Montana (8 page)

“Is that Joshua’s sister?”

The sheriff’s head whipped around. “How do you know about her?”

“Never mind. She looks cold. Why can’t she have a blanket? Or at least a sheet?”

“Suicide risk,” the sheriff said. “Look. I can talk to the people at the Sleep Inn, try to get you some kind of reduced rate. For that matter, the crime lab folks will be done up at Mary Alice’s by the end of the day, tomorrow at the latest. Don’t know if you’d feel comfortable staying up there, but it’s an option. At least it’s free. And likely the safest place you could be right now. Whoever killed her is probably as far away as he could possibly get.”

Joshua’s sister moaned. She rolled from the bunk and fell onto the floor and pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. She wobbled a moment, then crabwalked toward the lidless metal toilet and wrapped her arms around it and heaved. Lola looked away. “No,” she said. “I would not feel comfortable with that. I can’t believe you even suggested it.”

“Shame to let the place sit empty. You all right, Judith?” he called into the cell. “I know this part’s rough. I’m going to call over to the clinic and have Margie come check you out.”

Judith’s voice surprised Lola with its strength. “She hates me.”

“That she does,” Charlie said. “Nonetheless.”

“How long before you get him?” Lola interrupted.

Charlie led her back down the hallway and into his office and locked the door behind them. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“On you—at least in part. Maybe you’ll remember something useful. I’ll talk to Verle again, too. And Jolee, of course. But please think back. Anything, no matter how insignificant, could help. Maybe there’s something you’re not telling us.”

“Nothing. There’s nothing.”

Lola slumped against the office wall, limp with a sudden realization. Charlie Laurendeau didn’t have the first notion as to who might have killed Mary Alice. She gathered herself for a final effort. “You can’t hold me here. That material witness stuff—that’s crime show bullshit.”

“Try me.”

Lola eased her hand into her pocket and closed her fingers around the buffalo horn cribbage peg, pressing the sharp tip into her palm until she felt the skin break, the sudden comforting warmth of blood sealing her inner vow. If Charlie couldn’t find the killer, she would. She looked again at the newspaper photo and this time met Mary Alice’s eyes. “Love you,” she whispered.

CHAPTER SIX

M
ary Alice’s funeral drew a crowd.

Lola sat in the back of the whitewashed wooden church and watched them file in, the men in starched and creased jeans, big hats dangling from hard hands; the women, even the young ones, trussed up in the sort of dresses Lola’s mother might have worn. The flimsy flowered material strained tight across breasts and behinds that had filled out considerably during the years that those good dresses had waited in the back of the closet for the rare occasion demanding their appearance, their wearers stumping uncertainly along on heels no more frequently called into service than the dresses.

Lola had traded her cargo pants for a pair of black jeans and attempted to dress up her usual black pullover by draping her headscarf around her shoulders. She tucked her unwieldy hiking boots as far back under the pew as they would go, and tried not to think about the likely paucity of mourners at her own funeral when that day came, something she’d contemplated several times after close calls. Nothing she’d imagined involved anything like this rapidly filling church standing lonely sentinel over the prairie some miles from town. A plaque inside the vestibule told her it was the old mission church, abandoned a century earlier when the reservation boundaries shrank. Lola had the feeling that most of the time it stood empty and forgotten. She’d grown up in the lush Catholicism of Baltimore, all gilt and garish stained glass and arrow-pierced saints with eyes rolled heavenward. More recently, there had been the centuries-old mosques of Central Asia, gorgeous wrecks with turquoise-tiled minarets and fantastical geometric patterns on the crumbling walls. She’d forgotten about the austere faiths of the heartland, devoid of imagery and comfort, exacting doctrines all of a piece with their unforgiving surroundings.

Still, despite the stark interior, the air in the church was electric, ions of emotion caroming off the tall clear windows, sliding along the severe casket parked up in front. Lola recognized some faces: Jolee, from the convenience store, heavy-lidded and scowling. The toothless vagrant who’d felt so sorry for Mary Alice, face scrubbed, a clean red bandana around his neck, rocking a little in his seat. Fred, Lola thought, trying to fix his name in her mind, eyeing him with heightened interest. No, Frank. She wondered why Charlie had been so insistent that he couldn’t have killed Mary Alice. Frank sat between the busboy from the cafe and a small man in thick glasses with heavy black rims, lenses cloudy with scratches.

The sheriff stood alone at the back of the church, raking the mourners with his gaze. Lola wondered how many of these people were Mary Alice’s friends and how many were there solely for the entertainment value afforded by the county’s first murder in forty years, according to the newspaper story she’d finally forced herself to read. The few funerals for journalists Lola had attended were generally hushed, uncomfortable gatherings in museums or community centers or other secular places, the members of the newsroom generally being an unchurched lot. There’d be some generic music and short speeches by editors fumbling for polite euphemisms for the person’s less pleasant qualities. In her own case, Lola imagined words such as “determined,” “hard-working,” “driven.” The subtext ringing through: stubborn, stiff-necked. Nobody’s idea of fun. The same sorts of things her editor had implied when he’d sent her off to Montana. What had he said on her way out the door? “Stuck.” As in, “You’re stuck in those old days. They’re gone. Go hang out with that friend of yours, watch some TV, figure out what people really care about. Then come back and write me some stories with pop and sizzle.”

Pop and sizzle
. Lola silently shaped her lips around the ugly words. They felt like something she shouldn’t say in a church. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed her distraction. But everyone was sitting up taller and twisting in their seats, the high-octane event flaming even brighter with a new arrival. Lola saw the suit first, dove-grey, the jacket buttoned over a lustrous black silk shirt and a bolo tie with a big chunk of turquoise. Her gaze slid to his feet and she almost laughed at the idea of anybody picking his way across the sagebrush-dotted churchyard in those paper-soled, butter-soft eyelet oxfords. She belatedly lifted her eyes to his face, to the hair black as oil paint and woven into two short braids gathered into a single ponytail; to the nose that still bore the blow of whatever fist or other blunt object it had encountered years earlier, its high arrogant arch resolving into a shapeless mass. A secondary commotion localized at her pew. Verle Duncan squeezed past people, scattering pardons like confetti in his wake, shoehorning himself into the nonexistent space beside her.

“Johnny Running Wolf sure cleans up good.” He nodded toward the man in the suit.

“That’s Johnny Running Wolf?” Lola leaned past him for another look at the subject of Mary Alice’s recent journalistic focus. Lola had gone online to look up those stories, but the
Daily Express
website had a pay wall that demanded a credit card. Which Lola’s newspaper had just canceled. A kilted man cradling a bagpipe stepped to the front of the church.

“Andy Macleod,” Verle said. “His family runs sheep.” Pronouncing
sheep
the same way she’d heard those words
pop and sizzle
in her mind. “He’s always looking for an excuse to put on a skirt and screech away on that thing.”

Andy Macleod closed his lips around the reeds, and the opening strains of “Amazing Grace” wailed toward the rafters. People rose in a deep, rustling sigh. A framed photo of Mary Alice stood atop the casket, the same smiling shot from the newspaper, her eyes coolly surveying the crowd. Lola imagined the elbow in her side, the breathy voice in her ear. “Get a load of this, Bub. Half of them are here to make sure I’m really dead.” An elbow nudged her again, real this time. Verle extended a folded linen handkerchief. “Go on. It’s clean.” She handed it back to him. “I don’t cry,” she said. Voices lifted around them.

“
Through many dangers, toils and snares

I have already come.”

The interminable dirge finally ended, the last notes subsumed in a murmur tinged with excitement. Johnny Running Wolf made his way up the aisle, shaking hands along the way. The toothless man waved, trying to catch his eye, but Johnny kept moving, nodding to Verle, his gaze flicking across Lola’s face as he headed for the pulpit. The minister, mouth open in preparation to speak, stood frozen as Johnny commandeered the only funeral service for a murder victim the minister was likely to conduct. Johnny paused before him and the minister closed his mouth and stepped aside. Johnny waited until the rustling ceased.

“Mary. Alice. Carr.”

He tolled her name, waiting for each word to fall away before intoning the next. Lola shivered. He was going to talk about Mary Alice and it was going to be in the past tense.
Mary Alice was gone.
Johnny paced before the front pews like a lawyer at a jury box, making no noticeable effort to raise his voice, which nonetheless easily reached the rear of a church gone hushed and still as the moment before daybreak. “Mary. Alice. Carr. That name was on top of a lot of stories in the newspaper about me. I didn’t always like those stories.” He waited as a few quick knowing smiles ran their course through the crowd.

Lola’s eyes narrowed at the practiced pause. Mary Alice’s voice in her ear again: “What’s up with that, Bub?” Verle put a hand on Lola’s shoulder, the gesture warm, steadying. Lola shook it off. She didn’t want any distractions. The sheriff had said Verle was a suspect and Johnny wasn’t. Lola wondered if he’d gotten things backward.

“No, I didn’t like many of them at all. But she always told both sides. She made a lot of people mad. They thought she was poking around in places she didn’t belong. But she was fearless. She kept on writing those stories and a lot of other ones, besides. We don’t know if that’s why she was . . .” He left it there, the word worse for being unspoken. Lola sat up straight within the collective held breath.

“We hope not. All we can do, in this time of tragedy, is to hold tight to our memory of Mary Alice Carr, a woman who called it as she saw it.” An emphasis on
she,
leaving open the possibility that other people might not see it that way at all. Lola wondered if she’d imagined it. Knew she hadn’t. A half-dozen people in the front pew shifted in their seats. Mary Alice’s colleagues at the newspaper, Lola decided. She’d need to talk to them after the service. A young woman sitting among them raised a camera and fired a series of shots of Johnny Running Wolf, the shutter’s sliding clicks sounding unnaturally loud, intrusive. Johnny faced the camera.

“She went after the truth. And now she’s gone. I guess that’s what the truth gets you nowadays.”

He stood at the front of the church a few moments more, then shook his head and walked back to his seat. Lola pressed her thumb into the wound on her palm from the cribbage peg. She’d heard less subtle warnings, warnings involving gun barrels warming against the flesh of her throat and spittle-flecked shouts mere inches from her face, but this one, she thought, was just as pointed. An organ creaked into another plodding hymn, only slightly more tuneful than the bagpipes, and Lola sank into her seat, wondering what Mary Alice had gotten herself into in Montana.

Y
OU’RE HER
friend, right? The one who came to visit? The one who found her?” The young woman, camera slung over her shoulder, stood at Lola’s elbow after the service. She wore a denim jacket over a black dress that wrapped and rewrapped itself around her legs in the wind that swept Lola free of any lingering warmth from the church’s interior. Lola stared at the pearly skin nutmegged with freckles and wondered when everyone in her business had gotten so young. “Jan Carpenter,” the woman introduced herself. She pulled out a tape recorder barely larger than a cigarette lighter. “I wonder if we could visit for a minute.”

Lola scanned the crowd spilling from the church, seeking the dark hair, the braids, finding him at the edge of the throng, talking with Toothless. She turned back to Jan Carpenter. “Tell me you’re not trying to interview me at my best friend’s funeral.” Trying to forget all the times she’d done exactly that, not just at funerals but right at the graveside, for the big stories and the small ones, too, people grieving just as hard after a garden-variety Saturday night shooting in South Baltimore as at a suicide bombing. All the while, Lola standing there among them, offering Kleenex and sympathy, notebook and pen at the ready.

Jan shrugged and the jacket fell open, her collarbones bracketing a neckline far too low for the occasion. She clutched at the jacket, pushing the buttons belatedly through their holes.