Montana (6 page)

“Do you always wake up this cheerful? Must do wonders for your social life.”

A teenage boy approached, a hairnet over his braids, coffeepot in hand. Lola recognized one of the youths from the convenience store.

“She’ll have the steak and eggs,” Verle said to him. “You want a cinnamon bun, too?” he asked Lola. “Nell makes a mean one. Bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t eat breakfast,” she told Verle. To the youth, she said, “Just coffee. Black.”

“She’ll have the steak. How do you like your eggs?”

“I don’t.”

“Aw, hell. Just bring them over easy. And some oatmeal for me.”

The youth poured the coffee in an unsteady stream and left without looking at Lola. “You can drag your jaw up off that floor anytime,” Verle said.

“Are you deaf?” Lola snapped. “I don’t eat breakfast.” She drained her mug. “Where’s that kid with the goddamn coffee?”

“Lola, meet Joshua. Joshua, Lola,” Verle said, as the boy reappeared and poured with the automatic movements of a somnambulist. Verle put his hand over his own cup. “You may as well leave that pot here. Set it down and back away slowly. She might bite.”

Someone chortled. Joshua’s expression changed not at all.

“That was a joke,” Verle told Joshua’s retreating back. Steam curled around Verle’s fingers. He lifted his hand from the cup and blew on the palm. “Most people,” he said to Lola, “you take them out for a meal, they smile and say thank you.”

Lola looked again at the newspaper on the other table. “I don’t see myself smiling. Not today.”

“No. That’s a fact. You do not have a thing to smile about.”

Lola inclined her head in gratitude of that simple acknowledgement. “You didn’t answer any of my questions.”

“I did not.”

“What do you do? What were you doing last night when I saw you?”

Fine lines threaded his face. When he smiled, they ran into fissures that bracketed his mouth. “I’d been riding fence all day. Elk got me pretty bad this winter, dragging right through the fences trying to get to the hay. Every time I think I’ve got it all fixed, I find a new hole. Thought I’d stop on the way home and check the head gate before they start running the water through the irrigation ditch. Good thing I did. Otherwise, you’d have had to go all the way into town to find somebody. Way you were driving, I’m not sure you’d have made it. Then Charlie would have had two bodies on his hands.”

Lola fought an urge to pull out a pen and take notes. “I don’t think I understood two words you said. Except for that last part. I got that just fine. But riding fence? A headgate? What do you do?”

“I’ve got a place between Mary Alice’s and the reservation. Run some cattle there.”

She shaded her eyes against the sun. Through the window, the sky went on and on, lifting effortlessly above the mountains. The cafe felt small. “Does that mean a ranch? And what does little mean? A hundred acres? A thousand? Because nothing out here looks little to me.”

The air in the room went dead. Verle leaned toward Lola and delivered an indictment heard by everyone in the room. “You’re not from here, so I’ll excuse you. You don’t ask someone how much land he’s got.”

Lola’s head hurt like a hangover. In Afghanistan, she’d spent years learning how to get along. She never ate with her left hand, never pointed the soles of her feet at anyone, never offered a handshake to a man, let alone looked a man in the eye. She’d draped an extra layer of cloth over her breasts, covered her hair, her face, her whole body in yards of flowing fabric. And now she was up against a new set of rules. “What are those mountains?” she said. Trying for distraction. As if, at this point, a change of subject would help.

“Those mountains?” Verle replied, after he’d given her enough time to wonder if he was still talking to her at all. His eyes signaled amused tolerance. “Those would be the Rockies.”

The food arrived in the midst of a collective guffaw, the steak still sizzling around the edges, the eggs goggling yellow-eyed at her. She pushed the plate away. Verle leaned across the table, took her knife and fork, sliced a piece of the steak, jabbed it into the eggs until the yolks broke, and then waved it beneath her nose. “Go on and eat this now.”

She turned her head away. The fork followed. She opened her mouth. Bit down, chewed, swallowed. Protein hit her veins like speed. Her mouth fell open again. Verle laughed and handed her the silverware.

“You can take over from here.”

Lola sliced at the steak, layering it with some egg onto a piece of toast. She folded the bread and brought it dripping to her mouth. Verle handed her a napkin. “I may have to rethink my bias against breakfast,” she allowed.

The youth with the coffee returned and stood beside her, making no move to refill her cup. “Miss.”

She strained to hear his voice.

“Wicks,” Verle told him.

“Miss Wicks.”

“Please,” she said. “Lola.”

He set the coffeepot on the table. His arms stuck like sticks from a T-shirt that billowed nearly to his knees. “You know—you
knew
—Mary Alice?” he asked the floor.

“Yes.” Not a single person in the cafe made a pretense of not listening.

“Mary Alice and my uncle—he works for the tribes—they were good friends.”

“They were?” Verle’s voice intruded.

Joshua looked up. His eyes, fixed on a point just behind Lola, were rich and brown and liquid, the color of a good strong Arabic brew rather than the watery stuff in her cup. “Do you know what happened to her? All we heard is that she’s dead.”

“And that’s all we know, too,” Verle broke in. He lay a ten on the table. “This lady can’t be talking to you about it. She’s got to talk to the sheriff first.” He dug in his pocket and dropped a quarter atop the bill. “You want to find out about it, I’d suggest you read the Daily Distress. Sorry, Miss Wicks. I forgot you were in that line of work.
Daily Express
, I should have said. Looks like they gave it a big write-up.”

The boy pinched the money between his fingertips and drifted away. Lola had figured him for seventeen or eighteen, but his hairless cheeks and chin made her wonder if he was even in high school.

“What’s his deal?” she whispered to Verle. “He seems so—” She wasn’t sure. “Worse than depressed. Almost like he’s grieving. Was he close to Mary Alice, too?”

“Naw. His sister’s probably back in jail,” Verle said. “Best place for her.” Then, at Lola’s look, added, “Old story. Long story. We should be getting over to the sheriff’s office before he sends out a posse.”

Lola grabbed the last piece of toast, wiped the egg yolk from the plate, stuffed it into her mouth and followed Verle out of the cafe. At the door, she glanced back. Joshua stood silhouetted against the window, cleaning rag dangling from his hand. Verle had seemed surprised to find out that Mary Alice and Joshua’s uncle were friends. Something had slipped across the smooth surface of geniality as he glanced around the room to see if anyone else had registered the remark. Lola ran through the moment in her mind.

They were?
Not quite a frown, but close. A couple of quick blinks before his gaze returned to her face. No. She hadn’t imagined it. Verle hadn’t known. And he hadn’t liked finding out.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he sheriff sat on one side of a grey metal desk whose heft and dimensions suggested an aircraft carrier.

Lola gauged its immense surface and then the narrow door and wondered if someone had simply winched the desk down onto a piece of flooring and built the office around it. She perched on the edge of a folding chair, fingertips doing a drum roll against her knees, waiting for him to start. The morning newspaper sat to the left of the sheriff’s elbow, Mary Alice’s black-bordered photo looking up from it, her stare disconcertingly direct. Lola glanced away. A row of pencils lay beside the paper like small spears, freshly sharpened points trained upon her. The smell of graphite and cedar hung in the air. He picked one up and pulled a legal pad toward him.

“I called her parents,” he said.

Lola checked her percussive impatience. She’d never given Mary Alice’s parents a thought and she could tell that he knew it. In contrast to the previous night’s dishevelment, the sheriff was properly buttoned up, cowlicks slicked into damp submission. A couple of fresh cuts crosshatched his chin, as though he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of shaving. One of those fake-wood signs on his desk spelled out his full name: Charles Laurendeau. He didn’t look French, Lola thought.

“Do they know I’m out here?”

“Figured I’d let you tell them that.” Not letting her off the hook, presuming she’d have the belated good grace to call them herself.

“How’d they take it?”

“Quietly.”

Lola pictured the home where Mary Alice had grown up, the parlor that resembled every other first-floor room in the claustrophobic rowhouses just far enough away from Baltimore’s newly fashionable waterfront to allow the neighborhood to cling to its Irish-Polish roots. Two sway-seated recliners facing the television, antimacassars on the sofa and hand-tatted doilies on the end tables. Pressed glass bowls of candied almonds and Easter-colored mints whose levels never changed. Every object in the room daily wiped free of dust, layers of wax so deep on the furniture that the grain lay wavy and indistinct beneath it. The television’s tinned laughter a constant backdrop from morning’s rise until late-night’s ceremonial thimbleful of Jameson’s. “Just a wee drop, girls.” Lola had spent an interminable Thanksgiving there with Mary Alice, the two of them occupying opposite ends of the inhospitable sofa, trying to make small talk past the TV. Giving up.

And yet. Mary Alice was their only child. Even after moving to Montana, she paid the punitive fares to fly home for Thanksgiving and back again at Christmas. Telephoned them twice a week, sent chocolates on birthdays and fruit baskets for anniversaries, and postcards and letters for no reason at all. The funeral in Magpie would be in two days, the sheriff had told her when she arrived for her interview. No doubt her parents would schedule a memorial later in Baltimore. Lola made a mental note to call the airlines to push back her flights so that she could stay the extra day. She’d send Mary Alice’s parents a bushel-size bouquet. And a card. With a note, a long one.

“What about your parents?” the sheriff asked.

“What about them?”

“Have you spoken with them? You might want someone to talk to under the circumstances, seems like.”

“Dead. For years now.”

“Friends?”

She thought about that one. She had foxhole friendships with the cadre of foreign correspondents in Kabul, traveling with them in convoys for safety, sleeping with one or another on occasion, and organizing the softball games in courtyards ringed by armed guards. But those ties generally vanished upon departure. The departure in this case being hers.

“No. Mary Alice was it.”

He picked up a pencil. “Ready?” He established her full name—“No middle name? Really?”—raised an eyebrow at her exotic address and showed no reaction whatsoever when she told him she was thirty-four. Which, Lola supposed, meant that Afghanistan had taken its toll and she finally looked her age.

“What brings you all the way out here?”

“Vacation.”

“You’re a long way from home. Couldn’t you have found something a little closer?”

She fought an urge to rearrange the pencils, to set something askew on that orderly desk. “Mary Alice and I haven’t seen each other for five years. Montana seemed like a better vacation spot than Kabul.” No reason for him to know about her job situation.

“For someone on vacation, you sure travel light. They said over at the Sleep Inn you’ve only got the one bag and the book bag.”

Lola thought back to the proprietress at the motel, a tiny alert woman with inquisitive darting eyes, and wondered whether the sheriff had called her, or she’d called him first. “Why are we talking about me? Can we get to Mary Alice?”

His chin crimped in disapproval. Like everything else in his face, it was too big, mouth too wide, eyelids too heavy, nose deserving of its own listing in the U.S. Geological Survey. Lola had known men who managed, through force of personality, to turn their homeliness into an asset. The sheriff was not one of them. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” he said. “And you were the last one to see her alive.”

“Alive?”
Verle was right. Charlie Laurendeau didn’t know squat about sheriffing. “I hope to God you’re calling in some help on this one.”

The pencil snapped in his fingers, the halves spinning across the desk, wobbling at the metal edge before gravity won out and jerked them floorward. He watched them go, turning his head first one way, then another. “What do you mean?”

“You saw the back of her head.”

He picked up a new pencil. His fingertips went pink where he clutched it. “I did. But there was no rigor mortis.” She heard the boy in him then, his tone protesting that what he’d seen didn’t fit with the way things should have been. “So I asked the medical examiner. Everything is very preliminary. He hasn’t completed a full autopsy. But he said as bad as that looked, the bullet missed a lot of important things. It’s not impossible that she lived for several hours afterward, probably unconscious, but maybe not. I thought there might have been a chance she was alive when you got to her, that she might have said something. I almost stopped by the Sleep Inn at two in the morning on my way back from the cabin to ask you.”

Lola closed her eyes and let it come back to her. But for the staring eyes, the wound like a beauty mark, Mary Alice could have been napping. Lola had put her hands to Mary Alice’s face, her head rolling easily as Lola lifted. Fresh blood rippling like satin. A scream—her own. Falling back. Somehow righting herself and stumbling down the hill toward the cabin and her car.

“Her head,” she said thickly. “You saw her head.” Mary Alice could not possibly have been alive, could not have lain for hours alone but for the dog’s mute vigil, the life leaking out of her while Lola dawdled at the airport. “She was dead.”

Saying the word aloud for the first time. She took slow, deliberate breaths to steady herself, focusing in turn on each object on the sheriff’s desk. Not the newspaper. She couldn’t face that photograph yet. But the pencils. The telephone. Files. Blotter. Calendar. The safety of the mundane. Her inventory ended at a narrow, arched pegboard. She reached for it, fingertips wandering across its polished surface, anchoring herself.