Ten

Families of Faith was the first surprise.

Lola was used to the raffish atmosphere of a newsroom, an echoing open space populated by reporters with phones at their ears and fingers pounding keyboards nonstop, desks awash with stained coffee cups, pens run dry, and the newspapers and documents that the digital age had failed to vanquish.

But Families of Faith, which took up the fourth floor of a downtown Salt Lake office building, had a vestibule worthy of a law office, all dark wood and gilt-edged portraits of somber men, brass plates identifying them as past editors. No women, Lola noticed. She searched the plates for Munro’s name. Nothing. Maybe editors didn’t rate the wall until they’d retired or moved on.

The desk assigned the office manager—also male, according to the nameplate—was bigger than Jorkki’s back at the Express. It was vacant. The clock stood at five past one. Maybe the manager was on a lunch break, also a departure from a newsroom, where meals were afterthoughts, consumed if at all at desks or in cars between assignments. Lola sat in the vestibule, one foot tapping silently on the carpet, waiting for the manager’s emergence and trying to imagine what it would be like to work cooped up in such a plush cage.

A photo of the resplendent temple just a few blocks away dominated another wall. Which reminded her: the pieces of wood displayed in Melena’s hallway. She’d said something about a handcart. And faith. Lola pulled out her phone and went to Google.

As usual, a few moments told her more than she needed to know. Mormons fleeing murderous opposition in Illinois headed by the tens of thousands for Brigham Young’s proclaimed haven in what would become Utah. A few hundred, unable to afford the luxury of a jolting Conestoga wagon and the sturdy oxen to pull it, piled hundreds of pounds of belongings into rough handcarts and shoved and pulled them across the desert. On foot. For more than a thousand miles. In some groups, more than one in four died.

Lola thought of the barren expanse that had unfolded for mile after unpopulated mile beneath the airplane that had whisked her to Salt Lake. Tried to imagine crossing it on foot, especially as a woman, already exhausted from too-frequent childbearing, only to see those children wither and die during the pitiless Darwinian trek. Hard people, the survivors. No wonder Melena’s family had held on to the remnant of the cart.

Her research used up all of five minutes. She waited another five. “Hello?” she called into dead air.

Somewhere down a long hallway, a door sounded. The office manager loped so purposefully into the vestibule that his chin-length sandy hair swung back from his face. The navy blazer worn by every junior staffer Lola had ever known flapped behind him. His tie hung askew. He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“I have an appointment with Donovan Munro.”

He turned on his heel and beckoned her to follow, still moving at a good clip. Closed doors passed in a blur. The hallway dead-ended in a door with a frosted glass pane that proclaimed EDITOR in etched gold letters. Beneath the pane, a brass plate read Donovan Munro. Lola’s escort opened the door and stood aside.

Somewhere in that room was a desk, its presence signaled mainly by stacks of paper even taller than the stalagmites of documents rising at precarious angles from the floor. A heap atop a tall file cabinet reached nearly to the ceiling, and the mess on the windowsill partially obscured what otherwise would have been a precisely framed view of the temple’s Oz-worthy spires.

The chair in front of the desk held yet another Leaning Tower of Paper, rivaling the rest. Lola knew better than to touch it. If Munro’s system was anything like hers, the slightest change could wreak havoc when it came to finding a crucial document. Munro’s chair, like that of the office manager, stood vacant. He’d been so insistent that she be prompt, and now he was the one who was late. Fine. She’d take anything that would give her an advantage. She turned to her escort to ask when to expect Munro.

But he stepped around her and dropped into the chair behind the desk.

“You must be Lola Wicks.” He held out his hand. “Donovan Munro.”

Lola’s jaw hung somewhere just above her toes. With some effort, she closed her mouth. Words emerged. “No way.”

Munro’s hand, his fingers long and tapered, hung empty in the air. He started to pull it back. “You’re not Lola Wicks?”

“Yes, I’m Lola.” She did some quick calculations as she took his hand. Munro had been one of Jan’s instructors in college, and then spent some time as an editor at the Salt Lake Tribune, so he’d be pushing forty. This man didn’t look close to that. Had Jan said professor? Maybe she’d meant teaching assistant. Lola had little enough respect for the best of editors. Despite what Jan had told her, she doubted Munro fell into that category.

He dropped her hand and leaned back in his chair. A rakish mustache curved toward his chin, giving him the look of a Western movie gunslinger—or a seventies lounge lizard. A grin spread beneath it.

“You’re not … ” she began.

“Not what?”

Not the stumpy bearded elder I’d expected. A yawn, the combined result of the previous night’s pill and the inability of the hotel’s weak coffee to combat its effects, ambushed her.

“Are you all right? You seem a little—I don’t know.” He canted farther back still, the chair now tilted at a dangerous angle, threatening to upend its occupant as well as a paper skyscraper behind it. “Worse for the wear.”

And you’re even more rude in person than you are on the phone. Which left her free to respond in kind. “Other than not seeing the point of this story, I’m fine.”

His own jaw-drop rivaled hers of moments earlier. Except that he recovered faster. “No point? No point? Boy kills girlfriend’s mother—at least, that’s how it looks at this point. Sex and death. Two of the three subjects guaranteed to grab readers. Dig up a money angle and we’ve got ourselves a trifecta.”

“Getting the story you’re talking about could take a while.” Lola dredged up a kind of generosity she hadn’t known she possessed. “It would make more sense for someone here to do it. I could hand off what I’ve gotten so far.” She hoped Munro wouldn’t dime her out to Jan, who’d be quick to inform him that never once in her life had Lola Wicks willingly turned over a story to another reporter.

She slouched against the wall, waiting for him to invite her to sit. Munro leaned forward. His chair descended onto all four legs with a thump. “Let’s talk about what this story could be.”

Lola knew this trick. Suck her in, make her part of the process. Maybe it had worked with younger reporters. Or students. People who were Jan’s age. Lola folded her arms across her chest as he spoke.

“How old was this kid—Frank, right?—when they adopted him? Remind me.”

Trying to trap her, thinking she didn’t know. Not an hour ago, she’d stood in Melena’s darkened hallway. She felt again the weight of the framed photo in her hand and saw the image of the child, blurred in his attempt to escape the camera’s scrutiny.

“Ten.” So there.

“Anything about that strike you as odd?” Munro spoke very slowly, as though addressing someone who didn’t understand English.

Insult received, thought Lola. She fought another yawn. “Isn’t that a little old for adoption?”

“Just so. You’re talking about a fully formed kid. You’re a mom, right? How old is your—what do you have, a son or a daughter?”

“Daughter. Eight. What the heck does she have to do with this?” Lola congratulated herself for the restraint of heck. Mentally she threw some stronger words toward Jan, who apparently had briefed Munro on her family situation.

“What if something happened to you? What if she were orphaned? Adopted by another family, in another country, another culture? How would she handle that?”

Lola came away from the wall. Her hands fell to her sides. Munro rattled on. “Even if they were the nicest people in the world, it would be tough, both for her and for the people who adopt her. Especially at first.”

“No.”

“No, what? You can’t imagine it?”

Lola shook her head. Even though, thanks to Amanda Richards, she could imagine it, in a way that made her breath come short, catching in her chest. Removal. She coughed, trying to clear the constriction in her throat.

“Now take that experience and multiply it by dozens, maybe hundreds, of families around Salt Lake. A lot of these kids are older when they’re adopted. They’re under tremendous pressure to conform to this new culture. But if they do—” He held out his hands, palms up, inviting her to continue.

Playing along helped sideline the specter of Amanda. “It means giving up some essential part of themselves. Their home. Their families. Everything they knew before.”

She thought of Margaret, with her white mother, her Indian father. Raised off-reservation, going to a white school, but with near-daily exposure to the Blackfeet Nation and its mix of familial love and taken-for-granted poverty. Margaret was still young enough that she seemed oblivious to the differences. But what about later? Would she be angry about them? Feel forced to choose sides? And if so, which side would she choose?

“It’s got to scare those adoptive families to death, wondering if they might be rejected someday. And now here we are, maybe looking at the ultimate rejection—murder. Think that might be a story?”

For a moment, she was almost grateful to Munro for the way his clumsy attempt at manipulation, the hackneyed story idea, derailed her runaway thoughts. She envisioned a dreary round of interviews with families who’d adopted, every last one of them handing her a version of “So sorry, such a terrible thing. Thank heavens our own Frank/Kwesi/Maria/Katya is so well-adjusted. It could never happen in our family.” A rookie could do that story. She started to say as much, but Munro beat her to the punch.

“Not the story you’d write.” It wasn’t even a question.

“It’s the story everyone will write.”

“Fair enough. But what’s the story no one else will write?”

Lola expected him to launch that tired mantra: Zig where the others zag. Or was it the other way around? But he just waited.

“Whomever”—Lola tried to infuse the single word with not me—“writes this should stick with this particular family. Whatever went wrong here is probably the sort of thing that could happen in any family. It’s not like a teenager has never killed a parent before. On some gut level, people know that. They’ll read every word.”

“But everyone will be writing about this particular family as this thing winds through the court system. Our next deadline is weeks out. How do we make our story different?”

“By focusing on what you just pointed out.” Lola, secure in the knowledge that she was moments from handing the story back to him, let slip a bit of magnanimity. “The whole culture clash. How it exacerbates tensions. Can these sorts of adoptions, especially with older kids, ever really work? Actually”—she pulled a bit of useful information out of her ass—“I know an adoption lawyer here in Salt Lake. She’d be the perfect person to give perspective on the story. She’s a Navajo woman who was taken from her mother and adopted by the Mormons. They used to do that, you know.” Lola hoped he didn’t. It would be nice to turn the tables.

But Munro nodded as though it were a familiar story. Which, maybe in this part of the world, it was. Still, Lola was proud of her Hail Mary move. She’d come to know of Loretta Begay in Arizona through her mother, who was an elder she’d befriended before Charlie’s death. She and Loretta’s mother, Betty Begay, had kept in sporadic touch.

Lola buffed her bona fides. “She could speak to the whole different culture, different skin color thing.”

She studied Munro with narrowed eyes as he shuffled through some papers. Cheekbones dominated a thin face. He glanced up, meeting her eyes in a gaze so direct that she glanced away. His were hazel. BC—Before Charlie—she’d have thought him bedworthy, if only for a single night, one that preferably involved as little talking as possible. She’d had a long-standing policy of not getting romantically involved with anyone better-looking than she was—and on her best days, she rated herself a seven. Munro was a solid nine. Cut the hair, lose the ’stache, he’d be an easy ten. And, even though she’d never broken the rule about not sleeping with a supervisor, after another five minutes Munro wasn’t going to be her supervisor anymore.

Get laid, Alice and Jan had advised, albeit more tactfully. But Lola’s years with Charlie had transformed her into a confirmed monogamist. She did a gut check, both seeking and fearing the incandescent flicker of lust that at one point in her life invariably meant she’d lead someone off to bed before he’d entirely realized what was happening. Now, though, she felt nothing—other than a wash of relief at the realization. Not happening, Jan. Your suggestion respectfully declined, Alice.

She scanned Munro’s desk. The only photo was of a young boy. No sign of a wife. She checked his hand. No ring. Probably the boy’s mom had realized early what a jerk she’d married. Lola dusted her hands, trying to rid herself of unwelcome thoughts, the gesture a holdover from long-ago assignments to the Middle East. Hallas! people would say. Enough! Conversation over!

As apparently it was. Munro mined one of the piles, threatening an order-wrecking tumble, and emerged with a folded pamphlet.

“Give that lawyer a call. The sooner you can set something up, the better.”

Lola backed toward the door. “I thought we agreed”—even though she knew they’d done no such thing—“that you’d hand this off to someone else. Someone who can take the time. I’ll pass the lawyer’s name along. I’ve got to get back to Montana.”

Munro made his own sort of hallas motion, the paper snapping in his hand. “Do you see anyone else standing in front of me? That boy has his initial court appearance Wednesday. They announced it at the news conference—which I guess you chose not to attend. Get what you can in the next day or so. Go to court. Call your adoption lawyer friend yourself. And talk to as many people who are close to the family as possible. Start with that girlfriend.” He held out the pamphlet. “This might help with some other contacts.”

“What is it?”

“Maybe you could read it and find out.”

Lola silently congratulated Munro’s runaway wife on her great good sense, even as she shook open the leaflet. “A hockey schedule?”

“For Frank Shumway’s team. Go to one of the games. There’s one on Friday. If nothing else, it’ll make for some nice color. I know, I know.” He held up a hand to forestall any response. “You’d already planned on going to the game. Right?”

On Friday? Lola hadn’t planned on being in Salt Lake at all at the end of the week, let alone at a hockey game. On the other hand, she supposed she couldn’t turn up back in Montana too soon without risking whatever was left of her credibility with the aunties and Jan. And she could avoid Amanda, whose texts had already started to stack up in her phone. So she would do these first few interviews and then hand her notes over to the dimwit behind the desk, not giving him a choice about assigning the story to someone else.

She stuffed the pamphlet in her pocket and turned to go.

“Don’t forget to check in. Daily. More than,” he called behind her.

In a long history of hostile encounters with editors, she thought as she stalked from his office, this ranked high on the list. She headed down the street toward her hotel, trying to distract herself with the nugget that had snagged her attention amid his string of insults and orders.

Frank would be in court Wednesday. The police must have found something that justified filing charges against him despite the tryst with his girlfriend, and even though Bryce had been the one to find Sariah.

None of it, thought Lola, made any sense at all. A feeling that had been AWOL since Charlie’s death reasserted itself as she thought of the coming court appearance:

Anticipation.