by Gwen Florio
Now she tried to summon that same feigned certainty as she faced Charlie’s wrath. “I’m not accusing anyone. Truly.” Even to her own ears, she sounded insincere. “But Bub didn’t run away. You know him.”
Naomi’s sewing machine hummed in the next room. Naomi had said she sewed to relax. Given the level of tension in the house, Lola figured Naomi would be sewing all night.
“I thought I knew you.” Charlie’s words fell like blows. Lola twisted away.
“I thought you put family first.” She bent double.
“Except when you don’t.”
She put her hands over her ears. That last, the worst, with its reminder of the previous year, when she’d pursued the story that put both herself and Margaret in danger. Now she was back in that same dark place, with the morning’s explicit threat to Margaret’s safety.
Tell anybody about this, and …
Tell anybody. The only person she wanted to tell was Charlie. Tell anybody about this, especially that cop husband …
The only person she didn’t dare tell was Charlie.
Look at me, her eyes begged him. Force me to tell.
But in his anger he turned away, announcing concern for his brother. “He’s working late tonight, to make up for the hours he lost today. All of us—Naomi, Edgar, and me—came running home when you called us. We’ve got two men dead, people working around the clock to keep it happening again, and you want us to drop everything and look for a goddamn dog. Get a grip, Lola. Bad enough you think Eddie let the dog get away. I’m surprised you’re not accusing someone in my family of being the bomber.”
The thought that Gar or Naomi might be the bomber indeed had crossed her mind, based on Charlie’s own oft-spoken mantra. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the simplest explanation is the right one, he liked to say. The person closest to the victim is usually your perp.
But in this case, the victims were so widely disparate—a Navajo elder who hated the mine, a young truck driver who worked for it—as to rule out the usual cast of friends and relatives. Unless, Lola thought. Unless you substituted “case” for “victim.” The person closest to the case would be the one they needed to seek, the case being the mine, or things representing it. And who’d been affected by the mine?
Lola thought of Betty Begay, alone in her hogan, her sly smile barely perceptible in the darkness, her words a whisper. “Maybe little Betty big bomber.” But even though Lola knew better than to rule anybody out, she couldn’t overcome her own antipathy to viewing an elder, and such a likable elder at that, as a suspect, although she and Charlie had each had far too many encounters with entirely likeable perps. But Betty didn’t drive. She’d have had to enlist someone’s help to put the bombs in place.
Another of Charlie’s sayings: Get a partner, get caught. He frequently pointed to Timothy McVeigh, whose co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing, Terry Nichols, blabbed the details of the plot to his large and dysfunctional family. It had made fine fodder for conviction at the men’s trials. It had to be someone capable of working alone.
Lola jumped as Charlie voiced her own train of thought. “What about Naomi? Have you homed in on her already? She’s as angry about the mine as anyone I’ve seen.”
Privately, Lola thought that Naomi should be considered, for that very reason. On the other hand, she couldn’t quite picture Naomi’s manicured hands wound in a tangle of detonation cord, those slender fingers packing nails and scrap metal into a container that later would be blown apart. She said as much to Charlie.
“But you have thought of her. Christ, Lola. You’re worrying this one like a dog with a bone.”
“You said it yourself. It’s what I do.”
When it came to stories, she never quite trusted other reporters to do as good a job on a story as she would, sure that they’d miss key details, forget to interview that one last source who would tie everything together. It was a tendency that went beyond newspaper stories, with Lola unable to stop herself from hounding Charlie for details of criminal investigations that he was, by law, unable to give her. On those occasions, he’d drive her crazy by pinching his fingers together and drawing them across his smiling lips, mimicking a zipper. Maybe he made the gesture again now. But he’d turned his back on her so she couldn’t tell. For sure, there was no tolerant humor in his voice when he spoke again.
“Drop it, Lola. I know I encouraged you to work on a story here. But you’re not, and you’re not a cop. So there’s no reason for you to be involved.”
Until the incident in the canyon, Lola would have agreed with him, albeit begrudgingly. But I am involved, she thought now. Dammit, Charlie, look at me.
He switched off the lamp, falling asleep before the heat of anger had dissipated from him. Lola feared for his dreams. For that matter, she feared her own waking thoughts as she lay wide-eyed and tense, the possibilities continuing to run a treadmill in her mind.
The man who’d accosted her in the canyon that morning had spoken of the bombings. He’d also known about the spider. Lola’s thoughts had gone first to Edgar, but he’d been at work when she was in the canyon, something that would be easy enough to verify. Still, there remained the discomfort of Edgar’s ongoing hostility toward her, his continual mention of her whiteness, just as the man in the canyon had made a point of it. And Edgar, having grown up on the ranch with Charlie, would know how to blow things up. Stumps and such, although Charlie hinted that as boys, they weren’t above practicing their detonative talents on lesser targets like ground hornets. “Dirt clods thirty feet high,” he’d said with satisfaction. “No more stung feet.”
Her thoughts roamed to Thomas. Despite Juliana’s obvious affection for him, there was something dark and secretive about Thomas. Somebody had driven away from the house in the middle of the night, just hours before the truck bombing. And—Lola sat upright as though jerked by strings, her hand across her mouth to stifle her gasp. She thought back to that first meeting with Thomas, the hilarity caused to everyone but Lola and Charlie by his car’s explosive backfiring. He’d carried a bookbag that day. More recently, though, there’d been the books stacked alone on the kitchen island. She hadn’t seen Thomas with a bookbag since that first meeting—which was the evening before they’d discovered that bookbag in the cliff houses.
She wished she’d paid more attention to the bag Thomas had carried. Still, as much as she hated to admit it, Charlie’s point about Thomas’s youth was well taken. Bomb making required a level of sophistication usually not acquired during one’s teenage years.
She let her mind wander still farther afield. There was that environmental writer. What was his name? Something bland, white-bread. Jim Andersen. He’d made the pilgrimage to Betty Begay, heard the tale of the betrayal of the mesa dwellers. Add that human wreckage to the ravishment of the environment and you could have motive, especially when it came to greenies of a certain bent. Along with ability, given Anderson’s time in the military. Lola thought that if she found out the man had been a bomb expert, he’d rival Thomas for the Number One Suspect spot. But …
“Occam’s razor,” she whispered. Reining her wild theories back in. Every time she strayed from that principle, she got into trouble. “Simplest is best.”
At which point, her mind circled back to where she’d started, with suspicions that lacked a shred of evidence beyond a prickling of skin, a chill in the blood whenever he turned her way. “Edgar,” Lola hissed into the darkness. “Gar.”
The thought muscled its way into the buzzing space in her brain already occupied by the man in the canyon, Bub’s disappearance, and now Charlie’s anger, a toxic stew that made focus impossible. Lola knew sleep would be her best weapon. She dug around in her Dopp kit for a sleeping pill, only to remember that she’d tossed the empty container before she’d left home. The long-unused bottle of painkillers rattled promisingly. She clicked on her phone’s flashlight and squinted at th
e label: May cause drowsiness.
“Good enough,” she said. She swallowed one dry and awaited the approaching blackout.
The sun sneaked between the blinds, striping the sheet that draped Lola and Charlie and the wide space between them. Lola watched its progress with eyes bloodshot from the long night. Even with the pill, deep sleep had eluded her. Whenever she’d drifted toward it, the words of her tormenter in Antelope Canyon whooped like emergency sirens. Get out. Or Margaret might get hurt.
She’d spent much of the night in the weird restiveness where bad dreams mingled with a worse reality. Daylight brought true wakefulness. She lay silent, mulling her choices. She knew that despite Charlie’s avowed nostalgia for her previous brashness, if she put Margaret in danger again, their marriage might be over. She couldn’t blame him. If the roles were reversed, she’d have felt the same way. But Margaret was already in danger—the tarantula in her shoe, the threat from Canyon Man, and now the dog kidnapped. Somehow, given what the man in the canyon had said, they were all related to the bombings.
And if Gar was involved, then they were all in danger, perhaps Charlie most of all. Lola edged closer to her sleeping husband, curling against his broad back, breathing in his scent. She was, he’d often remarked, the least demonstrative woman he’d ever been with. “Those others,” he’d said, shrugging away her queries as to just how many others, “it’s like they wanted to brand me. Hanging on me whenever we were out in public. Always leaving things of theirs at my place, staking out their turf. Bringing me home to their mom. Well. You know how it is on the rez. See a girl once, you’re going steady; twice, you’re engaged.” Lola had winced, wondering how many girls Charlie had been “engaged” to before he’d moved in with a white woman.
Early on, she’d been self-conscious about her visible status as an outsider. Every time a pretty Blackfeet woman so much as smiled a hello at Charlie, she’d wondered if the woman had been one of those hanging on him before she’d stumbled into his life as a potential witness in a murder case. But then the woman in question would turn the same welcoming smile on her without the slightest change detectable even by Lola’s hypersensitive radar, and as the months passed, she’d relax to the point where she could josh right back with the aunties about the sexual superiority of Indian men. She’d gotten so relaxed, in fact, that Edgar’s hostility had come as a surprise.
And then, the words of Canyon Man: You and your white child. She pressed herself closer still to Charlie, forcing herself back into those moments of icy terror, trying to recall any twinge of recognition. But all she could remember was the utter strength of the man, the hand hard across her mouth, his lips to her ears, the foul words.
Lola jerked as her brain fastened on a detail. He’d been clean-shaven. There. That was something. And he’d bent his head to hers. So he was taller. Another thing. Two things, she thought ruefully, that probably applied to half the men on the Navajo Nation. But not Gar, who though clean-shaven was shorter than she was and possibly, as much as she hated to admit it, even a few pounds lighter. Thomas, though … He and Edgar didn’t seem particularly close. But that might be by design.
Lola would make any queries about Thomas—about any of them—carefully, carefully. Nothing she said or did from this moment out could raise suspicions that she was looking into things. She’d announce to anyone who would listen that they planned on leaving—in a few days. The search for Bub made a good excuse for the delay.
Get out, Canyon Man had said.
Whoever he was, he’d know she’d ignored his order. He might make another run at her. Which, despite the danger, meant she’d have another chance to identify him.
“Come on,” she whispered, trying to psych herself into a bravado she in no way felt. “I’m waiting for you.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
I grabbed a chunk of lamb from Naomi’s refrigerator and held it out to the dog.
He hustled toward me and I backed away, through the kitchen, out the door, to the car. At the last moment, with his nose a millimeter from the meat, teeth bared to snatch it from my hand, he hesitated. It was almost as though he knew what was going on.
I moved fast, grabbing his collar and hauling him toward the rear door I’d left open. With only three legs, his balance was off. He half-fell onto the back seat and I shoved him the rest of the way in and slammed the car door behind him. He made a leap for it when I got in, but I managed to block his escape with my body. Shut my own door and locked it, just for good measure. He went crazy then, jumping around and barking, nipping at my arm as I worked the shift so that I nearly went off the road a few times. Fast as I was driving, that would have been a disaster.
When we finally stopped, it took me forever to wrestle him to a point where I could duct-tape his legs—with only three of them, it was like tying up a calf after roping it—and then wind the tape around his muzzle, too. He rolled his eyes around until his gaze found mine, the blue eye cold as steel.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I said. “Real sorry.” But for what I had to do, he needed to be still. I couldn’t afford anything else going wrong. I threw him over my shoulder so I couldn’t see that accusing stare. He quivered and groaned against me until I released him from his suffering.
Afterward, I drove back home in the dark. For the final time that day, I almost crashed, wrenching the wheel hard to the right when two coyotes sauntered across the road in front of me. The car spun out and came to a stop facing them. They’d stopped in the middle of the road, staring straight at me, square in the beam of the headlights.
But their eyes were flat and dark, not throwing the light back at me. The sound of breathy laughter filled the night.
And no wonder. Because when I finally got back to the house, I found that my scheme had only served to make the woman even more determined to stick around. What I’d done to that dog—it was all for nothing.
TWENTY-NINE
Lola took advantage of her sleeplessness and managed to be the first one up. She fortified herself with a mug of coffee and had started on a second before Gar sauntered into the kitchen. She watched his gaze sweep the room, assuring himself that no one else was there. He gathered himself for some sort of pronouncement, straightening his shoulders, running a hand through his pompadour. Lola swallowed, set down the cup, and beat him to the punch.
“You know,” she said just as he opened his mouth to speak, “it seems crazy for us to stay here while you and Naomi are in the midst of your investigation. It’s nice to be able to help with Juliana, but in the long run, it just seems like we’re in the way.” Any more sugar in her voice and her teeth would have dissolved, she thought. She raised her mug to hide her expression and peered at him over the rim.
“Well. You might just be right.” Spoken expansively, the sort of tone he might have used with the mine supervisors, matching their gestures and mannerisms as well as their suits and ties, saving the quiet, questioning tones of Indian-speak for time with his family, his friends.
The mug inched down. “Of course,” Lola said, “we’ll want to hang around a few more days in case the dog shows up.” Gar jerked, as though a fisherman had snagged an errant fly between his shoulders blades and pulled hard, thinking he’d snagged a big one. Lola imagined herself digging around in the sugar canister and shoveling another scoopful into her delivery. “I hope I’m not insulting you by focusing on the dog when you’re dealing with such important issues. But you know how kids are. And you know how it hurts when you see them hurting. I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else until we find him—or until I’ve found a way to explain to Margaret that we can’t find him.”
Despite herself, her voice hardened on that last phrase. She’d find Bub, one way or the other. And then she’d get herself and her family out of Arizona. For once, she wouldn’t complain about Charlie’s speeding.
Gar gave a single, slow nod. His eyes narrowed. “I get that.”
Lola figured his lie was at least equal to hers. Which meant that she probably wasn’t fooling him. She gulped her coffee and declared her intention to go for a run. Despite her sleepless night, she was going to have to be on high alert as she moved through the day. She’d need a plan. A run always helped her focus. She laced on her running shoes, grabbed her water bottle, and headed out the door.
A half-hour later, fighting a stitch in her side, she had at least the beginnings of a plan. She’d let her speed creep up as the ideas came to her, and as a result had gone farther than she’d intended before turning around. For a few blessed, long-striding moments, heart pounding and arms pumping, the memory of the man in the canyon had receded. Now it reasserted itself with the force of a fist to the jaw. What if he were shadowing her, watching to see if and when she complied with his order to leave? The house was far behind her, well out of sight. The desert rolled away in all directions, all rock and scrub, gathering itself to radiate the day’s heat with the intensity of a stovetop coil. Lola slowed to a walk. She twisted and scanned the road behind her. There were, of course, no footprints on the pavement, but even if she veered to the side of the road, she’d be running on rock, leaving no sign that she’d passed. If someone took it into his mind to snatch her from this lonely spot, there’d be nothing to show she’d ever been there.
She turned and sprinted for the house, a good three miles away. By the time it showed itself, a squat dark hexagon against a sky fast losing dawn’s rosy glow, sweat stung her eyes and blurred her vision, and cut meandering tracks through the dust on her arms. She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes, adding grit to the salty mix. Her breath came in ragged gasps. A scalding knife jabbed at her ribs. She forced herself to a jog, then a walk, and shoved to one side all thoughts of Canyon Man.
“The plan,” she reminded herself. Her hands moved restlessly in the air, sketching the circles and arrows she would have drawn in her notebook if she’d been working at home. But in this place, it seemed better not to put anything on paper. She had to do it in her mind. She imagined a bull’s-eye pattern, with the Conrad Coal mine at its center, asterisks beside it representing the elder and the truck driver. Gar represented the innermost circle, working as closely with the mine supervisors as he did. Naomi, Thomas, and Betty Begay were dashed circles a little farther out, the dashes indicating that Lola thought they had motive but not the means. Beyond them, a wide circle labeled Jim Andersen, the environmental activist. Start with him first, Lola told herself. Rule out the least likely.