Five

Lola rubbed the condensation from the plane’s scratched plastic window and took in the immensity of the lake below.

More than a million people lived in and around Salt Lake City, exceeding the entire population of Montana. Look at us, the city’s lights commanded as they blinked on against the moonless night fast descending. How grand we are! But the lake dominated, stretching far beyond the knot of humanity at its edge, capturing and holding the flame of the dying day like candlelight in a pewter sconce.

Beyond the lake, mountains circled much of the city, trapping it in a tight bowl. Lola fought a touch of impending claustrophobia. She’d gotten used to the defining boundary of the Front; before it, the beckoning sweep of prairie, offering escape with its ribbons of roads that led on forever.

She handed her copy of the Salt Lake Tribune to a passing flight attendant. Jan had told her that even though the Latter-day Saints had long ceased to be the majority population in Salt Lake, they still held sway over the city’s power structure. The newspaper’s lead story focused on a new church edict that labeled people in gay marriages “apostates” and excluded their children from baptism.

“Taliban,” Lola had muttered as she read. Even though she knew things were nowhere near that bad. Spiritual banishment, harsh as it was, didn’t compare to the grotesque executions the Taliban imposed upon gay people. She knew the Mormons were hardly alone among faiths in rejecting gays and lesbians. But the strictures applying to their children seemed particularly cruel.

She shut down the iPad she’d ordered as a surprise for Charlie just before his death. He’d never even seen it, but using it still felt like a way to keep him close. She’d been reviewing the notes she’d taken during her conversation with Donovan Munro yesterday, one that had begun badly and ended worse. Her assignment was to interview the Shumway family. Some years earlier, they’d added a ten-year-old boy from Vietnam to their family of five daughters.

“Why adopt, if they already had kids?” she’d asked Munro.

“Guess they wanted someone to carry on the family name, if not the bloodline.” There was a clipped, supercilious quality to his voice. Lola pictured him short and rounded, red of face and fierce of mien, befitting the Scottish ancestry apparent in his name.

“It’s a trend,” he added. “A lot of families around here adopt a foreign child after they’ve already had a brood of their own.”

“But why?”

“That’s a question I hope your story will answer.”

Lola noted the not-quite rebuke and decided to let it pass. “Why this family? Why”—she checked the name again—“Frank? Wouldn’t a baby be more photogenic?” She gave silent thanks that their conversation was by cellphone rather than Skype. The magazine’s very name still made her gag. She’d imagined a treacly story, one involving fat brown toddlers nestled in the laps of their new white parents.

“Babies? Why would we do a story on babies? You can’t interview them.”

Fair enough. Lola told herself she was imagining the sarcasm. “Why this particular kid?”

“Hold on.” She heard a conversation, muffled as though Munro had held the phone to his chest. “Okay, I’m back.”

“If you’re busy— I know it’s the weekend.”

“I am. From what Jan told me, I didn’t figure you’d need this much hand-holding. He’s a hockey star. Kind of unusual for a kid from a place with no ice except in the tourists’ umbrella drinks. Good details, right? The kind of stuff that make for a good story. All of which you could have found out on your own if you’d bothered to spend five minutes on Google. I’ll email you the family’s contact info, since I’m guessing you didn’t look that up on your own, either.”

“I can find it—”

Lola spoke into dead air. She stared at the phone in her hand. Asshole. Adding insult to, well, insult, he’d followed up with a text, asking her to meet him at his office at one on Monday. “We can go over your first interview.”

It was almost as though he’d known she hadn’t arranged it yet. In a fury, she’d dialed Melena Shumway to set it up. They’d agreed on ten a.m. Monday—“Not tomorrow. It’s the Sabbath day.” Something Lola hadn’t considered. It still gave them plenty of time to talk before her meeting downtown with Munro.

“The school will let us keep the kids out for the morning. And I’ve asked the neighbors over.” Melena’s voice was soft as a moth’s wing, and nearly as soundless. Lola had to strain to hear her. “I hope that’s all right. They’re our best friends. And their son is Frank’s best friend. And Frank and their daughter just got engaged.”

“Of course.” The more of Frank’s friends she could interview in one sitting, the faster she’d be done with her story. Still—engaged? Frank was in high school.

“In some ways, it’s a different country down there. Or like going back in time,” Jan had said of Salt Lake. Apparently she’d been referring to the fifties.

Lola had tapped out a text to Munro: Interviewing parents, fiancée, and best friend @ 10 tomorrow. Maybe, if he knew how extensive the interview would be, he’d cancel their meeting. But there’d been no reply by the time she boarded the plane.

The overhead lights blinked. Things beeped. People winced and cringed at the airline’s canned announcement, volume set on ten, about seat backs and tray tables. The ground rose toward the plane, and Lola touched her hand to her hip pocket. The pills she’d grabbed from Lena’s medicine cabinet nestled within like a talisman. She’d take one when she got to her motel—the better, she assured herself, to be well-rested for her interview the next morning.

The plane’s speakers emitted a sound like tearing cloth. Beneath it, the pilot’s announcement that a tailwind had speeded their arrival and their gate wasn’t ready. They’d spend a few more minutes in the air before landing. The plane tipped up on one wing, pirouetting away from downtown, nothing but the rippling fabric of lake below, a single boat yanking a thread of wake across it. The plane righted itself at the far end of the lake and headed back toward the airport. Lola pulled away from the window, unsure of what she’d just seen, then pressed her face against it again.

It was still there, a fantastical apparition, a sort of Moorish alcazar at water’s edge, all arches and domes, edges dissolving into the gloom. It reminded her, a little, of the old Darul Aman palace in Kabul, or at least what that stately residence must have looked like before decades of war took their toll. A road led to the edifice below, but it was empty of cars. Desert stretched otherwise unbroken from the water’s edge. She wondered if mirages could arise from water as well as from sand. She turned to her seatmate to ask about it but the flight attendant stood at their row, rapping seats that had yet to be returned to their upright positions, eyeballing tray tables still mutinously in use.

By the time everyone in Lola’s row had been shamed into compliance, the castle was long gone from view.

She didn’t even bother with dinner, slipping a pill between her lips as soon as the hotel room door closed behind her.

Then she wished she’d given herself a bit of time to appreciate the sort of luxury she hadn’t experienced since her days as a foreign correspondent, when the safest hotels in conflict zones like Kabul or Baghdad or Jerusalem—the latter, places she’d worked as a fill-in for vacationing colleagues—were often the most expensive.

The hotel in Salt Lake proper was miles from Camellia, the suburb that the Shumway family called home. More hand-holding, she figured, Munro wanting her downtown, near his own office where he could keep an eye on her. The room was vast, with a faraway glass wall that framed a view of the famed temple, so fiercely spotlit that it glowed, its chalky spires drawing lines of demarcation against the darkness. She thought of the strange palace she’d seen at the far end of the lake, outlines rounded and welcoming in comparison to the temple’s emphatic jabbing pinnacles.

She unlaced her boots and kicked them off in deference to the plush carpet. She tiptoed across it, peeking into the bathroom on her way, sighing at the sight of a tub in which she could soak chin-deep, long enough to accommodate her even at her height. She’d save her bath for the following night; she didn’t dare take one now, given the efficiency of the pills. Although she thought daily of ways to end her life, none involved the indignity of being discovered naked in a tub.

Out of habit, Lola clicked on the television to a local news station, where talking heads debated the church’s new edict on gays. She muted the sound and fell onto the bed, stretching horizontally across it. Maybe because she wasn’t going through the same mental checklist that preoccupied her nights at home—Margaret’s needs, taking care of the animals, her work assignments—the pill worked even faster than usual, despite a humming vibration in the room that anyone else might have attributed to the heating system. As fiercely as she missed Charlie, she could have done without his constant disapproval. She’d hoped to avoid it here.

“Didn’t see you on the plane.” She addressed him aloud. “What did you do, fly first class?” The hum intensified. He wasn’t amused. Lola wrapped a pillow around her head, the better to escape the pulse of his anger, and let the medication drag her under. Mercifully, Charlie had yet to invade her dreams.

Hours later, the buzzing penetrated even her barricade of fabric and foam. It stopped. Began again. Stopped. Then again, each time tugging her a little closer to consciousness. Something familiar about it. Her phone.

She fumbled for it, knocking it from the nightstand. The next time it buzzed, she managed to retrieve it from the floor. The time after that, she read the words on the screen. Donovan Munro.

Lola ran a furred tongue around her lips and rubbed at the dried saliva crusting the corners of her mouth. Worked at forming “hello.”

An ungodly flow of phrases, most of them unrecognizable, came from the phone. “Hell you doing still in bed?” She got that one.

She sneaked in a question when he paused for breath. “Wha’s up?”

“Have you looked at your news feed? Turned on a radio or TV? Checked out a newspaper?” All things that any reporter did immediately upon rising, if not before.

No, you idiot, because it’s the middle of the night. Sentences formed just fine in Lola’s brain, even if she couldn’t quite get them out of her mouth. She looked at her bedside clock—nine a.m.—and was glad she’d withheld the indictment. Light strafed the bed through the inch-wide opening in the drapes. She heard a knock two doors down, the creak of a cart, a voice. “Maid service. Would you like your room cleaned?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Munro had gotten hold of himself. “Get over to the Shumways’ house. Right now. Are you all right? You sound sick. Or something.”

She tried to ignore the suspicion contained in that “or something.” The room tilted. Or maybe it was her head. She lay back on the pillow and concentrated on not moving. He’d called—probably coached by Jan—because he thought she might miss the interview she’d set up with the family. She tried to draw energy from the slight.

“I’m fine. I’m not supposed to meet with them for another hour.” Coherence! She congratulated herself, and even hazarded a bit of defiance. “What’s the hurry?”

“Sariah Ballard’s dead.”

“Who?”

“The television. Have you turned it on?”

Lola felt around for the remote, beat the odds by finding it, and then upped the ante by actually hitting the right button. The screen came to life, showing the same local news station she’d watched before she went to bed. An anchorman, face contorted, mouth moving fast. She held the remote to her face, trying to find the volume button. It didn’t matter. The view switched to a knot of cop cars and news vans in front of a beige stucco house. A red banner across the bottom of the screen proclaimed Local Woman Killed.

“Melena Shumway?” she hazarded into the phone. “I thought you said—”

“I said Sariah Ballard. Get your ass over there. She’s the Shumways’ next-door neighbor.”

Wayward memories tumbled like small hard stones through the mush of Lola’s brain and came to rest against an unfortunate outcome. Melena had said something about inviting the neighbors to the interview. The neighbor who was her best friend. Whose son was Frank’s best friend. Whose daughter was Frank’s fiancée.

She played for time. “If the neighbor is dead, why should I go to the Shumways’ house?”

“Because of Frank. Remember him? The subject of your story.”

Her brain took another turn around the interior of her head, worse than before. Munro saved her the effort of trying to form her next query.

“Seems he sank a hockey stick into her skull.”