by Gwen Florio
There was the person in Antelope Canyon, the person she remained sure was Thomas. What had he said?
It will get worse.
Well, it hadn’t, not really. Kerns’s house was gone, but no one had died. And whoever had kidnapped her hadn’t killed her. It seemed like they’d just wanted her out of the way for a while. But why? Nothing had happened while she was up there. And, gratifyingly, the FBI and local authorities had taken her concerns about the meeting seriously, adding the security at the gym. So nothing was likely to happen there, either.
Someone came out of a side door and whispered to one of the elders in the front row. The elder turned to the man next to her, and that man turned to the next, a message flying around the room like a game of telephone: The gathering before the public meeting was taking longer than expected. A few more minutes. Which Lola translated as at least another half hour.
She wished Charlie would come out. He was in there with Kerns and Kerns’s bosses, with Edgar and some of the tribal cops, with the tribal president and some council members, and Naomi. Lola’s body reacted to the notion before her mind fully grasped it, shoulders hunching as though against a blow, her breath coming fast.
Not the big meeting. The one before it, in a classroom without metal detectors. After all, everyone entering was a known quantity. All the executives of the hated mine in one place, along with Edgar who represented the mine, the tribal cops who investigated the crimes against it, and the tribal president and council members who supported its presence. A target-rich environment, as the saying went. It will get worse. Charlie was in there. As was Naomi, flashing that chipped-tooth smile as she’d left the house that morning with her briefcase swinging at the end of her arm, an arm whose blazer disguised its climbing-enhanced biceps. I taught him. You know how it goes—get kids doing something physical.
The thought of what that briefcase might contain, the wires and detonator and explosives layered beneath some innocuous papers, propelled Lola out of her seat, deaf to the cries of the girls, ignoring the surprised faces turning her way, shock giving way to annoyance as she shoved past the elders, threw an elbow of her own—hah!—at the cameraman who reached for her shouting, “Hey, what’s going on?”
She fled the gym, sprinted down a dark hallway, banged on the classroom door. No time to wait for an answer. Twisted the knob, thankful that it gave. Flung herself into the room, slamming the door behind her, praying it was strong enough to contain a blast within. The room, a lab by the looks of it, was long and narrow—too much space between Lola and the group at the other end. Naomi stood at the head of one of the lab tables, her briefcase resting on its soapstone surface, her fingers at the latch. “Let me just show you—” she was saying. She straightened. “Lola?”
Edgar stood near Naomi, Charlie beside him. The mine guys, the cops, the council members, leaned over the table, waiting for whatever Naomi planned to reveal.
“A bomb,” Lola said. Her voice shook. “There’s a bomb in her briefcase. Get her away from it. Get yourselves away from it.”
“Oh, Lola.” Naomi’s face went soft and fond. She turned to the rest of the room. “She’s been through a terrible ordeal. Still in shock. She should have stayed in the hospital.” She looked to the tribal cops. “Maybe you could help her.” They began to move toward Lola, even as others stepped away from the table.
“No! Don’t let her touch that briefcase!”
Naomi’s head shook in slow motion. Her hair swung through the luminous air. Dust motes swirled prettily. Edgar stared at her. Charlie’s head jerked. He looked a question toward Lola.
“Yes,” she mouthed as the tribal cops closed in. “Really.”
Charlie grabbed his brother and flung him aside, then went for Naomi as the room burst into sound and flames.
FORTY-SEVEN
The visiting room chair was plastic, the table steel, the window between Lola and Thomas badly scratched Plexiglas.
He picked up the phone on his side of the window and nodded toward hers. She lifted the receiver. Beside her, Edgar leaned close, his ear at the receiver’s side.
They sat about midway down a row of booths, the dividers providing the barest minimum of privacy. Most of the chairs on Lola’s side were populated by wives and girlfriends. At least that’s what she surmised, given the abundance of special-occasion makeup, hairdos, and clothing, most of which was cut as low and slit as high as prison regulations allowed. Warring perfumes filled the air. Lola wondered if the women expected it to waft through the holes in the telephone receivers.
Most of the men on the other side of the Plexiglas were white and middle-aged, midsections spreading after so long away from the gym, hair finally going to gray after years of discreet touch-ups. Federal prison housed the big shots, the players, the guys whose minions had ended up in some hellhole of a common room in a state prison. Only a few brown faces punctuated the row. Natives, probably, given an inexplicable law that sent tribespeople convicted of felonies on reservations to federal instead of state prisons. Lola wondered if they put the guy who stabbed his cousin in a bar fight in the same cell with the insider trading honcho. Part of her hoped so.
“Hey.” Thomas’s face was rounder, the scar sunk in the yielding tissue surrounding it. All that starchy prison fare, Lola supposed. His voice, too, was softer than Lola remembered, clear of the asthmatic hitches she remembered. Lola fought an urge to smash the phone receiver against the glass. She said nothing at all.
Thomas tried again. “Thanks for coming to see me. I know Tucson is a long way from where you live.”
An understatement, Lola thought. Tucson took the harsh environs of the Navajo Nation and went one better, from near-desert to the real thing, saguaros standing guard like something out of the cartoons she’d watched as a child. “I don’t want to be here,” she retorted. “I don’t want to see you. I’d be happy never to see your face again. I just want to know how this all went down. Oh, and feel free to tell me about all the times you could have stopped it.”
“Lola.” Edgar’s hand fell on her shoulder. Lola jerked away. “Hear him out,” Edgar said.
“It’s okay. She’s right. I could have stopped it. But if I’d said anything, Naomi would have gone to jail. I kept trying to figure out how to tell someone without leading them to her, but I couldn’t.”
Lola’s fingers tightened on the phone. “You didn’t want Naomi to go to jail, but you were fine with her killing the elder and the truck driver and my husband—and herself, too. And it could have been even worse.”
Charlie’s last-minute lunge had knocked the briefcase under the table, whose heavy soapstone surface helped deflect the blast. Some council members had suffered grievous wounds, but Charlie and Naomi had been the only two fatalities.
“I didn’t know—” Thomas began.
Lola cut him off. “You just said you did.”
“No. Not all of it. I didn’t know how it was going to end.”
She spat the words at him. “How it didn’t have to end. If only you’d spoken up. Don’t forget. If you’d told someone, your precious Naomi would still be alive.”
“Lola, please.” Edgar’s voice brought her back. She’d been his precious Naomi too, Lola reminded herself.
Thomas’s voice burst loud through the receiver. “Nobody was supposed to die! It started with the billboard. Something big and symbolic, just to get their attention. No one was supposed to be out there that day. I set the … the thing—”
“The bomb, you mean.” Lola couldn’t help herself.
“I set it down behind the billboard the night before. There was a timer.”
“Who made it?”
“She did.”
Lola thought of all the times she’d considered Naomi as the bomb-builder and had rejected the thought. Even now, her mind pushed back at the possibility.
“How? It’s not like she was some kind
of chemistry whiz.”
A shadow of a smile twitched at one corner of Thomas’s mouth. “The Internet.”
“But—” Naomi would have been smart enough not to use her own laptop. Lola thought of all the confiscated computers on the reservation. Thomas supplied the answer.
“Down in Tempe. She’d look stuff up on the law school computers when she went there to teach her class. She bought all the stuff there, too. Went from one store to another, getting a little here, a little there, not just in Tempe, but in the towns along the way.” Admiration shaded his voice. “You know how she’s a good cook? And she does—did—all that sewing?”
Lola glanced sharply at him, wondering if a slam at her own obvious lack of ability lay beneath the words. He continued, guileless. “She said it was just like cooking or sewing. Follow the recipe or the pattern, get the proportions right, and it works. She hid everything in the sewing room. She kept pressing the pedal on the sewing machine when she was working on it so it would sound like she was making something to wear.”
Lola thought of the old-fashioned skirt that surrounded the sewing machine table, of the late-night whirring that had disguised the assemblage of explosives while she and Charlie—and Margaret and Juliana, for that matter—lay just feet away on either side of the room. Of the girls, going into the room to retrieve scraps of fabric to weave into Valentine’s mane. Her hand tightened on the receiver. “She could have killed us all,” she said to Thomas. “Instead, she killed those people. How’d you square that with your conscience? What about the bomb in the middle of the road that killed the truck driver? The cops said whoever set that one used a remote control. Who set it off? You or Naomi? Either way, you had to know it would kill someone.”
He shook his head. “She said she was just going to blow a big hole in the road leading to the mine. Send another message. She swore to me she didn’t mean to kill anyone. She said there was some sort of lag between when she dialed the number on the cellphone. She’d already sent the signal when the truck came along.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah. I thought so too, afterward. But it was too late then.” Ask me anything, Thomas had written in the identical letters he’d sent to Lola and Edgar, telling them that he’d put their names on his visitors list. I’ll tell you. I owe you that much.
Some sort of prison twelve-step program, Lola had surmised even as she’d hurried to her laptop to buy a plane ticket and rent a car. She’d arranged for a couple of aunties to come stay with Margaret at the house. If nothing else, the presence of these women, whose soft, large bodies so often shook with the laughter that sprang from an unending series of practical jokes, would likely bring a burst of warmth and cheer to the rooms whose silence echoed the pain of Charlie’s loss.
“The threat? The one left on the front step?” she asked now.
Thomas lifted a shoulder. “She must have done that on her own.”
“What about Kerns’s house? Was that supposed to send a message, too?”
“No. She wanted to kill him. She hated him.”
After so many excuses, the bald statement shocked her.
Edgar spoke up again, his voice sandpapery. His skin was gray and sagged loose from his cheekbones and chin. In the months since Lola had last seen him, his slender frame had gone gaunt. His fingers whitened as he pressed them to the glass. It was as though, Lola thought, he wanted to reach through the pane and wrap them around Thomas’s neck. She felt the same way herself.
He took the receiver from her. “How do you know she wanted to kill him?” he asked. Still seeking the shred that would tell him it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, that the story Thomas sketched for authorities was somehow untrue. Or, even if only partly true, that there’d be some merciful detail that would spare Naomi from complete responsibility. Maybe Thomas had laid everything on Naomi to save his own skin. Yet here he sat in a federal prison for untold decades to come, put there largely by his own words. He’d admitted complicity immediately. Now something beseeching flitted across his face.
“She asked me about Kerns. Before, I mean. She wanted to know when he left the house in the morning, when he came home. She knew I’d know because my uncle works at the mine.”
“Along with half the reservation,” Edgar said. “She could have asked anyone.”
“She didn’t want to raise suspicions.”
Lola pulled Edgar’s hand from the glass and took the phone back. “And she knew you’d tell her. Even though you knew why she was asking.”
Thomas dipped his chin. “Yes,” he said simply. “At least, I was pretty sure. So I told her that every Tuesday he and his wife had a standing lunch date at the house. I made a little joke of it, something about their weekly nooner. Even though I knew that his wife and her friends went to Phoenix on that day.”
“So when the house blew up, nobody was home,” Lola said.
The half-nod. “I thought that was the end of it. She said she wanted to do something so big that the mine would shut down and never come back.”
“How’d she get the bomb in their house? My husband was with her all the time at work. ‘Providing security.’ Damn shame you didn’t tell him that he was the one needing security.”
Thomas just looked at her.
“You put it there, didn’t you? When?”
“I sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night and drove down there. I took the Prius. No engine noise. I used her car a lot when I needed to go somewhere at night.” Lola remembered the night Charlie had thought he’d heard a car door. He’d been right.
“Who took Bub?” She couldn’t look at Edgar. He’d lost his wife; she, her husband. She’d probably insulted both of them by her insistence upon including the dog’s disappearance in the list of Naomi’s crimes.
“I did that, too,” Thomas said. “She told me to, and I did it. She wanted me to scare you off. But I didn’t kill him.” Again, the imploring look.
“I’ll give you that much.” Lola spoke past the bile rising in her throat. “And that night I was kidnapped—” She’d read about it once, in the charging documents, but had only skimmed it, tears blurring the words describing the actions that inevitably led to Charlie’s death.
Down the row, a guard raised his voice. “Five more minutes.” A choked sob came from the chair next to Lola, and she pushed away the bitter thought that at least that woman still had her man, behind bars though he was. She’d have taken Charlie in prison. In a hospital bed. At home in a wheelchair. She’d have taken him any way she could have kept him. And the man sitting on the other side of the glass was a large part of the reason he was gone.
“I just parked the car and left you in the trunk. She did it. She told everyone she was in the house making phone calls, trying to see if anyone had seen or heard anything, but she took my car and drove it to the ruins. She promised me she wouldn’t kill you. She kept that promise. At least give her some credit for that.”
Lola leapt to her feet, fists pounding the Plexiglas. Thomas jerked back so abruptly he nearly fell from his chair. Lola was dimly aware of Edgar’s grasp. “Lola, Lola, stop!”
Footsteps pounded down the row. Guards shoved Edgar aside, took her arms, lifted her away from the window, dragged her down the row, oblivious to her screams. “She should have killed me! I’d have been better off. Goddammit, why didn’t you just let her kill me?”
FORTY-EIGHT
They sat, as they had so many times before, in the shade house, their chairs pulled close to the outdoor fireplace, trying to catch the bits of warmth thrown off by the leaping flames.
Lola had followed Edgar back to Gaitero in her rental car. She’d wanted to return immediately to Montana, but Margaret had demanded she bring home a firsthand report on Juliana. Lola had hoped the six-hour drive from Tucson might calm her. Instead, she gave thanks for the car’s solitude as she moaned in rage and pain at the sight of
the places where she’d spent her last days with Charlie.
In the shade house, she huddled in a down vest. It would have made more sense to visit indoors, but the house felt too personal, too full of memories. There, Lola had fought with Charlie, made up with him, last slept in his arms. And there Edgar had spent all the years of his marriage with Naomi. He lifted his chin toward a bedroll to one side of the fireplace. “Can’t sleep back in the house even yet,” he said. “I go in, make my meals, shower, and get the hell out of it. Can’t wait until somebody takes the damn place off my hands.”
A For Sale sign, its metallic surface pitted by wind-driven grit, had greeted Lola at the end of the driveway. She wondered again, as she had the first time she’d seen it, how many people on the reservation could afford such a home. Edgar might end up sleeping on the ground all winter long. At least, she thought, the tarantulas would be deep in their hidey-holes throughout the colder months.
A shadow bisected the window’s square of golden light. Betty Begay, moving about the kitchen, cleaning up after a simple dinner of mutton stew. She’d moved in after the bombing to help Edgar with Juliana. And her daughter, Edgar told Lola, had taken leave from her job in Salt Lake to join the cobbled-together household. “It was too much for Betty,” he said. “She still has the sheep, after all. Her daughter—Loretta’s her name—goes up and looks after them during the day, then comes down here in the afternoon when Juliana gets home from school. She stays up there some nights, though. That’s where she is now.”
“How is Juliana?” Lola chided herself for the stupidity of the question. How could she possibly be, her mother dead, her father a shell, her friend and protector Thomas in prison? The girl had emerged from the house and given Lola a polite bedtime hug before retreating without ever making eye contact. Lola noticed the key chain from Thomas’s bookbag dangling from her pocket.
“That key chain is with her twenty-four/seven,” Edgar said. “She’s like a baby with a blanket. She doesn’t know it, but Betty’s made some duplicates in case this one—God forbid—gets lost. Betty’s even scuffed them up so they don’t look new. Think about it. Juliana was worried about Thomas from the beginning. She feels guilty, even though there’s no way a nine-year-old could have foreseen how this would go. How’s Margaret?”