Dakota (15 page)

The red patches reemerged on Charlotte’s face, creeping up her throat, finding purchase in her cheeks. She reached for the butter dish. One, two, three pats were deposited atop a dumpling. Charlotte poked at them with her fork, speeding their transition into a golden pool. She lifted the gravy boat and swamped the little butter pond with a tidal wave. Back to the fork, a sodden mouthful scooped up and deposited. Eyes closed in defiant bliss. The flush subsided. A row of Hummels watched from a sideboard, their wide innocent eyes a rebuke to Lola’s uncharitable thoughts. A seated porcelain boy took shelter under an umbrella nearly as big as he was; another boy also held an umbrella, this one furled and resting on his shoulder. He toted a portmanteau in his other hand and strolled along whistling. With their round eyes and rounder cheeks and winsome blond locks, the Hummels looked like miniature versions of Charlotte. Or, Lola thought with a start, like Dawg. Pre-ink and steroids, of course. She cleared her throat. She needed to say something to cover her gaffe, but had no idea what. She’d forgotten how Thor tended to fill in any silence, no matter how brief, with bursts of verbiage.

“Charlotte makes sure to keep my strength up. Which is a good thing because the things that are happening in Burnt Creek these days have me running day and night.”

Lola broke in before he could build up verbal steam. “What sorts of things?”

He ladled a helping of butterbeans onto his plate. Lola thought it one of the paler meals she’d ever consumed, the yellow beans swimming in their cream, the bread and dumplings whiter still, the lettuce almost startling with its hint of green, the tiny red tomatoes downright shocking. A chandelier tinkled overhead in the steady hot breath from the furnace, its crystals refracting shards of light across the dishes.

“You, for starters. Some animal attacking a woman right on the street, in broad daylight. Nothing like that ever happened here before. That’s not Burnt Creek, that’s big city stuff. If that’s the kind of life we wanted, we’d move to Denver or Chicago or someplace, and Charlotte could take herself shopping in fancy department stores every day.”

“How are you feeling, dear?” Charlotte dished more chicken onto Lola’s plate. “Let’s get some more protein into you.”

Lola was pretty sure all the protein had been cooked out of the chicken, but she dutifully took another mouthful. “Sore. A little headachy, but no dizziness, none at all,” she added quickly as Charlotte’s features creased in concern.

Charlotte sat back. “Good. Then you should be able to drive home tomorrow.”

Lola slid a dumpling through some gravy. She wanted nothing more than to leave this frozen, confounding place. But returning to Magpie wasn’t much of an improvement. She’d have to explain to Jorkki that she’d wasted time on a story that had vanished. Charlie would no doubt assume that her injuries had been caused by Lola doing something she shouldn’t have. And she’d have to tell Joshua she hadn’t found out a damn thing about Judith, and admit to Jan that she hadn’t even asked about the other girls.

A thought pushed through the haze of carbohydrate overload. “I can’t leave tomorrow. I set up a meeting with a couple of people. I’m trying to find out what happened to a friend. I’m afraid she ended up in one of the bars out here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

T
he Breviks exchanged looks. Charlotte pressed a hand to her chest. She had the sort of generous bosom that Lola associated with dental technicians and elementary school teachers, a comforting place to press one’s head, a refuge.

“I feel bad for any girl who ends up in one of those places. You could just cry,” Charlotte said. “I go to the high school every year, talk to the girls—nowadays, the boys, too—about nursing. It’s a good job, pays well, and you can take it anywhere in the country. The world even. But when I tell them the pay, they just laugh at me. The same way they laugh at me when I try to tell them the downside of working in the patch. The girls, you see how they end up. And the boys, sure they make great money. But it’s dirty, dangerous work. You can end up hurt bad, dead even.”

Thor ladled more dumplings onto Lola’s plate before she could object. The tightness in her stomach was beginning to rival the bruises on her back in terms of discomfort. “Now, Mother,” he said. “Think of all the ways you can get hurt ranching. Just look at me. I’ve been all busted up since I was in my teens. And it’s not like I made any real money for my pains.”

The response had a well-rehearsed air. “For reasons that escape me, he felt obligated to ride those bulls when he was young,” Charlotte told Lola. “As far as I’m concerned, he brought his injuries upon himself. Good thing he married a nurse.” Thor, unsmiling, raised his glass to his wife. The light caught the golden cider within. Lola craved a wine, or even a beer, but as far as she could tell, the Breviks were teetotalers.

“We interrupted you,” Charlotte reminded her. “You were talking about your friend. If you’re trying to find her, it shouldn’t take too long. Burnt Creek’s grown, but not so much that it should take you more than a day or two to track somebody down here. Besides, maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll find her working in one of the fast-food places or cleaning the motels. There’s lots of ways to make money here, good money, and still keep your dignity.”

Thor shook his head before Lola could reply. “Lola already knows where her friend is. I expect she’s just trying to find out how she got there. Am I right?”

Charlotte clapped a hand over her little mouth as Lola explained the circumstances of Judith’s death. “I think she got into some kind of trouble out here. I’m supposed to have dinner tomorrow night with a couple of guys she met here. One of them seems pretty rough. Don’t worry,” she said in response to Charlotte’s look of alarm. “I’m meeting them at The Mint. I know you don’t like it, but it still seems safer than any other place in town.”

“Do you know their names?” Thor asked. “Maybe I’ve run across them. If that’s the case, there might be some information in the files you could use. It’s all public record. But you being a reporter, you already know that.”

Lola could have kicked herself. What the sheriff said made eminent good sense. “All I’ve got is Swanny. Big red-haired guy from Idaho. Elvis sideburns. His friend is Ralph. I don’t know either of their last names. Ralph looks like this.” She sucked her lower lip beneath her teeth. “Hangs out at the Sweet Crude. And The Train, too. At least, that’s where he was today.”

Charlotte’s eyes grew avid. Lola thought that you could take a church organist, a Sunday school teacher, a maiden aunt, people as far removed from the world’s hard realities as possible, people who insisted they avoided newspapers and television because the news was simply too upsetting, and yet every last one of them reliably lit up at a hint of scandal.

“The Train! That awful place. Do you think they killed her?” A shred of lettuce, drenched in ranch dressing, fluttered from her fork onto the tablecloth unnoticed.

Thor answered. “The sheriff back there thinks it’s natural causes. I can tell you for a fact he doesn’t appreciate Lola poking around. He called me again today, wanted to know what she’d been up to. Luckily, it was before Lola ran into trouble.”

Lola coughed, dislodging a butterbean in the back of her mouth. She spit it into her napkin. “He called again?”

“Even all the way out here, your Sheriff Charlie Laurendeau has a reputation for being thorough.”

“Charlie Laurendeau.” Charlotte rose to clear the table. She paused with the platter of chicken denting her side, the dish of butterbeans in her other hand. “Isn’t he the one—there was something with a woman. A child, too, if I remember correctly.”

Lola stared at her lap. As far as she knew—which, she realized now, wasn’t very far at all—Charlie had never been married. Which of course didn’t mean he hadn’t had serious relationships before, let alone a child. But he might have told her. And even if he hadn’t, she was surprised that neither Jan nor anyone else in Magpie had informed her about it the very second her involvement with Charlie became public knowledge. Which appeared to have happened about five minutes after the first time she slept with him. She made a mental note to herself to go online and check birth announcements from the reservation as soon as she got a free minute.

“Lola and the sheriff,” Thor began.

“No,” Lola said, even as Charlotte smothered her in an apologetic hug, “it’s really not like that.” Not anymore it wasn’t, she thought grimly. Not until the two of them had a very long talk, both about Charlie’s background and also as to why he insisted upon checking up on her work in Burnt Creek.

C
HARLOTTE’S APOLOGIES
only became more fulsome when she found out her husband had let Lola spend the previous night in her truck. Within moments, Lola found herself in a cozy attic room, a stack of sheets and towels in her arms, and the insistence that the room was hers for the next two nights, or however long she stayed in Burnt Creek. Bub wasn’t welcome inside the house—Lola had noted the gleaming, dust-free surfaces and presumed as much—but Charlotte assured her he’d be fine in the mudroom, even after Lola warned her of the havoc a frustrated border collie was capable of wreaking upon an entire house, let alone a single small room. “I’ll check on him before I go to bed,” Charlotte told Lola. “Maybe give him a treat to settle him down. And Thor’s up at an ungodly hour in the morning. I’ll make sure he feeds him and lets him out first thing. The best thing for you right now is a solid night’s rest. You don’t need the dog bothering you.”

“He’s not a bother,” Lola said, but Charlotte went right on as though Lola hadn’t spoken.

“I hope it’s not too quiet up here for you. We added some extra insulation and put in those triple-glazed skylights, too. See where the old leaky window was?” A tall oblong in the wall beside the twin bed had been turned into a recessed bookshelf that held a collection of Raggedy Ann dolls. “Here.” She gave Lola another pill. “You’ll sleep like a baby.”

Lola thought of her restless night in the truck, the whine of passing tires on pavement, the metronome sweep of headlights across the windows. The two skylights, small and square, served as the attic’s only windows. Lola, who could stand upright only in the middle of the room, pressed her hand to one. Her outstretched fingers barely fit within it. The idea of a good quiet night’s sleep appealed. She swallowed the pill dry and bent over the bed to put the sheets on, pain flaring anew as she stretched to reach the corners. Charlotte backed out of a narrow closet with a quilt draped over her arm. “You should be warm enough, but just in case. The bathroom’s across the hall. Lola—” She hesitated in the doorway. Light from the hallway haloed her head. “Do you have to go meet those men tomorrow?”

Lola had asked herself the same question, considering the worst-case scenario that the meeting was likely to yield nothing more than a few additional salacious details about Judith, nothing she’d ever pass along to Joshua. The extra day would only make Jorkki madder. And it would delay whatever reckoning she faced with Charlie. Still. Ralph and Swanny were her only connection to Judith, and maybe to the other girls, too. The latter was the most fragile of possibilities, but Lola long ago had learned the hard way never to pass such opportunities by. “I set it up. It would be rude for me not to show. Besides, I’ve got no way of contacting them to cancel.”

“I see.” Charlotte’s tone said she didn’t see at all. “At least let me know exactly where you’re going and when, and how long you expect to be. If you’re not back by then, I’ll send Thor in. Or better yet, that Dawg. He’d put the fear of the Lord in anyone.”

Lola laughed with her. Even Swanny might quail at the sight of Dawg, she thought. Charlotte turned out the hallway light. “Good night.”

Lola sat a moment in the narrow bed. She’d gotten used to sleeping with Charlie. Even on nights when a call kept him away from home, there was always Bub. She thought about him alone in the mudroom, no doubt reducing a row of boots to scraps of well-chewed leather. And she thought about the child Charlotte had mentioned. Check on Bub, she told herself. Then fire up the laptop and review those birth records. But even as she swung her legs over the side of the bed, the pill Charlotte had given her began its fast work. “In the morning,” she promised herself as she fell back. She scanned the row of grinning Raggedy Anns and chose one that looked old and well loved. She turned off the light and fell asleep with the doll clutched to her chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A
bout the only sound Lola hated more in the morning than the alarm was that of her cellphone.

Yet there it was, shrilling in her ear, a good fifteen minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off. “What do you want to bet Jan’s got a wild hair again?” she said, talking to Bub out of habit before realizing he wasn’t there. And indeed, Jan didn’t even bother to say hello. “Jorkki wants to know how your story’s coming. The one on the folks from the rez working in the patch. Isn’t that what you’re working on?” Which meant, Lola assumed, that Jan knew good and well the men from the reservation had lost their jobs.