Dakota (3 page)

Josephine brought the subject back to Judith. “I hear she almost made it home,” she said. Lola knew Josephine was past sixty, yet her skin remained unlined and her hair gleamed like obsidian. Lola, only in her mid-thirties, was acutely aware of the silver already threading her own tangled chestnut curls, the insistent etchings at the corners of her grey eyes. Josephine sat rounds of bread on a tray, beside a stack of the inevitable sandwiches of bologna and cheese on white bread. She wiped her hand on a dishtowel and dipped it into a plastic bag of powdered sugar. She sifted the sugar over the fry bread, toweled her hand again, lifted the tray and swung a hip against the kitchen door. The women waited until it closed behind her. “At least we know where Joshua’s sister is now,” Angela said. “Not like those other ones who ran away.”

Beside Lola, Tina stiffened. But in a group of older women, it wasn’t Tina’s place to talk. Lola swiped her sleeve across her forehead again. “What other ones?” Sometimes there was an advantage being shaky on etiquette.

Angela counted on floury fingers. “Let’s see. There was Maylinn Kiyo. She was the first. Carole Bear Shoe and Annie Lenoir, they ran away, too.”

Jeannette Finley Heavy Runner dumped more flour into a bowl, added baking powder and salt, and rubbed in lard with her fingers. She was Salish, from the other side of the Continental Divide, but had married a Blackfeet man thirty years earlier and long since mastered the labyrinth of kinship and gossip. “And Nancy deRoche. Josephine’s husband’s nephew’s daughter. Josephine raised her.” The women looked toward the door.

“I don’t know any of them,” Lola said.

“They left last year. A few months after Judith, but before you got here. For a while there, it seemed like every time you turned around, another girl ran off.”

“My sister didn’t run away.” Joshua stood in the doorway. The fat in the skillet hissed and popped, tiny explosions in the sudden silence.

“Nobody ever heard from her,” Angela said finally.

“That’s how I know she didn’t run away. She never would have just up and disappeared on me. She was doing so well. Those other ones, they were—” He looked around the room at the women, and dropped his voice—“using.”

Lola thought of the tracks on Judith’s forearms, the angry brand. “I know that—” she caught herself just as her lips began to shape the name “that your sister had her struggles.”

Joshua’s eyes were veined red, his voice raw. “And she beat them. That time in rehab last year, that did the trick. We got her into a program that uses traditional healing. They gave her an eagle feather when she completed it. She was so proud.”

Lola saw again the dark feather clutched in Judith’s frozen hand, swiveling like a weathervane with each snowy gust. Her hands stilled.

Angela took the dough from her, worked it briefly, and dropped it into the hot lard.

“Have you talked to Charlie yet?” Lola asked.

“No. Tribal police is all. Why?”

“Just talk to him,” Lola said. And turned away to avoid the question in Tina’s wide eyes.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he numbers on the clock glowed one in the morning when Lola heard the front door open. A candle burned on the nightstand. Its flame crouched low before the rush of cold through the house, then leapt high as the door closed, rendering Charlie’s shadow monstrous as he crept into the bedroom in stocking feet. Lola watched in the wavering light as Charlie reversed his morning routine, standing on one leg, then the other, to peel off the layers of socks, the pants and the long johns, the wool shirt and sweater.

“You’re going to burn the house down someday with those damn candles of yours.” His voice was fond.

“I like them.” She’d never told him why. They were a reminder of her years in Kabul and its unreliable electricity, when it was deemed better to use candles for light and save the generator’s precious power for the computers, the cameras, the satellite phones. She’d come to appreciate the way soft candlelight rendered spaces intimate, forced people to huddle close, threw up a barrier of darkness beyond that made the nightly pop-pop-pop of rifle fire—as likely from bandits as insurgents—seem insignificant and far away.

“Go ahead. Get it over with.” Charlie didn’t mind the candles so much as the way she put them out.

Lola touched her tongue to thumb and forefinger and positioned them on either side of the flame. She counted down slowly, moving her fingers closer together. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—ow!” She pinched out the flame and blew on her fingers as Charlie slid into bed in his T-shirt and shorts. “Your feet are freezing.”

“Says the woman who plays with fire. Why such a wimp about cold? Besides, your feet would be cold, too, if you’d been standing out in the snow for the last few hours. Move over and give me the warm spot.”

Lola nestled deeper beneath the layers of star quilts hand-stitched by Charlie’s grandmother. Their pointed crimson, orange and gold patterns reminded her of the candle flame she’d just extinguished. “Like hell. Make Bub move. You can have his spot.”

“His spot? I was under the impression this was my bed.” He yawned and put icy soles to her calves. “It feels good in here. You feel good.”

Lola turned on her side and he spooned against her, pressing his chest to her back, an icy slab slowly thawing. “Tough deal about Judith,” she said.

“And the truck driver.”

Lola didn’t much care about the man who’d died in the crash that had kept Charlie out much of the previous night. But she didn’t want to seem too eager about Judith. “What about him? It sounded pretty straightforward. The truck went off the road in the storm, right?”

“Looks that way. Impossible to tell. Snow filled in his tire tracks and then the wind played hell with everything. I called in the snowplow, but there’s no skid marks on the road. If it had happened on Deadman’s Curve, I could understand. But he was a few miles past it, on the straightaway. And then there was his neck. It was—” Charlie’s voice trailed off.

“What about his neck?” She shifted, and felt him jerk awake.

“Broken. Twisted clean around. I’ve seen plenty of broken necks in crashes, but never one like that. And there was a footprint.”

Lola raised her voice to keep him from drifting off again. “I thought you said the wind blew snow all over everything.”

“There was a lee spot, where the trailer jackknifed. One print there, clear as day.”

“Let me guess. It didn’t match the driver’s shoes.”

“Boots. Not even close.”

“Maybe somebody stopped to see if he could help and left when he realized he couldn’t. Who called it in?”

Charlie’s words came slow and sepulchral, dragged up from whatever small part of him was still awake. “Unidentified male. Said he was too busy trying to keep his own rig on the road in all that snow to give us any more than the location. Actually, what he said was, ‘all that fucking snow.’ ”

The house shuddered within the wind’s renewed attack. Snow pinged like gravel against the windowpanes. These Montana storms were nothing like the gentle snowfalls of Lola’s childhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with their fat flakes seesawing lazily toward the ground, settling in soft sparkling heaps, clinging to each twig and bit of brush, creating postcard prettiness in tired oystering towns too far from Washington, DC, to have been revived by tourists. In Montana, the wind slammed snow against earth frozen hard as iron and then packed it tight enough to hold cattle on a surface so glazed and brittle that when the occasional steer broke through, it emerged with legs sliced and bloodied by the sharp edges.

“I know how that guy feels. I hate the snow here,” she said to Charlie, trying to keep him awake, surprised when he responded.

“What about Afghanistan? You said it was a lot like here in terms of weather. So the snow must have been the same, too.”

“I was hardly ever there in the winter.” The various warring factions, made pragmatic by a quarter century of war with the Russians, then one another, then the Americans, generally put away their rifles and grenades and IEDs when winter fell. Ever wary of an underemployed reporter, Lola’s editors promptly sent her on the road to other war zones in a constant churn of travel that she’d complained about at the time, but now found she missed. Other than near daily trips back and forth to the reservation, she’d barely left Magpie since her arrival.

Charlie’s breath puffed against her back, a prelude to the easeful snores whose rise and fall would compete with the wind’s low howl. A lifetime insomniac, Lola considered the finality of Charlie’s sleep a thing of wonder. She’d tried various experiments in their time together—turning on the light, the radio, even one memorable night running the vacuum cleaner across the floor—only to see Charlie pull his pillow over his head and plunge more deeply into slumber. She pressed her thumb and forefinger together, feeling the calluses of her nightly experiments with the candles. “That brand on her arm. It was creepy.”

“Gang sign, I guess.” The words floated on a long, slow breath.

Lola knew that gangs had launched operations on reservations around the country, having divined with criminal efficiency the opportunities existing within the vacuum created by the wrangling among law enforcement agencies. But still. “A heart? That’s way too girly for any gang I know. Not the Crips or the Bloods, for sure, nor the Nortenos or Surenos, either. Not the Mongols or the Angels or the damn Pagan’s.” The last, a motorcycle gang, particularly irritated Lola with its grammatical flaw.

Charlie’s chest quivered with a deep chuckle. Lola relaxed. He wasn’t as far gone into sleep as she’d feared. “Here all this time I’d been worried that you might be a terrorist, given how much time you’ve spent in all those bad places,” he said. “Now it looks like you might’ve been a gangbanger. How do you know this stuff?”

“Live where I did in Baltimore and you learned about gangs fast. Plus, I covered courts for awhile before I went overseas. I sat in on every bullshit drug trial there was. Man.” Lola shook her head, remembering. “I earned that Kabul posting.” Which she had, but never was able to shake the conviction that the only reason she got the job was because no man at the paper had been crazy enough to want to go to Afghanistan—or if one had, his wife’s objections had trumped ambition. She pressed her fingertips against her temples, erasing the memories. She needed Charlie’s attention while he was at least half-awake. “I went over to Joshua’s tonight. He doesn’t think his sister ran away.” Lola turned onto her back and lifted herself on her elbows. Cold flowed beneath the tented quilts.

Charlie snatched at them and drew them tight. “Dammit! I was almost asleep.”

Lola lifted the quilts again. “The women tonight were talking about some other girls who ran away, too.”

Charlie pulled her back down beside him and wrapped the covers tight. “There was a rash of them for awhile. These things come in waves. A few years back, it was suicides. That was bad.”

Lola took his hand and held it to her lips, warming it with her breath. “How do you know they ran away?”

“Because it’s what kids do. And because nobody turned up dead.” His words caught on a yawn. “I’m off the clock. And you’re off the beat. Let it go.”

Lola lay quietly, doing math as Charlie’s breathing slowed again. Half a dozen girls, maybe, from a school of about six hundred kids. Half of those students, girls. Probably the girls who went missing were older, maybe juniors or seniors. By the higher grades, the classes would have been decimated by the reservation’s gut-punch dropout rate. So, maybe six girls out of a hundred, max. A number to be noticed, absences keenly felt. Lola jostled Charlie. “Just because I’m asking about something doesn’t mean it’s for a story. Anybody would be curious. Four or five girls go missing in a year, that’s scary.” He lay motionless beside her. “Faker,” she said. “I know you’re not asleep.”

He put his hands on her shoulder and turned her to face him. His hair still smelled of cold. “These were very troubled young ladies. I was aware of them before they went missing and I’m even more aware of them now. Painfully aware. But I’m not going to share the details with you. Look. We promised each other we wouldn’t talk about work. That’s the only way to keep either of us from getting in more trouble than we’re already in. Everybody already expects this thing to blow up in our faces.”

Lola knew he was right. Dating a source broke every rule in the book. Except that she hadn’t been working for the Magpie paper when she’d started seeing Charlie. The job came later, and she’d almost lost it on her first day, when the editor had expressed relief that he’d finally have someone to cover the police beat, vacant since the murder of Lola’s friend Mary Alice. Lola had looked at the editor’s expectant face and gave two seconds thought to not telling him about her budding relationship with the sheriff. The words were out of her mouth before the thought was even completed. “I’m afraid the police beat won’t work,” she’d said.

The editor had cursed so vehemently that she’d been halfway out the door, lecturing herself that she’d been a fool to consider working even temporarily in a place like Magpie. Then he called her back. “You’ll cover the reservation. I’ll put Jan on cops. I’m going out on a limb here. You so much as look sideways at a crime story and you’re gone. Got that?”

Lola got it. His caution was fair, she had to admit. But she hated the feeling of being on some sort of long-term probation, of having to tiptoe around any number of topics with Charlie. She pulled the covers all the way over her head and let them muffle her words. “If we don’t talk about work, then what are we going to talk about?”

Charlie dove beneath the quilts and ran his hands, warm now, from her shoulders to her thighs. “We’re not going to talk at all.”

CHAPTER FOUR

A
row of tricked-out double-cab duallies took up the parking spaces in front of Nell’s Café. Lola parked her own pickup down the street behind some displaced ranch trucks, their original colors obliterated by layers of frozen mud. Their drivers had left the engines running, wreathing the café in blue-tinged exhaust. Winter-furred cattle dogs rose stiffly from the beds and aimed perfunctory barks her way. Joshua stood outside the café, the smoke from his cigarette adding to the general miasma. Lola yearned toward the warmth of the interior, but paused beside him. “What are you doing at work today?”