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healing. They gave her an eagle feather when she completed it. She was so proud.”
    Lola saw again the dark feather clutched in Judith’s frozen hand, swiveling like a weathervane with each snowy gust. Her hands stilled.
    Angela took the dough from her, worked it briefly, and dropped it into the hot lard.
    “Have you talked to Charlie yet?” Lola asked.
    “No. Tribal police is all. Why?”
    “Just talk to him,” Lola said. And turned away to avoid the question in Tina’s wide eyes.

CHAPTER THREE
    T he numbers on the clock glowed one in the morning when Lola heard the front door open. A candle burned on the nightstand. Its flame crouched low before the rush of cold through the house, then leapt high as the door closed, rendering Charlie’s shadow monstrous as he crept into the bedroom in stocking feet. Lola watched in the wavering light as Charlie reversed his morning routine, standing on one leg, then the other, to peel off the layers of socks, the pants and the long johns, the wool shirt and sweater.
    “You’re going to burn the house down someday with those damn candles of yours.” His voice was fond.
    “I like them.” She’d never told him why. They were a reminder of her years in Kabul and its unreliable electricity, when it was deemed better to use candles for light and save the generator’s precious power for the computers, the cameras, the satellite phones. She’d come to appreciate the way soft candlelight rendered spaces intimate, forced people to huddle close, threw up a barrier of darkness beyond that made the nightly pop-pop-pop of rifle fire—as likely from bandits as insurgents—seem insignificant and far away.
    “Go ahead. Get it over with.” Charlie didn’t mind the candles so much as the way she put them out.
    Lola touched her tongue to thumb and forefinger and positioned them on either side of the flame. She counted down slowly, moving her fingers closer together. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—ow!” She pinched out the flame and blew on her fingers as Charlie slid into bed in his T-shirt and shorts. “Your feet are freezing.”
    “Says the woman who plays with fire. Why such a wimp about cold? Besides, your feet would be cold, too, if you’d been standing out in the snow for the last few hours. Move over and give me the warm spot.”
    Lola nestled deeper beneath the layers of star quilts hand-stitched by Charlie’s grandmother. Their pointed crimson, orange and gold patterns reminded her of the candle flame she’d just extinguished. “Like hell. Make Bub move. You can have his spot.”
    “His spot? I was under the impression this was my bed.” He yawned and put icy soles to her calves. “It feels good in here. You feel good.”
    Lola turned on her side and he spooned against her, pressing his chest to her back, an icy slab slowly thawing. “Tough deal about Judith,” she said.
    “And the truck driver.”
    Lola didn’t much care about the man who’d died in the crash that had kept Charlie out much of the previous night. But she didn’t want to seem too eager about Judith. “What about him? It sounded pretty straightforward. The truck went off the road in the storm, right?”
    “Looks that way. Impossible to tell. Snow filled in his tire tracks and then the wind played hell with everything. I called in the snowplow, but there’s no skid marks on the road. If it had happened on Deadman’s Curve, I could understand. But he was a few miles past it, on the straightaway. And then there was his neck. It was—” Charlie’s voice trailed off.
    “What about his neck?” She shifted, and felt him jerk awake.
    “Broken. Twisted clean around. I’ve seen plenty of broken necks in crashes, but never one like that. And there was a footprint.”
    Lola raised her voice to keep him from drifting off again. “I thought you said the wind blew snow all over everything.”
    “There was a lee spot, where the trailer jackknifed. One