Disgraced (4 page)

SIX

The trip from the
ranch to town took half an hour. Lola gasped anew whenever the pickup crested another rise and the horizon leapt away, mile after treeless mile in every direction. The landscape's unwelcome resemblance to that of Afghanistan struck her again. She reminded herself of the differences: the luxury of a smooth paved road, a truck that she could drive without hiring a man to do it for her, and the absence of anyone intent upon killing her. Still, the old tendrils of unease, her constant companion during her years overseas, curled insistently around her spine.

The outskirts of Thirty arose, sudden hard angles amid the rolling hills and wind-rounded rocks. Lola left her memories behind and pointed the truck toward the offices of the
Last Word
, Thirty's weekly newspaper. She intended to find out everything she could about the soldiers who went to Afghanistan, starting with the first body blow that had come in the form of Mike St. Clair's death. She'd gone to the newspaper's website on her phone the previous night, looking in vain for an online archive, but beyond posting a sampling of stories from each week's edition, the
Last Word
had yet to go fully digital. She drove around the block, seeking a parking place in the shade, and retraced her route on foot with Margaret to the newspaper office, forcing herself not to look back at Bub, whose drooping ears and tucked-in tail telegraphed a full sulk. A woman behind the front desk removed a cherry popsicle from her mouth at the sight of Lola and Margaret. Her face glistened.

“Sorry about the heat. Air conditioner's broke. Been broke for two weeks now. Every day, the publisher passes out popsicles to help us keep cool. He musta got a crate of 'em the last time the store had a sale. Cheap S.O.B.” Her lips were stained red. A scarlet droplet ran down the popsicle stick, skittered across her thumb and wrapped itself in a line around her wrist. Lola explained their mission.

“You wait here. I'll see about those back copies. You want a popsicle?”

“No, thank you,” said Lola, over Margaret's hopeful intake of breath. While they waited, Lola read a plaque summarizing the
Last Word's
brief history. She'd already surmised that newspapering and the town were inextricably linked, given that, back in the long-gone days of hot type, the notation “—30—” signaled to pressmen that they'd reached a story's end. The plaque confirmed her guess. A newspaperman had founded the town after the Conestoga wagon that had hauled his printing press across a thousand miles of prairie irreparably foundered on the banks of the nearby Popo Agie River. The receptionist returned, sans popsicle, and held open a door for Lola and Margaret. “You can come back now. Honey, I think I can find a toy or two for you to play with while your mommy does her work.”

“She's fine,” Lola said. Margaret had spent much of her young life in the
Daily Express
office, learning early how to entertain herself, drawing flaking pictures on pieces of printer paper with red grease pencils and old bottles of Wite-Out that nobody had gotten around to throwing away. Lola handed Margaret a pen and looked around. The people in the room spoke into phones tucked between ear and shoulder, or tapped at their computers. Lola filched a couple of pieces of paper from a printer tray and gave them to Margaret, then she approached the daunting stacks of what looked to be decades' worth of newspapers.

“Looking for anything in particular?”

Lola took a single glance at the guy who'd posed the question and knew him for a reporter. Shave a little past due, shirt a little too wrinkled, demeanor a little too pleasant. The old competitiveness flared, the resistance to telling another reporter what she was working on. But she wasn't actually doing a story. Technically, she was still on vacation. Even though she'd felt far more relaxed than at any point on her so-called vacation the minute she'd stepped into the
Last Word
and inhaled the comforting scents of dust and ink and the never fully eradicated smoke of now-forbidden cigarettes; more at home in a newsroom than she was anywhere else. “Just checking out something for a friend,” she said. “We're here on vacation. “

“You've got a funny idea of vacation.”

About Jan's age, she figured, getting his start at a small newspaper, where he'd spend as little time as possible before jumping to the first big daily that would take him. If the bigs were even hiring anymore. Which, in Lola's recent experience, they weren't. He came out from behind his computer terminal and sauntered toward her, lanky and loose-limbed. Lola took in the cargo shorts made of some sort of indestructible material, the wiry calves knotted with muscle, the Vibram-soled sandals that would have eaten up a good part of his weekly salary, and revised her opinion. The Wind River area was home to an internationally renowned outdoors school, priced accordingly, that attracted people from all over the country who wanted to acquire the skills necessary to kayak off the Australian coast, climb mountains in Patagonia, backpack in the Yukon. Some of those folks came, completed the programs, and left again, but others stayed in the area, working jobs that kept them afloat during the week, heading into the Winds—as locals called the Wind River Range—on weekends and vacations for more of the sorts of near-death experiences in which the school specialized. At least, that's how Lola viewed their activities. The
Last Word's
reporter, she decided, was most likely a trustafarian, slumming in Wyoming with the safety net of mommy and daddy's money. Such good bone structure and straight teeth went beyond vitamins and orthodontia, bespeaking generations of good breeding. The confident slouch she attributed to prep school and a history of success with women.

“Dave Sparks.” His thin lips quirked in a smile. He held out his hand.

She took it, feeling the roughness in his fingertips, and slid her gaze along his arms. From a distance, Dave Sparks looked like a scarecrow, but up close his biceps challenged the seams of his shirt. Rock climber, then. She imagined him spread-eagled halfway up a cliff, that expansive wingspan to his advantage.

“Lola Wicks.” She let go of his hand and held her hair away from her neck. The newsroom was, if anything, even warmer than the lobby. “Don't you rate a popsicle?”

“I don't eat sugar.” He flashed his perfect teeth.

Of course you don't, she thought. She pointed to the yellowing newspapers crammed into the slotted shelves. “Is there a system here?”

“If you can call it that. You looking for any particular time frame? That's the easiest way.”

Again, she went with vague. Soldiers served one-year stints in Afghanistan and Iraq. Lola had called Jan to try and pinpoint the date of Mike St. Clair's death, without success. “Last spring,” Jan had said. “That's more or less the last time I heard from Pal. She told me a friend of hers had gotten killed, and that was it. Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious,” Lola had said. Which was true enough. “I'll start with March,” she told Dave Sparks now.

He led her to the correct shelves. She looked at the stacks of newspapers. She'd come to take for granted the search-term-and-click efficiency of Google. It had been years since she'd resorted to microfiche, let alone paged through actual hard copies. Hanging around a newsroom, especially the one offering the sort of scenery that Dave Sparks offered, was momentarily pleasant, but putting a lot of work into only the vaguest notion of a story was another matter. Thirty was small, but Lola had already noted a coffee shop, a bookstore and, most important, a compact but newish supermarket that undoubtedly would offer more than canned ravioli. She had better things to do with her time than dirtying up her hands with newspaper ink. She decided to forego pride in favor of speeding up the process.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked Dave.

“Couple of years.”

She blinked. Most trustafarians, no matter how they rhapsodized about the great wide open, soon fled back to the delights of a city, unleashing their love of wilderness in two-week vacations.

“Does the name Mike St. Clair ring a bell? Got killed over in Afghanistan a few months back?”

“Remember him? It was a big story here. Local boy and friends enlist together, serve together. Every last one of them grew up here. They'd all known one another since grade school. Losing one of them hit all the families hard. And now—” He started to say something else, then stopped.

“What?” said Lola. She reminded herself that, as far as he knew, she remained unaware of the suicide.

He shook his head. “I've got a story to finish. You read all the coverage, then maybe we can grab coffee. You'll probably have some questions.” He started toward his desk, then turned back. “Mike died in April. But you'll want to go back before that. There was a story when they all enlisted, right after graduation last year. Start there.”

Lola moved along the shelves until she'd located the previous June. She heaved an armload of papers onto the table and set herself to the task at hand. She'd have questions, Dave had said. So she'd be looking as much for what wasn't in the stories as what was. She muttered under her breath as she turned page after page. “What the hell could that possibly be?”

SEVEN

An hour later, Lola
had learned that Palomino Jones once had a mane of blond hair that did justice to her name. It swung nearly to her waist in the photo of her with the group who'd enlisted in the Army the day after graduation. They stood, arms around one another's waists, laughing into the camera, the picture of youthful health and optimism and absolute ignorance of the world in which they were about to be immersed.

Lola pulled out the reporter's notebook she always carried with her, even on vacation, and wrote down their names. The third name stopped her. Cody Dillon, the soldier who'd killed himself at the airport. Lola repeated Pal's words aloud. “‘Didn't know the guy.' What a bunch of bullshit.” Lola glanced Margaret's way to be sure she hadn't heard. She was running low on quarters. The next two names rang a bell. She unzipped her bookbag and pawed through its detritus, seeking the newspaper she'd picked up in Yellowstone. Sure enough, the names of the recently jailed soldiers were in the caption below the photo. She copied them into her pad, doodling stars next to all three names. Such a small group. Such big trouble. Such a good story. “
No
,” she said aloud. She didn't have to write it. Could stay another day or two with Pal, just as Jan had asked, and then resume her vacation.

“Mommy?” Margaret looked confused. She wasn't doing anything wrong.

“You're fine,” Lola reassured her. “Mommy's just talking to herself. Here.” She fished through the bookbag again until she found a previously overlooked sandwich bag of whole-wheat crackers for Margaret that she'd packed before leaving home. She turned her attention back to the papers, taking care with pages already going brittle. A brief story ran a few weeks after the one about the enlistment, just a notice that the whole group had successfully completed basic training and had been assigned to the same unit, headed for Afghanistan. She replaced the June papers and wrestled an armful from the following spring onto the table. April yielded the terse notice that a local soldier, Mike St. Clair, died there.

So far, so standard, Lola thought. She checked on Margaret. The crackers were gone, the baggie dutifully deposited in a trash can. Margaret lay on the floor, covering pieces of paper with scribbles, murmuring the story that went with the pictures. Good. The paper wrinkled beneath Margaret's sweat-dampened arm. Lola tore a blank page from her notebook and accordioned it into a tiny fan. She handed it to Margaret and made another for herself. It didn't help. Lola wiped her ink-smeared fingers on her pants and paged through the next few days' newspapers until she came to a longer story about Mike's death, this one accompanied by a photo. Delbert's own face had been so rearranged over the years that it was impossible to discern familial resemblance in his grandson. Lola thought that if it had once existed, Delbert must have been a striking man in his youth. Mike had wide eyes under bushy brows, a straight nose, a long jaw, and a serious expression behind which an incipient smile lurked. She knew she should just ask Delbert about his grandson. But the depth of sorrow in his eyes when he'd spoken of Mike, and the knowledge that to question him would increase that sorrow, had stopped her. It would amount to causing pain to an elder, as unthinkable as it was unforgiveable.

She turned her attention to the story that, as had the others, carried Dave's byline. It started with the standard recitation of Mike's achievements—good enough student, better athlete, eager to follow the family tradition of military service that had seen his grandfather serve in Vietnam and his father one of the cruelly few casualties of the first Gulf War. Then it got around to Mike's own death.

“Mommy?”

Lola knew she must have gasped aloud. “Nothing,” she said. “A tickle in my throat.” She coughed a couple of times and for good measure put her hand to her neck, covering the same place where Mike St. Clair had suffered the gruesome wound that killed him.

“Was that the issue? That his—” Lola looked toward Margaret, who was busy dissecting her sandwich and rearranging it in a way that better suited her. Still, Lola was unable to bring herself to say the words aloud. She drew her finger across her throat.

She and Margaret and Dave Sparks sat at a table in, of all things, an organic foods café that existed to serve the outdoors school's participants. At least, that's what Lola thought when she first saw it. She scanned the room and thought again. The people at the mismatched kitchen tables and whimsically painted wooden chairs would have looked at home in Nell's Café back in Magpie, ranchers who'd traded in their wintertime coveralls for lightweight canvas summer pants and long-sleeved work shirts that provided protection not only against the sun but dust, itchy chaff, and bedeviling insects. A few, like Lola, wore running-style shoes, but most wisely stuck with work boots, opting for safety over comfort.

Dave noticed her look. “Good food is good food,” he said. “A lot of the people who come here pull the sprouts from the sandwiches”—as Margaret herself was doing, piling up a miniature green mountain range along one side of her plate—“but they seem to like the rest just fine.”

Lola thought the rest was more than fine. The ham in her ham and cheese between generous slices of what tasted like homemade bread was thick and moist, nothing like the floppy processed slices at Nell's, and the cheese had a fine sharp bite. Usually she saved part of her sandwich for Bub, but he was going to go without his customary treat today. She thought of the canned ravioli back at the house and took a bigger mouthful. “Mike,” she mumbled around it, bringing Dave back to the topic at hand.

“What a tragedy. You must know how important military service is to the tribes.” He looked at Margaret. There was no mistaking her for a white child.

Lola nodded and chewed.

“When somebody gets killed after falling asleep on watch, that's hardly a hero's death.”

Lola forgot about manners. “What are you talking about?” she said past a fresh mouthful of sandwich.

Dave reached for Margaret's sprouts and stuffed them into his own sandwich. He'd gone for hummus, Lola noted. No sugar, and probably a vegetarian, too. Lola wondered if he drank coffee. She didn't trust reporters who foreswore caffeine. Just as the thought occurred to her, Dave signaled a waitress and asked for a cup of coffee. She decided to forgive him for calling it java. “Two,” he said. “Black? Iced?”

“Yes,” said Lola, “and no.” The café's air-conditioning was in fine working order, a welcome respite from the newsroom. But no matter how high the mercury climbed, Lola considered iced coffee only slight less of an abomination than coffee ruined by cream and sugar.

Dave waited until the mugs sat steaming before them. “There's talk around town about Mike,” he said. “People say Mike was on watch while the rest of them slept, but that he fell asleep, too, and the guy crept up on him and cut his throat. Could have killed everybody else. Just luck that he didn't.”

Lola lifted her mug and blew wavelets across the coffee's surface. “That's impossible. Those bases have got perimeters that Superman couldn't bust through. It must have been an inside job. One of those American-trained Afghani soldiers who turned out to be a Talib.”

Dave ran the heel of his hand over close-cropped hair. “Nope. They were on their way back from a village, just a small group of them. As I understand it, their vehicle broke down and they were waiting for a replacement. They were close, only about a mile away. But this guy came across them and took advantage of the situation, I guess.”

Lola turned her attention to the fries, sweet potato, and obviously homemade, as was the tangy ketchup that accompanied them. “What was he doing out of the vehicle? That's not exactly standard procedure.”

“I wouldn't know what standard procedure is,” Dave parried.

You could ask, Lola thought. It's what reporters do. She reminded herself that it would hardly serve her purposes to insult him. Then came close, anyway. “None of this was in the paper. So it's just gossip, then.”

“Gossip, maybe.” He dunked a fry into the pleated paper container of ketchup. “Maybe more. It'll never be in the paper because the editor didn't think it needed to be. The idea was that Mike's grandfather had suffered enough, losing him. Why make his shame public?”

“But what if that's not how it happened?”

Dave's shoulder lifted. “We'll never know, will we? Besides, what if it's something even worse? This seemed the best thing for all concerned.” He changed the subject. “You're going to want to try the dessert.”

Margaret's face lit up. Lola's darkened. “We don't do dessert.”

“You might change your mind. Look here.” He turned the menu toward her, pointing out the no-sugar, vegan-crust benefits of the pie. “It's good. Really,” he said, an assurance accompanied by a look so simultaneously earnest and droll that Lola succumbed, admitting aloud after the first bite that he might just have been right. Dave touched his tongue to his upper lip to remove a crumb. Lola crossed her legs. She'd been away from Charlie—what, less than a week?—and here she was, going all swoony for a good-looking, barely-more-than-teenage guy in shorts. Dave wore a bracelet on his left wrist, a complicated affair of woven leather thongs and an occasional silver bead, the kind of thing no man wore unless a woman bought it for him. Lola pointed her fork at it. “Doesn't that snag on things when you're climbing?”

“How'd you know I climb?”

Lola sat her fork down and took his hand and turned it palm-up.
Shame, shame, shame
, her internal voice scolded. She ignored it. It had been a long time since she'd flirted with anyone. There was no harm in enjoying the feeling, she told herself, as long as flirtation was as far as it went. She traced his calluses with her thumb. “You didn't get these pushing a pen across a notebook or banging away on a keyboard.”

He folded his hand around hers. “Why's a reporter from Montana working on a story in Wyoming?”

“How'd you know—?” Lola stopped, nodding acknowledgment. He'd gone back to his desk and Googled her name the minute she'd introduced herself, exactly as she would have done if the roles had been reversed. “You got me,” she said. “But I'm not working on a story.”

“Then why?”

“Just curious,” she said. “I was at the airport when that guy killed himself in front of everyone. It got to me and I didn't even know him. It has to affect the community. You must be working on something about that.”

Dave withdrew his hand. “No. Nothing more than what I've already written.”

Margaret fidgeted in her chair, her own sliver of pie, shaved from Lola's piece, long gone. Her accusing look at Dave mirrored her mother's, albeit for different reasons. Margaret just wanted to get out of the restaurant. But Lola had one more question.

“Why not? It's such an obvious story.” So much for flirtation, she thought. Nothing killed an urge like the implication of incompetence or, at best, indifference. To his credit, Dave Sparks met her gaze directly. His eyes were clear and hazel and extravagantly lashed, a softness at odds with the rest of his lean, spare body. “I live here,” he said. “But I'm not from here. Just like you're not from that town in Montana. You know the drill.”

Lola did indeed. Poking a stick into war wounds would stir up resentment. Locals would blame the paper in general and Dave in particular for airing whatever dirty laundry he might uncover. Advertisers might decide to spend their money elsewhere. All the old reasons. “If you're going to stay in this business”—she spoke aloud despite herself—“you've got to grow a way thicker skin.”

“So noted.” He might not have been in the business long, but he'd already developed a practiced, professional smile, nothing like the endearingly crooked grin he'd turned upon her earlier. Just as well, thought Lola as she said goodbye. The last thing she needed was a distraction like Dave. Still, he'd been distracting enough that she'd finished her grocery shopping and was on her way back to the
ranch, Margaret asleep in her booster seat, before her mind returned to the ominous phrase he'd shoehorned into their conversation about the rumors surrounding Mike's death.

“What if it's something even worse?”