Dakota (31 page)

Lola pushed herself up from the floor and splashed cold water on her face, taking care to avoid the unwieldy bandaging on her nose. She brushed her teeth and considered the possibility that Jan was telling the truth. “Why would Charlotte say that?”

“Possibly because, at least from what you’ve told me, the woman was a stone lying bitch. But maybe Thor ran into Charlie at one of those sheriff’s conventions when Charlie was taking care of his niece. His brother’s girlfriend had a baby awhile back and then ran off and left him and the baby, too. Navajo girl. Don’t know what she was doing all the way up here. Anyhow, Charlie took the baby in for a while when his brother went down to Arizona to try and patch things up. Must have worked out because they’re there still, the baby, too. Although I guess she’s not a baby anymore.”

“Stop saying baby.” Lola kicked the trashcan. Her stomach performed an ominous, slow-motion revolution. “I need air.” She rushed to the porch. But the bracing gulps of subzero air she expected eluded her. Slush sprayed from a passing car. Water dripped from the porch eaves. A soft breeze slid past. Lola lifted her face to it and slitted her eyes against a sun that had emerged full strength from wherever it had been hiding for weeks on end. “What’s going on? Everything’s melting. It’s so warm.”

“I know.” Jan followed her out onto the porch, straddled the railing, grabbed one of the supports and leaned far over the melting yard to catch the sun. Bub lay on the newly bare sidewalk a few feet away, sprawled to soak up maximum warmth. “It was ten degrees this morning. I’ll bet it’s sixty now. Warmer, maybe. It’s a Chinook.”

Lola braced her hands on the railing and leaned out beside her. “Whatever a Chinook is, I like it. I can’t remember the last time I was really warm. Does this mean it’s spring?”

“Hah. We’ve got weeks and weeks of winter left. It’ll get cold again. But not as cold, and not for as long. We’ll get a warm day here, a warm day there. One day we’ll wake up and the snow will be gone and the whole prairie will have gone green—”

“—as Ireland. So I’ve been told. But I don’t believe it.”

Jan held out her hand to catch the droplets of melting snow from the porch roof. She touched her tongue to her palm. “I wonder if I should be doing this. Used to be snow water was the sweetest. But now with the crap spewing into the air from the patch, there’s probably all sorts of pollutants in this. What are you going to do?”

Lola rocked forward, leaning farther still over the yard. “About pollution?”

“Don’t be coy. You know what about. And be careful. If you fall and hurt yourself, you might not have anything to be coy about.” Lola straightened and stood. Her hand went, seemingly of its own volition, to her stomach. “Huh,” said Jan. “There’s a telling move. Are you going to keep it?”

Lola snorted. She touched the bandage that felt as though it covered half her face. Her nose hurt. “That would be crazy. I’m not exactly the maternal type. I don’t even know if Charlie and I are together anymore. I can barely take care of myself and Bub, let alone a baby. Besides, there’s probably something wrong with it. I got beat up. And Charlotte gave me some sort of drug.”

“Babies are tough. My mom rodeoed while she was pregnant with me and my sister, right about ’til when we popped. Besides, Indian people aren’t big believers in abortion. There aren’t enough of them. Did you know there aren’t even twenty thousand Blackfeet?”

“I’m not an Indian.” Lola pointed out the obvious. She clasped her hands behind her back, to keep them from straying again to her abdomen.

“But that baby is. Or at least, a descendant.”

“It’s not a baby. It’s just a blob. What’s a descendant?”

Jan’s pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone. “Damn. Jorkki’s on me to write a story about the Chinook. And he wants to know when you’re coming back to work. Want me to tell him you’re still too traumatized?”

“Descendants,” Lola reminded her.

Jan tapped a text into the phone. “Why don’t they make an emoticon that looks like a middle finger? Anyhow, a descendant is anyone who’s less than twenty-five percent Blackfeet. Some people want descendants admitted to the tribe. Some don’t. The blood quantum people will figure out which your baby is. They’ve got it down to a science.”

Lola smacked a porch support. “Stop calling it a baby. And stop acting as though anybody has a say in this other than me.”

Jan swung back down onto the porch, her boots clattering against the boards. “At least one person does.”

A cloud scooted across the sun. The temperature took a nosedive. Lola crossed her arms over her chest. “Charlie.”

Jan gnawed at the end of her braid. “When do you think you might get around to telling him?”

The cloud kept moving, the Chinook triumphing. But Lola was still cold.

“Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell him now.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

W
hen Lola had first moved to Montana, she’d wondered at the way houses sat hard by the roads, entirely too close for her taste to the admittedly sparse traffic. Once the snows started, daily layering driveways, she understood. Charlie’s place was an anomaly, well off the road at the end of a curving lane. In addition to his cruiser, he kept a geriatric pickup that seemed largely held together by Bondo, but that served its sole purpose of pushing a snow blade. Lola parked her car next to the truck, its raised blade gleaming in the sun, and looked around for Charlie.

She saw the Appaloosa first, tied up outside the corral, the winter’s accumulation of grit brushed from his coat. Despite his winter shagginess, Spot looked newly sleek, stamping a forefoot in anticipation of the ride, the first one in months, that apparently awaited. Bub soared from the truck and ran to him. Spot lowered his head and they touched noses, the horse nickering in the back of his throat, Bub’s body a wriggling blur.

Charlie came out of the shed, a bridle in his hand. He stopped when he saw Lola. “I was going to call you.”

Lola liked the sound of that. “I need to talk to you, too. What’s going on?”

“I thought I’d take advantage of the Chinook, take Spot for a ride. He could use the exercise.” But he draped the bridle over the fence, and turned toward the house. A deep porch wrapped it on three sides, populated by fast-dwindling stacks of firewood—and, on this day, a pyramid of taped and dated cardboard boxes. Lola recognized them. She’d packed them herself, when she’d decided to leave the newspaper in Baltimore and take a chance on a new life in Magpie. She didn’t recognize one of the boxes. He’d have assembled that one himself, she guessed, filling it with the contents of her single dresser drawer, the few pieces of clothing she’d hung in the closet, the handful of things from her side of the medicine cabinet.

Her mouth went cottony. “What’s this?”

Charlie’s hands hung by his side. Lola wanted to go to him, take those hands, wrap his arms around her. She’d always felt safe, protected, in his embrace. She’d never wanted to admit to that, not to herself and definitely not to Charlie. She took a step toward him. His eyes warned her away.

“Charlie?”

“Lola. You saved my life back there in Burnt Creek. Don’t think I’m not grateful. But you don’t base a relationship on gratitude. We both know this wasn’t working. It hit me after you left. Your being gone wasn’t a whole lot different than your being here. Look at your things—you hardly unpacked anything from home, and the few things you did barely filled a whole box. You have no concept of relationships, of family.” He fussed with the bridle, arranging the reins so they wouldn’t fall into the snow. He had to know about the baby, Lola thought; almost certainly had amassed quite the collection of voicemails and texts and e-mails from people vying to be the first to let him know his girlfriend was pregnant.

Lola had practiced casual, confident phrases on the drive over from Jan’s.
Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.
Or, maybe,
I’ve made an appointment at the clinic in Missoula
. She hadn’t. But she would. Now those phrases fled. “You know why I’m here.”

He shook his head. “I don’t. I told you to stay at Jan’s, not to contact me. But you didn’t listen. Again.” He leaned over the fence and slapped Spot on the flank. “Go on. Git. There’s not going to be any ride for a while.” Spot sulked away, ears pinned back against his head, Bub gamboling beside him.

Fine, Lola thought. If he wanted to pretend he didn’t know, she’d go along. She fell back on work. “Has Jan set up an interview with you yet?”

“You know I can’t talk to you about this. Either of you.”

Lola wasn’t surprised. “Doesn’t matter, really,” she said. “Jan and I can get your part from the court documents.”

“What documents are you talking about?”

In her work, Lola frequently played dumb. She didn’t appreciate it when someone turned the tables on her. “Oh, come on. The incident reports, the complaints, the affidavits. Even if you strip them down to the bare minimum, the charging documents will be a gold mine.”

“What charges?” Charlie stood with his back to the bright sun, his face in shadow. Lola couldn’t see his eyes.

“I figure rape, at a minimum. Aggravated assault. Drug possession—even if Charlotte came by that stuff legally, it wasn’t supposed to leave the clinic—and trafficking. Kidnapping, for sure. And taking the girls across state lines, that’s federal.”

A muscle jumped in Charlie’s jaw. “And negligent homicide. Don’t forget that.”

Lola struggled to remain impassive. He must have decided Judith had been murdered after all. “Dawg, right?” she said. “How did he do it? Was it a deliberate drug overdose? Or did he just beat her the way he did DeeDee? Because I’m sure he killed her, too. Was Judith dead before she ended up in that snowbank? Have you told Joshua yet?” She stopped. She couldn’t pinpoint the expression on Charlie’s face; knew only that somehow she was on the wrong track.

“Not Dawg,” he said. “You.”

The world stopped. Lola couldn’t hear her own question. But she heard Charlie’s answer.

“For killing Charlotte.”

F
OR
ONCE
Lola wished she could throw up. It would have provided a distraction. As it was, she stood staring at Charlie, waiting for him to tell her he was joking. Which, after a pause that lasted entirely too long, he did. Sort of.

“It’s something that had to be considered,” he said. “They took my word that it was self-defense.”

Lola took two steps and latched onto a corral post for support. “Of course it was.”

He lifted a shoulder. “All scenarios had to be considered.”

“What about Thor and Dawg? And Finch, too? What are they being charged with?”

“Well.” Charlie rubbed his toe across the melting snow, revealing the sparse, frozen grass beneath. “That’s a problem. Finch, especially. His part’s pretty nebulous. Pretty sure he’s the courier and the special customer, too, but none of the girls saw who took them from the reservation. And for sure nobody’s identifying him as the special customer, although it makes sense. Maybe Dawg or Thor will dime him out, but I don’t have much hope. Dawg’s easier. He’s on the run from charges in about a half-dozen states. They’re all fighting, each trying to push him off the other, because nobody wants the cost of jailing him and prosecuting him. We might be able to go after him for that poor trucker. The boot prints match, for starters. Although other states have stronger cases.” He moved his foot in a circle, uncovering more grass.

“And Thor?”

“That’s problematic, too.” He sounded so tired, so uncharacteristically embittered, that most of Lola’s fear and anger drained away. “But I’ll let you find out for yourself why. Come on. Let’s get this stuff into the truck.”

Lola, numb, walked behind him in the strip of grass. He led her to the porch and handed her a box. He stacked another box atop a third and lifted them both. It took less time to load them than she’d thought. Charlie stood by, a hand on the pickup’s hood. He had to know, she thought. He’d just been bluffing.

“You’re wrong,” Lola said. Her voice wobbled. She cleared her throat. “What you said awhile ago about family. I do have a concept of family. More than just a concept.” There. She’d given him an opening.

He slapped the hood. “You take care of yourself, Lola. You and—”

She held her breath. So he did know. Which meant there was no way he’d let her drive away. As long as he stopped her, she could forgive him the bluff. He cleared his throat. “You and Bub,” he said. “I’ll miss him.” He whistled. Bub, fur soaked and paws muddy, streaked beneath the corral fence and jumped into the truck, leaving tracks across the seat. Lola brushed at them, succeeding only in smearing dirt into the upholstery. She climbed in after Bub. Started the engine. Headed down the lane. The phrases she’d practiced on the way to Charlie’s came back to her.
Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. The clinic in Missoula . . .
She rested her hand on Bub’s back until she stopped shaking. She tried out her voice. It, too, had lost its quiver. Good, she thought.

“Let’s go back to Jan’s and pack. How do you feel about a couple of days in the big city, Bub? Looks like we’re headed to Missoula.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE