Dakota (6 page)

“I don’t give a shit about Josephine’s husband.”

Lola slumped, avoiding Jan’s eyes.

“Scratch that. It’d make for a nice sidebar. I meant, how long will you need?”

Lola let out a long breath. “Couple, three days. Not counting the driving. Four. Five.”

“Three. And the driving’s on your own time. Jan’s right. The mileage alone is going to wipe out petty cash.”

“We’ve got a petty cash fund?” Jan asked.

Jorkki ignored her. “Leave Monday so you’re back by Friday.”

“What the hell?” Jan bounded up from her desk. “Why does she get to go? You’ve never sent me anywhere and I’ve been here three years. She’s here all of what—three months? Besides, how am I going to write the whole paper by myself?”

Something shifted in Jorkki’s face, not quite a smile, but a shade less dour than his usual death mask. “You never asked. We reward initiative here. Or at least we would, if anyone ever showed any. As for writing the paper, Tina’s been doing just fine on feature stories. Time we threw some news her way.”

Tina glowed quietly. “That’s a great idea,” Finch enthused. “One of your best ever.”

“Shut up, Finch,” Jan and Lola snapped in unison.

“Can’t I at least go along and watch? I want to see how Lola here handles that bunch over on the eastern plains and beyond. They’re a different breed of human. Tough. More than tough. Got to be, to live in that godforsaken place.”

Jorkki spoke to Lola. “How do you feel about sleeping in your truck? Because there won’t be a vacant motel room within a hundred miles of where you’re going. Oh, and pack your woollies. You think it’s cold here? That wind’s been rolling across the Hi-Line for five hundred miles with nothing to stop it by the time it hits the patch. When you get back, this place will feel like Phoenix.”

Lola doubted it. But she was too relieved to care. Even if it meant nothing more than trading one frozen wasteland for another, she was finally escaping the increasingly suffocating confines of Magpie.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“W
hy the sudden interest in the patch? Can’t it wait until spring?” Charlie stood in the bedroom doorway as Lola added underwear and socks—and then more socks—to a duffel bag. Bub shadowed her, alternately radiating suspicion and excitement. The candle flickered beside the bed, redundant in the glare of the overhead light that Lola had switched on so that she could see as she packed.

“It’s a better story in the wintertime. Shows how desperate people are for work. Jorkki said it would be even colder there than it is here. How is that possible? Do you think I should get one of those facemasks that make people look like bank robbers? Do you have one? Can I borrow this?” She reached for the coyote-fur-trimmed hat that sat on Charlie’s nightstand and put it on. She unfolded the earflaps, tied them beneath her chin and stood before the mirror. The brim came down over her eyebrows. “I look like an idiot. But maybe if I wear my watch cap under it, it’ll fit.” She took off the hat and tossed it beside the duffel, then rooted through the contents of the single dresser drawer she’d allowed herself at Charlie’s. Most of her possessions were in boxes in the barn. Lola may have acquiesced to Charlie’s pleas to join him in Magpie, but she’d insisted to him and to herself, too, that their living arrangement would last only until she found her own place. But summer had turned to fall, and then winter arrived with a ferocity that made any effort beyond work and simple survival unthinkable. When Charlie suggested she delay her house hunt until spring, she’d shoved another log into the woodstove that kept the living room bearable and agreed that was a fine plan. Now, noting the rigidity in Charlie’s shoulders, the set to his jaw, she wasn’t so sure.

“Jorkki liked the idea,” she told him.

“Jorkki doesn’t know you like I do. He’s about to find out. You won’t stop at anything when it comes to a story.”

“That’s generally considered a good thing.”

Bub whined, looking from Charlie to Lola. He had belonged to Mary Alice, but had finally transferred his loyalties to Lola. Bub had one brown eye and one blue, and guilt shot through Lola when he trained the blue one on her. She dropped to her knees and stroked him. “It’s okay, Bub. I won’t be away for long.”

“You’re leaving the dog with me, too? Did you even think to ask?”

“He’ll just slow me down. Besides, he’s better off here than hanging around in the truck all day.” Lola zipped the duffel shut and turned her attention to her book bag. Laptop. Notebooks. Pens—and, of course, pencils, along with a small sharpener, the kind she’d used in elementary school. Chargers and spare chargers. When Lola had been stationed in Kabul, she’d had to lug a camera, too, in the event she couldn’t find a photographer to accompany her to an assignment. But smartphones were everywhere when she returned from her overseas posting, making her life considerably less burdensome in that regard. The
Express,
like so many papers, had long ago dispensed with photographers, relying on Jan and Lola and Tina to provide photos and videos with their own stories—although Jorkki ran Lola’s cluttered, off-kilter photos only as a desperation measure. Lola went into the kitchen and retrieved Charlie’s Thermos, the size of a small fire hydrant, from a cupboard. A steady supply of caffeine was the only solution, she told herself. She could sleep when she got home. She held open the cupboard doors, seeking more plunder. Charlie’s kitchen was a place of mystery to her, stocked with all manner of ingredients in rows of mason jars. Flour, both white and whole wheat. Cornmeal, again white, and yellow, too. Rice, white and brown; likewise with sugar, and a veritable rainbow of beans. The problem, Lola had learned early on when she went looking for snacks, was that everything required some sort of preparation and assembly.

“It’s called cooking,” Charlie said when she’d remarked upon that fact. “Maybe you’ve heard of it.” After which, dinner became his responsibility.

Lola located a jar of almonds and shook a handful into a baggie. Useless to hope that Charlie would have squirreled away a bag of chips someplace. He blocked her way back to the bedroom. “I just think it’s interesting that you chose to focus on workers from the rez.”

Bub wormed his way between them and leaned against Lola’s legs. Lola nudged the dog away and stepped around Charlie. “I cover the reservation. So it makes perfect sense. All of those jobs have affected the rez in a big way.”

Charlie’s voice followed her. “I ran into Joshua. That’s quite a shiner he’s got. He said he punched out a guy who called his sister a whore. Guy told him she’d been working someplace. But I forget where.”

Lola turned around. Charlie had a hand to his head, as though trying to remember. “Wait. It’s coming to me. The patch. What a coincidence.”

“Yes, it is. And that’s all it is.”

Lola sat on the bed and looked at the clock. It was eleven. The hours before her departure stretched dark and interminable. She never slept well the night before heading out on a story; preferred, in fact, to leave the night before and drive through until morning. But when she’d said as much to Charlie, he’d threatened to report her to a suicide hotline. “Bad enough you’ve got almost no experience driving in this kind of weather and now you want to try it at night? Do you want to end up like Joshua’s sister? Or that poor trucker?”

Lola had to concede the point. She’d already experienced too many days in which even the short commute between the newspaper and Charlie’s small ranch just outside town turned eerie and unrecognizable in wind-driven snow. “Fine. Come to bed.” She switched off the overheard light, and wet her fingers and framed the candle flame between them, counting down and smiling as the fire licked at her calluses before she pinched it out.

Charlie walked to the window and scraped at the icy ferns patterning its surface. “Stars are out. If it’s clear, it’ll be even colder. Lola, I need you to promise you’ll stick to the one story. If this thing with Joshua’s sister turns into a criminal investigation, you could really screw things up by poking around the way I know you like to do. You could wreck the investigation and you could wreck things for us, too.”

The investigation into Judith’s death? Or was Charlie also talking about the missing girls? Lola started to ask, but thought the better of it. She slid under the covers and peeled out of her clothes and kicked them onto the floor. Of course it had crossed her mind that her trip might provide some information about Judith and the girls. Even if she couldn’t do the story herself, she relished the thought of presenting her gleanings to Jan. But she’d be damned if she’d admit as much to Charlie. “Do you take me for a fool?”

Bub leapt onto the bed and burrowed beside her. Charlie’s voice rang emphatic in the darkness. “Promise.”

Lola crossed her fingers beneath the blankets.

“I promise.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

L
ola woke at midnight, at two, at three. At four, she gave up trying to sleep and lay sandwiched between Charlie and Bub, stiff with impatience. Dawn was hours away. Twilight would arrive too quickly behind it, grey at four in the afternoon, full black by five. Lola had long used her nighttime sleeplessness to good effect, making mental lists of questions she’d ask in coming interviews. But as much as she tried to focus on the men from the reservation, her mind strayed to the missing girls. In her experience, men who went walkabout tended to show up eventually, sometimes worse for the wear, but not infrequently better. It was different for women, especially young ones. Predators homed in on them like wild dogs to scraps of raw meat, sniffing out their need and vulnerability. Too many ended up like Judith. The lucky ones lived. Although, given what some of the survivors endured, Lola thought that maybe “luck” wasn’t the right term.

“Did the
Express
ever write about any of those girls who disappeared?” she’d asked Jan.

“No.” Jan avoided Lola’s eyes. “People go missing, they turn up. We’d go crazy if we tracked every single one of those stories.”

“But they never turned up.”

“Right.” Spoken past a larger-than-usual section of braid.

“No story even after the third or fourth girl? Or the fifth?”

“Nobody would talk.”

Jan’s misery was so obvious Lola almost felt sorry for her. Of course they wouldn’t talk. Leaving the reservation was, for all practical purposes, a nonexistent problem. The bigger issue usually involved people coming back. No matter how generous the academic scholarship to the University of Montana—or Dartmouth, or Harvard—no matter how high a college basketball profile, no matter how sweet the offer of full partner in the big-city law firm, the pull of home too often proved more powerful. There was some shame in that, inflicted mostly by the white world, but pride, too. What family wouldn’t luxuriate in drawing their own back home again? A dynamic that made a true disappearance unimaginable, and airing it in the press unthinkable.

Tina’s fingers had rattled over her keyboard, loud in the silence. Lola resisted an impulse to stand and look over Tina’s shoulder, to confirm her suspicion that nothing but rows of x’s marched across the screen as Tina tried to mask the fact that she was once again eavesdropping. “Roy deRoche seems to think those girls are dead,” Lola said.

Tina dropped all pretense of work and spun around in her chair. “Or not. You yourselves said how hard it is to disappear a body. Let alone several bodies. You told me. All of you. So they could still be alive.” Her soft voice shook with the boldness of the accusation.

When Tina first started working at the
Express
, so nervous she fairly trembled as she walked through the door each day, Lola and Jorkki—and even Jan despite her relatively short tenure in the newspaper business—had treated her to a friendly hazing, regaling her with gruesome stories from their years in the business, in which abortive attempts to hide bodies figured prominently. Mary Alice’s murder the previous summer had been the only one in the county in forty years, but Montana’s other fifty-five counties provided plenty of fodder. Even if
Express
reporters hadn’t actually covered those killings, they pored over the details in preparation for the day someone in Magpie went homicidal—and creative.

“No matter how well people plan a murder, they always seem to forget the fact that there’ll be a body to deal with afterward. Forget wood chippers. Bone fragments and DNA from here to Sunday,” Jorkki advised.

“Same for garbage trucks,” said Jan. “They can smash the junk from your kitchen trashcan, but a dead person just ends up in big chunks.”

Lola’s own contributions harkened to Baltimore, or as she had described it to Tina, “the town where nobody ever reported a bad smell.”

“People were forever shoving bodies into closets or under the bed or some such, and just leaving them there. Somebody would finally find them and all the neighbors would say, ‘We thought a mouse had died in the walls.’ ”

Nothing, of course, could fully prepare Tina for the day when she’d cover one of those stories on her own. But she’d learn to turn it into a tale later, to rely on the fiction that a good barroom recounting could stave off the shock and horror of those initial facts.

Now Lola shifted uneasily beside Charlie, wondering if Tina had thought of the missing girls—she’d grown up with them, after all—and despite her defiance on their behalf, wondered if her friends had ended up as nothing more than fragments in a DNA lab somewhere. Lola rued her own part in planting such images in Tina’s head. She checked the bedside clock again. No matter how she timed it, she’d drive a significant part of the way to the oil patch in the dark. Better to make that part early, given that the truck traffic would only worsen the closer she got to the patch. She moved her leg experimentally and Bub jumped to his feet, instantly alert. Charlie stirred and flung an arm around her. There’d be no sneaking out of bed without waking him. She pictured his arm across her small, pale breasts. When she’d first met him, she’d thought him tanned by the sun that shone as fiercely in the summer as the winds blew in the winter. His last name came by way of earlier generations of French fur trappers who married Indian women, but his mother was Blackfeet, mostly, the algorithms of blood quantum qualifying him for tribal enrollment. For his children to meet the quantum, though, he’d be best off marrying within the tribe. Which Jan had pointed out to Lola.