FORTY-TWO

Lola hit the ground about five minutes after Bub.

She’d beckoned to him from the ladder, thinking to carry him down, but he’d raced past her with a disdainful sniff, free at last to negotiate the trail at his own headlong speed. When she stepped from the last rung, he launched himself at her chest, knocking her to the ground, her laughter and his yapping mingling in a joyful chorus.

The exultation was brief. Lola lay flat, Bub on her chest, the sun shining above. Not straight down on them, but too close. She scrambled to her feet, earning an injured look from Bub as he fell to one side. She still had to get back to the road, and then to town, so that she could warn the police and FBI about Thomas’s plans.

She bent and loosened the laces on her running shoes, easing the pressure on feet swollen and puffy from the heat. A mile, at most, to the main road. “Hell,” she reassured Bub, “that’s a sprint.” Except that after the first few steps, she knew it wouldn’t be. She was going on twelve hours with neither food nor water. The goose egg on the back of her head throbbed, competing for attention with her ferocious thirst. She’d been used to running in the relative cool of the morning, the sun slanting low and friendly across the desert. Now it launched a full-on assault from on high. And finally, because she’d set out on her run so close to nightfall the previous evening, she’d seen no need for a cap. She angled her head downward and traced a crooked, stumbling path down the dirt road leading away from the ruins. Her toe caught a rock. Her hands smacked the ground just seconds before her face. She lay still, spitting red dirt. Bub nosed at the back of her neck.

An hour earlier, she thought as she pushed herself up, she’d have given anything for a flat surface beneath her, blissfully extending in every direction. She’d made the mistake of relaxing her guard once she got on the ground. Potholes and rocks made the track more of a jeep trail than an actual road, and Lola wove her way among them at a trot, thinking back to the occasional races she’d run, always striving for a PB, or personal best, time. If there were such a thing as a personal worst, this was it, she thought. Her head swam. Bub, who usually raced ahead of her in long, low-to-the-ground zigzags, easily achieving five times her own distance, lurched behind her. Normally his missing leg, lost to that gunshot meant for Lola, was no impediment, but on this day the handicap was evident.

A sawhorse loomed before them. Lola stopped and leaned against it, marshaling what remained of her strength. A hand-lettered piece of posterboard flapped in the searing wind: NO CLIFF HOUSE TOURS. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. She let her gaze slide past it to the beautiful ribbon of blacktop now only yards away. They’d made it. At least, this far. Next step: Flag down a ride.

As though in response to her thoughts, an approaching engine grumbled on the other side of a rise in the road. Lola jogged the final few steps to the road and lifted her arm in preparation. A truck topped the hill. The driver’s head turned her way. The truck slowed. Conrad Coal’s logo adorned its side. She turned and walked back toward the road leading to the cliff houses, a woman and crippled dog trying to look purposeful in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t sure enough of Thomas’s intentions to gamble on a truck that might end up a victim of a second bombing. The sound of the truck’s engine faded. She turned and stared after it, wondering if her own foolish fears had damned the one chance she might have had.

She broke again into as much of a jog as she could approximate. When a car finally appeared, she simply moved to the center of the road and stopped, blocking its passage, not even bothering with the charade of flagging. The decrepit rez car wheezed to a stop. Regret and relief warred within her. She’d half-hoped for a tourist’s shiny new SUV, one that could speed her to her destination. The car now before her hadn’t sped anywhere in a very long while. But a tourist might not have stopped for her ragged, disreputable-looking self. Indian people generally were more apt to accept that anybody, anywhere, might be having a bad day.

Lola approached the car, reflecting that this was fast turning into the worst day of her life. She opened the back door without asking permission, squeezing herself next to a couple of aunties, pulling Bub onto her lap. An elder dozed in the front seat next to the driver, a middle-aged man who wore a Conrad Coal cap. No one spoke. But as she settled herself in the seat, the driver reached for a plastic water bottle in the console and handed it to her. Lola drank so fast that precious droplets ran down her chin and wetted her tank top. She swiped the back of her hand across it, then licked her hand. She forced herself to lower the bottle and pour some of its contents into her cupped hand for Bub.

“Thank you,” she said when the bottle was empty. And then, “Gaitero. Please. As fast as you can. Do you know Gar Laurendeau’s place?”

Charlie probably would be at the house, she thought. Or he might be with the tribal police, persuading them that his own anxiety about her disappearance in no way would prevent him from helping with their search. He’d take comfort from the known rituals, the cop talk, the bad coffee. But his first priority would have been Margaret, making sure she was safe with someone, almost certainly either Naomi or Edgar. Not, please God, Thomas. The possibility clutched at Lola’s throat even as she rejected it. Charlie barely knew Thomas. In a situation this serious, only immediate family would do.

The car’s rattling progress slowed as Lola pointed out the turnoff to Naomi and Edgar’s. She pushed her foot against the floor, impossibly willing the driver to speed up the dirt lane to the house. She barely remembered to fling thanks over her shoulder as she and Bub staggered toward the front door.

Lola barely registered Naomi rising from a counter stool, her face a rictus of fear. Behind her, Thomas shrank into a corner.

Lola shot him a look of pure poison and dodged Naomi. “Margaret. Where is she?” Without waiting for an answer, she stumbled down the hall to the girls’ bedroom and pushed through the door.

Margaret and Juliana lay on their beds, unread books propped on their stomachs. Margaret, the girl who almost never cried, shrieked and burst into tears. Lola waited until her daughter was cradled in her arms—and Bub wrapped in Margaret’s—before sliding to the floor, muscles that had been taut with fear and exhaustion for eighteen hours finally relaxing into the reality that she was safe.

Naomi eased into the room.

“Charlie and Edgar are on their way. The police, too. But I’m thinking we should get you to the hospital so they can check you out.”

Lola shook her head and clutched Margaret tighter. “I’m fine. I just need more water. Maybe some food. And—” She lifted a hand and studied its surface, rendered unfamiliar by layers of dirt, crosshatched with scratches and scrapes. She bent her head to one side, sniffed, and recoiled. “Maybe a shower. And some clean clothes.”

Naomi shook her head. The prosecutor in her spoke. “You have to do this. They’ll need to document your injuries. Especially if you were—” She hesitated.

Lola’s lips twitched in a half-smile of acknowledgment. Any woman would have had the same question. The possibility of rape hovered over even the most innocuous situations. “No,” she said. “He just kidnapped me. He didn’t do anything else.” Except leave me to die, she thought.

Naomi sagged back into her chair. “Oh, thank God.” She pulled open a drawer, fumbled with its contents, and brought out a schoolgirl’s black-and-white marbled composition book and a pen. “The police should be here any minute. But maybe while it’s still so fresh in your mind, you can give me a description of the guy. That’s what they’ll want first.”

“No need,” said Lola.

“But—” Naomi held up the composition book as though the very sight of it might cause Lola to change her mind. “It’s really important. Given everything else going on around here, it’s possible the person who took you is the bomber.”

Margaret whimpered in her arms. Lola stroked her hair. “He is the bomber. I’m sure of it. And I don’t need to give a description. I know who he is.”

Margaret raised her head. Juliana, who’d lingered in a corner of the room, crept close. She had to have known, from the day Thomas’s bookbag and its telltale key chain turned up at the cliff houses, that he was involved, maybe not in the bombings—she probably couldn’t have brought herself to think that—but in something he shouldn’t be. Lola cast a glance her way and braced herself to break a nine-year-old’s heart.

Enough damage, she told herself. Juliana would find out soon enough, but she wouldn’t find out from her. She eased Margaret from her lap, clambered to her feet, and gestured to Naomi to come close. She whispered into Naomi’s ear and watched in fascination as the skin on Naomi’s face, so smooth and brown, went as pale and mottled as that of a corpse.