by Gwen Florio
“Is that coffee?” The words emerged in a croak.
A chuckle. “Thought that might get your attention.”
Her eyelids eased up by degrees. Then slammed back down. The desert sunlight streamed into the room. Homesickness wrapped Lola. Montana’s mornings started gray and cool, easing a person mercifully into the day, nothing like this face-slap of glare and heat. She tried again, sitting up, slitting her eyes, and reaching for the cup. Charlie let her have it, but he kept his hands wrapped around hers lest she spill it. She sipped and sipped, and then, as it cooled, inhaled the rest in long gulps. “What time is it?”
“Nearly nine. The meeting with the mine honchos is at noon. I thought you might want to go.”
“Where’s Margaret?”
“She and Juliana are out with that pony.”
Coffee splashed across the bedspread. Lola was on her feet, heading for the door. “Are you crazy?”
Charlie pulled her back. “Wait. I’m not crazy. They’re not riding him anywhere. They’re braiding his mane and tail or some such, trying to turn a desert plug into some sort of East Coast show pony. Naomi’s with them.”
Lola tried to free herself. “I was with them, and look what happened.”
Charlie led her to a chair and eased her into it. “He’s tied up to one of the shade house supports. Anybody wanted to snatch them, he’d have to come right up to the house.” He let go of her, picked up the mug and set it on the nightstand, then stripped the coffee-soaked spread from the bed. “We’ll need to wash this.”
“Right. Sorry.” Lola took a breath and tried to talk sense into herself. “Besides, they’ve still got Thomas, right? Where did they hold him? Is there a reservation jail or does he have to go to a federal prison while they prepare the charges?”
The spread slipped from Charlie’s hands, pooling around his feet. He kicked it aside, knelt before her, and took her hands. “About that. Lola, what made you so sure it was Thomas who kidnapped you?”
Lola pulled away. “Why?”
“Seriously. I want to know.”
“Talk to your cop friends. I told them yesterday. Again and again.” She went over it anyway, the wheezing breath, the noisy car, the general size and shape of the man who’d clobbered her. She told him, at long last, about Canyon Man, trying not to see the effort it cost him to bite back a lecture. And the circumstantial stuff—the bookbag, the key chain, the way Thomas always seemed to be around whenever bad things happened. The way he came and went at night. “No doubt in my mind. None whatever.”
“But you never saw the man who kidnapped you. Never saw his face. What about his voice? Did you recognize that?”
Lola pressed her back hard against the chair, away from her husband-turned-interrogator. In the brief time she’d known him, Thomas had barely said two words in her presence. She might not recognize his voice. But that didn’t matter. Nor that she’d never seen her abductor’s face. “I never needed to. I know it was him.”
“Lola.”
“Stop saying that.” He almost never called her by name. It was unsettling. She tried to decipher his expression. The man could have played poker with the best. But something flickered at the corners of his eyes, pulled his mouth askew. Pity?
“Here’s the thing. There’s an alibi. I didn’t want to tell you yesterday—you were upset enough as it is.”
“What alibi?” Lola shoved herself out of the chair, forcing Charlie back on his heels.
He regained his balance and stood beside her. “He was here when you got kidnapped.”
Lola paced away from him. “No, he wasn’t. He was dragging me through the desert, forcing me up some stupid ladder. Hitting me. Holding a gun on me. Goddammit, Charlie. How can you even believe him when he says that? He wasn’t here. He was with me.”
Charlie’s head wagged back and forth, regular as a metronome. “He was here. He got here not long after you went out with the girls.”
Lola clenched her teeth, balled her hands into fists. “So he wasn’t here when it actually happened. He had time to knock me out and grab me before he showed up at the house. That’s why he let me sit in the car awhile, so that all of you could see him there. Some alibi. I can’t believe the cops let him walk.”
The look she’d seen before passed over his face again, lingering this time. “There’s a witness. Someone was with him when you were taken up to the ruins. No matter how you look at it, the time frame doesn’t work.”
“What witness? Naomi? Edgar? They’d stick up for him no matter what. He’s like family to them.” And I’m not. She bit her lip to keep the bitter words from escaping.
“No. I’m the witness. It was me.”
FORTY-FIVE
It took a while for the adults back at the house to realize she was missing, Charlie said.
“The girls got scared, tried to find you on their own. They thought they’d be in trouble if they came back without you. Thomas came in before they got back. When it got dark, Naomi went out and started calling for them. They came back then. Crying. Shaking. Naomi tried to tell them you’d just gone on a longer run than you’d planned, but we all knew better.”
Lola pictured Margaret’s face and turned away from the image.
“Eddie called the cops. But we didn’t want to wait for them.”
Lola nodded. The police station was miles away. It was the curse of rural life, exacerbated by the reservation’s vast empty stretches—help was never close.
“We all wanted to go out looking. Naomi and Eddie insisted. And no way was I going to sit at home. Margaret needed me, but—”
But I did, too, Lola thought. Charlie’s poker face failed him yet again, his warring distress over his wife and daughter etching deep lines from mouth to chin.
“Where was Thomas?”
“He waited with the girls until the cops came.” He held up his hand. “I already asked. The girls said he was with them the whole time.”
When she was jouncing around in the back of his car.
“I came back when the cops got here. Edgar went back out with them. I wanted to go out again, too. But Margaret was near hysterical, not wanting me out of her sight. So I took the girls with me, and Thomas, too. It was a risk. We might have found you”—Lola watched him struggle with the word dead and lose the fight—“hurt, and I didn’t want the girls to see that. But I knew you didn’t trust him, and I didn’t want him looking for you alone. Just in case.”
By then, she would have been climbing the ladder.
“But.” Lola’s legs, still none too steady after the hours in bed, gave way. She sank into a chair. She took a moment to appreciate the fact that Charlie had taken her distrust of Thomas seriously—so seriously that his actions had ruled out Thomas as a suspect. She’d been so sure. Whoever had knocked her on the head and put her in the trunk had had to carry her across some distance of desert. Thomas was the right size. But so were a lot of other men. But. But.
“I know it’s him,” she said one last time. Her shaking voice betrayed the certainty of the words.
“No,” said Charlie. “You don’t. And give yourself a break. One thing I’ve learned is to give crime victims time. Right after an incident”—he lapsed into cop talk—“people are typically so traumatized they can’t remember details except in bits and pieces. It’ll come back to you gradually, more than you’d like it to. You’ll feed that information to police, and it will help them.”
Stop talking like a cop, Lola wanted to say. Be my husband. She didn’t have to say it.
“You know what worries me more than anything?”
She stood and walked to the window and peered through the blinds, drawn against the sun. “That whoever did this is still out there?”
“That, too.” He bent his head to hers. His lips moved against the tangle of her hair. “You were doing so well. Getting back to your old self. Kicking ass. Being
obnoxious.”
Lola leaned into his embrace. “I’m not obnoxious.”
“Yes, you are. When you’re onto something, you’re like a runaway horse. Nothing can stop you. Don’t lose that again.”
Lola thought back to the hot darkness of the car trunk, the blind swaying trip up the ladder. The gun barrel grinding its perfect circle into the soft flesh beneath her jaw.
“I just want to go home.” The words slipped unbidden, truer than any she’d ever spoken. She braced herself for his disappointment. But he only tightened his embrace, rocking her like a child.
“If that’s what you want, you’ve got it. Now that we’ve got Bub back, there’s no reason not to. You can keep in touch with the cops by phone. I want to go to the meeting. Eddie asked me to sit in. Said maybe that, because I’m not from here, I’d pick up on something that everyone else has missed. But we can pack the truck ahead of time so we can leave right afterward.”
“No!” Maybe Thomas wasn’t the bomber—although Lola wasn’t prepared to accept that. But the meeting was still a target. “Surely you can see that.”
“Lola, every tribal cop, every state trooper, every sheriff’s deputy, every game warden, for God’s sake, is going to be at that meeting. On the entire Navajo Nation, that meeting is the safest place we can be.”
FORTY-SIX
Once again, a standing-room-only meeting, the best seats reserved for elders. Even Betty Begay was there, pale and shrunken, helped to her seat by a well-dressed woman Lola recognized from the photo in the hogan as her daughter.
Cops from various agencies, just as Charlie had promised, lined the walls and manned the metal detectors set up at all of the entrances to the gym. Lola’s theory about Thomas might have fallen flat, but the authorities weren’t taking any chances with the meeting, not with the bomber still at large. In the press corral, reporters tried to worm between the bulky TV cameras that had appropriated much of the first row, blocking the view for hapless latecomers. Good luck, Lola thought. She’d long had a theory that cameramen spent their downtime playing rugby, so adept were they with rough elbow jabs and toe-crushing missteps. “Oh, was that your foot?” Not apologizing, not ever.
Lola saw Thomas across the room. She stiffened. His gaze flicked her way and slid past. Coward, she thought.
“Ow, Mommy.” She sat between the girls, holding their hands. She loosened her grip, hoping Juliana hadn’t seen Thomas. Too late. Juliana jumped to her feet and waved. “Over here!”
Lola was glad when Thomas opted to stay put. She didn’t trust herself not to kill him in front of a roomful of witnesses. Okay, killing him might have been an overreaction. Punch him, maybe. Right in his smug, not-in-jail face. She remained certain that somehow, he was involved. Maybe he had an accomplice. And with that thought, the memories—kept at bay by the night’s sleeping pill/painkiller cocktail—asserted themselves yet again, circling her like feral creatures. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the fact of home. The truck sat parked in the shade a couple of blocks away, windows cranked down, Bub snoozing in the front seat, his filled water dish on the floor. The gas tank was full, their duffel bags stacked atop one another next to Margaret’s seat in the back. They’d be in the truck within the hour, Lola told herself, speeding home. For once, the thought of Charlie’s balls-to-the-wall style of driving appealed to her.
Then she factored in Indian time and revised her estimate to two hours. Or even three. As impatient as she was to hit the road, she relished the idea of the Conrad Coal honchos fidgeting, looking at their chunky status watches, wondering about the apparent lack of urgency for the matter that had pulled them away from their Very Important Jobs.
This meeting involved a level of brass far shinier than that of Kerns. Given that one of their own, or at least his house, had been attacked, Kerns’s overlords were on hand to try to soothe the restive crowd filling the gym. Lola had seen them earlier, three well-fed men in the inevitable suits, heading through the halls toward the classroom where Kerns and Edgar, with Charlie sitting in as a courtesy, would brief them on the most recent developments. Naomi would listen in as part of a tribal delegation. She’d swished out of the house that morning armored in a suit of her own, the skirt’s linen pleats miraculously wrinkle-free, her legs gleaming in nylons, slender feet encased in pumps of buttery black leather that matched the briefcase swinging from her manicured hand. Just looking at her had made Lola’s legs and feet itch. Her own wardrobe may have been short on style, if not lacking it entirely, but at least it allowed her to move in comfort.
She wondered how the executives would spin things when they came to the gym for their public presentation. Maybe, with more finesse than Kerns, they’d try to pin the blame on the tribe, all the while thankful that the bombings would give them an excuse to shut down a failing operation. The company might cut its losses if it were seen as shuttering the mine under threat of ecoterrorism, doing the responsible thing to protect its employees. That was the theory Lola had espoused to the cops and the FBI. They had, she’d noted with satisfaction, given it more credence than Charlie. Which didn’t mean they’d bought it entirely.
“Mines fail all the time,” one of them told her. “The gold, or silver, or coal—eventually it runs out. It’s the nature of the business. You’re from Montana. Ever been to Butte?”
Lola had, in fact, visited the city whose copper mine had once been known as the Richest Hill on Earth, and whose frenetic extraction operations had made it one of the biggest cities west of the Mississippi, drawing people from around the world desperate for the high wages that accompanied the dangerous and often deadly work of prying the copper free from the surrounding granite. But the mine finally went bust and Butte was now a fraction of its former size, its once-bustling streets empty but for windblown trash, the grand brick buildings moldering into decay. Now the only thing “biggest” about Butte was the toxic waste site in an old mining pit gouged into the side of a hill above town, its slowly rising waters owing their ghastly shade of green to a mix of heavy metals.
Butte in its heyday had featured death aplenty, with recalcitrant unions eternally at war with moguls whose gimlet gaze focused on profits, profits, profits, and damn those troublemakers in the way. But once the copper was exhausted, they’d simply pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere. Lola’s mind ticked along, likening that situation to the one at hand. Apples and oranges, she told herself. Copper versus coal, 1900s versus the new millennium. Still. While it made sense for Conrad Coal to seize upon the face-saving opportunity for closing the mine due to the attacks, it made no sense whatsoever for anyone from the company to have instigated them. Which left her … “Square One,” she murmured.
Yet again, she ran the possibilities.
Rule out Thomas, she commanded herself, even as her instincts balked. Cross him off the list and see who rises to the top.
Edgar … even though the reluctant, logical part of her brain told her it was just because she didn’t like the man. Edgar had so transparently wanted her gone. But no matter how she took it into her hands and twisted and turned it, looking at it from every angle, Edgar’s objections had been to her, not to the mine. Hurting the mine, after all, would hurt his own livelihood. Unless going after the mine was a twisted way to win Naomi’s approval.
Lola rubbed the back of her head, still tender and swollen from the blow that had knocked her out. But the pain was between her eyes, the product of too many things making too little sense. Too many buts, she thought. She remembered the shade house conversation in which Edgar had revealed that Naomi had pushed him to work for the mine. “Keep your enemies close,” he said Naomi had advised him.
Then they’d argued idly about how the saying went: Was it friends close and enemies closer? Or the other way around? “Friends closer,” Naomi had insisted with a Mona Lisa smile.
Naomi. Lola dutifully ran through the reasons even as she mentally checked Naomi o
ff her list yet again. Motive: Sure—the mesa. Means: None that particularly distinguished her from the next person. Anyone could learn the basics of bomb making in just a few hours on the Internet, Lola knew. Successfully building one was an entirely different proposition. Besides, the person who’d accosted her in Antelope Canyon had been male, and the person who’d kidnapped her had been too, she thought. The old reminder, a favorite of editors—assume makes an ass out of u and me—nudged at her. She had no idea who’d hit her that night. But the strength required to haul her unconscious body across the desert and into a car required someone who was stronger and bigger than she was, and she wasn’t a small woman.
Her suspicions returned insistently to Thomas even in the face of the most convincing evidence of all: Charlie’s word. The car had to have been close by, as Thomas’s had been. Maybe he did have an accomplice. Maybe he’d knocked her on the head, dragged her into the car, and then turned her over to someone else to take to the ruins while he went back to the house to establish his goddamn alibi, later going back out with Charlie and the girls while Edgar rode with the tribal police.
Naomi, according to Charlie, had stayed home to work the phones. Lola’s mind, wandering freely, jerked to a halt. She tried to recall the voice of the person who’d urged her up the ladder. It had been low, throaty, indistinct, as though muffled by a bandana. But the person would have had to be strong enough to haul her out of the trunk. Lola’s brain snagged on another memory. The person had loosened her bonds while she was still in the trunk. She’d climbed out by herself. And the person had never touched her with anything other than the gun. She had no idea whether the person who’d urged her so roughly up the ladder was male or female, short or tall, muscular or frail.
Again, her mind caught upon a detail. The person was strong, had rappelled down the side of the cliff before Lola could even make a futile grab at the rope. She went back over everything the person had said, searching for Naomi’s voice, not finding it, seeking any gleanings of information.
