FORTY-FIVE

It took a while for the adults back at the house to realize she was missing, Charlie said.

“The girls got scared, tried to find you on their own. They thought they’d be in trouble if they came back without you. Thomas came in before they got back. When it got dark, Naomi went out and started calling for them. They came back then. Crying. Shaking. Naomi tried to tell them you’d just gone on a longer run than you’d planned, but we all knew better.”

Lola pictured Margaret’s face and turned away from the image.

“Eddie called the cops. But we didn’t want to wait for them.”

Lola nodded. The police station was miles away. It was the curse of rural life, exacerbated by the reservation’s vast empty stretches—help was never close.

“We all wanted to go out looking. Naomi and Eddie insisted. And no way was I going to sit at home. Margaret needed me, but—”

But I did, too, Lola thought. Charlie’s poker face failed him yet again, his warring distress over his wife and daughter etching deep lines from mouth to chin.

“Where was Thomas?”

“He waited with the girls until the cops came.” He held up his hand. “I already asked. The girls said he was with them the whole time.”

When she was jouncing around in the back of his car.

“I came back when the cops got here. Edgar went back out with them. I wanted to go out again, too. But Margaret was near hysterical, not wanting me out of her sight. So I took the girls with me, and Thomas, too. It was a risk. We might have found you”—Lola watched him struggle with the word dead and lose the fight—“hurt, and I didn’t want the girls to see that. But I knew you didn’t trust him, and I didn’t want him looking for you alone. Just in case.”

By then, she would have been climbing the ladder.

“But.” Lola’s legs, still none too steady after the hours in bed, gave way. She sank into a chair. She took a moment to appreciate the fact that Charlie had taken her distrust of Thomas seriously—so seriously that his actions had ruled out Thomas as a suspect. She’d been so sure. Whoever had knocked her on the head and put her in the trunk had had to carry her across some distance of desert. Thomas was the right size. But so were a lot of other men. But. But.

“I know it’s him,” she said one last time. Her shaking voice betrayed the certainty of the words.

“No,” said Charlie. “You don’t. And give yourself a break. One thing I’ve learned is to give crime victims time. Right after an incident”—he lapsed into cop talk—“people are typically so traumatized they can’t remember details except in bits and pieces. It’ll come back to you gradually, more than you’d like it to. You’ll feed that information to police, and it will help them.”

Stop talking like a cop, Lola wanted to say. Be my husband. She didn’t have to say it.

“You know what worries me more than anything?”

She stood and walked to the window and peered through the blinds, drawn against the sun. “That whoever did this is still out there?”

“That, too.” He bent his head to hers. His lips moved against the tangle of her hair. “You were doing so well. Getting back to your old self. Kicking ass. Being obnoxious.”

Lola leaned into his embrace. “I’m not obnoxious.”

“Yes, you are. When you’re onto something, you’re like a runaway horse. Nothing can stop you. Don’t lose that again.”

Lola thought back to the hot darkness of the car trunk, the blind swaying trip up the ladder. The gun barrel grinding its perfect circle into the soft flesh beneath her jaw.

“I just want to go home.” The words slipped unbidden, truer than any she’d ever spoken. She braced herself for his disappointment. But he only tightened his embrace, rocking her like a child.

“If that’s what you want, you’ve got it. Now that we’ve got Bub back, there’s no reason not to. You can keep in touch with the cops by phone. I want to go to the meeting. Eddie asked me to sit in. Said maybe that, because I’m not from here, I’d pick up on something that everyone else has missed. But we can pack the truck ahead of time so we can leave right afterward.”

“No!” Maybe Thomas wasn’t the bomber—although Lola wasn’t prepared to accept that. But the meeting was still a target. “Surely you can see that.”

“Lola, every tribal cop, every state trooper, every sheriff’s deputy, every game warden, for God’s sake, is going to be at that meeting. On the entire Navajo Nation, that meeting is the safest place we can be.”