Six

She kicked into automatic pilot as soon as Munro rang off. The mantra of get there get there get there—the first imperative on any breaking story—replaced for a brief blessed time the dead-dead-dead drumbeat in her head.

She wasted precious time figuring out the room’s coffeemaker, poured the inadequate results into a go-cup, and hustled to her rental car, logic brightening her morning. Because if her story’s subject was charged with murder, the story was deader than—what was the woman’s name?—Sariah Ballard. Which was a good thing.

Not that she was glad about Sariah. Lola cast a supplicatory glance over her shoulder, hoping Charlie had caught her half-hearted apology. He’d often accused her of being a little too jazzed about whatever misfortune sent her racing toward the door with phone, notebook, and keys in hand.

“Pot, kettle,” she’d retort whenever the call was for him.

Munro, only a few months removed from newspapers, probably operated on the same impulse. She’d go to the scene, then report back. By the time she called him, he would probably have realized he’d wasted both her time and his. She resolved to be gracious, maybe even fake a little regret, when he killed the story.

She hit the horn and swerved around a car backing out of a space in the parking garage. At least she’d programmed the Shumways’ Azalea Court address into her phone the previous night. “Take that,” she said, as though Munro, with his obvious doubts about her preparedness, could hear her.

She tapped the app and let it steer her through streets and onto the interstate, her gaze pulled upward despite the long-forgotten challenge of driving in traffic, up and up past the sky-piercing spires of the temple and the surrounding office buildings to the peaks of the Wasatch Range to the east, the Oquirrhs to the west, dominating the view from the ground the same way the lake had grabbed her gaze from the air. These mountains were different than the Front, showy peaks rather than a solid wall, lofty and snowcapped. Together with the undrinkable lake they served as a warning that this landscape merely tolerated human intrusion.

“This is the place,” Brigham Young famously had said. Lola wondered if he’d been nearsighted.

The city center disappeared behind her, the spread of suburbs funneled between the mountain ranges. She floored it on the highway, speeding past the kind of sprawl she’d nearly forgotten during her time in Montana, whose cities, such as they were, switched abruptly from pavement to prairie. South of Salt Lake proper, shopping center after shopping center had displaced sagebrush. Furniture store, mattress outlet, lamp emporium. Hardware store, garden store, pharmacy. Multiplexes, miniature golf, video game arcades. And, for the hungry, a surfeit of fast food. Burgers, fried chicken, fish. And ice cream. Lots of ice cream.

“Watch out for sweets,” Jan had warned her. “Mormons can’t have caffeine. They seem to make up for it by overdosing on sugar. More bakeries and ice cream shops and candy shops than you’ve ever seen in your life.”

“Accident ahead. Take next exit,” the Directions Bitch chanted. Lola was in the left of four lanes, a solid wall of vehicles between her car and the exit. She managed to ease a single lane to the right before the opportunity flashed past. She could have sworn the Bitch sighed.

Brake lights flashed. A semi-trailer growled through its downshifts in the lane she’d just vacated, almost close enough to touch. To her right, a sports car crept even with her and, with a feint worthy of an NFL running back, air-kissed her front bumper as it slipped ahead of her. Lola raised a hand from the steering wheel and a middle finger from the hand. That much, at least, she remembered from long-ago years of big-city driving.

Ahead, lights flashed red and blue beneath an overpass. She’d be past the accident soon. She looked for a crumpled car, sending a quick plea to the Creator that its occupants had escaped alive; that their families would not find themselves in the same sea of grief that daily threatened to drown her.

But an ambulance sat unmoving among the police cruisers, its lights off. Never a good sign. Lola’s car inched closer. A body, covered but not yet bagged, lay in the center lane. But she saw no wrecked cars, nor even the bits of metal and taillight that usually marked a crash scene. The cops and EMTs stood with their heads angled back, looking up at the overpass.

Lola, her instincts honed by long years of covering the worst humanity had to offer, wondered if someone had been pushed. But the high, inward-curving fence that guarded the overpass made it unlikely that anyone with ill intent had heaved someone, even an incapacitated someone, up and over, or that anyone had taken a drunken tumble. A jumper, then.

Envy rose within her, so strong she could taste it, sharp and astringent. Her hands tightened on the wheel. Someone had found the courage she so far lacked. Her longing gaze swept the overpass. She shook her head. Not the right solution for her. The trick would be to make sure it looked like an accident. Charlie, ever the solicitous provider, had made sure both of them had healthy life insurance policies. She couldn’t deprive Margaret of that.

As to the emotional effect on her daughter—she punched at the radio buttons, seeking the distraction of an all-news station. Maybe it could tell her what had happened on the highway, and while she was at it, she could get more information on the murder of Sariah Ballard. But the news hour was past and the station had moved on to talk, opinionators yakkity-yakking about the new ruling on gays. A portentous voice issued a stern reminder that Mormons forbade all unmarried sex, gay or straight.

“Good luck with that,” she told the radio. She enjoyed a rare laugh before thoughts of sex led to memories of Charlie and their enthusiastic enjoyment of one another that had continued unabated through nearly a decade together. The laugh died on her lips. She turned off the radio.

“Get it while you can,” she whispered to all of the unnamed Mormon kids out there, lusting after whatever gender kindled those delicious urges she couldn’t imagine feeling again. “Because you never know when something will take it away from you.”

After the interstate, Camellia was a relief, defined by broad and near-empty expanses of pavement bordering lawns so thickly sodded that they bespoke tyrannical homeowners’ associations. Spindly trees and bushes—but certainly no camellias—struggled for purchase in miserly soil more suited to juniper and hackberry. Lola guessed the town and its streets were named by a transplanted Easterner, homesick for the lush, fragrant shrubs and delicate flowering trees that would never truly thrive here, no matter how much compost was applied and money poured into sophisticated drip irrigation systems.

She saw no pedestrians, and didn’t expect any. Her years in the West had taught her that most people would rather drive two blocks to pick up a quart of milk than walk, a habit she attributed to ranch childhoods where nothing at all was within walking distance. She took a few deliberate wrong turns, mightily vexing the Directions Bitch, to try to get a feel for the neighborhood before commencing the humiliation of arriving late to a crime scene.

A reporter’s notebook lay on the console. She scrawled notes as she drove. No sidewalks. Nice cars—Am-made, mostly. McMansions? Not quite. But big. Beige, beige, beige. Quit stereotyping, she lectured herself. Suburbs didn’t necessarily mean boring. But she’d bet Camellia was, for understandable reasons. There was the mere fact of its comfortable-verging-on-luxurious presence, a triumphant rebuke to a land that deployed an arsenal of summer heat and winter frigidity. The only vegetation that could withstand both was too bitter for grazing, too scrubby for undoctored lawns.

And yet the inhabitants persevered, descendants of a faith intermittently marked for extermination; tamers of a desert whose largest body of water was not potable; strivers par excellence whose most prominent members included the CEOs of multinational corporations, university presidents, and even a presidential candidate.

But all of that success came with a whiff of suspicion, the taint of polygamist heritage, the accusations of clannishness and secrecy. Suburbs like Camellia stood as a righteous beige bulwark against all of that, testament to barbecues and Little League, grass watered daily and mowed weekly, everything screaming “normal” in protesteth-too-much fashion. Or so it seemed to Lola, who’d spent her adult life in a skeptical occupation that claimed as its motto, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

She swung the wheel again, turning onto another street so similar to the one she’d just left that she checked the street sign to make sure she hadn’t doubled back on herself. “Recalculating,” the Directions Bitch sighed in exasperation.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”