Twenty-One

“Miss Wicks? Lola? Is that you?”

Maybe she’d just brushed elbows with her assailant. Maybe not. But there was no doubt that Melena now stood beside her in the parking lot.

Lola filed away the hint as to her attacker’s identity and wrenched her focus toward the mother of the accused murderer. She cast a glance at the crowded church annex behind them, where mourners no doubt stood at the windows, waiting to see what Melena would do next—and wondering about the stranger Melena was talking to.

“Melena. How nice to see you again. I’d love to visit for a while. But not here. Maybe someplace with a little more privacy.”

“I’d like that, too. I think the entire Relief Society is in there.”

As before, Lola had to strain to hear her. She took a few steps, forcing Melena to walk with her, anything to get away from the watchers at the window. The sooner they separated, the better. “Why don’t we meet at Starbucks? Isn’t there one just off the interstate?” Then mentally berated herself. When was she going to remember that the Mormons were strong enough to eschew the most necessary substance on earth?

She started to apologize, but Melena stopped her. “It’s all right. They have orange juice. Other kinds, too. We’ll see you there.”

We?

She arrived to see Melena and Bryce together at a table rendered inadequate by Bryce’s bulk. Lola faked a cough, an excuse to cover her face, hiding the leap of elation that surely showed there. An unexpected bonus, Bryce. He must have lingered in the church while Melena took her casserole to the gathering afterward. Smart man. She’d have to up her game if she was going to deal with him, too.

A water bottle poked its head from Bryce’s fist. A scone the size of a saucer and shiny with glaze sat before Melena. Lola put in her order for a latte and returned to the table, extending a wary hand to Bryce. He looked like the kind of guy who went in for the finger-crush. He was.

“We met at the house the other day, just for a minute. We were supposed to meet under happier circumstances. For the magazine story.” She flexed her fingers under the table. Nothing seemed broken. “I’m so sorry about all of this.”

“No need to apologize.” The rumbling voice so mild as to take the sting out of the words. Brown eyes beneath beetled brows. Tired. Kind. And brimming with the same anguish that was her own daily companion.

“Oh, honey. I didn’t want to do this in front of everybody else.” Melena stuck her finger in her mouth, then reached across the table and rubbed at Lola’s cheeks, hen-clucking in sympathy. Her own makeup was perfect, her hair brushed forward and shellacked into place, obscuring half her face. “Those hotel room mirrors.” She withdrew her hand, fingertips pink and powdery with Jan’s blush. “They just aren’t worth a darn, are they?”

She blotted her fingers on a napkin and redirected her attention to the scone, nibbling at it in a way that made Lola think yet again of a rabbit. “Want some? I can cut it.”

Lola waved away the offer. “How can you eat something like that and stay so tiny?” Start with innocuous chitchat, the same kind of happy talk buzzing at the tables around them, words uttered by people whose proximity to murder was enviously remote. Besides, you never went wrong terming a woman the opposite of fat.

“I work out a lot.” Melena patted her upper arm, sheathed in navy rayon. Lola pictured one of those women-only gyms, rows of pink, two-pound dumbbells. A pool, with hourly water aerobics. A place designed more for socializing than strength training. Melena’s next words confirmed it. “I went every day with—” She held a napkin to her mouth as she struggled to swallow the bite of scone.

“It will be a while before you can say her name,” Lola said. With Charlie’s death, the Indian prohibition against speaking the names of the departed made sudden sense. Why force people to do the impossible? So practical, compared to the stiff-upper-lip nonsense that permeated white society.

“You’ve lost someone.”

It was Lola’s turn to go speechless. “My husband,” she managed at last.

“When?”

Her throat hot and thick, she held up a hand, fingers extended.

“Five years?”

She shook her head.

“Five months? Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” It was Melena’s turn to offer the rote apology, one Lola had heard too often in the last months, flung like a plea by anyone who knew about Charlie, with its unspoken addendum please let’s not talk about it because it’s all so awkward and painful. She’d been grateful, then, to the aunties, their brisk acknowledgment of the sort of routine tragedy that permeated their lives, forgoing condolences, telling her instead about the old Blackfeet custom of chopping off one’s hair, even a finger at the first knuckle, a visible symbol of grief, substituting—if only briefly—physical pain for mental. Lola thought it made perfect sense, and for weeks had cast longing glances at the hatchet in its kindling box on the front porch.

She felt Melena’s knowing gaze upon her and sensed she was being drawn into an unwelcome sisterhood.

“Cancer?”

“No.” If she told Melena that Charlie, too, was murdered, she’d never get out of the conversation. Redirect, she told herself, the emotional equivalent of the Directions Bitch.

She turned to Bryce, the man who’d found Sariah, delivered to her this day by the frightening generosity of the journalism gods. At some point, there’d be a reckoning. “How are you holding up?” she asked. “I can’t imagine.”

She left it at that, the open-ended invitation for him to remove the need for imagining. To tell her exactly what it had been like.

He passed a broad hand across his face. Said something behind it … “so much blood.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if it’s too hard.” Melena. Damn her.

Lola tried to muscle past Melena’s roadblock. “You saw the dog. Rex, yes? You put him back in the house. And?”

“And we called the stake president right away.” Melena again.

“You what?” The shock so palpable she was afraid Charlie had spoken past her. Redirection went to hell.

Melena started to repeat herself.

Lola stopped her. “Not 911?”

“Of course not.”

Of course not? It’s a different country down there, Jan had said. But this felt like an alternate universe.

“I was so afraid for Bryce. The shock of what he’d seen. And then Tynslee just down the hall. He thought she’d probably been murdered, too. A sight he couldn’t bear to face. And even if the killer had left her alone, if she was just asleep, can you imagine the effect on her—woken up by police in her bedroom, being told her mother was dead? Murdered? She’d never recover.”

She may never recover anyway, Lola thought, even as she herself tried to recover from the shock of the information Melena had so blithely delivered. “So you called the—who?” Trying the words herself, seeing if they made any more sense coming out of her own mouth. They didn’t.

“The stake president,” Melena said. “A church leader. I called him. Bryce was in no shape to call anyone.” She slid a glance Lola’s way. That look, the one universal to women burdened with the messiness of reality, forced into practicality by the actions of men. “It was wonderful. The leaders were on our doorstep within—what would you say, Bryce? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?”

A nod. Not the talkative type, Bryce. Alas.

Twenty minutes. Every twitch forward of the minute hand a gift to the killer.

“Then what?” Lola feared the worst. She got it.

“We went next door with them. They went to Sariah’s room first, to make sure she was really dead. That Bryce hadn’t mistaken what he’d seen.”

Bryce shook his head, glaring down at the tabletop, now littered with crumbs from the scone. There’d been no mistake.

“The police,” he said. “I was a suspect at first.”

Of course he was. No reason he couldn’t have grabbed his son’s hockey stick on the way out the door, heading across the lawn to kill his neighbor.

“But they ruled him out.” Melena now. “His fingerprints weren’t anywhere in that room. Just the family’s and—and—on the hockey stick”—Lola nodded, saving her the agony of saying her son’s name, of mentally placing him in that gruesome tableau—“and the church leaders’ fingerprints, of course.”

“I didn’t go in,” Bryce said. “I didn’t need to see more than I’d already seen through the door.”

Oh, why the hell not, Lola almost said. Join the crowd trampling over the evidence, moving things around, adding their fingerprints to those already in the room, maybe obliterating those earlier ones altogether, trashing a perfectly good crime scene. As Melena laid it out, Lola sensed Charlie nearby, almost an electrical jolt, fury sizzling in the air around them. For once, they were in sync.