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By Root 337 0

here, the only access is by another dirt road off the main road. His house is about half a mile hike from here. For a long time he was the prime suspect. He had complained about the kids and the noise they made over here and the way they tore up the land, even though it was county land….did I mention that? We’re on white land here. If they had been killed on tribal land the FBI would have had jurisdiction, and probably a much better chance of solving it. But the case went to the Sheriff’s Department, and they didn’t know murder from mahogany. They fixed on that strawberry farmer, who had lived alone for years and had turned eccentric. They didn’t look anywhere else. They all thought that either he was here when the kids arrived or wandered by them when they were parked, and his anger at kids in general overtook him and…”

“Wandered by? Carrying a shotgun? In the rain and the mud and the dark, half a mile from his warm and cozy home?”

“Welcome to the case, Quinn.”

“Fuck you, Odd. Let’s get breakfast.”

“I had no idea what you were like before breakfast.”

“Now you do.”

7.

I wanted nothing more than for Charles T. Houser to be in the pink and homesick for Spokane. Odd was beginning to pose a danger to my own fragile equilibrium, because under normal circumstances I was a boo away from collapsing into tears. I could not tolerate behavior that was obsessive, compulsive, impulsive, passionate or inappropriately light-hearted; none of that nor sad country songs. I could not stand for things to take an unexpected turn, and me without a plan.

A light rain started to fall, sun filtering through, so that you could almost count the drops. I daydreamed running naked through those cool delicious rain drops.

Odd turned off the main road and up a gravel driveway to the chief’s house. For a moment, it felt as if we were back in Spokane, called to quell a domestic distrubance, because on the porch was the chief himself, being yelled at and obscenely gestured to by an hysterical young girl, while a middle-aged woman sat defeated on the step, holding her head as though someone had hit her upside same. And as often happened, back in Spokane, the disturbance back-pedalled upon the appearance of two uniformed officers getting out of a car.

“Morning, Chief,” said Odd.

“Let me guess,” said I. “This has to be little Stacey and her mother…”

“Gwen,” the mother introduced herself.

Stacey took a moment to check our patches, then spit out, “You have no jurisdiction here. Fuck off!”

“She’s been informing me of her rights,” said the chief. “She seems to know a lot about that.”

“I have a right to see him, goddammit! I have to know he’s okay!”

“I told you, this is not a public place. This is my house and you’re not going inside.”

“Are you okay?” I asked the mother.

She rolled her eyes, as though wanting a definition of okay.

“Look, take your daughter home…you’re driving?”

“Yeah, that’s our car,” said Gwen, pointing to a half-primered Civic in the driveway.

“Take her home and have a long talk…about the birds and the bees. Long overdue, looks like.”

“Fuck you, you old cunt!”

“Stacey!” admonished her mother, to no effect, then explained to us, “She wasn’t raised to talk like that.”

“Listen, young lady,” I said, “this is Indian land, and this man is the law here. They don’t have to indulge you, they can just throw you in jail.”

“Go for it, you fat fucker!”

So much for idle threats.

I asked to see the prisoner and the chief invited us inside.

“If they can see him, I can see him too!” yelled Stacey, and she made the mistake of grabbing my arm as I was going inside the house. I hit her with the pepper spray, a good blast right in the face. She reeled back and screamed so loud I expected glass to break, which would have been some small satisfaction if it had been the pain of her taking her medicine, but it was more of her bottomless anger. She made choked and snotty threats to file the largest lawsuit we had ever seen. Fourteen years old.

Charles T. Houser was kept in the locked