by Gwen Florio
Lola looked as though he’d suggested they wallow in a rattlesnake den. “What would I possibly want from Nordstrom?”
“I thought women liked shopping,” Charlie said, even as he conceded the point. Lola’s wardrobe—jeans and cargo pants, winter turtlenecks and summer T-shirts, with a few shorts and tank tops that would have gotten her killed or worse in Afghanistan—was long on service and short on fashion.
The pickup cruised wide, scary-clean boulevards. “There’s the mall,” Charlie nodded. “Right across from the temple.” Lola ignored the temple’s Oz-like spires, the golden angel Moroni trumpeting defiantly atop the tallest, and tapped at her phone, flush with four bars. “Looks like there’s an Apple store near Nordstrom. I don’t suppose you’d planned to duck in there while you dumped me at Nordstrom. You know that you can order their stuff online, right?”
She sneaked a glance at Charlie and bit her lip to keep from laughing. His own lip thrust forward. Margaret came by her epic pout honestly, Lola thought. Charlie had been making noises about an iPad for his birthday after the county refused to pony up for one for the sheriff’s office, despite his lengthy memo on its myriad uses.
Lola’s fingers stilled on the phone. “I found it.”
Margaret, who’d fallen asleep, stirred. “Found what?”
“A story about the bombing.”
“And?” Charlie lifted his wrist and studied his watch. Despite his newfound crush on technology, he’d yet to give up his sturdy Timex with its duct-taped band. “Mall’s probably closed, anyhow. Let’s find a motel.” His sigh filled the pickup’s cab.
“Pretty much what you said. Looks like the billboard was the target. Nobody expected the elder to be out there this time of year. Investigation continuing, no suspects yet, blah blah blah … Hey. Your sister-in-law’s quoted.”
Charlie pulled up to a chain motel known for allowing dogs. “What’d she say?”
Lola tucked in her chin, straightened her shoulders, and spoke in pronouncements. “‘No matter how people feel about the mine, this represents an inexcusable destruction of property, exponentially compounded by the unforgivable death—no, murder—of one of our most respected Diné elders,’ said Naomi Nez Laurendeau, a prosecutor for the tribe. ‘The full force of the law must be brought against the perpetrator or perpetrators,’ added Laurendeau, whose husband, Edgar, is an attorney for the mine.’”
“Edgar, huh? Guess the tribe didn’t get the memo about his new name.” Charlie reached across the seat and took the phone from Lola’s hand. “Let’s turn this thing off for now. We’re on vacation, remember?”
Lola slid her hands beneath her thighs to keep from grabbing the phone from him. She’d get it back when he went in to register.
Charlie tossed a grin her way and slid the phone into his pocket. “Back in a few. Don’t worry that you’re missing anything. Starting tomorrow night, we’re probably going to hear more about this bombing than we ever wanted to. Sounds like Naomi’s been assigned to the case.”
SIX
For whatever reason—Lola decided not to question it—Charlie continued his abandonment of sightseeing excursions the next day, barreling toward Arizona through scenery reassuringly similar to that of Montana, juniper and piñon now mingling with the sagebrush, but mountains always visible somewhere on the horizon. Midway through the day, she relaxed into sleep. She awoke in a different universe.
She sat up and scrubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes. When she lowered her hands, things looked the same. “What happened?”
She glanced back. Margaret stared wide-eyed through the window, her expression mirroring her mother’s, and stated the obvious. “Different.”
The mountains had disappeared, along with nearly any hint of greenery. Red rock jutted from red earth, fairly glowing beneath a fierce sun whose heat burned every last cloud from the sky. The horizon, so emphatically defined in Montana, was somewhere in the wavering distance. It was as though someone had skinned the earth of its surface, peeling back grass and loam and trees to reveal the rounded muscular rocks beneath.
“What do you think?” said Charlie.
Lola looked around for a patch of hazy air over a slough, or a wandering line of trees that would signify a creek. People needed water, she thought. As did animals and birds and plants. She didn’t see any of those things, and for sure, there was no water in sight. She touched her tongue to a crack in her lips. She couldn’t remember whether it had been there before. Had the tender skin dried and pulled apart in just the short time she’d slept? Her tongue clogged her throat. She reached for the water bottle that sat in the console—Charlie never so much as drove to the convenience store without water in the truck—and drank deep, holding the cool liquid in her mouth. Parched cells plumped with relief.
She swallowed. “It’s awfully dry.”
“You’ve got to give the Navajo credit. The Hopi, too. Not to mention the Ancestral Puebloans. They all found a way to survive here.”
“The who?”
“People used to call them the Anasazi. They lived here first. Farmed, too. Seems impossible, doesn’t it? But they traded with people as far away as Mexico. Eddie and Naomi will probably want to take us to Chaco Canyon on this trip. Something like a thousand people lived there. Although, come to think of it, Eddie and Naomi might not have time for a trip like that now, what with this bombing case. But we can go on our own.”
Lola thought she’d prefer that. They’d save money by staying with Edgar and Naomi, but Lola hated the idea of two weeks’ worth of enforced togetherness with people she’d never met. It would be nice to have some time alone with Charlie and Margaret, or mostly alone, given that Juliana would probably tag along. Annual Christmas photos of the girl, a little older and more serious in each, marched across their refrigerator in Magpie. Early on, when Juliana was just a toddler and before Lola had arrived in Montana, Charlie had had custody of her during a rough patch in Edgar and Naomi’s relationship. After a trial reconciliation in Arizona without his daughter, Edgar had finally made the decision to retrieve Juliana from the Blackfeet Reservation and permanently join Naomi there. Charlie hadn’t seen Juliana—or his brother and sister-in-law—since. When Lola had first met Charlie, she’d been wary of gossip about a possible daughter, and then had been unaccountably relieved when she’d finally unraveled the real story.
“How much farther now?”
“Not much,” Charlie said. “We’re almost to Gaitero.”
“Maybe you’d better fill me in on Edgar—Gar—and Naomi. How’d they meet, anyway?”
“College,” Charlie said. His lips twisted again, in an expression that was becoming familiar to Lola whenever he talked about his brother. “Dartmouth.”
Lola wondered how, in all her time with Charlie, she’d missed that detail. She thought she was beginning to understand the tension that crept into his voice whenever he talked about his brother. Charlie—and Edgar too, she supposed—had gotten a boost when their parents insisted they attend the adjoining county’s white schools, not the best, but several notches above the chronically underfunded reservation schools. Charlie had spent two years at the reservation’s junior college and finished up at the Montana University System school in the Hi-Line town of Havre, on the wind-scoured plains to the east. Lola knew Edgar had gone to law school at the University of Montana in Missoula, and she’d assumed he’d done his undergrad there, too. Bad enough that Edgar was a lawyer to Charlie’s cop. But he’d snagged himself an Ivy League degree. Way to one-up the big brother, Lola thought.
“What about Naomi?”
“Navajo royalty, if there is such a thing. She comes from a long line of tribal presidents, council members, what have you.”
“What’s she like?”
“Dunno. Never met her.”
So Charlie hadn’t gone to his brother’s wedding either. Tit for tat. “This vacation is
sounding more fun by the moment.”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind.” Lola guessed she was going to have to bite her tongue a lot during the next two weeks. She pointed to flimsy roadside shelters, their uprights made with twisted branches. Beneath them, darkness patched the scorching hearth of desert. “What are those?”
“Shade houses. People use them in the summer in the sheep camps. But these along the road, they’re mostly for folks selling things to tourists.”
Lola couldn’t imagine the shelters offered much relief from the heat she could feel radiating up from the road, permeating the underside of the truck, toasting the soles of her feet through her customary hiking boots. She made a note to switch to her running shoes as soon as they arrived. “What’s a sheep camp? And how do you know all these things?” Most of what Lola knew about the Navajo Nation was gleaned from a long-ago-read series of mystery novels and a quick spin through Google. Now she realized that she’d forgotten what little she’d learned.
“A sheep camp is where the people who still run sheep take them in the summer, up in the high country where it’s cooler. Eddie filled me in on some of this stuff when I came down here to bring Juliana back home, once he and Naomi had worked things out.”
“Wait. You said you’d never met Naomi.”
“She was away at a conference. She goes to a lot of them. You know how it is.”
Lola hadn’t, when she first met Charlie, but she’d learned. Between white groups eager to burnish their bona fides by featuring Indian speakers and Native groups flexing increasingly powerful legal muscle, the conference circuit could amount to a full-time job.
Charlie tapped the brakes just in time to slow for the speed-limit sign that announced the approach to Gaitero. The truck rolled through a town that looked too small for the adobe-style chain hotels on its outskirts. Lola said as much.
“It is,” Charlie agreed. “But it’s a good jumping-off point for places like Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly, so it gets its share of tourists. Naomi and Edgar live outside town, far enough not to be bothered by them.”
Town provided only the briefest of breaks from the barren surroundings. Lola looked at the map spread across her lap. “Doesn’t Naomi work at tribal headquarters? That’s got to be at least an hour away.” She consulted the map again. “More. This reservation is huge.”
“Biggest in the United States. You can ask her yourself in a few minutes. But she works in Gaitero—the rez is so big that there are court divisions in every major town. The mine has a satellite office in town, too. Best I can tell, they want an Indian face where people can see one, not hidden away up at the mine itself. It makes for a long commute on the days he has to be at the mine, though.”
Lola was approaching a decade in the West, but she had yet to accustom herself to the distances people routinely drove. She considered herself lucky that she and Charlie lived just outside Magpie, where each of them worked. People on farther-flung ranches or reservation towns drove an hour each way just to get groceries. Her few remaining East Coast friends still marveled at the way she spoke of larger Montana towns as being “only” about five or six hours away.
The pickup slowed again, this time for a turn onto a gravel road. It hit the first two potholes hard. Red dust rose around them. Lola closed her window seconds too late. Margaret and Bub registered protests from the jump seats behind them, Bub in a series of sneezes, Margaret with a word—one of Lola’s favorites.
“Quarter,” Lola said automatically. A family rule imposed a fine of a quarter per curse word—applied in theory to anyone, but in practice mostly to Lola.
Charlie braked and waited for the curtain of dust to fall, revealing a house. Not a regular house.
Lola took it in. “A hogan.”
“Sort of,” said Charlie. But she heard the pleasure in his voice at the realization she’d done some homework, belatedly acquiring the thinnest veneer of knowledge during the insomnia of her final night in Magpie, surfing Navajo websites on her phone as Charlie slumbered oblivious beside her. The house was a larger, updated version of the traditional hexagonal dwelling, with adobe walls instead of chinked wood and wide, deep-set windows in place of the traditional rooftop smokehole that also let in light. A real door, one with a suburban trio of stairstep windows, had replaced the customary blanket, but still it faced east, the direction of thought. A telltale layer of metal roof shone beneath an earthen topping.
At first glance, it looked modest, low to the ground, its muted hues taking their tones from the surrounding earth. A muffled hum from a clump of junipers revealed a concealed central air-conditioning unit. “Sweet,” said Lola, who’d spent the latter half of the drive wishing Mary Alice had invested in AC for the pickup. A late-model pickup, considerably larger than their own and clean, too, sat beside a Prius in the driveway.
“Not what you were expecting?” Charlie’s tone hovered somewhere between pride and rebuke.
Lola accepted the censure as her due. She hadn’t given much thought to what the house might be like, assuming the standard BIA shoebox, short on both charm and sturdiness. Some families gussied them up, tacking on porches, additions, sometimes even a second story that challenged the houses’ already questionable stability. Most people didn’t bother, accepting the fact that their homes would start falling down around them almost as soon as they went up. When she looked more closely at Edgar and Naomi’s home, she could see it had an addition of its own, not immediately apparent to passers-by. Lola calculated total square footage and whistled beneath her breath. She and Charlie and Margaret lived in about a third that space. A thatch-roofed patio, cool and welcoming, sat to one side of the main house. “A shade house?” she asked, even though it bore only the barest resemblance to the flimsy roadside shelters.
“Yes. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes. No. There’s beautiful.” She pointed with her lips, in the Indian way she’d learned, toward the two people who had emerged to stand like sentinels in the doorway.
Assumptions always got Lola in trouble. Nonetheless, she’d taken for granted that Edgar would have his brother’s height and bulk, along with the glowering square features that disguised the gentleness within. She’d imagined Naomi as equally imposing, one of those large severe women who commanded respect by their physical presence alone.
But the man and woman approaching the pickup were so similarly slight and slim-hipped that they looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Edgar was, if possible, the more beautiful, with the hooded eyes and arrogant aquiline features of a Goya portrait. He wore his hair short, swept up and away from his forehead in a high pompadour. Naomi’s hung to her waist. She brushed it back from her face with slender fingers weighted with turquoise. She and Edgar each wore jeans and crisp white snap-front shirts, Western dress-up clothes, suitable for everything from rodeos to church to board meetings. A person could have cut himself on the precise creases down the front of the jeans and along the shirtsleeves buttoned at the wrist despite the heat. Lola felt self-conscious and worse for the wear in her travel-crumpled cargo pants and sweat-sticky T-shirt. Her feet sweltered in their hiking boots.
She got out of the truck and hung back as Charlie helped Margaret unlatch her seat belt. Bub wriggled across Margaret and jumped onto the red dirt, taking a second to balance himself on his three legs before lurching to the truck’s back wheel and generously watering it.
A peal of laughter rang out beyond Edgar and Naomi. Margaret’s head snapped up. Juliana emerged from behind her parents and made a beeline for Bub. With her first glimpse of Juliana’s perfect parents, Lola had feared a miniature version of Edgar and Naomi, maybe decked out in one of those of Sound of Music-style sailor suits. But Juliana was small and sturdy in mismatched top and shorts, long hair tangled, hands reassuringly grubby. Charlie lifted Margaret from the truck and set her on the ground. Juliana veered from her pursui
t of Bub and came to a halt in front of Margaret.
The girls eyed each other, Margaret two years younger and a head shorter. Her eyes simultaneously implored acceptance and flashed a warning should none be forthcoming. Juliana registered the latter and defused it. “Do you want to see my pony?” She held out her hand.
Margaret took it and they raced away, Bub unevenly hotfooting it behind them.
“That went well.” Naomi’s chuckle was a throaty burble. “Ya’at’eeh. Greetings. And welcome.” She pressed her cheek to Lola’s. Her skin was cool and smooth. The whisper of her shirt, with its elaborate top-stitched flower pattern across the shoulders, bespoke raw silk.
Lola closed her eyes and inhaled Naomi’s light floral scent. She hugged her back, harder than she’d intended, overcome with memory. “My friend wore that same perfume.”
“Your friend has good taste.” Naomi’s smile revealed a chipped front tooth, enough of an anomaly to be charming. Lola wondered if that was why she’d never had it capped.
“She’s dead.” Lola couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Someone shot her.”
Charlie stepped in to save Lola from herself. “It was a long time ago. That’s how Lola and I met. I investigated the case.”
“Looks like you investigated more than the case.”
Three faces turned to Edgar. He had not, thought Lola, achieved his wife’s level of urbanity, a bit of grimace in the smile, some vinegar in the tone.
“Charlie. Long time.” Edgar held out his hand. Lola would have expected a man-hug, all exhalations and back-pounding with a few good-natured insults thrown in.