Forty-Three

“Where are we going? And why?”

“Where? I don’t know. For now, let’s just get as far away from your house as possible. As to why—” Lola wondered about the wisdom of letting Melena drive. How would she react to Lola’s suspicions about Bryce and Galon? She started with the now more pressing matter of Mai.

“Mai’s missing. I got back to the room and she was gone.”

“Missing? Oh, Lola. She probably went for a walk. She has to be all turned around because of the time change.”

Lola didn’t want to take the time to go into the missing bag, the desk clerk’s mystification. “Melena, did you say anything to Bryce?”

A “no” so long and drawn out as to be patently unbelievable. Followed by another, predicable, “why?”

“You’d better pull over.”

They’d ended up in an industrial district, featureless warehouses lining wide streets designed for semi trucks, deserted at this hour. The wind screamed past, funneled by the warehouse walls, lashing at the rental car. The interstate ran nearby, the road elevated, bright ribbons of headlights illuminating its path, traffic moving fast and purposeful, late workers finally on their way home, others headed for the supermarket to stock up on mass quantities of milk and bread and eggs before the snow started. So many cars. So many people. So many places for a girl to disappear.

The radio squawked the obligatory caution. “Eight inches or more … dangerous wind chill … essential travel only after ten … ”

Melena touched a gloved finger to the button. The wind’s shriek took over where the announcer had left off, issuing its own elemental warning, far more effective.

Lola needed to get this conversation over as quickly as possible, and then get herself and Melena somewhere safe. And she needed to find Mai. What if the girl were outdoors somewhere, spectacularly unequipped to handle cold let alone a full-on blizzard. Still, she soft-pedaled her news to the extent possible.

“You know how I told you that Mai might know something that could help Trang? Frank. Maybe something that could free him? Melena, I think it’s about Bryce.”

Lola had expected denial. Anger. Fear. Anything but the hope that raised Melena’s voice to a near-normal level.

“Does Bryce know something that could help him?”

Lola hadn’t thought about it that way. But no, fear had coated Mai’s words whenever she mentioned Bryce. “Maybe. Melena, I know I told you not to say anything to Bryce. But I have ask you again—are you sure you didn’t say something? To him or to Galon? I won’t be mad. I promise.” Fingers crossed behind her back. Time enough later for Melena to feel betrayed. Right now, she needed Melena to trust her. Snowflakes struck the windshield, dissolved, struck again. This time, they stuck.

Melena sucked in that rabbity underlip and looked away. “I might have said something. That his sister was alive.” She swung on Lola, eyes bulging and bright. “Oh, Lola, it was such wonderful news! Especially in the midst of such horror. Bryce has suffered so much these past few days. I couldn’t help but share it with him. Right then and there, as soon as I told him, we made a prayer of thanks.”

Go slow, Lola warned herself. Dole out the information in tiny doses. Don’t let her know—yet—that you suspect her husband. Or Galon.

A semi rumbled past, so loud as to give Lola an excuse to wait a moment longer before she spoke again. Headlights flooded the car’s interior as the driver braked and swung wide around them, casting a look of annoyance from his lofty perch.

“Melena, did you tell Bryce where I was staying?”

“No. But I told him about coffee tomorrow. Maybe he figured it out. That’s the only motel nearby. Lola!” Melena’s eyes brightened. She bounced in her seat like a little girl. “I think I can find Mai!”

She threw the car into gear and surprised Lola by heading deeper still into the industrial park, the interstate receding behind them. The wipers swish-thumped, the view ahead clearing and disappearing, black, then white, then black again. The car picked up speed, fishtailing a little in the snow.

“Melena?”

“I’ll bet he couldn’t wait to meet her. He probably wondered, just like me, if she’d recognize him after all these years. He’d want to show her all of his favorite sights, just like she showed us Hanoi, all those years ago. There’s a place he likes to go. … ” She flashed Lola a radiant smile. “Relax. I think I know exactly where Mai is.”

The buildings thinned out, then disappeared entirely. The road ran straight and lonely through a flat expanse of desert. A building reared before them, pale domes against a black sky. The castle she’d seen from the sky as the plane coasted toward the airport. What had Tynslee called it? Melena supplied the answer.

“Bryce loves the lake, even crazy old SaltAir.”

He did? Tynslee’s parents had described the place as dangerous, populated during concerts by druggies. Well, nobody was populating it now. It looked closed for the winter, windows black, a chain-link fence surrounding it.

Melena swung the car around SaltAir and pointed it across a parking lot, pulling up at the far side. Beyond the lot, a gunmetal-gray expanse heaved and sighed. The lake. Hush now, hush now, the wipers whispered. Snow glittered in the headlights. Melena killed the engine.

“They’re probably down here somewhere. Let’s find them.” She leaned forward and yanked the lever that popped the trunk.

Lola peered into the blackness. “I don’t see his car. I don’t see any cars at all. And it’s cold. And dark. Melena, are you sure about this? Why would anyone come here in this kind of weather?”

But Melena was already out, rummaging around in the trunk. Lola opened her door. A gust grabbed at it. She got out, leaning into the wind, slitting her eyes against the snow. She stood on a vast salt flat, the snow fast filling the cracks in the earth beneath her feet, the lake disappearing into darkness. The highway was far behind them now, its reassuring stripes of light revealed only when the wind parted the curtains of snow.

“Lola?”

She turned and saw Melena, a tire iron swinging from the end of her arm.

The wind pried a hank of Melena’s hair free and blew it across her face. Lola couldn’t see her expression. Didn’t need to. Animal instinct took over. She whirled to run. Took a long step.

The tire caught her across the back of the legs. She went down, rolling, curling around herself, arms cradling her head, Charlie’s voice in her ears: Always protect your head. They could fix everything else. But not head injuries.

Charlie hadn’t said anything about knees. That’s where the iron struck next. Lola, even as she screamed, marveled at the precise sensation of shattering bone.

She rolled away, wondering where the next blow would fall. It didn’t. She couldn’t trust her voice yet, but she opened her eyes.

Melena stood above her, twirling the tire iron like a baton. Even through her pain, Lola was impressed. That thing was heavy.

“CrossFit.” Melena nodded. “Sariah and I went together.”

Lola remembered her condescending assumption about pink dumbbells and lavender leotards. Switched out that image for one involving kettleballs and buckets of sweat. Damn the Mormon modesty, Lola thought. If Melena had been sleeveless the first time they’d met, she might have seen the musculature concealed beneath the prim drape of her blouse. Might have been more wary. She rejected the thought even as it came. Approximately a million years would have passed before she’d ever have imagined that the soft-spoken, diffident woman with the wounded eyes was capable of this. And if she was capable of this—

“You killed Sariah.” Lola wrenched her voice out of its low groan. Her knee, her knee. She felt the blood ballooning within the confines of flesh, testing the seams of her jeans. She’d sprained her ankle once in an eerily similar situation. At the time, she’d thought that had hurt. Now she’d give anything for a simple sprain.

Melena rested the tire iron on her shoulder, rifle-like, oblivious to the wind seemingly intent upon wrecking her careful hairstyle. “What was your first clue?”

Great, thought Lola. A killer, and batshit crazy, too. Logic wasn’t going to work. Maybe if she could keep her talking long enough. And … what? Get the tire iron away from her? Wrestle her to the ground? Lola tried an ill-advised experiment. She flexed her calf muscle. At the motion, the bits and pieces of bone floating around in her knee ground together. “Aiiieeeeeeeee.”

Melena halted. “Sorry about that.”

“Doubtful,” Lola managed.

But that “sorry.” Flippant though it was, it was a nod to normalcy. If you hurt someone, you apologized. She wondered if Melena had apologized to Sariah before …

“Why?” she asked through clenched teeth.

Melena tossed the tire iron from hand to hand. Probably something else she’d learned in CrossFit. Lola had spent nearly the last decade of her life among people whose daily lives involved holding down two-hundred-fifty-pound calves, stretching barbed wire tight against fence posts, bucking sixty-pound bales of hay. They thought gyms were stupid. So had Lola—until now.

“Would you mind putting that down? I’m not going anywhere.”

“Nice try.”

Lola rolled onto her back in a series of infinitesimal moves, each one ramping up the pain to dizzying levels. She lay panting for a few moments, then inched onto her elbows, as close to a sitting position as she could get, and gasped the word again: “Why?”

“Sariah? Why should I tell you?”

Lola knew that some people believed bad news should be broken gently, if at all. Doctors couched reality for terminal conditions: “Not compatible with life.” Rejections from literary agents routinely began with a paragraph of praise, followed by an ominous “But.”

Lola always liked to start with the worst-case scenario. That way, she reasoned, you were never disappointed, and sometimes even surprised with better news. She lobbed the worst at Melena.

“Because you’re going to kill me.”

Melena cocked her head this way and that, as though she were trying to decide among shades of beige for new drapes. Flakes glinted in her hair.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I am.”