Disgraced (19 page)

Which Pal did, in effect, standing on the accelerator with both feet. “You don't believe me. Get the hell out of my house. Take your brat and go. Right now.
No!”
She screamed as Lola started to speak. “Not another word from you!” Her face changed. Her gaze shifted past Lola.

“Mommy?”

Margaret stood in the hallway, sleep and fear at war in her eyes, thumb in her mouth, a return to the comfort of babyhood. “What's wrong?”

Lola ran to her. “Nothing is wrong,” she murmured, wrapping the child tight in her arms. She was glad she hadn't unpacked their bags after they'd returned the previous night. “We're just going to hit the road a little early, that's all. You're going to sleep in your booster seat and when you wake up, we'll be almost to where we're going.”

Wherever that turns out to be, she thought, as she hastened with Margaret to the truck, Bub at her heels, without a backward glance toward Pal.

TWENTY-NINE

Lola second-guessed herself all
the way to town.

She'd done the right thing. She was sure of it. But she wondered if she could have handled things differently, in a way that would have made Pal return to the table, pull out a chair, sit down and start spilling her guts. On the record. Along with a completed incident report to file with DOD. Lola knew that in rape cases, as in no other crime, readers liked that piece of paper. People were quick to denigrate sex crimes as “he said-she said” cases, conveniently ignoring the fact that so many others—muggings, burglaries, and the like—were, too. Yet nobody raised an eyebrow when those victims came forward.

Pal's fury lent credence to her account. Or did it? One of the things Charlie and Lola agreed on was that the bigger the lie, the more towering the indignation. It was a source of frustration for both of them that jurors were inclined to be taken in by theatrical, sobbing denials, while they looked askance at the man who sat quietly, saying, “No, of course I didn't do it,” so secure in his own innocence that it never occurred to him that others might see his very calm as suspicious.

Still. The hard knot of uncertainty took up stubborn lodging in Lola's gut. If Pal were lying—again—Lola didn't dare go ahead with the story. “So much for ever snagging another assignment from InDepth,” she muttered. But if Pal were telling the truth, Lola would have to write the story quickly. It would be an about-face from the Skiff-As-Hero version she'd already outlined. Skiff-As-Villain was the one part of Pal's account that gave Lola pause. He'd been the soul of earnestness in each of her encounters with him. He'd even cried in front of her. Most important, Margaret liked him. “I just can't see it,” Lola said aloud, convincing herself that she'd done the right thing by pushing Pal to file the paperwork that would bolster her case.

She'd give Pal a couple of days to think things over, she thought. This time, she'd really, truly head to the Tetons. Spend a day or two, before making the long detour back to Pal's on the way home. She'd check in, see if Pal changed her mind. She might even try to talk to Skiff yet again, to watch his reaction more carefully as she questioned him, without letting on that she'd talked to Pal, or what Pal had said. She felt marginally better. She had a plan. Now, to deal with the fact that she faced about three more hours of driving and a day of sightseeing, after a sleepless night. Coffee, she thought. And—she glanced at the dashboard gauges—gas. Margaret stirred as the truck slowed on the approach to town. A glance in the rearview mirror showed the slow surprise on her daughter's face at finding herself in her booster seat instead of bed, the confusion at her recollection of their abrupt departure. Margaret's lip trembled.

“I'm going to stop and get some gas, and some coffee,” Lola said. “Or, maybe we can go to the café for a nice breakfast. Would you like that?” Thirty's outbuildings appeared. The gas station was on the edge of town. Lola pulled in and braked beside the pumps. Another pickup sat at a second set of pumps. Lola fumbled in her pocket for her credit card. She'd thought that staying at Pal's would save money, but she'd spent far more on gas than she'd expected, running back and forth from the ranch to town every day. At least gas was cheaper in Wyoming than Montana, a testament to the state's plentiful oil refineries.

“Mommy.” Margaret's voice was urgent.

“Don't worry, honey,” she said. “We'll go inside as soon as I'm done with the gas. I'll get my coffee and you can use the bathroom.”

“No, Mommy.” Lola glanced again in the mirror. Margaret pointed a shaking finger. “Mommy. Look.”

Lola looked. She saw the store. A few cars parked in front of it. The other set of pumps. The truck at the pumps.
The truck
.

Silver and burly. A long scrape down the passenger side door. Bits of red paint embedded in it. The bastard hadn't even bothered to wash it off. Lola's first impulse was to rush inside the store and confront him. March him down to the sheriff's office herself. Which she knew was ridiculous. She took note of the other truck's license number. Chanted it to herself. Started her own truck. Glided away from the pumps.

“Mommy, where are we going?”

Lola pulled up to the curb across from the gas station. She opened the glove compartment and retrieved a reporter's notebook and pen from the stash that lived there and wrote down the license number. “We're going to sit right here and watch to see who comes out of that store. And then we're going to call the sheriff and have him arrest his a—um, rear end.”

Margaret pressed her nose to the window. Bub stretched across her, adding a wet round circle to the glass. Lola rolled her own window down and held her phone at the ready. Her plan to was snap a photo, and then call 9-1-1. On the off chance the truck didn't belong to the driver, she wanted the photo for evidence. The store's door swung open. A beefy man in a cowboy hat emerged, a super-sized soft drink cup in his hand. Lola clicked the camera. The truck's driver, Lola remembered, had been a big guy, like his truck. But he'd worn a ball cap. A lot of people changed hats, depending on the day, Lola thought. Maybe not this one, though. He got into a car at the far end of the parking lot and drove away. Lola's breath came out in a whoosh.

“Not him, Mommy.”

“No.”

Lola erased the photo. The door opened again, letting out two men, one behind the other. Lola and Margaret sat up straighter. Bub whined.

“Oh.” Margaret's voice went flat. “It's just Spiff.”

On any other day—and especially on this day, given the questions Pal had raised—Lola would have hailed him. But she had to find out who was driving that truck. His big body blocked her view. Lola craned her neck, trying to see around him. Then she stopped trying.

Skiff got into the silver truck, started it with a roar, and drove away.

Lola drove fast, carelessly, the speedometer needle creeping into the danger zone. A deer she never saw made a desperate leap that constituted the difference between life and road kill and then stood trembling, looking at the vanishing red blur that had come out of nowhere.

Lola's thoughts slammed like blows. It hadn't been, as the deputy sheriff had suggested, some random creep on the road that night, intent upon scaring her or worse. It was Skiff. He'd known it was her, would have recognized her truck by its color and make alone, not to mention the damning Montana plates. He'd meant to scare her. Maybe scare her into leaving Wyoming. Scare her off the story. Which meant that, of all the versions of the story she'd heard, Pal's had been true.

Pal.
Who was alone at the ranch. Lola looked in the rearview mirror. No silver truck. She stomped the accelerator harder. It already strained against the floor. They were almost to the ranch. Lola braked hard for the turn onto the gravel road, spraying grit in a great cloud behind her, obliterating the vista in the rearview mirror. If the silver truck crept up behind her, she'd have no way of knowing. Lola stomped the brakes on the final downhill to the house, steering to the very edge of the porch, trying to reassure herself that it meant nothing at all that there were no signs of life at the ranch. No smoke from the chimney, no lights shining from the window. Just Jemalina, scratching stupidly for grubs, as though this day was like any other.

Lola fumbled at the straps and buckles on Margaret's booster seat, torn between the desire to rush into the house and warn Pal, and the absolute necessity of not leaving her child alone. “Ow, Mommy,” Margaret protested as Lola dragged her from her seat, hoisted her beneath one arm, and ran heavily toward the house, fending off Jemalina's predictable assault with a sideways kick that nearly threw her off balance. She took the porch steps in a single leap and reached for the door. It was locked. Lola stared stupidly, trying to imagine the last time she'd encountered a locked door in the five years she'd lived in the West. Something else was off. Her ankle registered a sharp pain. She'd foolishly taken her eye off the chicken.

“That does it,” she said, and reached for the shovel by the front door. It wasn't there. Lola put Margaret down and pounded two-fisted on the door with all the fervor she'd intended to aim at Jemalina. “Pal! Pal!”

Margaret began to cry. Bub added his voice to the din.

The door opened. The noise stopped. Pal stood within, holding the shovel like a baseball bat, business end up, cocked above her head and ready to swing.

“Whoa.” Lola moved back fast, well out of shovel range. Margaret, Jemalina and Bub positioned themselves somewhere in the middle of the yard.

“What the …
heck
are you doing back here?”

Lola noted the verbal adjustment and thought that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Pal had actually paid attention to something she'd said. That probably required some effort on Pal's part. What Lola was about to do required more.

“I came back to apologize. And to make sure you're all right.”

The shovel lowered a millimeter. Lola took a step forward. It went up again, blade catching the sunlight, its razor edge flashing an unmistakable warning. Lola froze.

“Apologize for what? And why make sure I'm all right?”

“For doubting you.”

Pal's arms quivered. All that running wasn't doing a damn thing for her biceps, Lola thought. It had been awhile since she'd toted a heavy rifle for a good part of each day. The shovel had to be getting heavy.

“What brought on that revelation?”

Margaret's high thin voice reached the porch. “We saw Spiff.”

“Who?”

“You know who,” Lola said.

“Where?”
Pal hoisted the shovel higher, cocked her arms afresh
.

Lola made her voice low and steady, at odds with what she felt. “In town. He didn't see us. Didn't follow us. Believe me, I checked.”

The shovel came down with a thump. Lola looked at the gash in the floor and imagined a similar wound in her head. She wouldn't relax until Pal let go of it altogether. “Why don't you set that aside? We can talk about this over coffee. Margaret, you can play with Jemalina now. Stay on the porch, though. And get in here lickety-split if you see anybody coming.”

Pal stood aside. Lola crossed into the kitchen, back muscles tensed against the possibility Pal might change her mind. But Pal leaned the shovel against the wall and pointed to the coffeepot. “I just made fresh.” She stood with arms folded while Lola poured herself a cup.

Lola looked at her over the rim of her mug. “What's with the shovel? The door being locked?”

Pal snorted. “You first. What's with
Spiff
?”

THIRTY

“If I'd had any
idea it was him that night, I'd never have doubted you,” Lola said when she'd finished telling Pal about the truck chase. She spoke past a mouthful of strawberries.

Pal waved off the offer of a berry, and picked at the scars on her forearm. “Why didn't you tell me about it? That's some scary shit.”

“You didn't exactly invite conversation.” But since she appeared to be doing so now, Lola chanced another question. “What's with those?” She pointed at the scars.

Pal put her finger on the first one, the older whitened scar faint beneath the new, still-healing slash that X'ed it out. “Tommy McSpadden.”

She moved her finger to the next. “Tyson Graff. Although, those two assholes being bonded out of jail makes me think I crossed them off too soon. Anyway.” She moved her finger to the next. “Cody Dillon. At least he felt bad about it.”

Lola forced the question through lips that felt frozen. Pal, scarring herself for each of her attackers, and then cutting herself again in a sort of triumph when God or the Creator or whatever you wanted to call a higher power dished out retribution. “What do you mean?”

“When he shot himself. He couldn't face his father, knowing what he'd done. And shouting, ‘It's a lie,' the way he did. I almost feel bad that he's dead. But not really.”

“It's
a lie
,” Lola breathed. “Not, ‘It's alive.'”

“What?”

“Never mind. What's that last one?” Even though she knew, mouthing the words along with Pal as she spoke them.

“Skiff. He's the last one to have gotten away with it.” She dug her fingers into the line of scar tissue, reddening the skin around it. “And he's the one who caused it all. Without him, the rest would never have had the nerve.”

Lola reached across the table and pulled Pal's hand away from the scar and held it in her own. “He's not going to get away with it anymore. You and I are going to talk, and I'm going to take notes like a fiend. And then you're going to call the DOD, aren't you? I'll sit right here with you while you do it.”

She didn't know why she was so sure; wondered, as the words left her mouth, if once again she'd pushed Pal too far. But she must have sensed some shift in the woman, some new determination that stiffened her shoulders and lifted her chin and produced the first real smile she'd seen on Pal's face since that ghastly facsimile the day Cody had shot himself.

“Some reporter you are,” Pal said. “Where's your notebook?” Then laughed outright as Lola dug through the pockets of her cargo shorts to produce the most basic tools of her trade.

Within an hour, Lola's hand felt clenched in a permanent cramp around her pen. She recorded the conversation on her phone but, always wary of technology, took handwritten notes as Pal talked herself hoarse.

They started easy, the way she usually did with her interviews, lingering over the innocuous stuff, comparing their own first impressions of Afghanistan. “Lucky,” Pal said wistfully when Lola told of her travels around Kabul and beyond, accompanied only by her driver and fixer, her hair tucked beneath a shawl-like duppata. The arrangement that had seemed so limiting to Lola represented unimaginable freedom to Pal, who went nowhere without a full contingent of fellow soldiers, their appearance rendered appalling by helmets, blank-lensed sunglasses, robotic-looking body armor and of course the warning presence of rifles held at the ready. “Can you imagine wanting to talk to anyone who looked like that?” Pal said. “They'd see us coming and run. Which of course made everyone think they were up to something. Me, I think they were just scared shitless.”

Which gave Lola an opening to talk of the one advantage to being a woman, the fact that, unlike the male journalists, people often invited her into their homes, there being no shame in another woman mingling with the females of the family.

“What was it like?” Pal leaned forward. Lola suppressed a start at the curiosity lighting Pal's features, so unusual was the emergence of anything resembling human emotion on that sharp little face.

“Odd. They'd feed me, of course. They're the most hospitable people on earth. Even the poorest people would at least offer tea. But when it was a full meal, they'd often put me with the men for dinner. It's like I was an honorary man. I suppose I should have been flattered, but it made me so uncomfortable, I'd go eat dessert with the women. They were more fun, anyhow.”

“How's that?”

Lola laughed at the memory, and then again at the welcome realization that not all of her memories of Afghanistan were bad. “Because the women spent a lot of their time making fun of the men.”

“What was the food like?”

“Scary.”

Actual mischief crept into Pal's eyes. “Like yours?”

“Just for that, I'm taking the last of the coffee.” Lola emptied the dregs into her cup and prepared a fresh pot. The food in Afghanistan had to have been unsafe for a western gut, the vegetables washed in water swimming with bacteria, the meat obtained from a market where it hung, buzzing with flies, all day in the sun. “But it was so good I couldn't help myself. I ate it all!” she said. “The fruits and vegetables were nothing like the ones here, all good looks and no taste. The flavor was so intense. And for the most part, I never got sick. Just lucky, I guess.”

“Just immune from eating your own cooking,” Pal muttered.

“Let it go. Unless you want kitchen duty,” Lola shot back, warming to the beginnings of repartee, reminiscent of the same sort of smartassery she shared with Jan.

Pal obliged by returning to their earlier subject. “Did you make any friends? Among the locals, I mean.”

“Not really. Mostly I just interviewed people and moved on,” Lola began. “But there was one—” She stopped, teetering, fighting for balance at the lip of a bottomless chasm.

“Who?”

Lola closed her eyes against the images at the forefront of her brain, but that only threw them into sharper focus. The chasm yawned. Lola swayed. She grabbed at the table. “Never mind. Not important.”

A chair scraped. Footsteps. Hands on hers, clasping them tight, pulling at her, turning her in the chair. She opened her eyes. Pal crouched before her. “You want me to spill my guts to the whole fucking world about the worst thing that's ever happened to me? I say you'd better start talking.”

Lola forced the words. “I can't. I haven't. Ever.”

Pal's grasp tightened. The tiny bones in Lola's hands crunched. “You can. I'm living proof. What was that little lecture you gave me about not cowering before the shit that scares us? Well, right back at you. Close your eyes if it makes it easier. But start talking. Get it out.”

Lola squeezed her eyes shut. “His name was Ahmed. He was a fixer,” she began. She felt herself leaning even farther over the edge, Pal pulling just as hard against her fall. She steadied herself. And, against all odds, kept talking.

Lola awoke in her bed, with little idea how she'd gotten there and none of how much time had passed. She had a memory of Pal leading her to the room, her arm around Lola's shoulders, and urging her into bed beside Margaret. “You did great,” Pal whispered so as not to wake the girl. “You're going to need to sleep now. You'll feel better when you wake up. We'll finish my interview and do the DOD report then.” Lola couldn't even muster the energy to tell Pal she could have shouted without disturbing Margaret.

Lola's throat was dry. She opened her eyes. The light hurt. She squinted against it, almost expecting to find herself back on a Kabul street, bloodied bits of human flesh beneath her feet, the grievously wounded flailing about, screaming for help or, worse yet, lying in the grey silence that precedes expiration. Pal had said she'd feel better after sleeping. She wasn't sure. She went first to the bathroom and then the kitchen, waiting in the doorway as the room swam into focus, the humble Formica table, the long counter, Pal standing at it, doing something with food. Pal glanced her way.

“Welcome back to the world. It's nearly lunchtime, and we've got a long afternoon ahead of us. I'm fixing some food for us, and Margaret, too. Poor kid. She's been so good out there all morning. She's teaching Jemalina some tricks, apparently. God help us.”

A can opener sat on the counter. Lola sniffed. Tomatoes. Oh, Jesus, she thought. Not ravioli. Something sizzled in a pan. A familiar, buttery smell. Lola let herself hope. “Is that—?”

“Grilled cheese. Tomato soup, too. Canned, but it's all I've got. I know it's hot food on a hot day, but comfort seemed the way to go. Here.” She set a plate and a bowl in front of Lola, and called Margaret indoors. Lola finished her sandwich before her daughter had even settled in her chair, breaking yet another rule, this one involving waiting to eat until everyone was seated. Pal raised her eyebrows, buttered another piece of bread, and slapped it into the pan, topping it with thick slices of cheddar and another piece of buttered bread. “Do you mind waiting for yours, big girl? Your mom had a long night and she's in the middle of a long day. What say we take care of her before you and I eat?”

Margaret swelled at the “big girl” and nodded assent. “I'm teaching Jemalina how to fetch,” she announced. Bub's ears stood up at the word “fetch.”

“Sometimes she beats Bub to the ball.” The ears flattened. Bub's lip curled.

Lola held her bowl to her mouth and slurped directly from it. The more quintessentially American the food she inhaled, the farther Afghanistan receded.

“Rude, Mommy.”

Lola tilted the bowl high. Pal retrieved it and refilled it before she could even ask. “How can a chicken fetch a ball? It's too big for her beak,” Lola asked in the interminable seconds before the bowl returned.

“She rolls it. Do you want to see?”

Pal stepped in with Lola's soup and a second sandwich. “Your mom and I have a lot of work to do this afternoon. Why don't you teach Jemalina a new trick, and then tonight, we can have ourselves a regular chicken circus? I'll call Delbert and invite him up to watch. Maybe he can bring some popcorn.”

“Or ice cream.” Margaret cut her eyes toward Lola, who'd begun to think of Wyoming as the Land of No Rules.

Pal returned to the table with a sandwich and two plates. She cut the sandwich in half and put a piece on each plate. She went back to the stove and upended the pot over two mugs, filling each one about halfway. “One for you,” she told Margaret, “and one for me.”

She sat down. Raised her own sandwich. Took a bite. Swallowed. Put it down. Reached for her mug. Another swallow. Licked a bit of soup from upper lip. Back to the sandwich. Lola held her breath. It was the most food she'd seen Pal eat since she'd met her. Margaret watched open-mouthed.

Halfway through her sandwich, Pal raised her eyes. She looked from Lola to Margaret and back again. “What?”

Lola caught Margaret's eye and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, rearranging her face so as not to reveal the relief welling within. It was just a start. Pal had a long way to go. But she'd planted her feet firmly on the path. “Nothing at all. Eat hearty,” she said to Pal. “We're going back to your story next.”