Montana (23 page)

B
UB LAY
beside a flat rock the size of a briefcase, his head resting atop it. He neither looked at Lola as she approached, nor wagged his tail. She stood beside him. Trees in three directions, the cabin barely visible through them in the fourth. Had Mary Alice been setting out on a hike and simply run into a psychopath coming down the trail? Lola would have liked to dismiss such a scenario as needlessly dramatic, but she’d done too many stories about just such horror-movie fare. Or, maybe Mary Alice encountered her killer on her way back, hurrying down the hill so as to give herself enough time to meet Lola’s plane? There was the inexplicable note. The lingering matter of her heavy jacket. Lola had gone online to check what the weather had been like in Magpie on the days leading up to her visit. The nights had been chilly, but there’d been a stretch of days in the eighties. She stood rooted awhile longer, seeking insight from the very landscape. None occurred. Spot stamped his foot and tugged again at the rope.

“I give up,” Lola said. “Come on, Bub.”

He whimpered and refused to move. Lola sat next to him and stroked him. She wondered if dogs felt grief. He lifted his head and keened. She figured that answered the question. “I know, buddy. I miss her, too.” She lay down beside him, running her hand over his head. He rested his chin on the rock again. Lola lay her own head next to his and whispered into his ear. “Really, Bub. We have to go home.” She rolled onto her stomach and looked toward the cabin. Her eyes narrowed. She sat up. Then again stretched prone.

Standing, the view of the cabin was largely screened by thick pine boughs. But the branches started several feet up the tree trunks, leaving the lower portions bare. Lying on the ground, Lola had a clear sight line to the porch. She thought and thought. She jumped up.

“She was waiting here!” she shouted. “That’s why she needed the coat. She called me the night before I got here, and then she went up on this hill to wait! It was cold at night, so she wore her coat.”

Her enthusiasm roused Bub from his lassitude. He and the horse turned their puzzled looks upon her, which seemed to be the expression they used most often when she was around. “No, I don’t know why she was waiting. Or who she was waiting for,” she told them, deciding not to think too much about the fact that she was talking to a couple of animals. “But I’ll bet this trip to Calgary will help me figure it out.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

L
ola walked out of the cafe clutching two paper sacks, and nearly collided with a man on his way in.

“Excuse me,” she said, squeezing her arm to her sides so as not to drop the twin cans of Coke she’d tucked beneath an elbow.
“Oh.”

“Miss Wicks. What a pleasant surprise.” Verle lifted his hat, the sun’s momentary cruelty throwing the grooves in his face into high relief. He replaced the hat, angling it forward, a wedge of shadow concealing all but his mouth. He made no move to go inside. “I thought you’d left town. I stopped by the Sleep Inn, but they said you’d checked out. Charlie must have found his man.”

“No. At least, not that I know of,” she said, trying to tamp down a flicker of pleasure at the news that he’d been looking for her. She fumbled for words. “Jan and I are just picking up dinner.” She held up the sacks, gone shiny from the fries, without explaining why she was no longer at the motel. “She’s waiting for me.”

Jan sat across the parking lot at the wheel of a Subaru wagon that might once have been green before dirt and rust went to war on its surface. Joshua stood beside it, gazing off toward the mountains as Jan spoke to him. A hay truck drove past, bits of chaff swirling in its wake. The driver slowed to take the turn out of town, grinding down through the gears, making it impossible for Lola to hear what Jan and Joshua were saying. On the plus side, she thought, they couldn’t hear her conversation with Verle, either.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“That Charlie hasn’t arrested anyone or that I’m having dinner with Jan?” The door opened and three men left the cafe. One dug an elbow into Verle’s side as they passed. Lola watched closely for an answering grin of conquest, a chuckle of acknowledgment, but saw neither.

“That Charlie hasn’t homed in on anybody yet. Not that I’m surprised. But as for dinner, it’s a fact that you’d eat better if you were eating with me.” A grin plowed new furrows in his face. “Sleep better, too.” Jan and Joshua stopped talking. Verle didn’t.

“I’m heading down to Denver with the horses for a show there. Depending on how they do, I could get some pretty good offers. Deals like that, I prefer to do in person. I might be gone a couple of days. Didn’t want you to think I’d just up and disappeared on you the way you did on me.”

Lola looked down the street, hoping to see another hay truck or any vehicle at all that would rend the fabric of the golden evening silence that seemed suddenly to have draped the cafe’s small lot. Joshua dropped his cigarette. Small scraping noises reached Lola as he put his toe atop it and moved his foot back and forth. He walked slowly toward the cafe, gravel crunching beneath his boots.

“About that,” she said hurriedly to Verle. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Verle lay a finger across her lips. “Shhh. No need to explain.” He tipped his hat again, raising his voice. “Goodbye, Miss Wicks. Always nice to see you. And you, too, Miss Carpenter.”

The door closed behind Joshua before she realized that Verle had never acknowledged his presence.

“R
EMIND ME
again,” Lola said around a mouthful of cheeseburger, “why we couldn’t sit down and eat like civilized people. It’s only three hundred miles. We’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep before we go find Gallagher. It’s not like we’ll be driving in the dark.” It was six o’clock but she’d quickly learned that this far north, the sun would stay high for hours yet before dipping reluctantly below the horizon around eleven, nudging its way back into dominance before five in the morning. Jan held her burger in one hand and a can of Coke in the other, steering with her wrist as the car whipped around the hay truck they’d seen passing the cafe. Lola glanced at the speedometer and wished she hadn’t.

“The sooner we get to Calgary, the better. It’ll be a madhouse with the Stampede.” Jan had tried to talk Lola into waiting a week to go to Calgary. “We’ll never be able to get rooms. People book a year in advance because of the rodeo.”

“I’m paying cash,” Lola had informed her. “You’d be amazed at how a room materializes when somebody sees green. I’ll spring for the gas, too, if you drive.”

Jan reminded her of that now. “Here’s what’s left of the money you gave me. Are you still okay for cash? I gave Joshua more than he asked for. He’s going to drive all the way out to Mary Alice’s twice a day to look after the animals. And he knows to tell Charlie or anyone else who asks that I’m taking you camping for the weekend, trying to get your mind off things. I figured that was worth some extra money. He’s trying to get his sister into a private rehab program. The job in the cafe won’t cover that.”

Lola squeezed the contents of a foil envelope of ketchup onto the fries in the bottom of one of the bags and held it out to Jan. “That’s fine,” she said. Jan had no way of knowing just how much cash she was carrying, and she had no intention of telling her. A sign announcing the turnoff to the reservation blurred past.

Jan took a single French fry and bit it in half and pointed the other half at Lola. “About this Gallagher guy we’re going to see. Mary Alice must have hundreds of people’s phone numbers. Why is it so important to track this one down?”

“Because of the way I found it. And because he hung up on me when I told him Mary Alice was dead.”

The car slowed, though not enough for Lola’s comfort, as the road wound upward through groves of low, twisted aspens. The prairie fell away behind them. Lola opened the window and let the wind take away the scent of grease. Jan turned to her, eyes round and hard as marbles. “That’s it? We’re driving into Calgary on the busiest weekend of the year because somebody hung up on you?”

Lola lowered the visor and studied her face in the smeared mirror there. She pulled out a lipstick she’d found in Mary Alice’s medicine cabinet and stroked it across her lips, watching her mouth become a bold red stranger. “That’s right,” she said, wrapping those new lips carefully around the words.

Jan held out her hand for another French fry. “Do you know where he lives?”

“No.”

Jan’s expression softened, smugness trumping exasperation. “I don’t suppose you considered the fact that it’s summer, not to mention a weekend. His office will be closed.”

“One would assume that,” Lola murmured. She reached into her book bag and shook out a black square of silk splashed with chartreuse flowers. She folded it into a triangle and arranged it on her head and tied it to one side beneath her chin. “Unless,” she said, as though talking to herself, “one had called the university pretending to be a student with an urgent need to talk to Professor Gallagher. Something about an outstanding assignment from the spring semester, the one assignment that was holding up the award of her diploma, an assignment needing only Professor Gallagher’s review. And that student was so grateful to learn that she could call Professor Gallagher at his office this weekend because he always works on weekends to take advantage of the quiet.” Lola dove into the book bag again and came out with a pair of black snakeskin cowboy boots inset with a thunderbird pattern of turquoise leather. They were a size seven to her own nine. “The border,” she said. “How much farther?”

“About five miles.”

“Slow down.” Lola curled her toes and shoved a foot into one of the boots. She yanked on the sides until she felt her heel wedge improbably into place, and then went to work on the other one.

“What are you doing? Those are Mary Alice’s good boots. And that’s her scarf, too.”

“I know. I sent it to her from Rome, the last time I had a layover there.” Her face was warm with exertion. She put her hands to her cheeks, careful to keep them away from her mouth so as not to smear her lipstick. Ahead, the road peeled off in a Y, a small wooden building on the Canadian side, dwarfed by a post–9/11 concrete fortress across the way. A sign announced the border.

Jan touched her toe to the brake. Lola took out her passport. Its cover was dark red, the lettering stamped in gold: Unione Europea, Repubblica Italiana. “When we get there,” Lola said, “I’m your old friend from college. I was an Italian exchange student. Where’d you go to school, anyway?”

A man leaned from the smaller building’s window, waving them on.

Jan’s eyes went agate again. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“No time for that now. Your school. Quick.”

“University of Montana. In-state tuition and all that. Go Griz.” She took her foot off the brake. “I don’t understand.”

The car rolled forward.

“No need. If he asks, tell him everything I just told you. Oh, and my name. It’s not Lola. It’s Maria. Maria diBianco.”

T
HE CANADIAN
border agent had the broken-veined complexion of a man who enjoyed his liquor, and the distracted air of someone close enough to the end of his shift to anticipate that enjoyment. Good, thought Lola.

He held out his hand for their passports. “Where are we headed tonight?”

Jan’s voice was a ragged wisp. “Calgary.”

“Mind speaking up? All those big trucks coming through, it affects your hearing after a while.” He snapped Jan’s passport shut and turned to Lola’s. “Remove your scarf, please.” She slid it down. “Where are you going?”

“To Calgary,” she sang out. “To the Stampede.” She twisted in the seat, holding up a booted foot. Her toes burned.

“All the way from”—he looked at her passport again—“Italy to Calgary by way of Montana? Just for the Stampede? Why not fly straight to Calgary?”

Lola lowered her foot, kicking Jan.
“Scusi.”

Jan’s voice was barely louder than before. “We were in college together. She was an exchange student here. She’s back for a visit.” Her jawline was rigid. Her eyes were ghastly.