Montana (21 page)

The porch caught the sunlight and held it. A couple of Adirondack chairs beckoned. For all its wide, uncurtained windows, the cabin’s interior suddenly seemed dark and confined. Lola went indoors reluctantly and found a heavy sweater in Mary Alice’s closet and squirmed into it, throat tightening against the familiar citrus scent of her friend’s perfume. She dragged an end table from the living room onto the porch and arranged her various stacks of paper and her laptop upon it. Then she found the highlighter and a pen and some paper. She poured herself a Thermos full of coffee and settled into one of the chairs, its fanned planks already warm to the touch, and gave a last wistful look at the mountains’ mocking splendor before trying to decipher what she saw closer at hand.

“H
E CAME
out of nowhere—that is, if you consider one of America’s largest cities nowhere. But here on the reservation, that’s exactly how they look at Chicago. Nowhere—at least not in any way that is relevant to their reality.”

The highlighter slid with an outraged squeal across the information that had so startled Lola the night before. Most of Mary Alice’s stories on Johnny Running Wolf were the usual political fare. The announcement of his candidacy and then the reaction to the announcement. A companion piece, a retrospective of Indian candidates around the country. It was short. In fact, beyond the surprise of his entry into the race, Johnny merited little more than a line or two in Mary Alice’s stories until the much bigger surprise of his primary victory. At which point, Mary Alice delivered the standard lengthy profile that yielded the fact that Johnny left the reservation before starting school and grew up just outside Chicago as John Wolf. He’d made his way back to the Blackfeet Nation as an adult, sporting his reclaimed birth name and an avowed desire to help his people. Before that, he’d worked at an oil company after graduating from law school. In Calgary. “We’re never surprised when our students go on to prominence,” a professor told Mary Alice. A professor named Gallagher. The same name on the voicemail when she’d called the number Mary Alice had scrawled on the back of the campaign card.

Lola shuffled through the stories, looking for something she didn’t see. She looked again. She clenched the highlighter between her teeth and turned to the laptop, thinking that maybe in her exhaustion the previous night, she’d failed to print out a story or two that would expand upon the information in the profile. But there was nothing in the
Express
archives, beyond a brief story about the fundraising trip to Denver, about how Johnny was paying for his campaign. Lola bit down on the highlighter. It wasn’t like Mary Alice to gloss over such a basic issue, especially for an inexperienced candidate who appeared to be doing so well. There was the matter of gas money for a campaign in a state the size of Montana, funds for the plane travel, the billboards, the suits. Those boots. She opened a new search window for a quick check of Johnny’s campaign donors, only to bump up against the unpleasant discovery that Montana apparently had yet to switch to an electronic campaign finance reporting system. She explained to Bub that it was a very bad thing indeed. He yawned and rolled over and flung all four legs wide, ensuring maximum belly exposure to the sun. Lola fought a quick unbidden desire to join him, to spend an entire day moving from one patch of warmth to another. Maybe read a book. A novel. Forget about everything going wrong, all the things she didn’t understand, just for a day. “Is that too much to ask?”

The phone rang. Lola dashed inside and snatched the receiver from the cradle. The dog followed and lay down at her feet. “Yes?”

“I’m returning a call from Mary Alice’s number,” drawled a voice she’d heard only once before. “But this isn’t Mary Alice.”

“Hello, Gallagher.” The dog rose and shook its legs one after the other and padded to the door and whined. Lola shook her head at him. “I’m a friend of Mary Alice’s. I’m staying at her place. Mary Alice is dead. Somebody shot her. I’d like to talk to you about your interview with her.”

The line went dead before she’d finished. Lola hit redial. “Gallagher. Leave a message.”

She retrieved a map she’d found among Mary Alice’s things and calculated mileage. Then she let the dog out. “Better stretch your legs now,” she told him. “You’re in for a quiet couple of days.” She watching as he lifted his leg against the porch, against Mary Alice’s truck, against one of the fence-posts on the corral. The horse lowered its head and the dog squeezed under the lowest rail. The two touched noses. Lola called Jan at the
Express
.

“It’s Thursday, right? I’m losing track of time out here. Any chance we can take a little drive up to Calgary after you get off work tomorrow?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

L
ola urged Jan to cut her workday short on Friday so they could leave early for Calgary.

“I don’t know what it’s like at big papers like yours,” came the testy reply. “But we lost a third of our reporting staff when Mary Alice died. You should just be glad I’m not working through the weekend.”

Lola hung up. The sugar spoon, safely encased in a baggie, lay next to the phone. She went to her laptop and clicked on a file she hadn’t used in years. She returned to the phone and dialed a Baltimore number. Ed Sanchez was a Charm City cop whose quest to rise above sergeant was no more successful than his hopeless pursuit of Mary Alice, something he doggedly continued even after she moved to Montana, according to the plaintive emails Mary Alice sometimes forwarded to Lola. Sanchez had been one of Mary Alice’s best sources back when she covered the crime beat, work that involved, as she and Lola often joked, “all the ‘s’ stories—shoot, stab, slay, sexual assault.” Now Mary Alice herself was one of those stories.

Lola wedged the phone between neck and shoulder, and held the softball beneath the kitchen faucet and scrubbed at it as she spoke. “Hey, Sanchez. It’s Lola Wicks. Mary Alice’s friend. Right. The tall one.” Lola spent several minutes offering fulsome condolences. “You’re right. She never should have come out here. But she realized that too late. You know, the last time I talked to her, she said, ‘I wish I’d listened to Sanchez.’ ” Lola crossed her fingers behind her back. “Yes, really.”

She held the phone away from her ear. Sanchez was a little guy, but he was loud. “Listen, Sanchez,” she said finally. “I’ve got a favor to ask. I’m mailing you a teaspoon. I wonder if you could discreetly run the prints on it. I know it’s out of order. But we’re talking Mary Alice here.” She moved the receiver another six inches away and chose a single question from among the barrage he fired at her. “Do I think this guy is the one? He wasn’t here when it happened. But I think he might have been involved. If he’s clean, that would help me rule him out. Nobody will be the wiser. Thanks, Sanchez. You’re the best. Mary Alice always said so.”

She hung up, dried the softball on a dish towel and did a little dance step across the kitchen, waving the towel above her head. She tucked the towel through the refrigerator handle. Climbing up on a chair, she stashed the softball in a high cabinet, already crowded with other things Bub had shown a propensity to steal. He leapt against the chair and barked in frustration. “You’ve had your turn,” she told him. “Now I have to deal with the horse.”

L
OLA
W
ATCHED
Spot from a corner of her eye as she circled the corral with a pitchfork, tossing manure into a wheelbarrow as the sheriff had taught her. The pitchfork was heavier than she’d expected and it twisted awkwardly in her hands, spilling its pungent load, which broke apart and scattered. Bub chased the pieces and then Lola chased Bub, reminding herself not to let him lick her face. She spent entirely too long trying to spear the bits of manure with the pitchfork tines, then headed toward the shed for the wide scoop shovel she’d seen there. As soon as she opened the gate, the horse loomed behind her, trying to shoulder his way through. Lola shouted and threw an instinctive elbow. He half-reared, his hooves flashing large and sharp before her face, and spun away. Lola slammed the gate shut and fumbled with the latch, breathing hard. The horse trotted to the far end of the corral, sulking there when Lola returned with the shovel.

She thought of that first night, how she’d looked at the corral on her way to the cabin, remembering that Mary Alice had mentioned a horse but unable to recall when or why she’d acquired it. While Lola had stood there looking stupidly at the horse, Mary Alice was stiffening on the hillside. Lola posed the question to herself yet again. What if she’d come sooner? The shovel fell from her hand. She sat down in the dirt and put her head to her knees. A heavy footfall sounded behind her. Soft questing breaths whooshed above her head. The horse nosed about her, lipping at her hair. On impulse Lola breathed into the flared nostrils. His ears swiveled forward. His eyes were the color of polished bronze with dark rectangular pupils. Lola pushed herself to her feet and moved to retrieve the shovel. The horse took a step behind her. She took a second, experimental step, a third. It followed doglike. For whatever reason, the creature had been important to Mary Alice. And except for the twice daily, arm’s-length feedings, Lola had essentially neglected it.

Even before she’d arrived in Montana, she’d been condescending about Mary Alice’s choice to go to work for a newspaper not a tenth the size of the one in Baltimore. And disinterested in the particulars of her new life in Montana beyond poking fun at the log cabin, the pickup, the horse. “Hey, Cowgirl,” Lola had addressed her emails. Which were few, and brief. No wonder Mary Alice had mentioned the horse once, and never again. Bub, lavish and apparently indiscriminate with his affections, had forced her to pay attention. The horse—Spot—had been easier to ignore. She noticed now that his tail was a cascade of snarls, his coat so matted and caked that his spots blended into the grime. He watched her uneasily, unused to such prolonged focus.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Lola said to him. “And then I’ll figure out some exercise for you, too.”

A
N HOUR
later, much of the dirt from Spot’s coat had settled on Lola as she clumsily wielded a stiff-bristled brush. Spot heaved an occasional sigh and shook himself. Lola learned to shut her eyes against the volcanic cloud of fine grit that rose around her and floated back down, settling onto her scalp and beneath the neck of her pullover. As she swept the brush over and across the horse, the variations in his coat revealed themselves. His head and neck and chest were tinged the color of charcoal. The rest of his body was pale with lavish dark splotches on his rump, a careless grind of a pepper mill onto a snowy linen tablecloth. When she placed a hand lightly on his flank, the skin there twitched specifically, then stilled as she applied more pressure. Lola kept her touch firm as she ran her hand along the cleared paths left by the brush, learning the bulging musculature of his chest, the flat planes of his shoulder blades, the sculpted curves of his haunches. She sat the brush atop a fencepost and tugged at his halter, urging him into a walk, then a slow ponderous trot as she floundered gracelessly beside him. When the sheriff had recommended exercise, he’d meant riding. She knew that, but had decided against it. Hence, the idiotic jog around and around the corral, the horse seemingly puzzled but game beside her. Bub cavorted around them as they made their circuits. Lola let go of the halter and leaned against the fence, breathing mouthfuls of dust. She rubbed a hand against her side where a stitch burned deep, and then pushed the gate open and let it swing shut behind her. She twisted the spigot on the side of the shed and flung bright sparkling handfuls of water onto her face and neck. It ran into her eyes and cut uneven trails through the dust on her cheeks and neck. She straightened and looked around. She was alone but for Spot and Bub, who stood side by side, rapt. “You two want something to look at?” she said.