Disgraced (23 page)

THIRTY-SIX

Margaret was in Charlie's
arms as soon as he opened the door, the horn beeping as she wriggled onto his lap. They sat in the car a long time. Lola could hear them talking, Margaret's high, excited tones, Charlie's low rumble, but couldn't make out the words. She waited on the porch with Delbert and Pal, each shooting sidelong glances her way.

Charlie finally detached himself from the seat belt, if not from Margaret's embrace. He approached slowly. Margaret still exuded joy, but Charlie's face telegraphed low expectations. Lola tried to see the group on the porch as he saw them—an elderly, shirtless Indian man. A near-bald young white woman, her forearm bare and bleeding. And Lola herself. She touched her hand to her face. Gooey bits of strawberry still lingered around her hairline. Delbert's shirt hung nearly to her knees, but failed to cover the streaks of strawberry and fast-browning blood on her jeans.

“Hey, Charlie.” Lola dropped introductions into the silence. Charlie touched his fingertips to Delbert's, then switched to a whiteman-style grip for Pal. He turned back to Lola. “Anybody going to offer me some coffee?” In a different tone, it could have been a routine question. The way Charlie said it, it was a dare. A gust of wind kicked up some grit and carried the faint rise and fall of sirens toward them.

“Not a good idea,” said Lola. She moved so that she was between him and the front door. He handed Margaret off to Pal and brushed past her. Pal thrust Margaret into Delbert's arms and followed them both inside. Charlie stopped and stood unmoving as the sound of sirens grew and grew, filling the air around them, drowning out even the anguished moans from the man on the floor.

In the end, Lola never had to explain anything directly to Charlie. He introduced himself as a sheriff from Montana, mumbling the part about his relationship to Lola, and that was all it took for the ranks of tribal cops and deputies and EMTs and a late-arriving FBI man to bring him into their circle as they questioned Lola and Pal. Delbert was allowed to stand off to one side with Margaret and Bub, as well as Dave Sparks, who had followed entirely too closely the parade of cruisers. Why oh why, Lola wondered, had Dave picked this particular moment to get aggressive about journalism? She belatedly decided she'd liked him better as a slacker. Dave pointed his Leica at her. She forced herself to stare into the lens. She would never, she vowed, be that person ducking away from the camera, hand up to shield her face.

“Lola,” he called. “What's going on here?”

Charlie, in full sheriff mode, stepped between them. “Who are you? You know this is a crime scene, right?”

Dave introduced himself. Lola saw Charlie register the name, knew full well he had the kind of steel-trap mind that would have held on to Margaret's days-old mention of “Mommy's friend, Dave,” as well as Lola's own dismissive postscript that Dave was “just another reporter.”

“No interviews, not now. They're still in the middle of their investigation. And no pictures of the child,” Charlie warned. “She wasn't involved.” Margaret flapped a wan hand at Dave. Charlie turned back to Lola. Earlier, he'd looked as angry as she'd ever seen him. Now she realized that was just a warm-up.

“Charlie—” she started. Something behind her snagged his attention. They were bringing Skiff out of the house. Lola and Charlie moved toward Margaret to shield her from the sight. Charlie got there first. His look warned Lola away. Dave elbowed past her, shooting rapid-fire photos as the EMTs maneuvered the gurney down the steps. The ambulance brapped its siren, warming up for its screaming mission to Casper where, no doubt, Skiff would be loaded onto a med-evac flight bound for Seattle in a d
é
j
à
-vu of the trip made by Patrick Sounding Sides after his beating by T-Squared. A tribal cop climbed into the ambulance with the EMTs, on the off chance that Skiff might summon something resembling speech on the way. A bit of luck, that, Lola thought. No matter what Skiff said, if he said anything at all, the tribal cop soon would know Pal's version of events, starting with the allegation that Skiff had killed one of the tribe's own months earlier in Afghanistan.

“All the background you need is right here,” Lola had told the cops. “Look. I wrote a story about it.” She worked at her phone, typing in the address for InDepth.org. Her story popped up on the screen, photos of Pal and Skiff prominent amid the initial lines of type.

“Let me have that.” A cop reached for the phone.

“Why don't I just email it to you? Then you can forward it to all of these folks. It's got documents, everything.”

Charlie, who'd listened without speaking, spoke up now. “You wrote a story? On your furlough?”

“Not for the
Express
. For a website.” Lola felt another demerit land in the column against her.

“Come on, Margaret.” Charlie took his daughter's hand. “Let's wait in the car. I've heard enough here.”

Enough, Lola thought, to know she'd deceived him about her reasons for staying in Wyoming. To know she'd also lied about working instead of being on vacation. Both of those things were, possibly, forgivable. But he'd seen the unmistakable evidence sprawled on the kitchen floor that she'd put his child at risk, not just forgetting-to-hold-hands-across-the-street peril, but true, mortal danger.

Which meant that, as uncomfortable as the questioning from the cops, it was nothing compared to what she was going to face later from Charlie.

Later came too soon. The evidence technicians packed up their gear and collected their evidence bags. Officers and deputies folded notebooks and put them away. They pressed business cards into her hand. “We'll be in touch.” A promise, not a courtesy. “Don't go anywhere for a couple of days. Not without checking in with us.”

Charlie waited beside his car until the last left. “I'm taking Margaret to town,” he said. “Bub, too. We'll stay in a motel. The sooner we get her away from here, the better.” He whistled to Bub. The dog hesitated and looked at Lola. She nodded permission and he limped behind Charlie, glancing over his shoulder every few steps, waiting for her to follow.

What about me? Lola couldn't figure out a way to ask without sounding plaintive. She liked dealing from a position of strength. Forget asking, she thought. Thirty only had two motels. She could find him easily enough. “I'll be down later,” she called. Not giving him a choice about it. Besides, she needed time to update the editors at InDepth.org about the story. “We'll talk then.”

Charlie started the car and rolled down the window. He started to say something, but bit it short. They'd always tried not to fight in front of Margaret. “Suit yourself,” he said.

Lola allowed herself a moment of self-pity, bitter and satisfying in its predictability. She decided it was a good thing his proposal was likely off the table. As uncomfortable as it had made her, that sort of discomfort paled beside the task of explaining to him how a story, even for a second, had trumped Margaret's safety.

“Speaking of the story,” she reminded herself. She couldn't put it off any longer. She dialed the number for InDepth.org. The editor answered on the first ring. “Lola!” She held the phone away from her ear as he enthused about the response to the story, the comments and the web traffic it had engendered. “It's blowing up,” he said. “Great job.”

She waited for his enthusiasm to wind down. Finally, silence. She took a breath and lobbed the grenade. “There's been a development.”

By the time she clicked off her phone, the Winds sat in black judgment against a violet sky. The air wrapped her in gooseflesh. Pal waited on the porch steps, a quilt folded around her shoulders, another in her lap. Lola dropped beside her and took the second quilt, welcoming its embrace. The porch light threw a pale circle onto the dirt and sage. Something stirred at its edge, low and sinuous. A snake curved its way toward the warmth beneath the house. Pal leaned down and picked up a handful of pebbles and tossed them. The snake coiled tight and shook its rattles. “Get out of here,” Pal said. “Where's that chicken when we need her?”

“Want me to get the shovel?” Lola made an offer she wasn't sure she could fulfill. Her weariness ran bone-deep. She remembered when she'd tried to explain Pal's PTSD to Margaret. “It hurts her soul.” Her own soul felt as though it had been battered into something she barely recognized. She'd expected Pal to kill Skiff, and had done nothing to stop her. And if Pal had killed him, Lola had been prepared to leave that detail out of the story. The latter had been unthinkable—except that, of course, she'd thought it anyway.

At least the story was out of her hands, safe from her worst impulses. The editor at InDepth had responded exactly as he should have when she'd told him of the day's events. First, he'd cursed. Then he'd cursed some more. “We'll put somebody else on it. You can't be your own subject. But you already know that.”

“Of course I do,” she'd said. “Of course.” Needing to repeat it until she steered herself back on course. The effort drained her. The shovel, propped against a wall not five feet behind her, might as well have been miles away. The snake lowered its head and slid a foot closer to the house. Lola bent and felt about on the ground until she found a stone about the size of a walnut. She'd been a pitcher on her college softball team. The stone had real velocity behind it when it struck the snake's body. This time, it didn't bother with the coil-and-hiss routine, but slithered off into the sagebrush with a flick of its too-long tail.

“Cool.” It was the first time Lola had heard anything resembling appreciation in Pal's voice.

“Not really.” Years earlier, Lola had turned that same skill on a man who was trying to kill her. The object she'd thrown had hit his horse. Both man and horse had died in the resulting fall. At least she hadn't seen their bodies. She thought of Skiff, writhing on the floor. “Maybe I should stop throwing things at people.”

Pal drew her arm back and slapped Lola.

Lola drew back, hand to cheek. It hurt. A lot. “What was that for?”

“You did what you had to do. Skiff was like that snake. Turn your back on him for a minute and he'd have killed us both. And maybe Margaret, too.”

Lola's heart lurched.

Pal was on her feet, hands on hips. “You had no problem telling me to go ahead and file my complaint, even though you and I both know exactly what sort of hell I'll be going through as a result. You thought I was tough enough to take it. I think you're tough enough to take this. Cowboy up, sissy.”

“Sissy?” Something bubbled up in Lola's chest, pushing past the stone there. Her shoulders shook with the force of it. To her absolute and utter shock, it escaped as laughter, incredulous at first, gaining
strength, turning into whoops that bent her double. “Sissy?” she gasped past it before it overtook her again.

The next time she came up for air, she saw Pal on the ground, contorted in laughter of her own. She fell beside her, letting mirth chase the bad spirits from her body and, yes, her soul, leaving her limp and cleansed and, finally, quiet. Beside her, Pal sat up.

“All better?”

Lola tilted her head back. The upside-down peaks of the Winds were visible, just, a jagged inky line against a charcoal sky. “Hell, no. Not by a long shot. But getting there.”

“Good. Then it's time for you to pick yourself up and go to Charlie.”

A moment earlier, the laughter had still lingered within Lola, pushing against her chest, tugging at her lips, threatening to burst free again. Now it vanished. Lola tried to coax it back, if not the laughter itself, at least the lightness.

Too late. It was gone.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Charlie had bypassed the
low-end chain motel on the Thirty's eastern edge for the old-fashioned motor court on the west end of town, hard by the river. Its rooms, each with a postage-stamp concrete patio and two plastic chairs, faced the water. Flowers bobbed in boxes below the windows, their colors muted in the light that shone above each room's entrance.

Charlie opened the door before Lola could knock. “Heard somebody coming,” he said. “Figured it was you.”

Lola started to enter the room, but he shook his head and put his finger to his lips. “She's asleep.” He pushed one of the chairs toward her. Lola sat. The plastic was cold through her clothing. She was glad she'd donned a sweatshirt before heading into town. She tucked her hands into its pouch. Charlie lowered himself into the chair beside her and tipped it back against the wall. The river slid past, whispering over rocks, eddying among the grasses in the shallows. It glinted like liquid metal in the moonlight. A damn shame, Lola thought, that Charlie had chosen such a pretty spot to end things. She'd have preferred the chilly anonymity of the chain motel.

Charlie waited. That old trick. Thinking she'd crack and speak first. He could just think again. Lola closed her eyes and let her breathing slow. She had a few tricks of her own, one of them an ability to catnap when stressed. She feigned sleep and then it arrived, fast and fitful, a shallow dip below the surface, just deep enough to return her to the kitchen and the moment when her hands opened, launching the pot. Crunching, splashing sounds. A scream. Glass breaking. Thud of body to floor.

“Lola.” A hand on her arm. “Wake up.”

Lola surfaced with a gasp. Skiff vanished. Charlie's face hovered over hers, concern softening his features. “God,” Lola breathed. “Thank you.” She wanted to pull him closer, to soak in the strength that, much as she refused to admit it, had sustained her these last years. He withdrew to his own chair, his face once again set in lines of implacable anger.

“You want to tell me what happened out here? Start at the beginning. Don't even think about leaving anything out.”

Lola left some things out anyway; mainly, the dalliance with Dave. She could only handle so much self-destruction. She wasn't suicidal.

“Honestly, we thought we were safe,” she said at the end, her voice hoarse with the effort of prolonged whispering. “The story was going online. You were on your way. We had no way of knowing his friend was hanging out with that girl from the rez.”

“But he'd chased you. Nearly ran you off the road. And you didn't even call the cops when you realized it was him.” Each word dropped distinct and heavy onto a scale already lopsided with her failings.

Because when she'd told Pal about how Skiff had chased her, Pal finally decided to talk. To have called the sheriff at that moment might have given Pal time to change her mind. Lola knew better than to say those things aloud. It didn't matter.

“You and your stories. They'll always come first.”

“It was a hell of a story.” The word slipped unbidden from her lips, words that could only make him angrier. But it was the truth. “A
hell
of a story,” she repeated. “Even without what it turned out to be. Those deaths, those arrests, those kids who left Wyoming whole and came back dead or broken inside. It's happening all over the country and nobody has to think too much about it because our fabulous all-volunteer military is filled with people from rural areas or inner cities, and nobody gives a rat's ass about what happens to people in those places.”

Charlie started to say something but Lola bulled right over it. “And then Pal. Do you know how many thousands, how many tens of thousands, of women and some men, too, are assaulted in the military? And in this case, we're not just talking assault, but murder. Those assholes were going to get away with everything. But she stood up to them. And I helped her do it. That's what I do, Charlie. Sometimes it's dangerous—not nearly as dangerous as what Pal did, but still. It's dangerous the way your work is sometimes dangerous, too, but you don't see me going all whiney and crybaby about how you should stop. How many times have you gotten up from the dinner table when a call came in? What about Margaret's birthday last year? You left her party because of—what? A goddamn truck wreck?”

Charlie's protest turned defensive. “A truck that spilled steers all over the road. And I didn't have a choice. I'm the only law in the county outside the rez. But you have a choice. There's other reporters out there.”

Lola had already pounced. Now she dug in her claws. “But it was my story. I don't give away my stories, Charlie. Just like you don't give away your cases. This is who I am. Just like the Becker Babes are who they are.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. If you hadn't figured all of that out after six years, then you had no business asking me to marry you.”

Lola rose from her chair. She stood over him, no longer bothering to whisper. “And you have no business implying I'm a bad mother, either. I'm a good reporter and I'm a good mother. The two aren't mutually exclusive, just like being a good sheriff who's on call around the clock doesn't mean you're a bad father.”

Charlie tried to interject something. Lola held up her hand to stop him. “No. This whole proposal thing has been your show from the start. Maybe I'll marry you someday.” Lola thought about the marshmallow dress. The sticky makeup. “Maybe not. But for sure, it's not going to be because you bullied me into it. And if this means ending things between us, so be it.”

The words hung there, as much of a surprise to Lola as they no doubt were for Charlie. Beyond them, an immense blackness, populated by specters of separate homes, shared-custody arrangements, awkward social situations involving extended family and Charlie with a new girlfriend hanging on his arm. Lola wanted to shove past Charlie into the room, take Margaret and flee with her into the night. Life without Charlie, she could handle. Maybe. Life without Margaret, even part of the time? Incomprehensible. But they'd arrived at this point, and there was no turning back.

Charlie pushed himself slowly from the chair, only inches away from her when he stood, close enough for her to feel the warmth of his body. She leaned in. He held her so close that the buttons on his shirt mashed into her cheek.

“Maybe you're bluffing, Lola. I know how you like to do that. It's how you get half your stories. Well, I'm calling your bluff. The proposal goes. Forget I mentioned it. But I hope you stay.”