Homicide My Own by Anne Argula

he had been. It was like trying to remember a name that escapes you.
    “What about that old hermit,” Odd asked.
    “Wayne Coffey?”
    “Was that his name?”
    “Wayne was not a hermit,” said Mr. Coyote. “He was in my father’s house, and my father was in his. It was only later when he was old and tired of all the noise, that people started to talk about him. Wayne had no hatred in his heart for anyone.”
    “Could be whoever did it is dead,” I said.
    The three Indians looked at me as though sorry for my stupidity.
    “No,” said Odd, with authority, “he is not dead.”
    Now, they looked at him, but in a different way, like he was the smart one.
    “ He? ” said I. “How do you know it’s a he?”
    “Could a woman shotgun two innocent people?”
    “Catch me on a bad day.”
    “It was a man,” said Odd. Then, “I wish I could see that pick-up they were in that night.”
    “It’s out in the shed,” the father said.
    “You still have it?” asked Odd. I couldn’t believe it myself.
    “You can’t sell a vehicle somebody’s died in, unless you sell it to a white man, and I couldn’t do that.”
    We stepped through the mud to one of the several sheds, this one big enough to hold a car. The dog had given up on the game, but followed Odd’s heels as if trying to impress a new master. It was slow going because James’ father had to wheel his oxygen tank through the mud, but once outside the shed it was all gravel. I stomped the mud off my Rockports. The woman swung open the two wooden doors to the shed.
    “It’s under that,” said David, that being a dusty blue tarp. Odd took one corner, I took the other, and we pulled the tarp away, laying it out on the gravel. The truck was white, scarred and dinged, with a canopy over the bed, and spread on the bed was a mover’s blanket. There was little room left in the shed for anything else, though spare parts hung from nails in the walls.
    “Can we push it out into the light?” asked Odd.
    “You can,” said David. “I’ll watch.”
    The vehicle was already in neutral. Odd and I got behind it and leaned backwards. I put a muddy foot against the far wall. Odd did likewise, and we flexed that four-by off the spot it had stuck to for over thirty years. It broke free and rolled easily out of the shed, coming to rest over the tarp on the gravel.
    I believe the natural inclination of anyone looking at a vehicle for the first time would be to look into the driver’s side window. That’s what I did. You look at where you would sit if you had this car. You look at the steering wheel, where your hands would be. You might check the mileage from there. That was my theory, still is, but Odd got into the passenger seat without any hesitation.
    No way would I get into that vehicle, either side. Dry and hardened blood, and if I’m not mistaken, brain matter, was all over the dash, the seats, the passenger window, and the back window. He ignored all that and settled himself into the seat. He shut the door and turned his head a few times, as though trying to click into a position, which he did finally: looking across the imaginary driver and through the open window, at me.
    He put his hand to his throat and swallowed hard. “Something’s wrong here,” he said.
    “What?” said I.
    “That window is open.”
    “Yes,” said the father.
    “And this one closed?” The passenger window was all but opaque with dried blood and specks of other stuff.
    “Everything is like it was.”
    “The killer must have gone to the driver’s side,” I said. “Shot James, then Jeannie.”
    “No, something’s wrong. They talked to the killer through the open window. They knew him.”
    “Maybe the window was open ‘cause they wanted some air. They were necking, the place got steamed up,” I said.
    “No, they would have just cracked it then. It was raining that night, hard. They wouldn’t roll the window all the way down unless they were talking to someone, unless they knew