Twelve

Lola couldn’t believe it worked.

By the time she’d driven to another block and parked the car in a less conspicuous spot, and then jogged back, Tynslee and an aging German shepherd, stiff in the hips but with the alert gaze of a youngster, paced near a stand of trees.

Lola tried to catch her breath as she approached. Before Charlie—everything in her life these days seemed to have a Before Charlie component—she’d been a runner, nothing to brag about in terms of speed or distance, but she’d found it a fine way to unwind from the stress of a daily deadline. But running, too, had fallen away since Charlie’s death. The two-block jog left her winded, with a stitch drawing fingernails down her side.

Between ragged breaths, she studied Tynslee. Without the dog, she’d barely have recognized the golden girl of the photos. Her hair hung loose and unwashed, and weeping had turned her face into a Rorschach of blotches. Even in Magpie, Montana, casual wear had come to be defined by yoga pants and leotard tops, but Tynslee’s slender form swam in an open jacket that revealed a baggy T-shirt with a spaghetti-strap top pulled over it and shapeless sweatpants. She dropped the leash and threw herself sobbing into Lola’s arms.

Lola stepped on the free end of the leash, lest Rex be inclined to escape. But he sidled in close, hackles rising, in a warning that clearly telegraphed I think you’re probably okay, but don’t try any funny stuff. Because I will rip you to shreds.

Lola stroked Tynslee’s hair and spoke soothingly, as much to Rex as to the girl. She led Tynslee to a bench and eased her onto it. “I know this is hard. Really hard. But it might be better if you can stop crying. People will stare. Someone might recognize you. Another reporter, say, who’ll want to take your photo and put it in the newspaper.”

Tynslee’s sobs choked off on a gasp. “Would they really do that?”

“Believe it. And tomorrow they’re all going to be at Frank’s initial court appearance”—Lola neglected to mention that she’d be there, too—“writing stories about the charges against him. So if you know something that would help him, you need to tell someone.” Someone like me.

“I can’t.” The pink patches on Tynslee’s face went scarlet. Another watery eruption seemed imminent.

Only Lola’s grip kept the girl from sliding from the bench to the ground. She’d been worried about Tynslee weeping aloud, attracting attention. Now she feared Tynslee would faint. Sixteen years old, she thought. Mother dead, boyfriend in jail with a murder charge in the offing. And being outed as having sex with her boyfriend to boot. Lola gathered that for a Mormon girl, the implications were monumental, so much as to be on par with the shattering losses she’d suffered only the day before.

As for the loss of Tynslee’s mother, Lola thought her own bereavement seemed clean, almost pure, by comparison. What if the person who’d killed Charlie had been someone she’d cared for? How would she handle the loss of trust as well as love? And if someone she’d loved had killed Charlie, would she have been able to accept that person’s guilt? Or would she, like Tynslee, insist upon innocence even in the face of a plausible motive? She needed to calm the girl.

“Let’s talk about something else. That’ll help you settle down.” But what? Lola had never been good at small talk. “This is the first time I’ve been to Salt Lake. The lake—it’s really big.”

“The largest salt lake in the Western Hemisphere.” Tynslee’s automatic response had the sound of something memorized since elementary school.

“I saw something strange when I flew in. Like a castle, at the edge of the lake.”

Tynslee nodded through a hiccup. “SaltAir. It’s an old resort. They use it for concerts now. I’m not allowed to go to them, though.”

“Why not? It was pretty.”

Tynslee lifted a shoulder. “Maybe from the air. Up close, it’s pretty decrepit. My parents think people do drugs there.”

Drugs. The fear of every middle-class parent. Followed closely by sex, although Lola guessed most parents didn’t want to know about their kids having sex, as long as nobody got pregnant. The warnings about drugs, though, started in kindergarten and intensified by the year. Already she was getting pop-up ads on her iPad about drug-testing kits for parents, the internet having somehow divined that she was the mother of a child approaching middle school age.

“I take it you don’t use drugs.”

“Of course not.”

Lola’s remark had had the intended result. Tynslee straightened, eyes flashing indignation.

“But you and Frank … Tynslee, you’re his best alibi. If he was with you all night, then he couldn’t have killed your mother. And if you tell the police that, the information that you were together never has to come out in public. They can just say simply that he has a credible alibi and let him go.”

“Trang.”

“What?”

“His name is Trang. And I’m no alibi. I wish I were. But I’m not.”

Trang? No, Melena definitely had called him Frank. As had the newspaper stories to which Munro had directed her for background. Lola filed the discrepancy away for future reference and concentrated on the more pressing matter. “You really can’t give him an alibi?”

“I didn’t go to him that night. I couldn’t. We got caught. We had to stop.”

“In his bed?” Lola’s own teenage escapades had taken place in the safety, if not the comfort, of cars. She tried to imagine her parents, to whom like all teenagers she’d assigned utter asexuality, walking in on her and a boyfriend. Even now, from the comfortable remove of adulthood, her face burned at the thought. She stared at some nearby tennis courts where a doubles game had begun, the ball thunking back and forth, a background of incongruous normalcy to the scenario of shame and death.

“No. His dad ran into me one night going home, crossing the lawn.”

Bryce, outside again in the middle of the night.

“What did he say?”

Tynslee shook her head. “He didn’t have to say anything.”

A ball went wild and bounced toward them. Rex yanked the leash from Lola’s hand and leapt after it, tail wagging as he presented it to one of the players. “Great dog you’ve got there.” The man waved his appreciation. Rex bounded back to them and, satisfied that Lola posed no threat, dropped his head into her lap and rolled soulful eyes her way. Lola ran her hand over his head and dug her fingers against the sweet spot at the base of an ear. He groaned his appreciation. Longing for Bub knifed through her.

With some difficulty, she returned her attention to Tynslee. “What happened after he saw you that time?”

“Nothing. He just looked at me and shook his head and said, ‘You, too? Guess I was wrong.’”

“You, too? What does that mean?” That Bryce had been trysting with Sariah? Just as Tynslee was sneaking around with Frank?

A thought that had apparently never occurred to Tynslee. The girl ducked her head and hitched a shoulder. Her glance slid toward Lola, then away. “That I was just like those other girls, I guess. Gentiles.”

“Gentiles?”

Tynslee’s lips twitched in something that, under any other circumstances, might have been a smile. “It’s what Mormons call everyone else.”

“So the Shumways are the only ones who know?”

“I wish.” All traces of a smile vanished. “Mrs. Shumway must have told my mom, because Trang said she came over to his house and yelled at his mom later that day.”

“Yelled what?”

“Kind of what you’d expect. ‘It’s time to make this right.’” The shoulder lifted again, higher than before. “So we got engaged.”

That last word a rising wail. Lola sat on her hand to keep from clapping it across Tynslee’s mouth. She tried a verbal slap instead.

“You don’t want to marry him.”

“It’s not that.” Tynslee’s gaze drifted sideways again, met Lola’s, kept going. “I love him!”

Lola’s bullshit meter pinged. Tynslee was trying to convince her of something, maybe something beyond her boyfriend’s alleged innocence.

The back-and-forth thunk of the tennis ball halted. Lola didn’t dare look toward the courts. She tried again to lead Tynslee back into conversation.

“What about Frank? Trang.” Dancing around the conclusion the police already may have reached. A reluctant boyfriend, looking for a way out, too scared to say as much to an insistent parent, coming to the logically illogical conclusion that the only escape lay in murder.

The girl wrapped her arms around herself and rocked to the faltering rhythm of her words. “He wanted to get married as much as I did. But we couldn’t have a wedding because of … what we’d done. And that’s not the worst of it.”

Tynslee knuckled a fist into eyes gone startlingly clear. Lola tried to ignore the relentless BS meter, flashing on full alert now, and concentrated on what the girl had said. Being forced into a marriage at age eighteen was bad enough. “What’s worse?”

“He couldn’t go on his mission.”

Even Lola knew that LDS youths were required to serve two-year missions after graduating high school. “Why not?” she asked.

Tynslee’s look was withering, worthy of Donovan Munro. Lola began to wish she’d done a lot more homework.

“You have to be pure.” Tynslee spat the word, the same one Melena had used. “For the temple wedding and the mission, both.”

“Pure? Does that mean what I think it means?”

“Exactly. But if you’re married, you can’t go on a mission. And that mission meant everything to him. The church just started a mission in Vietnam and he wanted to go there. We all tried to tell him that probably wouldn’t happen—the church chooses where you go. But he wouldn’t listen. Nothing was going to stop him. He was desperate.”

Desperate enough to kill someone who got in his way?

Tynslee answered Lola’s unspoken question. “That’s why he never would have killed Mom. She was on our side.”

“On your side? What does that mean?”

Tynslee swiped at her damp face with the back of her hand, took the leash from Lola, and stood. “I’ve got to get home. They’ll be worried.”

“Wait. You haven’t told me why he couldn’t have killed her. And why your mom was on your side. And what she was on your side about.”

“I want to. Believe me. But I can’t. I promised him. You just have to believe me. Miss Wicks, I’ve lost my mother. I can’t lose him, too.”

God help her, she did believe the girl, Lola thought. She didn’t know why. Because if anything, Tynslee had provided even more ballast to anchor the narrative that Frank killed Sariah. The nagging feeling that something was off, that somehow Tynslee was playing her, remained. But Tynslee had wrenched the story from herself word by agonized word, with none of the ease of a practiced liar.

“Tynslee!” Lola ran after her, rounding a turn that took her back toward the house. A couple walking across the street stopped to stare. Lola could bet that within minutes, Tynslee’s aunt and uncle would know that a strange woman had pursued their niece down the street.

Lola slowed to a rapid walk and hissed to Tynslee, a few steps ahead, “I respect your promise to Frank. But is there someone else I could talk to, someone else who knows why he couldn’t have killed her?”

“No!” Tynslee shrieked. “Leave me alone!”

The woman across the street conferred with her husband, and reached for her cellphone. Lola turned on her heel and headed back to the park, sprinting for her car as soon as she was out of sight.

Lola fled the neighborhood, hoping the couple wouldn’t remember what she looked like, wouldn’t pass that information along to police.

Her biggest liability in pursuing the story—her near-total unfamiliarity with Salt Lake and its environs—was also her strongest advantage. She didn’t want her anonymity blown quite so quickly. It wasn’t until she was back in the car, confounding the Directions Bitch with one impulsive turn after another, designed to foil any pursuit, that she relaxed enough to consider her next move.

She had to talk to Kwesi. From what Melena had said, the two boys were at least as close as Frank and Tynslee, albeit in different ways. But Kwesi was in the house with his sister, likewise mourning the loss of his mother and arrest of his best friend. Lola had taken her one shot at that household for the day. She’d go to Frank’s court appearance the next day, and then maybe try Kwesi afterward. With the barest plan in place, she finally gave in and let the Directions Bitch steer her back to the hotel and the sweet relief of the waiting pill.

She patted her pocket. Then again. Took a hand off the steering wheel and contorted herself to dig inside it. Her finger poked through a hole. The pills were gone.