by Gwen Florio
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Disgraced © 2016 by Gwen Florio.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
For Kate, the original Margaret.
And for all of the strong women
who trusted me with their stories.
PROLOGUE
The Afghani shepherd died beneath the hard bright light of the stars, his unexpected emergence in the black-and-white landscape of night a stroke of luck for the soldiers, if not for him.
It was finished before he could run, rifles jerked into position, crack-crack-crack, the impact lifting his body right out of his cheap plastic sandals and slamming it back onto the rocky earth several feet away, his unused rusting AK-47 clattering down beside him. The sheep bleated and shat and ran this way and that, in the idiotic way of sheep the world over. Two of the soldiers slung their rifles over their shoulders and re-formed the band with quiet, competent movements, the action unnecessary but somehow comforting with its echo of childhood ranch chores. They turned their attention from sheep to the shepherd’s body, hefting it by wrists and ankles, what remained of his head dangling almost to the dusty ground, shreds of turban dragging behind.
“Count of three,” one whispered, and the body swung once, twice, thrice, and sailed through the air, thudding beside the dead American soldier. Starlight silvered the American’s face. The grin slashed across his neck leaked inky blood. That same black blood covered the hands of the woman leaning over him and stained the ends of her pale hair that, torn free of its military regulation bun, dipped into the corpse’s terrible wound.
A voice floated into the darkness above the woman’s head. “Let’s go.”
The woman didn’t move. The two soldiers reached down, grasped her shoulders, and raised her to her feet. “We got to get back to the base.”
A third soldier kicked the dead Afghani. The body rolled to one side and fell back. The woman shook off the hands and stumbled away. The third man raised his voice so the woman could hear. “Get over it. Karma’s a bitch.”
Her reply a promise so soft he barely caught it.
“I’ll never get over it.”
ONE
The shout could have been one of happiness, the pop—coming as it did amid a teary jubilation of the military homecoming ceremony in Casper, Wyoming—anything at all. A teenage daughter cracking her gum in excitement. A burst balloon among one of the dozens of celebratory bunches. A compression of bubble wrap from a torn-open welcome home gift.
Reporter Lola Wicks knew better. She shoved her five-year-old daughter, Margaret, to the hangar’s concrete floor and fell atop her, reaching simultaneously for her phone to tap a quick tweet as Margaret’s body shuddered beneath her. “Shot fired, Casper airport, soldiers’ homecoming.” The returning soldiers knew, too, scuttling toward the sound in a battle crouch, reaching for the weapons they no longer carried. Lola rolled off Margaret and shouted to the strange young woman she’d just met. “Take her. Get her out of here. Go. Now!”
She waited the second it took to ensure the woman indeed headed with Margaret toward the hangar’s entrance, then turned and followed the sprinting soldiers in the other direction. Above them, balloon bouquets flew in brilliant starbursts toward the hangar’s domed ceiling. Lola raised her phone as she ran, snapping photos of the fleeing civilians, images that in her experience would look just like every other photo of people making the split-second transition from normalcy to a flight for their lives, whether from earthquake or school shooting or suicide bombing. Arms pumped for greater speed. Faces twisted in screams. Eyes rolled wild, not yet glazed against the reality that would hit home too soon. Lola stopped to tweet a photo, then headed for the far corner of the hangar where the soldiers converged. She shouldered her way through the cluster of fatigues, thinking not for the first time that soldiers were far more polite in moving aside than elbow-throwing television cameramen, several of whom over the years had left her with bruises, one once lobbing an actual punch.
Lola reached the inner circle and wished she hadn’t. She worked the phone yet again. “Soldier down. Shot appears fatal, possibly self-inflicted. #CasperShooting.” She concentrated on the words, the need to inform without jumping to conclusions. The necessity of the ass-saving “appears” and “possibly.” Even though there was no appears about it, no way for 140 characters to convey the mess that had once been the soldier’s head. Soon enough, crime scene technicians would note the powder burns on what was left of the skin of his face, would verify that the gun was his own, that the bullet that had killed him had been fired from the pistol cooling in the hand already going gray; would write a lengthy report that would supply all the details that Lola and the cursing veterans around her could see with their own eyes.
Lola’s phone buzzed with a text alert. She edged her way back through the circle. The text was from Jan Carpenter, her friend and colleague at the newspaper in Magpie, Montana, more than five hundred miles away. “WTF? You’re supposed to be on vacation. Not your state. Not your story. Walk away. Is Margaret OK? What about my cousin?”
Shit. Lola ran through the now-deserted hangar, dodging the duffel bags and purses that people had abandoned in their haste to escape. The crowd outside surged toward her, shouting questions. She ignored them, calling for her daughter. “Margaret? Margaret?” And, oh hell, what was the name of Jan’s peculiar cousin, the woman who’d hustled Margaret to safety? Something as odd as the woman herself. “Palomino? Pal? Pal Jones?”
“Hey.” A voice like a hard swipe of sandpa
per, unexpectedly close at hand.
Lola snatched Margaret from the woman’s arms. “Oh, baby.” She pressed her cheek to Margaret’s, inhaling her wheaty scent.
“Boom, Mommy.” Margaret patted Lola’s face with soft hands.
Lola lifted her head and scrutinized her daughter. Margaret had her father’s lustrous ebony hair, bound this day in braids, stick-straight in contrast to Lola’s chestnut tangle. Margaret had Charlie’s skin, too, albeit a lighter shade of brown, but her eyes were Lola’s own, grey and skeptical, and for the moment, wide with a question. So she didn’t know what had happened. Only the sound. Lola let her breath out.
“Yes,” she said. “Boom. A big noise. Nothing to worry about. We should get going now. We’re just in the way here.” That last said with obvious reluctance, a nod to the fact that on most days, it was Lola’s role to be in the hot center of whatever was happening.
Palomino Jones hitched a shoulder, noticeably bony even in her disguising fatigues, settling the strap of her Army-issue duffel more firmly upon it. “Ready when you are.” She was a head and more shorter than Lola’s near-six-foot lankiness, but her appearance of fragility went beyond height. Her slight body swam within her fatigues, wrists protruding twiglike from her sleeves. During her own time in Afghanistan as a foreign correspondent, Lola had worn her hair cropped close and spiky, but Pal’s head was frankly shaved, the pitiless June sun highlighting the pink scalp beneath the blond fuzz. Her features were all sharp points, chin like an arrowhead, nose a blade, cheekbones that threatened to slice through skin. Above them, eyes blue and cold as winter pond ice.
Lola led the way to her truck, back braced against the woman’s glare. She’d agreed to meet Palomino at the airport as a favor to Jan. “You’re going to be in Wyoming on your stupid vacation and I can’t get time off because of it,” Jan had said. “Just pick her up and drop her off at the ranch on your way to Yellowstone.”
“It’s not a vacation, it’s a furlough. I’d rather be at work, getting paid, and you know it. Doesn’t she have any friends? Neighbors?”
“There’s a neighbor who’s been like a surrogate dad since her parents … ” Jan didn’t have to finish the sentence. Lola knew about the car crash a few years earlier that had killed Jan’s aunt and uncle, an occurrence so unremarkable on Wyoming’s ice-sheeted winter roads as to merit little more than a brief mention in the local newspapers. “His car is unreliable. To put it mildly,” Jan said.
“Casper is a hell of a detour from Yellowstone,” Lola pointed out, reminding Jan of her vacation destination. But the observation only spurred Jan to the unusual tactic of personal revelation.
“She’s like a sister to me, as much as she could be, given how far apart we lived. We spent most summers together. I get the feeling she had a rough time in Afghanistan. Her emails stopped months ago. You could pick her brain on the ride to the ranch, let me know how she’s doing. You’re the perfect person to talk to her, your having been there and all.” Jan rarely missed an opportunity to jab at Lola’s previous experience as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, usually when she thought Lola wasn’t taking her job in Montana seriously enough. Lola couldn’t remember a time when Jan had treated her background as an advantage.
“Come on,” Jan pressed. “There’s a month of free date-night babysitting in it for you.”
Lola knew, and knew that Jan did, too, that finding a babysitter for Margaret was never an issue. Margaret’s father, Sheriff Charlie Laurendeau, was from the Blackfeet Nation, its border just a few miles north of Magpie, with no shortage of aunties and elders willing to take Margaret on a moment’s notice. But for the sake of Jan’s dignity and her own, she appeared to value the offer.
“Six weeks,” she said.
“Done,” said Jan.
Lola reached her pickup, red as a bullfighter’s cape and equally irresistible to highway patrol officers eager to fill their day’s quota of tickets. At least it was easy to spot in the parking lot jammed with the more sensibly hued vehicles of families come to take their service members home. A dark, wet nose twitched at the truck’s partially open window.
“We’re back, Bub,” Margaret called.
Lola unlocked the pickup door—no matter how long she lived in the West, she’d never abandoned her old Baltimore habit of locking vehicle and house alike—and stood aside as the border collie leaped from the driver’s seat and landed on three legs at Pal’s feet. A suggestion of a smile touched the woman’s lips. Lola started at a recent memory. There’d been a moment, just a split second really, as the airport erupted in chaos around her. Lola had thrown herself atop Margaret, awaiting the sound of more shots. Heard none. She raised her head a couple of millimeters and took in the blur of fleeing feet. Except for the booted pair beside her. Everyone else in the hangar was in motion except Jan’s cousin. Pal stood frozen, staring toward the corner where the unseen soldier lay dying, and just then, so quickly Lola still wasn’t sure she’d seen it, a glorious smile lit up her thin, thin face.
TWO
The wind screamed past Lola, snatching at the cellphone in her hand. She was used to wind in Montana, constant and battering, but at least there it had a visual component. Slender trees bent double, groaning beneath the onslaught. Grasses bowed and rose in sealike waves. Soaring birds veered abruptly off course. But as far as she could tell, trees didn’t grow at all in this part of Wyoming. The sagebrush, low, tough and woody, appeared as impervious to the wind as the boulders and sandstone formations that littered the valley floor. The Wind River Range floated blue and spectral in the distance, reminding her of the Koh-e-Paghman mountains that so many years earlier had briefly lulled her into terming Kabul picturesque. In fact, she thought, throw in a few flat-roofed mud houses, some flocks of shaggy, fat-bottomed Arabi sheep, and bearded men in pajama-like shalwar qamiz toting AK-47s, and Wyoming would look just like Afghanistan—a fact not inclined to endear the state to her. She would not have been surprised to hear the wavering melody of a muezzin’s evening call to prayer rise around her as the sun dipped below the mountains. Lola turned her back to the gusts and yelled into the phone.
“The woman is a freak, Charlie. You should see her. I can’t wait to get out of here in the morning.” She stood atop a rise about a hundred yards from Pal’s house. It was a typical high plains ranch, a nondescript frame house with haphazard add-ons, scoured largely free of paint by the wind, smaller than any of the more essential outbuildings. Lola noted an equipment shed, a calving shelter, and sturdy corrals, all in good repair. But no sign of livestock. This time of year, cattle and sheep alike grazed high pastures miles away from ranches. But there should have been some horses in the corrals, a retired herding dog or two lazing in the shade, some barn cats slinking around. Pal must have shut down the ranch operations when her parents died, Lola thought. If Pal had been more talkative—which is to say, talkative at all—Lola would have asked her about it. As it was, Lola had fled the silent house as soon as she’d put Margaret to bed, telling Pal the cellphone reception would probably be better outdoors. Mostly, she just wanted to talk out of earshot from Pal.
But Charlie had no interest in the peculiarities of Jan’s cousin. “Tell me again about the shooting,” he said in what Lola thought of as his sheriff voice.
“A guy shot himself. Which you’d have seen if you’d ever check out my Twitter feed.”
She should have known better. Bad enough, Charlie maintained, that he had to waste valuable time checking the social media posts of the various ne’er-do-wells who populated and repopulated his jail. The last thing he wanted to do was track his girlfriend, too. “The only people I follow are the ones I can’t trust,” he’d say when she pressed. “Should I put you in that category?”
Now, he ignored her and repeated his demand. “From the beginning. You got to the airport—”
“Right.” She sighed. After nearly six years with Charlie, she’d learned, eve
n if the repeat offenders had yet to figure it out, that it was quicker just to answer him. “We got to the airport right before the plane landed. There was a ceremony. A band, Welcome Home banners, yellow ribbons, the whole nine yards.”
“Go on.”
“The first guy off the plane, they made a gantlet for him. Everybody cheered and applauded. He must have been some big hero because the others didn’t get that kind of treatment.”
“That’s my trained observer.” Teasing her now. Charlie and Lola often compared notes about the things they noticed at different events, each agreeing that the other filled in details that one of them missed. “When I retire from sheriffing and you finally get a pink slip,” Charlie often joked, “we can set ourselves up as private investigators.”
It wasn’t a joke anymore. Lola hadn’t been pink-slipped, not exactly. But she’d been furloughed without pay for three weeks from Magpie’s Daily Express, in a disturbing repeat of the downsizing from her job as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore newspaper a few years earlier, an action that had led her on a roundabout route that ended up in Magpie. Where, foolishly, she’d felt safe from the unending rounds of layoffs and staff cuts that plagued larger newspapers around the country. Lola was older by nearly a decade than Jan, the paper’s other full-time reporter, but Jan had seniority at the Express. The furlough fell on Lola, and Jan saw her long-planned trip to Wyoming to meet Pal upon her return from Afghanistan canceled. Which is how Lola had ended up stuck with Pal.
The road trip to Yellowstone had been Charlie’s idea. “You and Margaret take a vacation. It’ll be good for you,” he said, despite knowing full well that vacation was never Lola’s idea of fun. Charlie himself was busy training the new deputy that the county had, after years of pleading, finally seen fit to fund, so he couldn’t come with them. But he’d upped the ante by suggesting that Lola use the time to think about his most recent offer of marriage. Matrimony, he pointed out, had worked out fine for his brother Edgar, despite Eddie’s initial reluctance about the institution upon finding out about his college girlfriend’s pregnancy. Now, Eddie was living in Arizona with his Navajo wife and little girl. “This is the last time,” Charlie had said. “Margaret will be in first grade. She deserves married parents. If you can’t commit after all this time, we need to think about a different arrangement.” At which point, Lola had become even less enthusiastic about the trip.