by Gwen Florio
“What do you mean?” Each word distinct, bitten off. Not so much as a glance her way.
“Jan?” It would be just like Jan, she thought. Give the women enough of a head start toward Burnt Creek, then make a surreptitious call to Charlie, maybe while they made a rest stop. Jan would have wanted the law on hand to deal with the two hundred ways the women’s plan might have gone awry, not to mention the fact that Charlie’s presence would mean maximum drama, and an even better story.
“Nobody told me.” Lola flinched at Charlie’s harsh tone. Bub quivered, opened a single sleepy eye, then breathed deeply and fell back asleep.
“Then how did you know to come here?”
“Bub.”
The dog groaned and raised his head, his displeasure clear at being forced to pay attention yet again. Lola stroked him back toward slumber. “What about Bub?”
“I got a call. From a security guard, actually. He said the dog had been hanging around the man camp and he finally caught him. He called you first and then, when he couldn’t raise you, called me.”
That part, at least, made sense, Lola thought. Both their phone numbers were on Bub’s tags.
“So I came out here to pick him up. I knew that if you weren’t with him, something was wrong.” The ice in his voice cracked, betraying the hours of tension.
“But.” Lola struggled to fit the pieces together. “You knew to come to the trailer.”
“I didn’t.” He slammed a fist into the dash. The cruiser swerved. A semi blared its bullfrog horn. Bub was barking before he was fully awake, wobbling on his three legs before finding his balance in Lola’s lap. She steadied him as Charlie straightened the car. She counted to ten—she peeked at Charlie—then to twenty before venturing another question, softening it to a statement just before she spoke.
“You had the siren going when you pulled up. I thought—” She left it to him to fill in the blanks.
The quiver in Charlie’s voice spread to the corners of his mouth. Bub kept a wary eye on him. “It was because of the dog again. When the security guard handed him over to me, he bolted. Ran right through the man camp. I jumped in the car to follow him and put the siren on when he turned a corner. Didn’t want to run over some poor roughneck out for a stroll. Imagine my surprise when I saw Josephine and the rest of them.”
Lola imagined. Chasing a dog through a foreign landscape one minute, coming upon his own people the next. Tiny Alice Kicking Woman moving her frozen feet in intricate dance steps. The long-gone girls, tacitly acknowledged as dead, pouring alive from the trailer. Thor at the door with a gun to Tina’s head. His girlfriend’s voice calling to him from within.
She reached for him. He shuddered away. She dropped her hand.
“We shouldn’t talk until we get back and somebody can take your statement.” He’d regained control of his voice.
Lola matched her own to its flatness. “Fine.” She tried to relax against the seat. It probably wasn’t the best time, she decided, to ask him about the child Charlotte had alluded to, let alone to say anything about Josephine’s impromptu diagnosis of her nausea. She closed her eyes and slid her hand inside her sweater and felt the flatness of her belly and did math in her head. Until she’d started getting sick to her stomach, she’d had none of the usual signs. Josephine was flat wrong, she told herself. There was no way she could be pregnant.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Lola sat on the edge of the tub in Jan’s apartment and stared at mocking blue plus signs, a half-dozen of them. The previous day, she’d driven to all the towns within a fifty-mile radius and bought a pregnancy test from every drugstore or grocery store clerk she didn’t recognize. She’d waited until Jan called an entirely too cheerful good-bye to the neighbor who rented the other half of the bungalow, and then spent hours drinking water and peeing and watching as one “positive” sign after another emerged. Then she simply sat and cursed under her breath.
“Holy shit.” This time, the cursing wasn’t in her head. Jan stood in the doorway of a bathroom so small it was possible to stand in the tub and touch all four walls. Lola grabbed the trash-can and swept the sticks into it. Too late. Jan’s eyebrows climbed high. “Why’d you go and waste all that money on tests? Josephine already called it.”
Lola tried going on the offensive. “What are you doing here?”
“Take it easy. For starters, I live here. Besides, I brought you lunch.” Jan held up a paper bag that wafted scents of grease and burnt meat. With her other hand, she waggled a cup. “Milkshake, too. Figured you needed a calcium boost. Under the circumstances.”
But for a too-lengthy visit to the local clinic to get her broken nose examined and reset, and then her circumnavigation of the county in search of pregnancy tests, Lola had been at Jan’s ever since her return to Burnt Creek two days earlier. Charlie didn’t give her a choice. “Whatever problems you two have, work it out,” he’d said over her protests when he’d pulled up outside Jan’s place. “I can’t have you staying with me until this investigation’s done.”
Now Lola reached for the distraction of food. “I’m starving,” she said around a mouthful of cheeseburger. The next minute found her heaving over the toilet.
“Dammit. I spent good money on that food. Hate to see it go to waste.” Jan reached over Lola and flushed, then took Lola’s place on the edge of the tub and picked up the burger and took a bite. Lola turned away and groaned.
“Do you have to eat that in front of me?”
Jan took another bite. “At least the room’s got the right color scheme.” Jan’s bathroom was from a bygone era, its fixtures powder blue, the tiles pale pink. “Maybe I can hold a baby shower for you in here.”
Lola scooted on her bottom until she was in the hallway, putting a little distance between herself and the smell of food. “I can’t be pregnant.”
Jan nudged the trashcan with her foot. The test sticks rattled within. “All evidence to the contrary.”
“But we always took precautions.”
Jan licked a bit of ketchup from her finger. She crossed her legs and jiggled a cowboy boot. “Always? Every single time?”
“Well. When we needed to.”
Jan pointed a french fry at Lola. “There you have it. Half the girls in my high school class ended up pregnant because they thought they were safe that week. I thought you were smarter than that.”
Lola took a deep breath. In the space of a single split second, her stomach traded queasy for ravenous. “Hand over that milkshake.” She slurped her way to the bottom of the cup. “Did you eat all of the fries?”
“Yes.”
Lola took the bag and ran her finger around the bottom, feeling for fragments. “Were you ever going to tell me about Charlie’s kid?”
Jan nearly lost her balance on the edge of the tub. “What are you talking about?”
Lola wondered how long she’d have to live in Magpie before people stopped treating her like an idiot. “I know about him. Or her. Which is it, anyway? Charlotte told me while I was in Burnt Creek. I can’t believe Charlie never said anything to me.”
Jan wadded up the empty food bag and threw it into the trashcan. “You two need to work on your communication, along with your birth control. But maybe the reason he never said anything is that there is no other kid.”
Lola pushed herself up from the floor and splashed cold water on her face, taking care to avoid the unwieldy bandaging on her nose. She brushed her teeth and considered the possibility that Jan was telling the truth. “Why would Charlotte say that?”
“Possibly because, at least from what you’ve told me, the woman was a stone lying bitch. But maybe Thor ran into Charlie at one of those sheriff’s conventions when Charlie was taking care of his niece. His brother’s girlfriend had a baby awhile back and then ran off and left him and the baby, too. Navajo girl. Don’t know what she was doing all the way up here. Anyhow, Charlie took the baby in for a while when his brother went down to Arizona to try and patch things up. Must have
worked out because they’re there still, the baby, too. Although I guess she’s not a baby anymore.”
“Stop saying baby.” Lola kicked the trashcan. Her stomach performed an ominous, slow-motion revolution. “I need air.” She rushed to the porch. But the bracing gulps of subzero air she expected eluded her. Slush sprayed from a passing car. Water dripped from the porch eaves. A soft breeze slid past. Lola lifted her face to it and slitted her eyes against a sun that had emerged full strength from wherever it had been hiding for weeks on end. “What’s going on? Everything’s melting. It’s so warm.”
“I know.” Jan followed her out onto the porch, straddled the railing, grabbed one of the supports and leaned far over the melting yard to catch the sun. Bub lay on the newly bare sidewalk a few feet away, sprawled to soak up maximum warmth. “It was ten degrees this morning. I’ll bet it’s sixty now. Warmer, maybe. It’s a Chinook.”
Lola braced her hands on the railing and leaned out beside her. “Whatever a Chinook is, I like it. I can’t remember the last time I was really warm. Does this mean it’s spring?”
“Hah. We’ve got weeks and weeks of winter left. It’ll get cold again. But not as cold, and not for as long. We’ll get a warm day here, a warm day there. One day we’ll wake up and the snow will be gone and the whole prairie will have gone green—”
“—as Ireland. So I’ve been told. But I don’t believe it.”
Jan held out her hand to catch the droplets of melting snow from the porch roof. She touched her tongue to her palm. “I wonder if I should be doing this. Used to be snow water was the sweetest. But now with the crap spewing into the air from the patch, there’s probably all sorts of pollutants in this. What are you going to do?”
Lola rocked forward, leaning farther still over the yard. “About pollution?”
“Don’t be coy. You know what about. And be careful. If you fall and hurt yourself, you might not have anything to be coy about.” Lola straightened and stood. Her hand went, seemingly of its own volition, to her stomach. “Huh,” said Jan. “There’s a telling move. Are you going to keep it?”
Lola snorted. She touched the bandage that felt as though it covered half her face. Her nose hurt. “That would be crazy. I’m not exactly the maternal type. I don’t even know if Charlie and I are together anymore. I can barely take care of myself and Bub, let alone a baby. Besides, there’s probably something wrong with it. I got beat up. And Charlotte gave me some sort of drug.”
“Babies are tough. My mom rodeoed while she was pregnant with me and my sister, right about ’til when we popped. Besides, Indian people aren’t big believers in abortion. There aren’t enough of them. Did you know there aren’t even twenty thousand Blackfeet?”
“I’m not an Indian.” Lola pointed out the obvious. She clasped her hands behind her back, to keep them from straying again to her abdomen.
“But that baby is. Or at least, a descendant.”
“It’s not a baby. It’s just a blob. What’s a descendant?”
Jan’s pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone. “Damn. Jorkki’s on me to write a story about the Chinook. And he wants to know when you’re coming back to work. Want me to tell him you’re still too traumatized?”
“Descendants,” Lola reminded her.
Jan tapped a text into the phone. “Why don’t they make an emoticon that looks like a middle finger? Anyhow, a descendant is anyone who’s less than twenty-five percent Blackfeet. Some people want descendants admitted to the tribe. Some don’t. The blood quantum people will figure out which your baby is. They’ve got it down to a science.”
Lola smacked a porch support. “Stop calling it a baby. And stop acting as though anybody has a say in this other than me.”
Jan swung back down onto the porch, her boots clattering against the boards. “At least one person does.”
A cloud scooted across the sun. The temperature took a nosedive. Lola crossed her arms over her chest. “Charlie.”
Jan gnawed at the end of her braid. “When do you think you might get around to telling him?”
The cloud kept moving, the Chinook triumphing. But Lola was still cold.
“Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell him now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
When Lola had first moved to Montana, she’d wondered at the way houses sat hard by the roads, entirely too close for her taste to the admittedly sparse traffic. Once the snows started, daily layering driveways, she understood. Charlie’s place was an anomaly, well off the road at the end of a curving lane. In addition to his cruiser, he kept a geriatric pickup that seemed largely held together by Bondo, but that served its sole purpose of pushing a snow blade. Lola parked her car next to the truck, its raised blade gleaming in the sun, and looked around for Charlie.
She saw the Appaloosa first, tied up outside the corral, the winter’s accumulation of grit brushed from his coat. Despite his winter shagginess, Spot looked newly sleek, stamping a forefoot in anticipation of the ride, the first one in months, that apparently awaited. Bub soared from the truck and ran to him. Spot lowered his head and they touched noses, the horse nickering in the back of his throat, Bub’s body a wriggling blur.
Charlie came out of the shed, a bridle in his hand. He stopped when he saw Lola. “I was going to call you.”
Lola liked the sound of that. “I need to talk to you, too. What’s going on?”
“I thought I’d take advantage of the Chinook, take Spot for a ride. He could use the exercise.” But he draped the bridle over the fence, and turned toward the house. A deep porch wrapped it on three sides, populated by fast-dwindling stacks of firewood—and, on this day, a pyramid of taped and dated cardboard boxes. Lola recognized them. She’d packed them herself, when she’d decided to leave the newspaper in Baltimore and take a chance on a new life in Magpie. She didn’t recognize one of the boxes. He’d have assembled that one himself, she guessed, filling it with the contents of her single dresser drawer, the few pieces of clothing she’d hung in the closet, the handful of things from her side of the medicine cabinet.
Her mouth went cottony. “What’s this?”
Charlie’s hands hung by his side. Lola wanted to go to him, take those hands, wrap his arms around her. She’d always felt safe, protected, in his embrace. She’d never wanted to admit to that, not to herself and definitely not to Charlie. She took a step toward him. His eyes warned her away.
“Charlie?”
“Lola. You saved my life back there in Burnt Creek. Don’t think I’m not grateful. But you don’t base a relationship on gratitude. We both know this wasn’t working. It hit me after you left. Your being gone wasn’t a whole lot different than your being here. Look at your things—you hardly unpacked anything from home, and the few things you did barely filled a whole box. You have no concept of relationships, of family.” He fussed with the bridle, arranging the reins so they wouldn’t fall into the snow. He had to know about the baby, Lola thought; almost certainly had amassed quite the collection of voicemails and texts and e-mails from people vying to be the first to let him know his girlfriend was pregnant.
Lola had practiced casual, confident phrases on the drive over from Jan’s. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. Or, maybe, I’ve made an appointment at the clinic in Missoula. She hadn’t. But she would. Now those phrases fled. “You know why I’m here.”
He shook his head. “I don’t. I told you to stay at Jan’s, not to contact me. But you didn’t listen. Again.” He leaned over the fence and slapped Spot on the flank. “Go on. Git. There’s not going to be any ride for a while.” Spot sulked away, ears pinned back against his head, Bub gamboling beside him.
Fine, Lola thought. If he wanted to pretend he didn’t know, she’d go along. She fell back on work. “Has Jan set up an interview with you yet?”
“You know I can’t talk to you about this. Either of you.”
Lola wasn’t surprised. “Doesn’t matter, really,” she said. “Jan and I can get your part from the court doc
uments.”
“What documents are you talking about?”
In her work, Lola frequently played dumb. She didn’t appreciate it when someone turned the tables on her. “Oh, come on. The incident reports, the complaints, the affidavits. Even if you strip them down to the bare minimum, the charging documents will be a gold mine.”
“What charges?” Charlie stood with his back to the bright sun, his face in shadow. Lola couldn’t see his eyes.
“I figure rape, at a minimum. Aggravated assault. Drug possession—even if Charlotte came by that stuff legally, it wasn’t supposed to leave the clinic—and trafficking. Kidnapping, for sure. And taking the girls across state lines, that’s federal.”
A muscle jumped in Charlie’s jaw. “And negligent homicide. Don’t forget that.”
Lola struggled to remain impassive. He must have decided Judith had been murdered after all. “Dawg, right?” she said. “How did he do it? Was it a deliberate drug overdose? Or did he just beat her the way he did DeeDee? Because I’m sure he killed her, too. Was Judith dead before she ended up in that snowbank? Have you told Joshua yet?” She stopped. She couldn’t pinpoint the expression on Charlie’s face; knew only that somehow she was on the wrong track.
“Not Dawg,” he said. “You.”
The world stopped. Lola couldn’t hear her own question. But she heard Charlie’s answer.
“For killing Charlotte.”
FOR ONCE Lola wished she could throw up. It would have provided a distraction. As it was, she stood staring at Charlie, waiting for him to tell her he was joking. Which, after a pause that lasted entirely too long, he did. Sort of.
“It’s something that had to be considered,” he said. “They took my word that it was self-defense.”
Lola took two steps and latched onto a corral post for support. “Of course it was.”
He lifted a shoulder. “All scenarios had to be considered.”
