Elsie's business

Elsie Roberts has been dead a year when the narrator arrives in the town where she was bludgeoned to death in January 1969. The daughter of a black father and a Native American mother, Elsie moved there after being attacked by white teenagers near the Standing Rock Reservation. The narrator searches for the truth about Elsie, a story an old Native "grandfather" tells him has been "polished ... with lies, half truths, and omissions."