Montana (5 page)

“Who’s this?” the sheriff asked finally.

Verle’s shoulders relaxed, telegraphing victory. “This is the one found her. She flagged me down. I don’t think we were ever properly introduced.”

“Lola,” she said. “Lola Wicks.”

“After I’m done up there, I’ll need to take her statement,” the sheriff said. “Yours, too.”

Lola put her hands flat on the seat and dug her fingernails into the upholstery and jammed her foot against the floorboards as though seeking an accelerator. “Stop talking!”

Both men’s heads jerked as though yanked by the same string.

“Mary Alice is lying up there. Do something.”

“She’s right,” Verle said. “You’d better get on about your sheriffing.”

The sheriff looked up the track. His car inched forward, then stopped. “The longer we wait to start an investigation, the more time the perpetrators have to get away.” Phrases stiff, stumbling, like something he’d memorized out of a book but hadn’t had much chance to use.

“From the look of things up there, this happened quite a while ago,” Verle said. “Your perpetrators are probably across the border and halfway across Canada by now. You can visit with this one—Miss Wicks?” Lola nodded. “You can visit with her tomorrow. She’s not going anywhere. And you know where to find me. I’ll take her down into town, put her in the Sleep Inn for you. Unless”—he turned to Lola—“you’d rather not be alone. I’m sure Jolee over at the store would be happy to take you in.”

Lola thought back to the woman and imagined a bullying sort of sympathy, one urging avid, moist confidences. “No,” she said. “Thank you. I think I’d be better off at the motel.” She forced the words, distracted by the reality knocking at the forefront of her consciousness. Mary Alice was gone.

“Fine,” the sheriff said. “First thing tomorrow, then. You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

Lola looked down at the dog in her lap. “I went into the house,” she said. She held the dog up so that the sheriff could see it. “I got him some water. He was thirsty.”

“Damn. Verle, why didn’t you stop her? There goes my crime scene.”

Something nagged at Lola. “I touched Mary Alice, too.”

“Oh shit, oh dear.” The sheriff lifted his hands from the wheel and moved them helplessly. “Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to see what they used. I always check for that. It’s how you tell which side did it. . . .” Then, seeing their faces, added quickly. “It’s something you learn to do in Afghanistan. I’m a reporter. I work there. Did.”

The sheriff’s hands landed back on the wheel. The car lunged forward another six inches.

“Besides,” said Lola, “I just lifted up her head and put it back down. I didn’t touch her anyplace else.” As far as she could tell, her voice sounded normal, if somewhat far away, hard to hear past the words jangling in her head. Mary Alice was gone
.

“Look at her, Charlie. Let her get a night’s sleep. Talk to her when she’s fresh.”

“Hell and goddamnation. Fine.” Charlie hit the gas. His taillights washed red across the road, bent and disappeared.

“Thank you,” Lola whispered.

“That guy,” Verle observed, “doesn’t know any more about sheriffing than I do about dancing a damn fandango. But don’t you worry. This’ll all get straightened out, despite Charlie.” He eased the car into gear. “Let’s get you over to the Sleep Inn. I’ll get somebody to give me a ride back to my horse. You’ll be fine there. They’ll let you keep the dog in the room.”

Lola turned. “Me? Why can’t he stay with you?”

“You don’t seem to know much about animals,” he said conversationally, as if Mary Alice were not lying just up the road, blood congealing and limbs stiffening, her body closing itself off against the rude intrusions that would follow the initial indignity of being shot.

Lola wondered how much more she could say before her voice gave out altogether. “No,” she managed. “Animals were Mary Alice’s specialty.”

W
HEN THEY
met in college, there was a calico cat named Typo, smuggled into a dorm in violation of all regulations. She sashayed back and forth across Mary Alice’s keyboard as she typed stories for the school newspaper, giving her a handy excuse against an editor’s red grease pencil. Years later in Baltimore, when Mary Alice began working the neighborhoods where the police felt free to help themselves to the cash and drugs in stash houses after making their sweeps, she acquired Daisy, a Rottweiler whose jowly glare and rumbling bark usually sent anyone who got too close scrambling for cover before he could realize Daisy had only three legs. The dog’s handicap came from her habit of chasing cars, a vice that continued in lopsided fashion until she grew too old to muster her former speed and a tricked-out Hummer did her in.

In her room at the Sleep Inn, Lola’s lips twitched toward a smile at the memory. She had rearranged the room as she always did, pulling the bed away from the window and safety-pinning the thin drapes closed. She unrolled her sleeping bag atop the bed. After any extended visit to the field, she had a tough time readjusting to a bed’s intimidating expanse, its smooth clean sheets and yielding pillows, preferring instead the comfort of the bag’s close confines. She forced herself to leave her boots beside the bed and crawled into the bag in hard-soled slippers that would serve well enough for shoes should the need arise. The pup snored softly on the floor, its belly balloon-taut. She’d indulged him with extra food from the bag Verle had bought. He’d stopped at the convenience store on the way to the motel and Lola had waited in the car, sliding low in the seat when Jolee turned toward the blankness beyond the window, face slack as she tried to take in what Verle was telling her.

Lola reached down and scooped the dog onto the bed. He woke with a start, stared around wildly, then burrowed close, snuggling his head into the space under her chin. His hair was long and silky, his body surprisingly warm. Lola shook a sleeping pill into her fist, swallowed it dry, and switched off the light. She wrapped an arm around the pup and closed her eyes. It was always the worst time for her, the moments of half-sleep before the drug did its work. For years, all of the sights and sounds and smells of wherever she’d been that day rushed back in through the pinprick of fast-vanishing consciousness: the banshee wails of mothers at the sight of their own slaughtered children, freshly dead and mummifying quickly in the parched desert air; the dry-eyed grief of the fathers whose ancient Enfield rifles had been no match against errant bombs.

Tonight it was Mary Alice, eyes staring wide, mouth a circle of surprise, the wound like a lipsticked buss upon her cheek, something to be wiped away with a handkerchief. Still scarlet, not yet gone black and crusted, the way Lola usually saw them. But always on strangers. Never on someone who, years earlier when Lola had paid for a transatlantic call to object to Mary Alice’s inexplicable career choice, laughingly replied, “It’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done. You’re the one going to all the crazy places. Me, I aim to die of boredom.”

Lola curved her hand around the dog’s head and then the drug did its work, a fast sinking sensation, dark waters parting then closing above her before she stopped thinking altogether.

CHAPTER FOUR

L
ola awoke to soft slurping sounds.

A dog sprawled beside her, methodically dragging its tongue between legs splayed wide. Light slivered through an opening in the curtains. Beyond, a slice of jagged skyline. Mountains. The dog detached its face from its nether regions and leapt to its feet, tags jingling. Lola read them again. “Bub.” Mary Alice’s word. Mary Alice’s dog. It was real. Mary Alice was gone.

Lola unzipped the sleeping bag and pushed herself upright, wove a path to the bathroom, swigged water, squirted toothpaste into her mouth and swished. Pain banged away behind her eyes. She tried to remember the last time she’d eaten. The bag of pretzels on the plane so laughably small she’d counted its contents. Nothing since. The dog keened at the door. Lola kicked out of her slippers, stashed her cash and other essentials in their assigned places in her clothing, and pulled on her boots, yanking the laces tight. She cracked the door. The dog shoved past her, the force jerking the knob from her hand. It hiked its leg against the tire of her rental car and pissed an endless stream.

“They’ll probably charge you extra for that when you return it.”

Lola grabbed for the door.

Verle Duncan stepped out from behind a grey pickup whose side panels flared to accommodate extra tires. “Easy,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t.” She moved back into the room and pulled the door nearly shut, peering at him through the crack.

He stopped where he was, shoulders thrown back in a short man’s stance. She looked at the face under the hat and put him at close to sixty, clothing hugging a narrow frame. His boots ended in precise points. “Wasn’t sure when you’d wake up,” he said. “Been waiting awhile. Figured you’d need something in your stomach.”

She remembered the gentle courtesies of the previous night. Let a milliliter or two of tension drain away.

“Coffee,” she said.

He gestured toward the truck. “We’ll go to the cafe.”

She stood still, letting a thought undulate toward the surface of coherence. “The sheriff,” she said finally.

“Trust that first instinct. Get that coffee, some food. You’ll be more help with a clear head and a full stomach. We’ll both need our strength if we’re going to talk to By-the-Book Charlie. He’ll probably come at us with a checklist straight from the procedures manual. Is that dog coming with us?”

Lola kept forgetting about the dog. She took a step toward the truck and the dog flashed past her, already on the seat before she’d reached the door. She put her foot on the low running board, grabbed the side of the truck and pulled herself up.

“Forgetting something?” asked Verle.

Lola did a quick mental inventory. She’d glanced at her drawn image in the bathroom mirror and reset her face for public display, smoothing her hands over her cheeks until her jaw unlocked, running her thumb between her eyebrows to erase the furrows there, narrowing her staring grey gaze into a semblance of its normal skepticism. She’d run wet hands through her hair and called it good.

“No. I didn’t forget anything.”

“A purse. Don’t you have a purse? Women carry purses.”

She felt her hip pocket. She kept a few bills there, folded around her long-unused driver’s license with a doubled rubber band. The balls of her feet rubbed against more, layered into the bottom of each boot. She shifted in her seat and felt the rest of her cash sliding against her body, anchored at various points by her clothing. Pens jostled in her shirt pocket. The passports—her own and Maria’s—nestled safely in a zippered pocket inside her pants.

“I don’t own a purse.”

“Huh. I never knew a woman not to.” He drove a single block in silence and parked beside about a half-dozen pickups angled in front of a clapboard building set apart from the others by a gravel parking lot. The dog squeezed across Verle’s lap as soon as his fingers touched the door handle. Verle elbowed him back. Bub curled his lip and muttered.

“Border collies,” Verle said. “They’re smart, but I’ve never trusted them. Look at how they move, slinking around, bellies to the ground like they’re half-snake. They need somebody working them every day or they’ll turn devil. I don’t know what Mary Alice was thinking when she took one on.”

Even as he said Mary Alice’s name, there was her face, a black-bordered photo smiling from the front page of the local newspaper in the box by the door of Nell’s Cafe. Lola stepped wide around it. She’d force herself to read the story later. Inside, she breathed the familiar, forgotten smells of grease and coffee. Formica tables perched upon islands of wan linoleum, the floor between them scuffed to the boards. Men in feed caps sat around a center table, chairs pushed back to accommodate assertive bellies. They nodded toward Verle, eyes on Lola. The newspaper lay open on the table. Verle led Lola toward a spot beneath a window. Beyond the glass, dun prairie rushed toward the ebony blockade of mountains.

Lola hung back. “Let’s sit here.” She picked out a table just inside the room, but off to the side. “I thought you said we were going to a cafe.” She’d envisioned gingham tablecloths, maybe daisies in jelly glasses. “Back home, we’d call this a diner.”

“Call it what you want,” Verle said. “I call it breakfast.” A laminated menu flung choices at her. ScrambledOvereasypoached. WhiteWheatSourdough. BaconSausageHam. Conversation rumbled back to life at the center table. Sunlight spilled across the room. Dust gossamered the air. Caution belatedly kicked in.

“Who are you, anyway?” Lola asked. “What do you do—besides squire around crime witnesses? How do you know Mary Alice? What were you doing over by her place last night? Do you live next door?”

Verle tipped his chair back. He wore a denim shirt with the sleeves folded back a triple turn. His throat sagged soft, but hair bristled grey on forearms that meant business. He’d taken off his hat and balanced it on its crown on the chair beside him. That mane was even more impressive in the daylight, shining and senatorial.