The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 13
The council meeting was on a Thursday and she sat through it the way she sat through difficult things, still and straight, her hands flat on the table.
Wallace had done the work properly, which she respected even while she opposed it. The resolution was three pages, legal in its language, procedurally sound in its framing, and designed with the precision of a man who had been in councils long enough to know how to dress a personal objection in institutional clothing.
It cited the water agreement. It cited her role in the negotiation. It cited the relationship, not by name but by implication, ongoing personal association with the adjacent landowner, and proposed her recusal from any future negotiations or grant applications involving Branson Ranch or its water rights.
Her father let Wallace present it fully without interruption, which was his way of showing respect for the process regardless of what he thought of the content.
When Wallace finished her father looked at the table for a moment.
“The water agreement is signed,” he said. “Both lawyers reviewed it. The terms are favorable to the tribe. The grade control structure is installed and functioning. The creek volume at the boundary marker is already up eleven percent from the pre-installation baseline.” He paused. “Is anyone at this table prepared to argue the agreement itself was compromised.”
Silence.
“Thomas,” her father said.
Thomas Many Guns cleared his throat. “I witnessed the signing. I read the document. The terms are the best this tribe has had with a Branson in thirty years.” He folded his hands. “I would also point out that the grade control structure was designed by Alachooshe, not by the Branson hydrologist, and that it cost the tribe twenty-two thousand dollars instead of twenty-nine thousand because she knew a Crow contractor who could do the work for less.” He looked at Wallace. “If that’s a conflict of interest I’d like more of them.”
Wallace looked at his resolution. “The concern is going forward. Future negotiations. The grant application.”
“The grant application benefits the watershed,” her father said. “Which includes Branson land. A private landowner benefiting from a federal restoration grant on a shared watershed is standard practice. There is no conflict.”
“There is an appearance—”
“Wallace.” Her father’s voice was not raised. It never was. “I have run this council for eleven years. I have managed relationships with every adjacent landowner in this county, some of them difficult, some of them fair, all of them complicated. I do not make policy based on appearances.” He looked at the resolution. “I’m going to table this. If you have specific evidence of a compromised negotiation or a biased grant application I will hear it. Appearances are not evidence.”
Wallace looked at the table.
The resolution was tabled four to one, Wallace the single vote.
She drove home afterward and sat in her house for a while without turning on the lights, just sitting in the early evening dark, and felt the particular exhaustion of having been discussed in a room like a variable in someone else’s equation.
Her phone showed a text from her father. Done. Come for tea if you want.
She went.
He was on the porch with two cups and the particular settled expression of a man who had done what needed doing and put it behind him. She sat on the steps and took the cup and they looked at the cottonwoods in the evening light.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Thomas did the work. I just didn’t get out of his way.”
“Thomas did it because you asked him to.”
“Thomas did it because it was right.” Her father drank his tea. “Wallace isn’t wrong about everything. The appearance question is real and you should know that going in.”
“I know it.”
“Knowing it and being prepared for it over a long time are different things.”
She looked at the cottonwoods. “How long did people talk about you and mother.”
He made the sound that was almost a laugh. “Your mother was from the Bighorn band and I was River Crow and in 1986 that was enough for three years of commentary.” He paused. “People found other things to talk about eventually.”
“What made them stop.”
“We stopped giving them anything new.” He set his cup down. “We just lived our lives and did our work and after a while the commentary became less interesting than the reality.”
She held her tea cup and thought about that.
“He found something on the upper creek,” she said. “He wants to show me Saturday.”
“Go,” her father said simply.
Saturday she arrived at seven and he was at the boundary marker with the gray and the thermos, same as always, but there was something in his expression that was different from the usual morning patience, something that wanted to move.
“Leave the truck,” he said. “We’re riding up.”
They rode the creek trail past the grade control structure, the water moving clean and purposeful through Raymond’s rock, and continued upstream into the cottonwood corridor where the trail narrowed and the light came green and gold through the new leaves. Past the old beaver pond site, the sedge dark and wet, the water table still perched beneath it.
He stopped at a bend she hadn’t been to before, where the creek curved around an exposed gravel bar and a stand of young willows had established themselves on the inside of the curve, three years of growth maybe, waist high and dense.
He dismounted and tied the gray and she followed.
He led her to the base of the willows without speaking and crouched and pointed.
Three willow stems, each as thick as her thumb, cut clean at a forty-five degree angle eighteen inches above the ground. The cuts were pale and fresh, the wood not yet oxidized. Beside the nearest one, in a patch of bare mud at the water’s edge, a flat-tailed drag mark running from the cut stem to the water, and beside it the distinctive webbed print, large and clear.
She crouched beside him and looked at the prints and the cut stems and felt something move through her chest that was not complicated at all.
“When,” she said.
“Wednesday night or Thursday morning. I found it Thursday afternoon.” He looked at the prints. “There are two sets of tracks. Different sizes.”
She looked closer. He was right. A larger print and a smaller one, the smaller running alongside, both headed to the water.
“A pair,” she said.
“That’s what I thought.”
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