THIRTY-FOUR

Betty’s condition left Lola so unsettled that she forgot about the likely consequences of her visit to Kerns. Those consequences awaited in the form of Edgar on the front step, arms folded upon his chest, legs spread wide. Classic testosterone stance, Lola thought.

She slid Conrad Coal’s annual report and a sheaf of other papers beneath the front seat as the girls scampered past him into the house, then climbed the steps to confront him. She mirrored his own body language and rejected the courtesy of a smile.

“Edgar.”

“Lola. Busy day?”

“Good day. Productive.” Let him chew on that one awhile, she thought. She wondered what Kerns had told him about their conversation.

“I don’t appreciate you using my name to go someplace you had no business being.”

“I had every business being there.”

“Then why not make an appointment, like a normal person? Why just barge in?”

Rather than concede the point, Lola waited. It didn’t take long.

“Because you’re doing a story. A story! How dare you take advantage of our hospitality that way. Charlie told me you were a workaholic. I didn’t realize that extended to your honeymoon.”

Lola made her voice silky. “Not a story. Just a freelance proposal. You know how it is, trying to make it on the crap salaries in this part of the world. Oh, that’s right. You don’t.” She let her eyes drift to the shade house with its stone fireplace and fountain, the late-model truck that in Lola’s part of the world would have been called a Cowboy Cadillac. She shifted a little so that she stood in the stream of chilled air leaking from the half-open door and gave an exaggerated, appreciative shiver.

Bitch, said Edgar’s eyes.

You have no idea, said Lola’s.

“What are you two doing out here in the heat?” Naomi materialized in the doorway, perfection in another hand-tailored silk shirt. Her impeccable cool stopped at her eyes, where suspicion and worry did battle.

Lola played her trump card, laying down the ultimate distraction. “Oh, good. I’m glad you’re out here where the girls can’t hear. I was just about to tell, um, Gar about Betty Begay. I’m really concerned about her.”

“What about her?” Edgar and Naomi spoke in unison.

Lola brushed past them into the house. Thomas sat at the counter, bent over his books. He didn’t look up.

“We saw her today.”

A textbook crashed to the floor. Lola jumped. Thomas’s muttered “sorry” was barely audible.

“What were you doing there?”

Lola decided she was better off ignoring Edgar’s question. “There’s something wrong. She’s pretty sick. At first, I thought she was—” Mindful of the fact that just because the girls were out of sight didn’t mean they weren’t listening somewhere, she switched course. “I thought she’d fainted.”

Naomi crossed to the pantry and retrieved two empty milk jugs. She stuck one beneath the faucet and turned on the water. “I’ll go up there. If she needs help, I can bring her to a doctor.”

“I don’t think she’ll go. She chased me out of there pretty assertively.”

“Because it was you.” Lola read Edgar loud and clear: Not one of us.

“Wait.” Thomas rose from the floor with textbook in hand. He spoke so rarely that Lola looked at Edgar before she realized where the command had come from. Even Naomi turned to stare. The water filled the jug and gurgled over the top.

“I was up there just yesterday. She seemed, uh, she seemed okay.” Thomas reached past Naomi and turned off the water.

“Okay, how? Did she seem dizzy? Sick in any way? What did you two do? Describe her condition for me.”

Lola pictured Naomi in a courtroom, firing questions at a witness. They seemed innocuous enough, but Thomas flinched as though she’d asked whether he’d committed a crime.

“We drank tea. Looked at the stars. Shared a smoke.” He capped the jug and hoisted it onto the counter without looking at her.

“She was smoking? She seemed short of breath,” Lola offered. “Maybe that’s why.”

“She’s been smoking since before I was born. The woman has titanium lungs. Gar, have you seen my keys?” Naomi grabbed her purse and a light jacket. “Thomas, could you please fill that other bottle? Thanks.”

“I can do you one better.” Thomas took the keys from Gar. “I’ll drive up and check on her. You two are so busy with everything else. Mind if I take the Prius? It’ll get me there quicker than that beater of mine.”

Naomi nodded. “Of course. But I should go with you.”

“Look. I just saw her. Who better to judge any change between then and now?” He turned away again, filling the second jug. “It would probably just be a waste of your time, anyway. Lola here doesn’t know her the way we do, can’t read her the way we can. She’s probably mistaken.”

Naomi sagged onto a stool. “Maybe. I hope you’re right.”

“No. She really was sick—” Lola began.

She stopped. Her eyes narrowed. Thomas’s skepticism about her was all it had took to change Naomi’s mind about going to the mesa. She got that. What she didn’t understand was why Thomas didn’t want Naomi going up there.

Lola waited until past midnight before she retrieved the headlamp she’d stashed under her pillow. She positioned it on her forehead, adjusted the band for comfort, and cast an apprehensive glance at Charlie’s sleeping form. Not that she needed to bother. She could probably bend over him and shine the thing directly upon his face without waking him. Just once, she thought, she’d like him to suffer a night of insomnia, if for no other reason than to get some sympathy on the too-frequent mornings when she stumbled groggy into the kitchen after hours of tossing and turning.

This would not be that night. Charlie’s breath came deep and regular. Lola slipped from bed and tiptoed through the house, stopping every few steps to listen for sounds of wakefulness—a restless turning, a muffled voice, the whir of Naomi’s sewing machine. But the quiet was absolute. Once outside, she moved quickly, wary of lurking tarantulas.

On the way home from Betty Begay’s hogan, she’d stopped at a library and used the public computer to print the photos she’d snapped of the documents on Jeffrey Kerns’s desk, stashing the printouts under the truck’s seat along with Conrad Coal’s annual reports. The opening and closing of the truck’s door echoed like shots in the darkness. She stood beside the truck awhile, waiting for the front door to be flung open, for the wash of light across the yard that would illuminate the damning papers in her arms, for a flood of the accusatory questions. But the house lay calm amid the velvety darkness. Maybe they thought it was Thomas, returning in the silent Prius. Which he might do at any minute, she reminded herself. Still, she stood a moment, acknowledging the sequined sky, unabashed in its showiness. A coyote wailed. Lola hastened back indoors.

She spread the papers across the bedroom floor and switched on her headlamp, hoping that the rows of numbers she’d glimpsed would magically have transformed themselves into the reassuring familiarity of text. She shuffled through the papers. No such conversion had occurred. The numbers sat smug in their rows, as comprehensible to Lola as the Navajo words that rattled from the truck’s radio whenever she turned it on. In college, she had majored in English, and, with the fervor of a phobic, avoided any courses requiring math. She’d done her share of municipal budget stories over the years, each one a cause for heartburn during the writing, with strong drink afterward. She sighed, pulled off a highlighter’s cap with her teeth, and chewed on it as she ran her eyes down the lines of numbers.

She looked again, and read more slowly. Fifteen minutes in, her absorption was complete. An hour later, yellow lines striped the pages. Lola felt around for the annual report she’d taken from the office. She could have found the same information online. But the hard copy was so much easier on the eyes and—Hallelujah!—comprised more words than numbers. Lola flipped the pages and wielded her marker with the same alacrity with which she’d attacked the charts.

The next time she checked the clock, another hour had passed. She switched off the headlamp. Gray light oozed through the blinds. Lola slid headlamp, papers, and highlighter beneath the bed. Charlie would be awake soon. Maybe she could sneak in a little sleep before he arose.

But even as she squeezed her eyes shut, the numbers swam before them, telling the same story no matter how many different ways she looked at them. Conrad Coal may have been one of the world’s richest companies, a fact repeated ad nauseam in the rosy language of the annual report, but the Arizona mine appeared to be hemorrhaging cash. The report gave no inkling of that, but the papers on Kerns’s desk had told a story that even Lola could understand. Those numbers would surely show up in the next year’s report, and even if Conrad Coal’s shareholders weren’t yet aware of them, workers at the mine almost surely were. Things like that had a way of getting around. The big bosses might try to keep it to themselves, but inevitably a secretary would copy some charts for one of them, or collate some papers, and then she’d say something to her brother, who drove a truck for the mine, and he’d talk to his uncle, who was a supervisor, and the next thing you knew, the invisible lines of gossip that wrapped the reservation like a spiderweb would be humming, practically lighting up the night with their intensity.

All of which made Lola wonder why anyone would try, to the point of murder, to shut down a mine that was probably going to close anyway?