The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) by Margaret Coel Page B

It was part of taking care of herself; as if in finding justice for the girl, she could, in some strange way, find justice for herself and the years with Ben. She hurried on: “It’s part of practicing law. The killer shouldn’t be able to hide any longer. He should be brought to justice.”
    “What if he’s dead?”
    Vicky swallowed the hard lump forming in her throat. The killer wasn’t dead. He’d left a warning on her dashboard. She said, “The murdered girl had a child, Auntie.” She could hear the pleading note in her voice.
    Aunt Rose threaded her fingers together and looked at her hard. “They use to beat up people that didn’t go along with ’em.”
    “It was a long time ago.” Vicky tried to blink away the image of the word floating in front of her: STOP. A warning, that was all. He hoped to scare her, call her off. Let the case fade from everyone’s memory. And yet, he was still in the area. He had killed a girl once, and now he was watching her.
    “Way I look at it, they were mean then, they’re gonna be mean now.” Aunt Rose shifted about and clasped her hands in her lap. Finally she settled back. “Promise you’ll be careful.”
    Vicky nodded and tried for a reassuring smile. She could feel the muscles twitching in her cheeks.
    “You might wanna talk to Donita White Hawk over on Boulder Flats Road. Those White Hawks always made it their business to know what everybody was doin’.”
     

    VICKY TAPPED OUT the numbers for directory assistance when she got into the Jeep. She asked for White Hawk on Boulder Flats Road, then shifted into reverse and backed into the yard while the operator searched for the number. Another moment, and she was across the planks, driving down Blue Sky Highway, a phone across the reservation buzzing in her ears.
    “Yeah, hello.” A man had picked up. Vicky asked for Donita White Hawk.
    She wasn’t home—the voice was laced with irritation and a hint of sleepiness—and who wanted her, anyway?
    Vicky gave her name and was about to say that she was an attorney.
    “I know who you are,” the voice interrupted. “What d’ya want with Donita?”
    “I’m hoping she can help me with a case.”
    “Donita don’t hang around with the kind of low-life Indians you lawyers hang with.”
    “Of course not,” Vicky said. “When might I reach her?”
    The man seemed to be considering, and after a moment, a loud sigh, like a cough, sputtered down the line. “You might catch up with her at work tomorrow. Early shift at the Sunrise Café in Riverton.”
    Vicky thanked him, pressed the end button, and was about to slip the cell into her bag when it started ringing. She knew it was Adam, even before she glimpsed the readout.
    “I’m on the way,” she said. The dashboard clock was blinking 6:02. It would be another thirty minutes before she got to the apartment. The asphalt blurred through the stretch of plains ahead, and the sun burst off the hood of the Jeep.
    Adam said he’d wait.
     

    IT WAS COOL in the mountains, and peaceful. The faintest sounds—an engine backfiring, a dog barking—drifted on the air from somewhere below. Halfway up the dirt road that wound above them, they’d found a vacant picnic table overlooking a creek that plunged through a stand of evergreens. They’d set the cooler Adam had brought on the table, then hiked up the narrow dirt path next to the creek, dodging the branches that slapped at them. Adam went ahead, picking the way around the boulders that jutted out of the dirt, holding back the branches until Vicky stepped past, then letting them slap into place before he raced ahead.
    Long gray shadows lay over the path that had gotten steeper. The last daylight glowed through the trees. Vicky had the sense that they were climbing away from everything familiar—the sound of traffic sputtering past the office on Main Street, the bungalow-lined streets of Lander, the open spaces of the reservation. They might have been in the Old Time, she