Montana (14 page)

Lola thought of the beaded dress she’d seen in Wilson’s office. She sank onto one of the couches and ran her hand across the supple leather. She entertained a moment’s notion of stretching out across the sofa, closing her eyes, letting undrugged sleep carry her away. The silence within the house as Verle’s words died away was absolute. She’d forgotten the restfulness of a real home. Verle took her hand and pulled her to her feet. He dropped her hand the instant she resisted. Which, she knew, was a little too late. He’d caught the split second when she’d tightened her fingers around his.

“Carlos has been busy in the kitchen,” he said. “You want art? Wait until you taste his cooking. I think you’ll agree it’s an improvement on the cafe.”

L
OLA PICKED
up her glass and rocked it in her hand, watching the complicated dark wine slide along the sides. Lamb bones curved like quotation marks on either side of her plate. Lola hadn’t spoken since her first bite of the chops, edges charcoaled and crisp, centers pink and tender as rose petals. Verle tilted the decanter. She put her hand over her glass. She had things to ask him, questions to be formed while she was still able to think clearly.

“What did you mean about the sheriff?” she said. “About him being a problem.” As soon as she lifted her hand, Verle refilled her glass.

“He’s young. Inexperienced. Inclined to be overly conscientious rather than rely on common sense—which should tell him that you would be of absolutely no use to him in figuring out who killed Mary Alice.”

“If he’s so inexperienced, what’s he doing in the job?”

“It’s the Indian thing,” said Verle. “He’s got a grandmother who was full-blood. He didn’t grow up on the rez, but he campaigned hard there, yammering about protecting their civil rights even though he’d never had a problem with such in his natural life; and all those Indians who’d never voted in a sheriff’s race in their lives turned out for the last election.”

Lola played with the lamb bones, puzzling over what he’d said. “Indians have been here a long time. Why the difference in this election? Surely you’ve seen Indian candidates before?”

“Not really. It wasn’t worth their while. Indians didn’t vote much until a few years ago, when the ACLU sued over voting districts. Forced the state to redraw its districts so as not to divide up the reservations and dilute their vote. A whole bunch of Indians got elected to the legislature after that. Once the tribes realized they had some power, people started voting like mad.”

“Is that why Johnny Running Wolf is doing so well? At least, I presume he’s doing well, if Mary Alice was writing so much about him.” Lola still hadn’t been able to read those stories, but based on her conversation with Wiilson, she hazarded a guess as to their contents. “About how he was managing to fund his campaign, given that he’s considered to be such a long shot.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t much pay attention to politics. Long as a candidate supports policies that help ranchers, he gets my vote. And in Montana, that’s every candidate. I could pull any old lever come election day and I’d come out all right.” He leaned back and rapped on the kitchen door. Carlos appeared with another bottle of wine. Verle took it from him and spent a lot of time with the corkscrew.

“Where were we?” he said. “Right. Charlie. You should brace yourself for the long haul in terms of this investigation. It’ll make things harder on him, investigating his own people.”

Lola tried again. “You mean, like Frank?”

“That old drunk? Why would he shoot anybody? Even more than why, how? He couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn if somebody gave him a baseball bat.” He pushed back from the table. “Excuse me.” Murmurs rose and fell behind the kitchen door. He returned. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“Mary Alice was always a big one for camping,” Verle said. “To the west of her place, on the other side of the river, it’s all national forest. She was forever going off with that dog, sometimes on the horse, a few days here and there, exploring. She knew that backcountry better than some people who grew up here. Here’s what I think happened. Because nine times out of ten—hell, ninety-nine times out of a hundred—the simplest explanation turns out to be the solution.”

“Which is?”

“She’d been off on one of her trips. Came back and caught somebody breaking into her cabin. It happens all the time. Local kids get into those places, rip ’em off, sell or swap the stuff for drugs. We’ve got a little meth problem here. You’ve seen the billboards.”

Lola nodded.

“Somebody catches them in the act, they’ll usually just run off. But your friend came across the wrong guy. Probably a drifter. We get them here. People who want to play mountain man, live in the woods. They’re crazy when they go in and the longer they stay, the crazier they get. Bad luck, nothing more.”

Lola picked up the wineglass and knocked the rest back, looking for something to blame for her sudden dizziness. The idea of a random killing—the thought that a few minutes’ delay, a different route taken, could have changed everything—seemed almost too cruel.

“She had a gun with her,” she objected. “Was she afraid of guys like that? Or maybe someone else?”

“Sure she was afraid,” said Verle, and Lola sat her wineglass down so abruptly it tilted and fell.

Verle righted it. “Remember those grizzlies? Everybody around here carries a gun when they go into the backcountry. The environmental types will tell you to carry pepper spray, but that’s a crock. Your friend was smart that way, although for griz she should’ve been carrying a rifle. She did everything right and then one day something went wrong. Sorry you had to be the one to find her.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Lola insisted. “She was wearing a jacket on a summer day.” Lola thought of the phone message, the note. Verle had rejected her other theories so thoroughly that she was embarrassed to mention them.

“The jacket’s like the gun. You want one with you just in case something goes wrong and you end up stuck out there overnight. It’s pretty basic. You seem determined to turn this into more than what it might be. You ever think about just letting it go?”

“I don’t let things go.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled. “Another don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t carry a purse. Don’t eat breakfast. Don’t ride horses. Don’t cry. Jolee says you don’t even eat pie. What kind of person doesn’t eat pie? What
do
you do, Lola Wicks?”

She heard her editor yet again, essentially suggesting that it was time for her to be more like other people. Ignoring the fact that the thing that made her different was the reason she’d presumably been hired in the first place.

“I get the story,” she said. “That’s what I do.”

“But what if there’s no story?” he asked. Before she could speak, he followed with another question. “This is your day off, remember? And it’s almost gone. We don’t need to figure it out today.”

The kitchen door swung open. Carlos padded into the room and took their plates away, and came back with crystal glasses of dessert wine whose color recalled the day’s golden sunshine. Three bluish dots triangled the web between his thumb and forefinger. A dark teardrop dangled at the corner of one eye. Prison ink, Lola thought as he disappeared again into the kitchen, returning a moment later with two little crocks of amber-glazed crème brûlée. Lola tapped through the craquelured surface with her spoon, and let the custard’s rich creaminess and the caramelized sugar crystals mingle in her mouth as she watched the pinpoint bubbles ascend in the glass. The sun had set. The room grew dark. Verle’s features were indistinct, whether from the wine or the sombrous gloom, she couldn’t tell. Lola heard water running in the kitchen, the splash of pots and pans sliding into a full sink, homey sounds long forgotten.

“Where’s your wife?” In her experience, they all had wives.

“Long gone.”

Lola paid particular attention to her dessert.

“She never liked it here,” Verle added. “Seattle or Denver is more her style. She liked to shop. Always”—he shot her a glance—“carried a purse.”

Old rascal, she thought. Then she thought maybe she didn’t care. He was a handsome man yet. That hair. She inclined her head toward the wall. The framed sketches, he’d told her, were Charlie Russell originals. “So do you, apparently. Like to shop, I mean.”

“I collect. It’s different.” Then he asked: “Husband?”

She shook her head. “Not now, not ever.” Could hear Mary Alice’s voice in her ear: “None of your own, anyway.” Her spoon sought a final scrape of custard. “What do you do for company out here?” Aware as she asked the question that she’d made a decision. Had done a quick calculation of the months of drought and decided that they easily outweighed a twenty-year—she sneaked a quick glance and added a decade—age difference.

“For company?” he said. He lifted his glass toward her in a toast. “I’m doing it right now.” So he’d made a decision, too.

Lola stood. Any more chitchat a waste of time.

“I take it,” Verle said, “you want to see the rest of the house.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

L
ola dreamt in red.

Fields of poppies bending low in the backwash of a military helicopter. Trios of rocks splashed with scarlet paint in the international warning for land mines. Archipelagos of blood and dust beneath her feet in a just-bombed bazaar. A hole punched through a chalk-white cheek.

Beside her, a heavy turning. “You all right?”

She woke with a gasp. “Fine,” she murmured automatically, before she knew where she was, or to whom she spoke. The response a rustle and a snore. She slid a hand along her throat, down her sides. No tight, reassuring wrap of sleeping bag. Just sheets against skin. Bare skin. She was in a bed. Not alone. The rest just a dream. Mary Alice, though. That was real. As was the person beside her. Lola edged a tentative toe across the bed until it bumped a sinewy calf. Verle. She lay a few moments longer, remembering a slow savoring that had unfolded as deliciously as the dinner, one welcome surprise after the next. Verle had not been past the stage of some basic acrobatics; knew how to use his tongue, too, not something you could always count on with an older guy. She’d been happy to overlook the blue pill he’d slipped into his mouth as they left the table. Lola stretched and registered the easeful fluidity of the movement, muscles too long tensed for danger gone languid, knots worked free.

Moonlight slatted across the bed, shadows shifting within it, resolving into recognizable human shapes. Verle’s ranch hands, doing whatever they did at—she checked a nightstand clock radio—three-thirty in the morning. A horse nickered. Lola slid from the bed and knelt by the windowsill. A long trailer was backed up to the corral, a horse’s rump disappearing into the blackness within. On their way to a show, she thought. A man led another horse into the trailer, hooves thudding against the ramp.

Verle turned over and exhaled in a ragged snore. Lola wondered when he normally got up. Wondered how he’d react when he did. Would he try to clasp her hand across a basket of muffins still warm from the oven, Carlos remaining tactfully in the kitchen squeezing oranges for juice? Or would there be lingering glances toward the clock, the little throat-clearings that prefaced the old excuses? She’d experienced enough of the latter to last a lifetime. It wasn’t worth chancing. She scooped up her clothes, feeling for the bricklike packet of money she’d condensed from its various hiding places when she’d undressed in the bathroom after dinner. She crept from the room, slipped into her pants and pulled on her shirt, stuffing the money along with her bra and panties into a pocket, moving fast toward the front door with boots in hand, detouring only to grab one of the Zuni fetishes from the herd on the living room shelf.

A
MOLTEN
filament of sunlight outlined the prairie. The town still slept. Lola drove to the Sleep Inn and unlocked the door to her room. The dog, in full frantic flight, hit her a split second before the smell. At least, she thought as she tackled the entirely foreseeable mess with a hand towel and the miniature bar of soap, Bub had confined himself to a corner of the bathroom. She sat back on her heels and thought of the hours of inertia until she could talk to Mary Alice’s colleagues at the
Express,
her only diversion making coffee that tasted of the room’s sulfurous tap water. There was Nell’s, a delaying tactic, but that meant facing the tables of men whose desultory conversation ceased altogether whenever she opened the door, curious faces turned in unison her way. Wondering what she knew that they didn’t. Which, she thought, was not much of anything at all.