Page 105 of Whirlwind
I never want to stop playing this game with Tyson.
Epilogue
Kit
They won the Stanley Cup. After a few moments of the team celebrating on the ice, Tyson, Cillian, and Zander skated together toward the red line. All three scanned the crowd where the family section was.
I’m sure we weren’t visible in the sea of celebratory fans, but the trio blew kisses up to us, regardless. Lottie jumped up and down next to me, arms thrown in the air, tears pouring out of her eyes as she cheered as loud as she could.
The two of us became quite close during the playoffs. She’s even talking about moving down here to be closer to us.
It’s the proudest I’ve ever been of another person. It’s a pretty special thing to watch someone you care about fulfilling a life’s dream. That night, back at home, Tyson told me he needed a few days to get through necessary press and celebrations, but that he wanted to leave for Montana as soon as he’d fulfilled his obligations.
I argued that there was time. He ignored that.
“No. We put it on hold for my career. It’s time to go find out who your mom really was,” he’d said. I didn’t argue after that. It was time. And it felt right having him, and Nightmare, with me on the drive to Montana.
I’d already reached out to Jack Silva, the detective who’d worked on my mother’s case. We’d set up a time to meet. I wassurprised when we got to the designated park to find Jack wasn’t alone.
Hannah Markle’s brother, Daniel, was there, too. As we listened to Jack describe what he knew, I caught Daniel staring at me several times.
“Sorry,” he apologized sadly, after the third time. “You look so much like her.”
It turns out, there was never much evidence to go off. There was footage from hotel security cameras of her leaving the lobby and walking across the parking lot toward a diner. A waitress there had remembered her, said she’d eaten alone and left without any incident. That was the last she was seen. The hotel was on the reservation, right near the border. Her body was found five days later, off reservation by nearly eighty miles.
Jack had been a junior detective, at the time. He has Crow family members and is sympathetic to their struggles with missing people. However, the higher-ups in his department, at the time, had little interest in working with tribal police to pursue her case. There’s no way to know where she was murdered, what jurisdiction it fell in. Jack’s department didn’t care enough to figure it out. My mother was just one of many. Tribal police had even less to go on, since her body was found outside of their reach.
“It happened like that a lot, back then,” he’d said. “It hasn’t gotten much better. Part of the reason I left the force.”
He suspects that night—the night before she was supposed to fly home to me—someone had grabbed her on her walk back to the hotel. They brutalized her, murdered her, and dumped her body.
Just like that.
All too common, all too easy. A night for them, a lifetime for me. They gained whatever it is one gets from such an act; I lostmy world. Maybe whoever did it was eventually caught for some other crime and is sitting in prison, now. I doubt that, though. It’s far more likely they’ve gotten away with it—and countless other offenses.
Jack apologized profusely for never finding justice for Nimii.
“You did your best, I’m sure,” I’d tried to reassure him. “It’s not you who failed her.”
That made Daniel cry. Before we left the park, he asked me if we’d have lunch the following day and he’d show me where my mother’s plot was.
That’s where we’re at, now—at the diner she last ate at, only a few blocks away from the cemetery. It’s a run-down place, clean and busy, but with signs of wear. A lot of life has been lived in these four walls; you can feel it when you walk in. The staff all look like they’ve spent their careers here. I wonder, for a minute, if any of them were here to serve my mom that night.
I don’t ask. I don’t want to make it any more real than it already is. This was my choice, it’s where I wanted to be—this last place where she was alive. Free to be herself.
Daniel arrives and comes to sit across from me in our booth.
“Hi,” he says, almost timidly, as if he doesn’t know how to handle this situation any better than I do.
“Hi, Daniel,” Tyson says. “Thank you for this.”
“Of course,” he says. “I want to help any way I can. I…I tried before. When it happened, I tried appealing to your dad. Nimii had so few people in her life, I wanted to be a part of yours. For her.”
“She didn’t have family?” I ask.
“You really don’t know?” His shock is evident.
“He didn’t talk about her. I learned early on that my questions would be met with anger, so I stopped asking,” I say, almostashamed that I couldn’t stand up to my father as a child and demand answers. “All I know, I’ve only learned since my grandmother passed.”
