Page 42 of The Texas Murders

“We think you might be able to help us with some cases we’re working on,” I explain.

“So this doesn’t have to do with what happened to me?” she asks.

“It does,” I say, and then promise to explain more inside.

We lead her to a small conference room, where we sit around a table. We don’t sit across from her, like it’s a three-against-one interrogation, but spread out so it’s more like four people just having a conversation.

Carlos starts by noting that her old police file suggests she couldn’t remember anything from the time of her disappearance until she was found.

“It’s been four years,” he says. “Has anything come back to you?”

Isabella’s nervousness seems to amplify. Her breathing has become more shallow.

“No,” she says. “I really don’t think about it very often. I try not to, honestly. I remember the ambulance. The hospital. But the week or ten days or whatever it was that I was gone are just blank. Like someone reached into my brain with a big eraser and scrubbed them out.”

“So you can’t remember how your leg was broken?” Ava asks.

She shakes her head.

“You were bitten by a snake, according to the file,” I say. “Do you remember that?”

“No,” she says. “Nothing.”

Carlos asks if anyone had been following her in the days leading up to her disappearance. If anything unusual had happened. Anyone who might have been upset with her.

“I only know what you already know,” she says, gesturing to the file folder sitting on the table next to Carlos. “The last time anyone could remember seeing me was at the powwow. This was at Franklin Mountains State Park. The Tigua hosted the powwow, planning to make it an annual thing if it went well. But I think because of what happened to me they just didn’t bother to put it on the next year.”

Ava explains that while she grew up on the Pueblo, she had been working for the highway patrol elsewhere in Texas at the time. She asks Isabella to tell us about the powwow.

“It was like any other,” she says, looking at Carlos and Ava. “You’ve been to them. There’s dancing and drumming. Lots of crafts and leatherwork and jewelry. Food stands with Indiantacos and fry bread.” She shrugs her shoulders. “It was just a powwow.”

I try to picture this young woman at the event. There would have been plenty of people there who knew her—it was practically in her backyard—and it no doubt would have been a happy occasion.

“You know,” she says, “my life is divided in two. Whenever I remember something in my life, I immediately categorize the memory as happening before it happened, or after—whateveritis, I’m not even sure. But I don’t actually remember anything between the powwow and being picked up on the highway. And I’ve made my peace with not remembering. To be honest, I don’t really want to remember.”

I can’t fault her for not wanting to remember. But maybe there’s something before her disappearance that could help us.

“Do you remember seeing any kind of eagle feathers at the powwow?”

She laughs, a strange sound considering how upset she is.

“There are feathers everywhere,” she says, looking to Carlos and Ava for confirmation. They nod knowingly. “Everyone’s decked out in their regalia. Lots of feathers on their clothes, their spears, their drums.”

She looks back and forth between us.

“What’s this all about?”

We glance at each other and—without speaking verbally—agree to give her some information.

“You disappeared on the solstice,” Carlos says. “In the years since, four other Native women have gone missing onthe solstice from different areas of the Southwest. We believe those disappearances are related, and we think you might have been the first.”

Isabella is visibly shaken by the idea that there might be other women.

“You mean other women might have gone through what I did?” she asks.

“None of the others have ever been found,” Ava says.

This news seems to shock Isabella, who looks queasy.

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