Dakota (30 page)

Lola knelt and buried her hands in Bub’s fur. Charlie turned.

“Lola.”

“Hey, Charlie.”

And then, to her horror, the world went aslant. If only she hadn’t dropped the branding iron, she thought. It could have kept her upright. But the branding iron was gone and she was falling, fast, too fast to even put her arms out to keep her face from bashing into the polished granite surface of the snow.

L
OLA
CAME
to in the van, stretched out across the long seat in the back. She heard a commotion and tried to lift her head. Pain wiggled its knife between her eyes.

“Put your head back down.” Jan stood over her with a handful of snow. She packed it onto Lola’s forehead. The girls and aunties crowded close behind. “Don’t move.”

“Oh,” Lola moaned. “That feels good. Good being relative at this point.”

“Don’t talk, either.” Jan glared down at her through tears. “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble?”

At the sight of the tears, something coiled within Lola loosened. She and Jan were going to be all right. “How’d you find this place?” she murmured.

Josephine pushed her way past the others to stand next to Jan. “A menu for Mama’s was in Judith’s pocket. Charlie showed it around last night, asked if it meant anything to anyone. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out, especially given that Jan had told us you were staying with ‘Mama’ Brevik. Only problem was, we didn’t put it all together until late. It took awhile to round up everyone. We left about four this morning.”

It took me long enough to put it together, Lola thought. But then, no one had hurled “dark meat” epithets her way for half her life. She pushed away the thought and tried to take satisfaction in the fact that Charlie had taken Judith and the missing girls seriously after all. He just hadn’t wanted her to know it. But why had the women preceded Charlie to Mama’s? She wondered as much aloud.

“He didn’t know we were coming,” Jan volunteered when no one else said anything. “The aunties decided on their own to see if the girls were there, and to bring them home. They thought it would be easier on everyone if the whole thing were on the down low. The idea was that the dance would shame whoever had them into letting them leave.”

It might have worked, Lola thought, if they’d been dealing with people who had even a shred of shame. Which Thor and Charlotte didn’t.

“And you just happened to be with them?”

Jan’s response was oblique. “I heard they were going.”

From Joshua no doubt, Lola thought. She ventured a guess. “So you just showed up and hitched a ride with them.” Taking advantage of the fact that the aunties would never have been rude enough to turn her away. That, and they probably wouldn’t consider that even though they’d all known Jan from childhood, her determination to be on that bus likely stemmed at least as much from her pursuit of a story than those lifelong friendships. Melting snow trickled down Lola’s temples. Her head felt better. She started to sit up again. This time, her stomach rebelled. She turned on her side, retching toward the floor. “Sorry,” she gasped when the spasms ended. “I think I picked up a bug while I was here.”

Josephine put her hands to Lola’s shoulders and gently pushed her back down. “You just rest. And don’t worry. It goes away after a couple of months.”

“A couple of
months
?” Lola tried once again to sit up. Josephine increased the pressure on her shoulders. Smiles flitted among the women.

“Oh, dear child,” Josephine said. “Don’t you know you’re pregnant?”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

F
ive miles passed. Ten. Twenty. Lola sat small beneath the weight of the silence within the cruiser, the only sounds the roar and fade of passing trucks, the whomp of snow against the side of the car followed by the thunk of wiper blades to clean the cruiser’s begrimed windshield. The horizon fled before them, level as a chalked string snapped against the sky. Lola sneaked an occasional sidelong glance at Charlie. But his jaw remained set, hands clenched around the wheel, gaze drilling straight ahead. It had taken more than two hours for a contingent of highway patrolmen and federal agents and sheriffs from neighboring counties to make their way to Burnt Creek and take Thor and Dawg into custody. The women and their daughters were long gone by that point.

“You can’t leave,” Charlie had protested as they prepared to go. “Someone will need to take their statements. And the girls should be checked out at the clinic here.”

“We have our own clinic on the reservation. After what they’ve been through, another day isn’t going to make a bit of difference.” Josephine moved aside so Alice could come forward. Smart move, Lola thought. Charlie would never dare disagree with an elder.

Alice’s lips worked soundlessly while she gathered enough breath to force the words. “We’re taking our girls home. They can give their statements there—if they feel like it.”

“I’ll ride home with them,” Jan said into the hush. Lola wondered how long it would take Jan to pull out her notebook.

“Me, too,” Lola said.

“No, you won’t,” Charlie said. “You’re coming with me.”

Jan raised her eyebrows and whistled soundlessly. “Good luck,” she mouthed to Lola. She grabbed the handle on the side of the van and swung herself inside just before the door closed. Charlie hadn’t spoken to Lola since.

Bub lay across Lola’s lap, sleeping so deeply that even his legs, which usually paddled ceaselessly during his dreams, were still. At some point, a man from one of the trailers had emerged with a paper plate of roast beef. “That dog’s been hanging around for a couple of days,” he said, in the elongated syllables of the bayou. “Might be it’s a bit peaked.” He returned with a second plate, heaped higher still, when he saw how quickly Bub inhaled the first. Lola drummed her fingers lightly against Bub’s distended belly. “Who told you?” she said, as though she and Charlie had been chatting all along.

“What do you mean?” Each word distinct, bitten off. Not so much as a glance her way.

“Jan?” It would be just like Jan, she thought. Give the women enough of a head start toward Burnt Creek, then make a surreptitious call to Charlie, maybe while they made a rest stop. Jan would have wanted the law on hand to deal with the two hundred ways the women’s plan might have gone awry, not to mention the fact that Charlie’s presence would mean maximum drama, and an even better story.

“Nobody told me.” Lola flinched at Charlie’s harsh tone. Bub quivered, opened a single sleepy eye, then breathed deeply and fell back asleep.

“Then how did you know to come here?”

“Bub.”

The dog groaned and raised his head, his displeasure clear at being forced to pay attention yet again. Lola stroked him back toward slumber. “What about Bub?”

“I got a call. From a security guard, actually. He said the dog had been hanging around the man camp and he finally caught him. He called you first and then, when he couldn’t raise you, called me.”

That part, at least, made sense, Lola thought. Both their phone numbers were on Bub’s tags.

“So I came out here to pick him up. I knew that if you weren’t with him, something was wrong.” The ice in his voice cracked, betraying the hours of tension.

“But.” Lola struggled to fit the pieces together. “You knew to come to the trailer.”

“I didn’t.” He slammed a fist into the dash. The cruiser swerved. A semi blared its bullfrog horn. Bub was barking before he was fully awake, wobbling on his three legs before finding his balance in Lola’s lap. She steadied him as Charlie straightened the car. She counted to ten—she peeked at Charlie—then to twenty before venturing another question, softening it to a statement just before she spoke.

“You had the siren going when you pulled up. I thought—” She left it to him to fill in the blanks.

The quiver in Charlie’s voice spread to the corners of his mouth. Bub kept a wary eye on him. “It was because of the dog again. When the security guard handed him over to me, he bolted. Ran right through the man camp. I jumped in the car to follow him and put the siren on when he turned a corner. Didn’t want to run over some poor roughneck out for a stroll. Imagine my surprise when I saw Josephine and the rest of them.”

Lola imagined. Chasing a dog through a foreign landscape one minute, coming upon his own people the next. Tiny Alice Kicking Woman moving her frozen feet in intricate dance steps. The long-gone girls, tacitly acknowledged as dead, pouring alive from the trailer. Thor at the door with a gun to Tina’s head. His girlfriend’s voice calling to him from within.

She reached for him. He shuddered away. She dropped her hand.

“We shouldn’t talk until we get back and somebody can take your statement.” He’d regained control of his voice.

Lola matched her own to its flatness. “Fine.” She tried to relax against the seat. It probably wasn’t the best time, she decided, to ask him about the child Charlotte had alluded to, let alone to say anything about Josephine’s impromptu diagnosis of her nausea. She closed her eyes and slid her hand inside her sweater and felt the flatness of her belly and did math in her head. Until she’d started getting sick to her stomach, she’d had none of the usual signs. Josephine was flat wrong, she told herself. There was no way she could be pregnant.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

L
ola sat on the edge of the tub in Jan’s apartment and stared at mocking blue plus signs, a half-dozen of them. The previous day, she’d driven to all the towns within a fifty-mile radius and bought a pregnancy test from every drugstore or grocery store clerk she didn’t recognize. She’d waited until Jan called an entirely too cheerful good-bye to the neighbor who rented the other half of the bungalow, and then spent hours drinking water and peeing and watching as one “positive” sign after another emerged. Then she simply sat and cursed under her breath.

“Holy shit.” This time, the cursing wasn’t in her head. Jan stood in the doorway of a bathroom so small it was possible to stand in the tub and touch all four walls. Lola grabbed the trash-can and swept the sticks into it. Too late. Jan’s eyebrows climbed high. “Why’d you go and waste all that money on tests? Josephine already called it.”

Lola tried going on the offensive. “What are you doing here?”

“Take it easy. For starters, I live here. Besides, I brought you lunch.” Jan held up a paper bag that wafted scents of grease and burnt meat. With her other hand, she waggled a cup. “Milkshake, too. Figured you needed a calcium boost. Under the circumstances.”

But for a too-lengthy visit to the local clinic to get her broken nose examined and reset, and then her circumnavigation of the county in search of pregnancy tests, Lola had been at Jan’s ever since her return to Burnt Creek two days earlier. Charlie didn’t give her a choice. “Whatever problems you two have, work it out,” he’d said over her protests when he’d pulled up outside Jan’s place. “I can’t have you staying with me until this investigation’s done.”

Now Lola reached for the distraction of food. “I’m starving,” she said around a mouthful of cheeseburger. The next minute found her heaving over the toilet.

“Dammit. I spent good money on that food. Hate to see it go to waste.” Jan reached over Lola and flushed, then took Lola’s place on the edge of the tub and picked up the burger and took a bite. Lola turned away and groaned.

“Do you have to eat that in front of me?”

Jan took another bite. “At least the room’s got the right color scheme.” Jan’s bathroom was from a bygone era, its fixtures powder blue, the tiles pale pink. “Maybe I can hold a baby shower for you in here.”

Lola scooted on her bottom until she was in the hallway, putting a little distance between herself and the smell of food. “I can’t be pregnant.”

Jan nudged the trashcan with her foot. The test sticks rattled within. “All evidence to the contrary.”

“But we always took precautions.”

Jan licked a bit of ketchup from her finger. She crossed her legs and jiggled a cowboy boot. “Always? Every single time?”

“Well. When we needed to.”

Jan pointed a french fry at Lola. “There you have it. Half the girls in my high school class ended up pregnant because they thought they were safe that week. I thought you were smarter than that.”

Lola took a deep breath. In the space of a single split second, her stomach traded queasy for ravenous. “Hand over that milkshake.” She slurped her way to the bottom of the cup. “Did you eat all of the fries?”

“Yes.”

Lola took the bag and ran her finger around the bottom, feeling for fragments. “Were you ever going to tell me about Charlie’s kid?”

Jan nearly lost her balance on the edge of the tub. “What are you talking about?”

Lola wondered how long she’d have to live in Magpie before people stopped treating her like an idiot. “I know about him. Or her. Which is it, anyway? Charlotte told me while I was in Burnt Creek. I can’t believe Charlie never said anything to me.”

Jan wadded up the empty food bag and threw it into the trashcan. “You two need to work on your communication, along with your birth control. But maybe the reason he never said anything is that there is no other kid.”