Thirty-Seven

Mai remained stubbornly silent on most of the walk across the prison parking lot, but unleashed a torrent of words as Lola unlocked the car door.

Lola understood only “American Father.” She started the car and turned on the heat. The sun still shone bright, but the temperature was dropping almost imperceptibly. The Wasatch and Oquirrh sported meringue swirls of new snow, and the last few leaves hurried to let go of the trees before a shredding wind could tear them rudely away.

“American Father? Do you mean Bryce?”

Mai sagged, seemingly held up only by her seat belt, and dropped her face into her hands.

Lola pressed her for details. But the girl shook her head, repeating only that she had information that might help her brother, that it had to do with the American Father and that she would tell Lola after she’d slept.

“I never told my brother. I should have. This”—she looked toward the jail, an institutional rectangle of beige stone—“all my fault.”

“Never told him what?”

Mai shook her head.

Lola tried again. “Is it something that could free him?”

“Maybe.” Mai, heavy-lidded and nearly incoherent from the combination of jet lag and emotion, scrubbed at her eyes.

Lola gave up. At the motel, she made another attempt, thinking food might revive the girl. She picked up a plasticized sheet featuring take-out menus from nearby restaurants and waved it. “You must be starved. I know I am. I can order something for us to eat.”

“Later, maybe. Now I sleep. And sleep and sleep and sleep.” A smile flitted across Mai’s face. “And dream about my brother!” She sat on the bed, thin arms enfolding her thin body.

Lola showed her how to work the thermostat and asked for her phone. Before leaving Hanoi, she’d bought Mai a burner phone like her own, one that would work in the States. She programmed her new cell number into it. During the layover at Seoul Incheon, while Mai wisely took advantage of one of the sleeping lounges so thoughtfully provided, Lola had procured a new iPhone for herself and popped in her old SIM card, another bit of proof to Charlie and everyone else that she was rejoining the working world.

And rejoining it with true eagerness, not the initial reluctance of her forced trip to Utah. Her thoughts fizzed with the possibilities raised by two words Mai had uttered: American Father. She needed the butt-kicking of fresh air and caffeine to focus them, though.

“I have to go out for a bit. If you wake up and you need me—if you can’t sleep, or you’re hungry or if you need anything, anything at all—call me.” Mai nodded, but Lola remembered the automatic politesse of people in more courteous cultures. “I’m serious.”

But Mai was already asleep, fully clothed but for the shoes she’d kicked off upon entering the room. Lola tiptoed to the closet, took an extra blanket from the shelf, and tucked it around her. Asleep, with the anxiety and confusion of the last few days finally smoothed from her features, Mai looked her real age, not the older, worldly woman she pretended to be. Lola wondered how she’d survived the years after her brother’s departure, then pushed the likely possibilities from her mind. She had more important things to think about.

Bryce. All along, Lola had wondered about the possibility of an affair, impermissible for a church leader, between Bryce and Sariah. What had Tynslee said? That one day Sariah had screamed to her best friend that it was time to make things right.

Lola could see it: Melena in shock, thinking Sariah was enraged over the news of their children’s affair. Bryce silent beside her, wondering about the deeper message. Afraid to even meet Sariah’s eyes, knowing too well her longing to break free of the sham of her marriage, to find open happiness with him. After all, it happened all the time in other places. People got divorced, remarried. Even the LDS church allowed divorce. But the social cost was dear.

For sure, Bryce—maybe she’d let him fall too far down her list of suspects?—wouldn’t be to first man to kill rather than face revelation of his tawdry secret. Lola’s thoughts flew back to the night Tynslee had described, the girl tiptoeing home across the dew-damp lawn after her tryst with Trang, meeting Bryce possibly returning from a liaison of his own. The quick insistence that the young couple marry, the sort of holier-than-thou move common to secret sinners.

And it might have explained his objections to Trang’s wish for a mission in Vietnam, even though it was an unlikely possibility, anyway. Maybe Mai had seen something else while Bryce and Melena were there those many years ago—an argument between them, Sariah’s name bandied about, something Mai wouldn’t have understood at the time but would come to comprehend all too well after only a little while in America. Better to tell Trang his sister had died than risk her joining the family, figuring things out. Saying something.

She wondered if Melena—with her rhapsodizing over her beautiful boy, her happy, happy marriage—knew. Maybe deep down. Probably. But likely not in a way that she’d admit even to herself, let alone anyone else.

Well, she’d have to learn about it now. Lola pictured the small, fragile woman in the concrete box of a police interview room, dwarfed by men in uniform, hearing the unthinkable under unbearable circumstances. Realizing, unavoidably, that her husband had betrayed her. And that she, by believing the scenario he’d created, had betrayed her son by believing him guilty of murder.

She tried not to think of what her revelation would mean to Melena’s life. Marriage ended, public stigma—the reality that might have driven Bryce to kill Sariah rather than have their secret revealed—along with the extra shame of a son who might not forgive her. How would Melena face the world? And how, as a stay-at-home mother accustomed to a comfortable suburban existence, would she support herself?

Lola felt a twinge of guilt. She’d let Charlie’s death nearly break her. But compared to the enormity of what Melena was about to face, her own grief seemed almost manageable. Yet she was about to push Melena into the abyss. Even if she hadn’t known for sure about Mai’s existence, she’d been the one to track her down, to uncover the impossible truth—that she was alive. The least she could do was tell Melena herself. And maybe, just maybe, Melena would reveal something, a shred of information that might have seemed meaningless before, that could definitively tie her husband to Sariah’s murder, and thus exonerate her son.

A low growl of disapproval.

“I’m not stupid,” she told Charlie. She knew the dangers. Melena might be one of those wives—those spouses, she reminded herself, since men were as susceptible as women to the self-deception that enabled some marriages—who’d rather not know. Who might choose to disbelieve. Who might warn Bryce, help him escape, even flee with him.

“Don’t worry,” she added. “As soon as I’ve talked to her, I’ll call the police so that they can set up an interview with Mai.”

But the rumble only intensified, Charlie having heard far too many such assurances during their too-brief time together.

She dawdled, dreading the task ahead, tapping out a text to Munro in a few seconds’ worth of procrastination. Killer possibly ID’d—the sort of shameless, as-yet-unverified hype one sent to an editor in the hope of sending one’s own story leapfrogging over the offerings of other, equally ambitious (maybe not quite equally) reporters.

She watched the screen for a reply. Nothing. Which left her thoughts free to return to Melena. Surely, all those women … what had Melena called them? The Relief Society. Surely they would live up to their name, would surround her, wrap her in comfort and caring and probably supply enough casseroles to fill a gigantic suburban freezer. Or would they?

Not my problem, she lectured herself. Charlie’s palpable disapproval ebbed. He was a compassionate man within the limits of the law, but he’d always welcomed the black-and-white nature of those limits. “You’re the one who worries about the nuances,” he told her. “Save them for your stories. Me, the story ends with ninety miles per hour in a fifty zone. Or somebody blowing three times the legal breath limit. Or the guy standing over his dead wife with a face full of scratches and his fists all bloody.”

“Tough talk,” Lola would tease, not bothering to remind him of how he’d found empathy aplenty when a family with six kids took an elk out of season, or when a teenager who’d be the first in her family to graduate got stopped with an open container in her car. “Pour that damn thing out,” he might say. And then he’d stop by the girl’s house on the way home to rat her out to her grandmother, who’d be tougher on the girl than the law would ever be.

Lola lingered with her memories, willing Charlie closer. But all she felt was a sharp sensation in the small of her back—a virtual nudge to get on with it, that a killer was out there and she was on the verge of getting the information to put him away, so what was she doing sitting on her ass?