H5

H5

Huge swaths of the high plains still lay under  snow that first fell in November of ’42, but it was a dry  cold and the roads were clear. From the air Headwater looked like  an abstract map drawn in fine black ink on paper bleached an unearthly white.

The victim was found by a man in his eighties named Tashunka. He was older than the town of Headwater, a mere  boy of the People when the Golden Gift  came to  Wanica in  that final  hunt. The biggest animal he ever killed was a coyote baited with a rabbit he caught in  another trap. Tashunka almost didn’t see  the girl. Her body was dangling  at a roadside attraction  that had always bored him. On a map somewhere  one line  terminated on another. Three states came together at this place, but even when there was no snow Tashunka had never seen any lines.

What caught his eye was not so much that the dead girl was naked but how her  head  and  arms drooped  back,  and  how her  feet didn’t touch the  ground, as  though  she were  nailed to  an invisible cross. So he backed up his  truck and parked  in the little tri-state corral. There were two other set of tire tracks in the snow and two sets  of footprints which became  a tangled net near the body.

Tashunka tried to be careful in his approach to  leave the site clean for the sheriff. He could see no movement of the girl’s chest and no condensation from her mouth. The dead girl was too pale to be one of the People. Of a certainty she had part of the White Wing of the Church of Green Dome. Her ponytail gave that away. And Tashunka wept with  frustration that he could  not do the simple kindness of closing  her frozen eyes staring out upon eternity.

Tashunka recognized the dead girl at last: Kimberly Zinter. Then he wept more deeply, knowing why she was  murdered and guessing who the killer must be. Of a certainty the unhappy union of the Red Wing and White Wing of the Church was finished. He retraced his steps to the truck.

An hour later Tashunka returned with Sheriff Roddy Walker to the little fenced-off area nigh to  the road. The tri-state marker was a wooden beam embedded in the ground, one foot square with a sloping top, and Kimberly’s back rested on this, held fast by frozen blood. The sheriff told deputy  Bill to  start snapping pictures while deputy Bob followed Roddy around  with a notepad and took down a running commentary.

“I need to  steal your  sole with  my camera,  Chief,” Bill “said, so lay it out there.”