Twenty-Five

Lola woke to the sound of the wind blustering off the Front, picking up steam as it hit prairie, rolling east with nothing to stop it.

Most people hated it. All those old stories about pioneer women losing their minds. Not-so-old stories, too. A few years earlier, the EMTs being occupied with a fourteen-year-old who’d taken a car joyriding and ended up accordioned against a tree, it had been up to Charlie to wrestle Ada Karlsson into his cruiser and drive her all the way down to Great Falls where they could better handle psych cases. Ada wailed and hollered the entire sixty-mile trip, trying—as the frantic neighbor who’d called Charlie had told him—to out-scream the wind.

Charlie. At least, as the awareness of a new day asserted itself, he hadn’t been her first thought. Her chest tightened. Was this how she’d lose him forever? Being distracted by the sound of the wind, the need for coffee, a thousand different things pushing themselves into her consciousness until Charlie receded into some faraway niche, relegated to the bottom of an endless to-be-remembered list?

“Damn wind.” Maybe it was making her crazy, too. It sounded different today, deeper, more of a growl than a shriek.

A car horn sounded. Then another. The backhand slap of reality. She wasn’t in their bedroom in Magpie, but a hotel room in Utah. It wasn’t the wind, but the sound of traffic.

And Charlie was still dead.

It’s encouraging that you appear to have no intention of backing off.

Munro’s words echoed their challenge. Fake challenge, she reminded herself. Maybe.

Of course, real or fake, she still had every intention of backing off. Eventually. If nothing else, Loretta Begay had already confirmed the story’s original angle, the problems inherent in adopting older children, especially from a different culture. Dog Bites Man. Stop the presses.

And if she found something more? The possibility simmered beneath her grief, pinprick bubbles of ideas and plausibilities rising to the surface. She pushed the thought away even as the bubbles rose faster, grew larger. She took a mental spoon to them, stirred them down.

The strange symbiosis among Kwesi and Malachi and Frank—maybe they were druggies, playing at being badasses with Kwesi’s “people end up dead” warning. Maybe they weren’t. Either way, for sure it wasn’t a story Munro would want.

And Tynslee, now-I’ll-talk-to-you now-I-won’t Tynslee? A teenage girl, mercurial? Stop the presses yet again.

An hour earlier, Lola had feared the slow, incremental loss of Charlie. Now he was back full force, the room rumbling with censure, nearly audible, the traffic noises relegated to the background.

Go away, she almost said. Even though a judgmental Charlie was preferable to no Charlie at all. She closed her eyes so that she could see him better, the scowl that suited his square features, the narrowed eyes, the pursed mouth, lips pointing in the Indian way.

Pointing at what?

She’d missed something obvious. The accusing lips thrust forward insistently.

What? What?

The room fell silent. The lips relaxed. Lola nearly laughed at her own dimwittedness. The rumble receded.

Not what. Who.

She had to talk with Frank.

Back when Lola was a baby reporter, jailhouse interviews were easy. You dropped in, jawed with the guards, showed an ID, and scooted through the metal detector.

No more. Now there were permissions to be gained, visiting days to be observed. Lola decided to chance ignoring the former and checked the latter on the jail’s website. The journalism gods, so generous as of late, continued benevolent. Frank’s jail pod actually had Saturday visiting hours. Lola dreaded the day when the gods demanded their inevitable payback.

“But not just yet,” she pleaded as she signed the request to visit Frank Shumway. Please let the public defender not have given Frank the standard speech about not talking to the press. Please let the local reporters be exactly as young and green as they appeared, not thinking to make this same obvious move, and the more seasoned ones distracted by the assault on the police officer. And pleaseohplease, she added as the guard made the laconic pronouncement that the inmate would see her, please let Frank talk.

He didn’t, not at first. Just sat in the plastic chair, arms crossed on the ledge in front of him, making no move to lift the phone receiver on his side of the bulletproof Plexiglas cloudy with scratches.

Lola picked up her own receiver and pointed to his, trying not to breathe too deeply the stench of mingled rage and despair that permeated every jail and prison she’d ever been in. He reached for it, never taking his eyes from hers, the same curious, attentive expression he’d worn in the courtroom.

She introduced herself, name only, skipping over for the moment the inconvenient fact of her profession. “Am I the first person who’s come to see you?”

He shook his head. “My lawyer. Are you my new one? He said that sometimes they change lawyers.”

Sometimes? More like change, change, and change again. If Utah’s public defender system ran true to form, its lawyers burned out faster than a wildfire moving across the prairie. A case of any length might involve multiple shift changes. And if no one bothered to procure a private attorney for him …

Lola wasn’t sure how Utah’s public defender laws worked, but she wondered whether someone might be able to make the case that, as an eighteen-year-old adult, especially one about to get married and be on his own, Frank could legally be declared indigent. She could find out about that later. For now, he was expecting an answer.

“I’m a reporter,” she said, as always moving fast to get past the instinctive resistance, throwing out something innocuous for distraction. “Please—what should I call you? Your name is Frank in all of the newspaper stories, but Tynslee called you Trang.”

“Because it’s my name.” Emphasis added for the idiot adult who faced him through the glass. “Obviously.”

“Of course, of course. How stupid of me.” Granting him the upper hand, not pursuing the obvious question of the different identities—the original name, the one from home, for those closest to his heart; the other name, bestowed upon arrival in this strange place, used by parents, teachers, anyone at an emotional arm’s length. And what of it? Didn’t all teenagers assume split personalities as they navigated their various worlds?

“I’ve already talked to Kwesi.” Whose parents had thought his name was just fine, who’d never had to morph into Ken or Kevin. No use mentioning that Kwesi had been disinclined to converse. “And Tynslee. She thinks you didn’t do it.”

Frank’s shoulders slumped. The skin beneath his eyes shaded from brown to nearly black. Jail, with its clanging and shouting and constant sizzling fear, was no place to get a good night’s sleep, and he’d been there for several nights now. But those eyes themselves were clear, his gaze direct. “That’s because I didn’t. How much longer before they let me out?”

Oh, you poor clueless kid. Even if the church leaders finally came through on their pledge to find a defense attorney, one who could talk the judge into setting bail, the amount would probably be prohibitive—in the house-mortgaging realm—and the negotiations would take a while, anyway.

“It’s a long process.” Surely his public defender had explained as much. Or his parents.

“But I have to get out of here. I’m supposed to go to Vietnam.”

“I thought you couldn’t go now. I mean, even before … this. Because you aren’t—” Lola stopped, uncharacteristically embarrassed.

Frank wasn’t. “Pure?” He shrugged. “Just because I can’t go on my mission anymore doesn’t mean I can’t go on my own. In a way, it’s even better. This way, I can be sure to go to Vietnam. That’s what I wanted do.”

“What about Tynslee? Weren’t you going to get married?” Lola tried not to think about all the times she’d left Charlie in pursuit of a story, heedless as to his concerns.

Trang raised his chin. He didn’t smile, not exactly, but his face softened. “Tynslee wants me to go. She knows how important it is to me.”

“Why is it so important? Please. Knowing this might help.” She already knew. But she needed to tell it in his own words. “I want to share the real story.”

“There’s no real story. I didn’t do it. That’s all.”

Lola looked at the heavy receiver in her hand. She wondered if Frank knew that jailhouse interviews were recorded. Still, she had to ask. “Do you have any idea who did do it?”

“No.” A beat too late. “I wish I did.”

That pause, with its clumsy follow-up, could mean anything. Probably not anything good, though. Either he did have an idea, or he was trying to cover his own guilt.

Lola wondered how best to bring up Bryce. “I saw your parents. Your dad—he’s seems like he’s having a pretty rough time.” Duh. She’d just one-upped Trang in the clumsy department.

No hesitation at all this time, though. “You saw Dad? Is he okay? I mean—how can he be? But still. Did he ask about me? Is he coming to see me?”

Even as her cynical reporter’s heart broke a little at the sight of the boy’s eagerness to see the father who’d withdrawn when most needed, her vigilant reporter’s brain made a quick notation: whatever suspicions Trang might harbor about who killed Sariah, they weren’t focused on Bryce.

“He didn’t say,” she replied. If the boy didn’t know about the church leaders’ advice to his parents to stay away, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. She hurried to a more agreeable subject. Frank had given no hint that he was upset at the prospect of his impending marriage, but she had to be sure. “About you and your”—she still couldn’t bring herself to say fiancée—“sweetheart.”

“What about us?” Another palpable leap of feeling, the intensity so raw she looked away.

“Is it real? Is it love?”

The hard plastic receiver clattered onto the metal table. A guard started down the row toward them. Trang rose.

“We’re done here,” he mouthed.

Lola sat stupidly, looking at Frank’s retreating back, until the guard touched her shoulder.

“Ma’am? Did you hear what he said? You’re done.”