The girl’s name was Maggie, after her great-aunt Maggie Peace. The girl had pale luminous skin and her hair was chestnut brown—it lay on her shoulders in a sly wave. Dusty’s hair had been a scorched blond, the same color as the deer. He’d been wearing a tan T-shirt and it was hunting season, although that wouldn’t have mattered on the side of the boundary where Landreaux had shot at the deer.
The acting tribal police chief, Zack Peace, and the county coroner, an eighty-two-year-old retired nurse named Georgie Mighty, were already overwhelmed. The day before, there had been a frontal collision at 2:30 a.m., just after the bars closed—none of the dead in either car were wearing seat belts. The state coroner was traveling in the area, and stopped at the reservation to expedite the paperwork. Zack had been struggling with this side of things when the call about Dusty came in. He paused to put his head on the desk before he called Georgie, who would persuade the coroner to stay a few more hours and examine the child so that the family could have an immediate funeral. Now Zack had to call Emmaline. As cousins, they’d grown up together. He was trying to hold his tears back. He was too young for his job, and anyway too good-hearted to be a tribal cop. He’d come over later on, he said. So Emmaline knew about it while her children were still at school. She’d come home to meet them.
Emmaline stepped to the door and watched her older children get off the bus. They walked toward the house with their heads down, hands flapping at the grasses as they crossed the ditch, and she knew they had also heard. Hollis, who’d lived with them since he was little, Snow, Josette, Willard. Nobody on the reservation gets a name like Willard and doesn’t pick up a nickname. So Willard was Coochy. Now her youngest boy was stumbling down to meet them, LaRose. He was the same age as Nola’s boy. They’d been pregnant at the same time, but Emmaline had gone to the Indian Health Service hospital. Three months had passed before she’d met Nola’s baby. But the two boys, cousins, had played together. Emmaline put out sandwiches, heated the meat soup.
What happens now? said Snow, quietly watching her.
Emmaline’s face was filling again with tears. Her forehead was raw. When she’d knelt to pray she’d found herself beating her head against the floor—and now fear was leaking out of her in every direction.
I don’t know, she said. I’m going down to tribal police and sit with your dad. It was such . . .
Emmaline was going to say a terrible accident but she clapped her hands over her mouth and tears spurted down, wetting her collar, for what was there to say about what had happened—an unsayable thing—and Emmaline did not know how she or Landreaux or anyone, especially Nola, was going to go on living.
Minute by minute, a day passed, two. Zack came over, sat on the couch, running his hand over his brushy hair.
Watch him, he said. You gotta watch him, Emmaline.
At the time she thought he meant Landreaux was suicidal. She shook her head. Landreaux was devoted to his family and cared to the point of obsession about his clients. He was a physical therapy assistant, in training as a dialysis technician. He was also a personal care assistant trained and trusted by the Indian Health Service hospital. Emmaline phoned Landreaux’s clients. There were Ottie and his wife, Bap. When she called the sweet old man named Awan, a terminal patient, and told his daughter that Landreaux would not be coming, the daughter said she’d take off work and care for her dad until Landreaux was back. Her father loved playing cards with Landreaux. Yet there was in the daughter’s tone a note of tired unsurprise. Maybe Emmaline was paranoid—her nerves were buzzing—but she thought Awan’s daughter hesitated and then nearly said the same thing as Zack. You gotta watch him. Emmaline told herself it was because they loved Landreaux, but later on she knew that was only part of it.
There was the short investigation, the sleepless nights before Landreaux was released. Zack took the key from Emmaline and put the rifle in the trunk of the car. After Landreaux walked out of the tribal police headquarters, Emmaline went with him, straight to the priest.