boxes she doubted she’d ever unpack. The neighbor’s Australian shepherd yapped on the other side of a short yard behind her house.

The weak glow of a security light gave her an unrelenting view of the sagging wooden deck on which the dog was penned. The sliding glass door that led to the deck was covered with tacked-up blankets and a Confederate flag. Whenever she was at her duplex, day or night, the dog barked, a monotonous note boring into her brain.

When she noticed the air rifle leaning against cardboard, she picked it up, pumped it a few times, sighted above the dog’s head and fired into the night. It was a decent shot at sixty yards, the pellet pinging the siding of her neighbor’s house and momentarily shocking the dog into silence.

Starr ran her hand over the gun’s scarred wooden stock, her last name carved into it. She’d been so proud of the gift—the only one she could remember receiving from her father, even though they’d lived most of her childhood, just the two of them, in a four-story Chicago walk-up apartment building.

She set it aside and

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