The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Read Free

the meeting; maybe she hadn’t heard the news. She’d leave first thing in the morning. Ruth might even have gas she could siphon.
    She swung left onto Plunkett Road, her gaze frozen to the pavement bending around the curves. After a couple of miles, she tapped at the brake pedal, turned right and bounced over the barrow ditch and across the dirt yard that spread in front of the small house. The white siding shone in the headlights. The windows were dark, and for a moment, she stayed in the car, trying to work out another plan if Ruth weren’t home. Finally she got out, pulled the rear door open and slid the cardboard box across the seat. She lifted it in both arms and, holding it close, made her way to the house. She kicked at the base of the wooden screened door.
    There were no sounds apart from the wind flapping a towel against the pole of the clothesline that jutted from the side of the house. Liz kicked at the screened door again. “Be here, Ruth,” she said out loud. “Please be here.”
    A light switched on inside, sending rectangles of light out onto the dirt. The inside door opened about two inches, and a thin slice of Ruth’s face appeared in the crack. She stared at Liz with one eye. “What’re you doing here?”
    “I need a place for tonight. I thought…”
    “You crazy? You can’t stay here.”
    “It’d only be for a few hours,” Liz said, trying to squeeze the desperation from her voice. “We’ll be gone soon’s it gets light.”
    “Don’t you know what’s going on?”
    “I didn’t have anything to do with Brave Bird gettin’ shot.”
    “They’re gonna put a snitch jacket on you.”
    “You know me, Ruth. You know it’s not true. I’d never betray any of the members.”
    “You gotta go somewhere else. Jake hears you stayed here, he’ll beat the shit outta me.”
    “Ruth, please…” The door slammed shut.
    Liz stared past the screen at the dark wood for a long moment. It was as if a black wall had risen in front of her. The glow of lights disappeared from the windows. “Please, Ruth,” she said again, but she was speaking to the wall.
    Liz stumbled back through the darkness to the car. The baby began stirring in the box, emitting little chirping sounds, like those of a baby bird. She shoved the box onto the backseat and slid in behind the wheel. Maybe there was enough gas to get to Lander. She would head for Highway 287 and drive south, get as far away as she could before the gas gave out. A snitch jacket, Ruth had said. They wanted her dead.

2
    THE AIR TASTED of summer—of dust and dried sage and brittle grass. Cottonwoods straddled a dry creek bed, branches splayed against the blue sky, and the lumps of sagebrush scattered about shimmered like water in the sun. There was a reddish tint to the bluffs that rose out of the earth. A hot wind knocked against the Toyota pickup and whistled through the cab, nearly drowning out The Magic Flute that blared from the tape player on the front seat. It was the last Monday in July, the moon when the chokecherries begin to ripen, in the Arapaho Way of marking the passing time. Father John Aloysius O’Malley shifted into low gear and pointed the pickup down a slight decline. He could feel the rear tires slipping. Pebbles and dust spewed from beneath the wheels and laid a thin golden film over the rearview window. The slope flattened into the gulley that trailed the base of a bluff. He followed the tire tracks that ran across the brown earth.
    “Might wanna head out to the Gas Hills,” Thomas Whiteman had told him. The elder’s voice had cracked on the telephone, and for a moment, Father John thought the call was breaking up. “Somebody buried in a gulley out in no-man’s-land. Wild animal got to the bones.” The old man sounded like himself again, the voice strong with indignation. “Ain’t right, Father. Buried alone, nobody knows where you are, nobody prays for you, blesses your body.”
    Father John had written down the