I pulled my handkerchief from my pants pocket and wiped my hands. I told the white woman to forget about Yellow Knife, to go back to Yakima. I looked into her face and then I had to look away, because I could see she believed I would somehow save Baptiste Yellow Knife and, worse, that I would save her too. I understood the pinched corners of her eyes, the intent stare. All my instincts, all my suspicions seemed thin now. I questioned my reasoning and my ideas about Yellow Knife. I could have hated him because he had what I would never have. He had Louise.

I followed the woman back out to her car. She did not answer me. Her lips drew together tight and straight. She opened the trunk of her car and removed an old Pendleton blanket like she had been expecting my reaction. She flapped the blanket on the car seat. I thought she might stick around, haunt me like a white woman on a mission. But she left without questions, without answers, and I realized she had little more power than an Indian, a small voice she was quick to silence herself, maybe because she had never been heard, and she would never be recognized. She could come back a week later with a posse of officers. She could come back with a lawyer, a detective, a team of investigators. She could change her mind a year from now and return to Lake County with her blood-rusty seats and her long list of suspicions, but I knew she would never return. I was safe from her. I was safe from little else but I was safe from her. I turned to see the woman looking at the blood on my hands, dry eyed, accepting this end for Baptiste Yellow Knife, expecting this end, I thought. Now the only grief was work.

Before I went home to Louise I paid the killing site a visit. I parked my own car a mile from the Chefler place and stumbled toward the spot I’d last seen Yellow Knife. The thing I will remember most is the blood. There was so much blood at the site where Yellow Knife had been beaten, my knees trembled. I tried to find Yellow Knife’s body but when I couldn’t find him, I walked the long mile back to my car. I grabbed the fire shovel from the trunk. I walked fast, so fast my head throbbed. My lungs gripped breath. It was cold but a steam of fog was hiding me. I ducked at every sound and I prayed. I prayed like the nuns had taught me because I figured the devil had something to do with all of this. I needed to be rid of him.