by Gwen Florio
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
“Why 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
Lola 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.
“Bad enough you slept with a source,” she’d said, speaking over Lola’s protestation that she hadn’t even been working for the Express when she’d started seeing Charlie. “But no white woman has a future with that guy. You’re just asking to get hurt.”
“Jesus, Jan. Nobody’s getting hurt, and for sure nobody’s having kids. It’s just a good time.”
Jan spoke with the authority of someone raised in a small town where secrets were nonexistent. “I know a whole lot of babies who started out as a good time. I hope you two are taking precautions.”
Lola’s face had grown warm, as much from pride as embarrassment. She’d held several friends’ hands through any number of pregnancy scares, had driven more than one to a clinic, trying to ignore their obvious resentment at her own clockwork biology that was, apparently, foolproof. Now, she checked a mental calendar, sighed, then nudged Charlie. He woke instantly, as fully alert upon waking as he was oblivious while asleep. Alert, and ready, too. “Condom,” she whispered, as he pulled her to him. The clock said five. Lola wound her arms around him, almost as grateful for the distraction of lovemaking as she was for the fact that she’d be on the road minutes after they’d finished.
THE THERMOS rolled from atop the pile of gear in Lola’s arms and clanged against the frozen ground. Lola retrieved it and shook it, relieved not to hear the rattle of a shattered liner.
“Lucky.” The whisper floated toward her through the darkness.
Lola spun around, almost dropping the Thermos again. “Joshua! What are you doing here?”
Joshua stepped from the truck’s shadow. “Waiting for you. About an hour now. Mind if I have some of that coffee? I’m near froze.”
Lola handed him the Thermos. He unscrewed the top and poured. The coffee gurgled and steamed. “God, that’s good. I didn’t think you’d ever come out.”
A whicker sounded from the direction of the barn. A spotted horse, curious about the hushed commotion, ambled through the open door and stretched his neck over the fence, seeking the packets of sugar Lola usually filched from the café for him. Lola waved him away. “Go back inside, Spot.” The Appaloosa, like Bub, had been Mary Alice’s. Lola had given him to Charlie after Mary Alice’s death, then had ended up with him, anyway. She’d come to learn that his curiosity was insatiable. She glanced toward the house, where Charlie was cleaning up after the breakfast he’d insisted upon making. The last thing she needed was for Spot to neigh and draw Charlie to a window, where he could see her talking with Joshua.
“How’d you get here? I didn’t hear anything,” she said to Joshua.
“OIT.”
“What?”
“Old Indian Trick. We’re always creeping up on you white people in our moccasins.”
“Hah.” Indian people were unrelenting jokesters, but Lola never knew when it was appropriate for a white person to laugh. She usually settled for the same forced smile she now turned upon Joshua, hoping he hadn’t noticed that she’d actually glanced toward his feet to ensure he was wearing boots. “Seriously, how? And why?”
“Heard you were leaving this morning for Dakota.”
Of course he had. Lola had mixed feelings about the gossip in Magpie, which was nearly as acc
urate as it was widespread. As a reporter, it was a great help. But she didn’t like being the subject.
“When did Dakota lose the North?”
Joshua ignored the question. “I parked down around the bend and walked up here. I wanted to talk to you before you headed out.” In the harsh black and white of moonlight, his injuries looked even worse, the swollen jaw leaping to prominence, the space gaping darkly where his tooth had been, eyes cavernous and haunted.
“About your sister,” Lola said, “Charlie already told me not to go asking about her. Or those other girls, either.”
Joshua’s mouth stretched into a grotesque semblance of a smile. “But you will, anyway.”
“Maybe.”
He reached for the Thermos, took another swig. “Look. I thought about what you said. About the other girls. I don’t care if it ends up in a story or not. I just want to know what happened to my sister. And if knowing what happened to her helps find out about them, too, maybe that’s a good thing, closure or no closure.”
Lola thought of the man in the café, his ugly words about Judith. It was entirely possible, she thought, that Judith had endured worse abuse than the simple beating the man had delivered to Joshua, something so cruel as to make fleeing into a blizzard in street clothes seem the only way out. There were the track marks, the brand. The autopsy report still hadn’t been released. She confessed her reluctant second thoughts to Joshua. “Are you sure you want to know the details?”
The front door opened. Lola turned to see Charlie silhouetted in the doorway. A whisper barely reached her ears.
“Disappearing now. Another OIT. And, yes. I’m sure.”
“COULDN’T WAIT to hit the coffee?” Charlie shook the half-empty Thermos. “I can’t believe I’m letting you take it. I’ve had that Thermos since I was a boy.” He handed Lola her duffel bag. She tossed it into the space behind the pickup’s seats. The moon was still high, its silver light so bright that Charlie hadn’t bothered to turn on the outside light. He looked toward the horse. “Nice of Spot to see you off.”
