Crimson Print

Lou and Winona pulled up to a rugged, yellow brick square of an apartment building that screamed a need of repairs and maintenance. They walked up and Winona jerked the door a bit. This was obviously a regular occurrence; Winona moved as though this was her millionth time of breaking into an apartment building. Even so, Lou walked warily and gaped at her. Winona noticed this as they headed down the hallway that was saturated with the stench of marijuana.

"I lost my building key awhile ago. Not that it's needed too much anyhow." Winona explained.

They reached Winona's door, and she unlocked it and led Lou in. The place smelled heavily of cigarettes, but had a faint touch of sage underneath. The walls displayed different animal skulls, thread art and feathers. The living room, kitchen, and dining room all had the same theme of simple black, gray, and white furniture and decor. It was a calming atmosphere despite Lou's disgust with the smell of cigarettes.

Lou followed Winona down the hallway into her bedroom and was met with a disarray of clothes, boxes and papers. There were many papers, and Lou pondered the importance of them all. Winona's room had the same color scheme as the rest of her home, except for something on the wall above of the bed. A red handprint was stamped onto the eggshell colored wall with the red paint running down behind the headboard of Winona's bed. It stuck out from the rest of the room like a sore thumb. Lou approached it to survey it better. Winona noticed this as she shuffled around boxes and folders.

"Youse act like you never seen that before." She commented as she she set a stack of manila folders on her tiny desk in front of the gray, wet window.

Lou looked back at her. "It's symbolic for something?" She asked.

Winona frowned. "M.M.I.W.?"

Lou's gaze was still blank and she shook her head.

"Missing and murdered indigenous women. That's what it symbolizes." Winona explained as she dug out another binder from her closet.

She threw it open onto the desk for Lou to see numerous newspaper clippings and pictures of native women posing somberly in their traditional dresses with red handprints that engulfed their faces as if a bloody hand was kept over their mouths to keep them quiet. There were some handwritten notes on things such as napkins and even toilet paper, printed dialogs of text messages and phone calls, and random political articles.

"Our struggle started when you all came across the ocean to claim our land you know. Slaughtered and kidnapped many of our girls. You know that kid's movie Pocahontas?"

Lou nodded.

"She was kidnapped. She was forced to marry that dumb Smith fuck. A 15 year old. You know they forced her into Christianity?"

Lou shook her head.

"Guess what name they gave her. Fucking Rebecca. Who wants to be named Rebecca? No wonder she got sick and died just at legal drinking age." Winona shook her head bitterly. Her tanned cheeks were a bit rosy from the rage she displayed.

Lou felt an ache deep in her stomach, as if she was about to be sick. She identified this as a deep sorrowful regret; this was the first time Lou was ashamed to be a white woman.

"Anyways," Winona said. "Now that you're educated, let's compare knowledge a bit. Francis. Been gone two weeks right?"

Lou nodded.

"And what's the probability that she'd go off the grid for a few weeks?"

"It's normal not to see her too much, but the thing is she uses social media regularly. She's always updating her status and keeping her followers in the loop. I haven't seen a single thing from Claudia in—" Lou paused as that stupid little notification popped into her head. "Weeks." She finished.

Winona snapped her head up at Lou once she heard a pause in Lou's explanation. She was quick and Lou figured Winona definitely picked up on her hesitation. "You're not 17 anymore, Lou. Claudia's not gonna get in trouble for going rogue on her family or whatever. What do you know?"

"I literally don't know anything. It's just this weird thing happened... I've been sending her messages and then when we were at the bar I got this notification that Claudia was typing in the chat. I opened it and she wasn't typing. She hasn't even opened any of my messages. Here," Lou went to her notification center and scrolled down to the notification. She handed her phone to Winona who looked at it intently. Then she took a screenshot of it and opened the chat to screenshot that as well. She sent the screenshots to herself and returned Lou's phone back.

"Where does she live?" Winona asked.

"Duluth," Lou replied. "She lives with me and my other roommate during the school year and stays at her parents' house in the summer. They're barely home though— travel a lot. Sometimes they'll bring her when they're getting along enough to be together with Claudia."

"Any talk of divorce between the two?"

"No. Monty makes too much money for Diane to leave. She has full freedom to do as she pleases."

"Classy." Winona remarked. "So Claudia physically fits the victim profile, but her background suggests nothing sketchy."

"Drugs, sex, booze. It's what she lives for." Lou remarked.

"There it is." Winona said. "That's where she fits."

But fits where, Lou wondered. She felt like Winona was so many steps ahead that it was unfathomable—inhuman almost.

"All that," Winona started. "It made her more prone to getting taken. When you're going around alone not giving yourself a chance to sober up, it makes you vulnerable. She was extremely vulnerable."

Lou didn't like that. She didn't like that whole sentence— she was extremely vulnerable. Lou knew Claudia was fragile when no one was looking. She often found Claudia drunk or high, or both, crying at the doorstep of their apartment because a party didn't go well or she knew she was unsafe so she left before anything serious went down. She was notorious for either losing her keys or not even bringing them with in the first place, so it was often that she was locked out.

But Lou imagined how terrified and defenseless Claudia must be. She imagined how scared and helpless she must have been when whatever happened happened. And Lou was sure to trust her gut throughout this since it proved her right earlier in thinking Claudia was missing, so she figured Claudia was taken. She felt it in the pit of her stomach that Claudia was kidnapped.

Winona shuffled papers and folders around the desk, and Lou absentmindedly picked up a folder and sifted through it. All the information there pertained to the Texas governor, Matthew Abele. Abele was a boring old man who seemed to just want to be in politics to have a reason to be crabby and to be able to argue.

For the past 50 years, positions in the U.S. government have been slowly passed to younger candidates once the public realized their seniors were only a small percent of the population. For decades and decades young adults have disagreed with their seniors on a number of political issues. They protested while others went to college to infiltrate the government just so the majority of America was heard.

Now there was only a handful of stubborn old bastards left, but no one except some radical conservatives payed them any mind. Abele was included in this small percent of politicians. Lou tried to connect dots as to what story was being told here, but this information was all over the spectrum from an article about his special recipe for biscuits to an article about his more known declaration that young women have no place in politics.

"Do youse keep up on politics?" Winona asked.

Lou shook her head. "Not much, just what I need to know. I write papers about politics sometimes, but I don't really pay attention."

"You should. You'll start to question the land of the free."

Lou didn't really understand what Winona meant, but she didn't put much weight into this comment. Lou gently set the folder back and shifted her attention to Winona. Winona was sitting on her desk, fiddling with her turtleneck while she was looking at her phone. Lou suddenly felt the creeping feeling that she was being intrusive. She could see that Winona was getting tired, and that she was letting her guard down— just an inch— but nonetheless. She was in a different city, in a stranger's home in that stranger's bedroom...

Lou could just see her mother's unrelenting face while she rubbed her freckled temple; she could even hear her mother sighing and smell the worry on her breath. Sorry mom, Lou thought. She felt a little thrill of doing something so potentially dangerous and out of character. Lou was always a cautious person, never out of line and the girl of the group who was seen as the most responsible. The worst Lou has ever done was maybe drink a little and go a little faster over the speed limit.

"So," Lou started. "What do we do now?"

"We?" Winona scoffed. "You will go home. There's nothing that you can do for her at the moment. I will continue to gather more information."

A pause. Lou felt a tiny flicker of fire in her stomach.

"I do nothing? No," Lou began. "No, you know more than I do. I know nothing except for the fact that she was most likely taken. Like, how am I just supposed to go home and go about my business? She's my roommate. Her room is empty and I'm going to have to try not to notice that every day until she either comes back or our lease is up."

Winona hopped off the desk and reached behind it. She pulled out a bulletin board with a U.S. map pinned onto it. This map was colored in random areas with red, but as Lou looked closer she could tell that it was not, in fact, colored in. There were tiny individual dots that speckled over the entirety of this map, some areas more clustered until you could barely differentiate each of the dots while others were inches apart from each other. Winona pulled out a random tack, and a folder slid out from behind the map. Winona tossed this folder over to Lou, and Lou clumsily caught it, shuffling the papers inside back into their place.

Lou looked blankly at Winona, not knowing what to do. "Open it." Winona said, lighting a Newport.

The front page was a file with a picture paper clipped to it. The picture looked old; a dark, smiling girl with wild curls framing her face looked at the camera, showing a set of bright pink braces. Tanya Williams, 13 years old, Kansas City. Lou read further and discovered that she was reported missing by her father in 1992. Her case went cold, and different newspaper articles on the next pages told Lou about Tanya's single father's angst and the city's confusion as to where she could have disappeared to.

Lou came to another file— Katie Peters, age 16, Clayton, Delaware, 1992. Called in missing by her foster mother, never found. Then another. Charlotte Abelson, age 15, Forest Park, Oklahoma, 1993. Devine Meyers, age 17, Ottumwa, Iowa, 1993. Amy Duboias, age 14, Syosset, New York, 1993.

Lou scanned through each file of each girl all the way to the very end. The collection of missing girls in this folder was immense, and they all had similarities that were hard to overlook once gathered together. Lou closed the folder and handed it back to Winona.

"Now do you get it?" Winona asked condescendingly. "Your friend is not the only one. I have thousands of other girls waiting to be found as well and the police ain't gonna do it."