Where They Last Saw Her

Quill, an Ojibwe woman living on the Red Pine Reservation in northern Minnesota, is training for the Boston Marathon when she hears a woman's scream while running alone on a snow-covered trail deep in the woods. The scream does not repeat. Terrified, she sprints three miles back to her car.

That evening, Quill tells her husband, Crow, a backyard auto mechanic, that the scream was human. Crow makes a spirit plate, an Ojibwe offering of food and tobacco placed outside to honor spirits, and prays for whoever was in the woods. Quill voices her fears about the pipeline man camps, temporary housing complexes for oil pipeline workers near the reservation, and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The next morning, Quill and Crow investigate the trail. They find disturbed snow, exposed dirt, and drag marks suggesting someone was dragged along the ground. Quill spots a small beaded earring in the snow and pockets it, recognizing the beadwork style of Giigoonh Jones, an artist from the neighboring Leech Lake reservation.

A flashback reveals the source of Quill's lifelong anxiety. At nine years old, she watched an older teenager from the reservation named Jimmy Sky jump from a railway bridge into the ditch where she and her cousins were playing. She ran to the village for help and fainted. The community never discussed the suicide. Running became her way of managing the anxiety that followed.

Quill recruits two friends to train with her: Punk, a pierced extrovert with a dyed-green mohawk, and Gaylyn, a quiet younger woman who works as a casino housekeeper and whose home life is shadowed by her father's meanness. As the three stretch near the trail, a dark pickup truck with tinted windows and no front license plate speeds past, a man screaming a racial slur while the driver fishtails gravel at them.

Quill visits Giigoonh and learns the earring was sold to Mabel Beaulieu, a young woman from northern Ontario staying in Duluth, possibly at a halfway house. Mabel said the purple pair celebrated her new sobriety. On the drive home, a maroon pickup with mudded-over plates follows them. At the casino parking lot, Quill scrapes part of the truck's license plate before the men return and she flees.

That evening at the casino, Quill and Crow witness two men carrying a drugged, limp Native woman toward the exit. A security guard, recognizing the woman as his cousin Julie Jackson, tasers one of the men. Quill administers Narcan, a medication that reverses opioid overdoses, while Crow performs CPR until paramedics arrive. Julie's friend Lisa, who accompanied her, cannot be found. Security footage later shows Lisa being led out a side exit and lifted into a dark truck. That night, Quill returns alone to the casino and draws a four-petaled flower in the dust on a suspicious pickup's tailgate to mark it for later identification.

Quill and Gaylyn travel to Duluth. At the halfway house, a resident named Suzy secretly reveals that Mabel left for work and never returned; the timing aligns with the scream in the woods. At St. Mary's Hospital, Julie remembers nothing, and doctors find a date rape drug in her system.

Quill confesses everything to Crow, who is furious she risked their three-year-old son Baby Boy's safety by bringing him along on her investigations. He insists she give a statement to Patrick, the tribal police officer. At the station, Quill presents the duplicate earring she purchased as the one she found, keeping the original. Patrick's new officer, Cliff, a military veteran from Turtle Mountain, sits in on the interview. Punk later tells Quill she has been secretly dating Cliff.

Patrick organizes a fifty-person search party that finds only a torn piece of cloth. Social media alerts then report a child abducted from a Walmart in Duluth. A photo shows Barbie, Crow's sister and the family's babysitter, in the crowd, but Baby Boy is not visible. Quill races there and finds her children safe. Days later, at a march under the hashtag #mmiw (missing and murdered Indigenous women), news arrives: The abducted child, Raven Lone Eagle, has been found dead, dumped alive and left to freeze in a ditch. Niswi, Quill's ten-year-old daughter, begins waking at night in tears, and Quill resolves to find her a therapist.

Julie texts Quill one morning: Lisa has called from a gas station in Little Sweden, a small town near the pipeline route, barely clothed and refusing police contact. Quill and Gaylyn find Lisa battered and drive her to the hospital, where a rape kit reveals she was kept drugged. She remembers almost nothing. At home, Quill's argument with Crow escalates until she throws a coffee cup against the wall. She describes Lisa's condition, and Crow holds her as she sobs.

The community organizes a relay run to Little Sweden, where Gaylyn leads runners to circle the motel where Lisa was likely held. Patrick arrests one pipeline worker based on DNA evidence. Meanwhile, Punk grows increasingly isolated. A man grabs Quill in the casino parking lot and warns that she could end up like Punk. Quill also spots Cliff hurrying out of a casino guest room. Gaylyn then reveals that her father, high on meth, threatened to sell her younger sister to pipeline workers the same way the new cop had sold his own girlfriend.

At Punk's house, Cassandra, Cliff's pregnant wife, blocks Quill's driveway and pulls a gun. Cassandra accuses Quill of sleeping with someone called Trent, revealing Cliff's real name. Quill dives through Punk's front door as bullets hit the house. Patrick and Crow arrive and disarm Cassandra. Crow takes the children to Barbie's house, telling Quill he cannot keep them safe around her. That same night, Gaylyn's mother stabs Gaylyn's father in self-defense and is arrested. Quill searches Punk's house and finds only her sequined phone abandoned in a drawer. Punk is gone.

Quill drives country roads north of the reservation and spots Cliff's car at an isolated farmhouse. Before she can retreat, Cliff slides into her passenger seat at gunpoint and knocks her unconscious. She wakes in a room at the Little Sweden motel with Punk, gaunt and traumatized. Punk reveals that Cliff owed money to pipeline workers from a failed drug deal and agreed to pay with women from the reservation, using his police position to sabotage investigations into Julie, Lisa, and Mabel.

Using a fire-exit map on the door, Quill and Punk block the entrance, tear through the drywall into an adjacent room with a towel rack, and flee down an exit stairway. Quill steals a snowmobile and they ride through freezing temperatures to Gaylyn's house. Despite exhaustion, Quill insists on returning to the farmhouse. Armed with rifles, she and Gaylyn ambush Cliff at dawn, force him into a car trunk, and deliver him to the tribal police station. Patrick is furious but processes the arrest.

In the aftermath, Crow returns home and pulls Quill silently into his arms. Punk destroys every item Cliff left in her house, joins a domestic-violence support group, and gets an emotional-support dog. Gaylyn pursues a restraining order against her father and saves money to take her younger sister to the Twin Cities. Earline, a community elder, gives Quill a red ribbon skirt with slits on the sides so she can run in it.

Quill makes a therapy appointment for herself, deciding to stop accepting silent endurance as a way of processing trauma. On a mild spring day, she returns alone to the trail and makes a tobacco offering where she heard Mabel's scream. Deeper in the woods, she discovers the black pickup truck abandoned on a deer trail, its plates removed but a faint flower still visible in the tailgate dust, the one she drew months ago. The driver remains unknown. She runs to the spot where she found the earring, takes it from her pocket, and pushes the post into the bark of a tree. She tells Mabel she is sorry, that she will go to ceremony and call Mabel's spirit home, and that she brought the earring back for her.