Disgraced

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Disgraced
© 2016 by Gwen Florio.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First e-book edition © 2016

E-book ISBN: 9780738748801

Book format by Bob Gaul

Cover design by Ellen Lawson

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Editing by Gabrielle Simons

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)
ISBN: 978-0-7387-4766-8

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For Kate, the original Margaret.

And for all of the strong women
who trusted me with their stories.

PROLOGUE

The Afghani shepherd died
beneath the hard bright light of the stars, his unexpected emergence in the black-and-white landscape of night a stroke of luck for the soldiers, if not for him.

It was finished before he could run, rifles jerked into position,
crack-crack-crack
, the impact lifting his body right out of his cheap plastic sandals and slamming it back onto the rocky earth several feet away, his unused rusting AK-47 clattering down beside him. The sheep bleated and shat and ran this way and that, in the idiotic way of sheep the world over. Two of the soldiers slung their rifles over their shoulders and re-formed the band with quiet, competent movements, the action unnecessary but somehow comforting with its echo of childhood ranch chores. They turned their attention from sheep to the shepherd's body, hefting it by wrists and ankles, what remained of his head dangling almost to the dusty ground, shreds of turban dragging behind.

“Count of three,” one whispered, and the body swung once, twice, thrice, and sailed through the air, thudding beside the dead American soldier. Starlight silvered the American's face. The grin slashed across his neck leaked inky blood. That same black blood covered the hands of the woman leaning over him and stained the ends of her pale hair that, torn free of its military regulation bun, dipped into the corpse's terrible wound.

A voice floated into the darkness above the woman's head. “Let's go.”

The woman didn't move. The two soldiers reached down, grasped her shoulders, and raised her to her feet. “We got to get back to the base.”

A third soldier kicked the dead Afghani. The body rolled to one side and fell back. The woman shook off the hands and stumbled away. The third man raised his voice so the woman could hear. “Get over it. Karma's a bitch.”

Her reply a promise so soft he barely caught it.

“I'll never get over it.”

ONE

The shout could have
been one of happiness, the
pop
—coming as it did amid a teary jubilation of the military homecoming ceremony in Casper, Wyoming—anything at all. A teenage daughter cracking her gum in excitement. A burst balloon among one of the dozens of celebratory bunches. A compression of bubble wrap from a torn-open welcome home gift.

Reporter Lola Wicks knew better. She shoved her five-year-old daughter, Margaret, to the hangar's concrete floor and fell atop her, reaching simultaneously for her phone to tap a quick tweet as Margaret's body shuddered beneath her. “Shot fired, Casper airport, soldiers' homecoming.” The returning soldiers knew, too, scuttling toward the sound in a battle crouch, reaching for the weapons they no longer carried. Lola rolled off Margaret and shouted to the strange young woman she'd just met. “Take her. Get her out of here. Go.
Now!
”

She waited the second it took to ensure the woman indeed headed with Margaret toward the hangar's entrance, then turned and followed the sprinting soldiers in the other direction. Above them, balloon bouquets flew in brilliant starbursts toward the hangar's domed ceiling. Lola raised her phone as she ran, snapping photos of the fleeing civilians, images that in her experience would look just like every other photo of people making the split-second transition from normalcy to a flight for their lives, whether from earthquake or school shooting or suicide bombing. Arms pumped for greater speed. Faces twisted in screams. Eyes rolled wild, not yet glazed against the reality that would hit home too soon. Lola stopped to tweet a photo, then headed for the far corner of the hangar where the soldiers converged. She shouldered her way through the cluster of fatigues, thinking not for the first time that soldiers were far more polite in moving aside than elbow-throwing television cameramen, several of whom over the years had left her with bruises, one once lobbing an actual punch.

Lola reached the inner circle and wished she hadn't. She worked the phone yet again. “Soldier down. Shot appears fatal, possibly self-inflicted. #CasperShooting.” She concentrated on the words, the need to inform without jumping to conclusions. The necessity of the ass-saving “appears” and “possibly.” Even though there was no
appears
about it, no way for 140 characters to convey the mess that had once been the soldier's head. Soon enough, crime scene technicians would note the powder burns on what was left of the skin of his face, would verify that the gun was his own, that the bullet that had killed him had been fired from the pistol cooling in the hand already going gray; would write a lengthy report that would supply all the details that Lola and the cursing veterans around her could see with their own eyes.

Lola's phone buzzed with a text alert. She edged her way back through the circle. The text was from Jan Carpenter, her friend and colleague at the newspaper in Magpie, Montana, more than five hundred miles away. “WTF? You're supposed to be on vacation. Not your state. Not your story. Walk away. Is Margaret OK? What about my cousin?”

Shit.
Lola ran through the now-deserted hangar, dodging the duffel bags and purses that people had abandoned in their haste to escape. The crowd outside surged toward her, shouting questions. She ignored them, calling for her daughter. “Margaret? Margaret?” And, oh hell, what was the name of Jan's peculiar cousin, the woman who'd hustled Margaret to safety? Something as odd as the woman herself. “Palomino? Pal? Pal Jones?”

“Hey.” A voice like a hard swipe of sandpaper, unexpectedly close at hand.

Lola snatched Margaret from the woman's arms. “Oh, baby.” She pressed her cheek to Margaret's, inhaling her wheaty scent.

“Boom, Mommy.” Margaret patted Lola's face with soft hands.

Lola lifted her head and scrutinized her daughter. Margaret had her father's lustrous ebony hair, bound this day in braids, stick-straight in contrast to Lola's chestnut tangle. Margaret had Charlie's skin, too, albeit a lighter shade of brown, but her eyes were Lola's own, grey and skeptical, and for the moment, wide with a question. So she didn't know what had happened. Only the sound. Lola let her breath out.

“Yes,” she said. “Boom. A big noise. Nothing to worry about. We should get going now. We're just in the way here.” That last said with obvious reluctance, a nod to the fact that on most days, it was Lola's role to be in the hot center of whatever was happening.

Palomino Jones hitched a shoulder, noticeably bony even in her disguising fatigues, settling the strap of her Army-issue duffel more firmly upon it. “Ready when you are.” She was a head and more shorter than Lola's near-six-foot lankiness, but her appearance of fragility went beyond height. Her slight body swam within her fatigues, wrists protruding twiglike from her sleeves. During her own time in Afghanistan as a foreign correspondent, Lola had worn her hair cropped close and spiky, but Pal's head was frankly shaved, the pitiless June sun highlighting the pink scalp beneath the blond fuzz. Her features were all sharp points, chin like an arrowhead, nose a blade, cheekbones that threatened to slice through skin. Above them, eyes blue and cold as winter pond ice.

Lola led the way to her truck, back braced against the woman's glare. She'd agreed to meet Palomino at the airport as a favor to Jan. “You're going to be in Wyoming on your stupid vacation and I can't get time off because of it,” Jan had said. “Just pick her up and drop her off at the ranch on your way to Yellowstone.”

“It's not a vacation, it's a furlough. I'd rather be at work, getting paid, and you know it. Doesn't she have any friends? Neighbors?”

“There's a neighbor who's been like a surrogate dad since her parents … ” Jan didn't have to finish the sentence. Lola knew about the car crash a few years earlier that had killed Jan's aunt and uncle, an occurrence so unremarkable on Wyoming's ice-sheeted winter roads as to merit little more than a brief mention in the local newspapers. “His car is unreliable. To put it mildly,” Jan said.

“Casper is a hell of a detour from Yellowstone,” Lola pointed out, reminding Jan of her vacation destination. But the observation only spurred Jan to the unusual tactic of personal revelation.

“She's like a sister to me, as much as she could be, given how far apart we lived. We spent most summers together. I get the feeling she had a rough time in Afghanistan. Her emails stopped months ago. You could pick her brain on the ride to the ranch, let me know how she's doing. You're the perfect person to talk to her, your having been there and all.” Jan rarely missed an opportunity to jab at Lola's previous experience as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, usually when she thought Lola wasn't taking her job in Montana seriously enough. Lola couldn't remember a time when Jan had treated her background as an advantage.

“Come on,” Jan pressed. “There's a month of free date-night babysitting in it for you.”

Lola knew, and knew that Jan did, too, that finding a babysitter for Margaret was never an issue. Margaret's father, Sheriff Charlie Laurendeau, was from the Blackfeet Nation, its border just a few miles north of Magpie, with no shortage of aunties and elders willing to take Margaret on a moment's notice. But for the sake of Jan's dignity and her own, she appeared to value the offer.

“Six weeks,” she said.

“Done,” said Jan.

Lola reached her pickup, red as a bullfighter's cape and equally irresistible to highway patrol officers eager to fill their day's quota of tickets. At least it was easy to spot in the parking lot jammed with the more sensibly hued vehicles of families come to take their service members home. A dark, wet nose twitched at the truck's partially open window.

“We're back, Bub,” Margaret called.

Lola unlocked the pickup door—no matter how long she lived in the West, she'd never abandoned her old Baltimore habit of locking vehicle and house alike—and stood aside as the border collie leaped from the driver's seat and landed on three legs at Pal's feet. A suggestion of a smile touched the woman's lips. Lola started at a recent memory. There'd been a moment, just a split second really, as the airport erupted in chaos around her. Lola had thrown herself atop Margaret, awaiting the sound of more shots. Heard none. She raised her head a couple of millimeters and took in the blur of fleeing feet. Except for the booted pair beside her. Everyone else in the hangar was in motion except Jan's cousin. Pal stood frozen, staring toward the corner where the unseen soldier lay dying, and just then, so quickly Lola still wasn't sure she'd seen it, a glorious smile lit up her thin, thin face.