Disgraced (2 page)

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, even 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.

Marriage came accompanied by the specter of a wedding, and an obligatory marshmallow dress that resided in a different universe than Lola's daily outfits of cargo pants and turtlenecks or T-shirts, depending on the season. Just thinking about a dress made her feel itchy and constricted. She'd probably have to wear makeup, too. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth as though to wipe away nonexistent lipstick.

“I'd just met up with Jan's cousin,” she told Charlie, returning to her narrative with relief. “It was pandemonium. People crying, hugging, kissing babies. Then a guy shouted something and shot himself.”

“How did you know he's the one who shouted? And did you see him shoot himself?” Always the cop, Lola thought.

“Negative.” Charlie already knew the answer to both questions. “But it was obvious, when I saw him, that he'd shot himself. And I asked people if he'd been the one shouting ahead of time,” she said with a bit of pride. It might not have been her story, but she'd taken pains to verify the facts anyway.

“What'd they say? And what did he say?”

“Nothing that made sense. Or at least, not what people thought they heard. Nobody was really sure. He said, ‘It's alive. It's alive.'”

The phone went silent as Charlie digested that piece of information. “Like in
Young Frankenstein
?” he said finally. The Mel Brooks horror movie spoof was a shared guilty pleasure.

“Except nobody laughed.”

“Right.”

He got around to the question Lola had hoped he wouldn't ask. “Where was Margaret during all of this?”

“Outside,” Lola said.

A longer silence. “Alone?”

“With Pal.”

“Lola—”

She turned into the wind and held the phone high as his voice rose, saying something else about Margaret. But not so high that she couldn't hear what he said next. “Have you thought about my question yet?”

The gusts swept past with the sound of tearing fabric. “Can't hear you, Charlie!” she shouted toward the phone. “Losing reception out here. Sorry. Talk tomorrow. Love you.” Lola thumbed the phone off. She wished that in exchange for his ultimatum, she'd extracted a promise that he wouldn't bring up the topic of marriage again until she was back in Magpie. She hunched against the wind in preparation for her next obligatory call. Jan would want to know about her cousin, but Lola didn't have much to tell her. The two-hour ride from Casper to the ranch had passed in near-total silence but for Margaret's chattering, an ongoing conversation with Bub in a language that only girl and dog understood. Lola had asked Pal about the suicidal soldier, only to be silenced with a bitten-off, “Didn't know the guy.”

She tried a few other questions, about Pal herself, about Jan, about suggestions on what to see in Yellowstone, eliciting only monosyllabic answers and, finally, the flat statement, “I'm tired.” Pal leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. In the jump seats behind them, Margaret and Bub had already succumbed to sleep. But for air shrieking past the open windows, cooling only by virtue of motion, Lola drove in silence through a landscape that increased in desolation as the miles passed. Montana, with its overlay of postcard mountains and trout streams and movie-mogul ranches, was a gift to tourism marketers. Central Wyoming was the same landscape stripped to bleached skeleton, barely enough dirt clinging to hardrock to anchor sagebrush, and wholly inadequate for trees, which all but disappeared along with any hint of human habitation the farther west Lola drove from Casper. Towering rocks banded with red angled abruptly out of the ground, as though shoved by an unseen fist below. Alkali patches stretched across the flats between them, bouncing back the glare of the heat-whitened sky.

Lola wished the truck had air-conditioning. Pal had already shrugged out of her fatigue jacket, her Army-issue brown T-shirt revealing arms braided by slender ropes of muscle. Her hands were large and capable-looking. Lola guessed Pal was stronger than she appeared at first glance. Of course she was, Lola admonished herself. Carrying one of those big rifles, humping that bulky pack and body armor through the vengeful heat of an Afghan summer. Lola had hoped to compare notes with Pal, maybe get an update on how things had changed—or not—in Kabul, but their conversation had been too brief for Lola to mention her own years there.

Pal stirred and muttered in her sleep. Her hands, which had been clasped in her lap, fell apart, the tension in her body easing. One arm fell to her side. Lola glanced and gasped. She forced her gaze back to the empty road ahead. But she couldn't keep it from straying to Pal's forearm, to the four faint scars there, a row of slashes, the skin tough and whitened.

The scars were old, she reminded herself now as she punched Jan's number into her phone. No need to mention them. Jan spoke without preamble, as was her habit. “How's my cousin? Is she all right? What's the deal with the shooting?”

“You probably know more about the shooting than I do. There's got to be a story online about it somewhere,” Lola told her. As to Pal—she looked toward the ranch house crouched at the bottom of the hill, edges dissolving into the gloaming. Lola was sure she'd snapped on the porch light when she'd set out up the hill, but now the house lay in darkness, nothing to suggest life within. Earlier that afternoon, they'd stopped at a town about twenty miles from the ranch so that Lola and Margaret could get dinner—Pal declined—while Pal stocked up on groceries. As far as Lola could tell from the bags Pal toted back to the truck, Pal was going to subsist on canned goods. While Lola and Margaret waited in the truck, Pal ducked into a package store and returned with a clinking bag, at which point, Lola set her internal alarm for the earliest departure possible the next morning. She and Margaret could drive back to the town and have breakfast there before heading to Yellowstone. They wouldn't even have to see Pal at all. Jan would surely call her cousin, and figure out on her own what was going on with Pal. Lola mouthed some noncommittal phrases into the phone and rang off.

She shoved the phone into her pocket and jogged back to the house. She ran her hands over the wall just inside the door, seeking the light switch. She wished she hadn't found it; that she'd simply felt her way through the darkness to the back bedroom where Margaret slept, Bub plastered to her side. Then she wouldn't have seen Pal, passed out at the kitchen table beneath the glare of the naked overhead bulb, one of the just-purchased pint bottles of bad bourbon nearly empty beside her. One arm cradled her head. The other, the one with the scars, stretched across the table. Lola tiptoed close. Sometime during the late afternoon or evening, Pal had added a new scar, a slash across one of the earlier ones, turning it into an X. The line had already started to scab over, but the skin around it remained red and angry.

Guilt washed through Lola as she remembered how she'd ended her conversation with Jan. “She's not the most talkative person,” Lola had told her. “But I remember those flights home from Kabul. I could barely stand up when I got home, and I was flying coach, not rattling around inside a cargo plane. She's exhausted. Aside from that, I think your cousin is just fine.”

THREE

Lola's pickup crept along
in a line of traffic, exhaust fouling Yellowstone's crystalline air. In Montana, she lived within an hour of
Glacier National Park, and she knew the best way to negotiate its roads with the minimum amount of aggravation during tourist season. But in Yellowstone, she was the tourist, stuck on the main roads along with what appeared to be about one million other people. Behind her, Margaret slumped in her booster seat, no longer excited by herds of bison and the occasional far-away grizzly that caused the entire crawling procession of vehicles to come to an interminable stop.

Bub sprawled on the passenger seat beside Lola, every so often lifting his head and regarding her with his bifurcated gaze, one brown eye, one blue, reassuring himself that nothing had changed since the last time he'd checked. “Go to sleep, buddy,” Lola told him. “You might as well sleep, too, Margaret. We're in this for the long haul.” She checked her map, reminding herself that the distance to the park entrance had barely changed since the last time she'd looked. Forty-eight miles. What on earth had possessed her to make the long loop through the park at the height of tourist season? “Right,” she reminded herself. “I didn't have a choice about when I got furloughed.” She and Margaret only had been on the road a few days. She had another two and a half weeks to kill. Charlie and Jan and her editor, too, all had urged her to stay out of town for as long as possible.

“You won't be able to help yourself,” Charlie said. “Something will happen and you'll want to cover it. They'll fire you if you do any reporting while you're on furlough.”

The plan had been to spend a few days in Yellowstone and then go on to the Tetons. Lola thought they might cut the former short in favor of the latter. The Tetons, at least in the photos she'd seen, looked more like Glacier, with heavily forested mountains, their peaks foreboding with mist. Yellowstone's vast sunlit savannahs lacked the swirling sense of mystery that Glacier always evoked. Visitors complained about the latter. The park in northwestern Montana was scary, they said. All those trees pressing in close, roots grabbing at the unwary ankle, while from above skeins of black moss brushed scalp, shoulders, an unwisely exposed neck. And the fog, descending without notice, rendering a clearly marked trail tunnel-like, obscure. You never knew when a grizzly would charge out of the gloom. Or so Lola enjoyed telling the tourists.

Ahead of her, lights flashed red. Lola hit the brakes. Bub stood up. He saw the distraction before Lola did. His hackles raised, then smoothed. He lay back down with a yawn more outrage than ex
haustion. “Good lord,” said Lola. “It's only some stupid mulies.”
Back in Magpie, mule deer were nearly as common as dogs, making short work of newcomers' flowerbeds and finding clever ways to destroy the wire fences of the old-timers at constant war with them. Lola looked at the map again. Forty-six miles. She reached for the newspaper she'd picked up from a bench outside a ranger station and propped it against the steering wheel, alternately scanning its pages and the road ahead of her. A story about the soldier's suicide dominated the front page. He was, the story noted, one of a tight-knit group of companions from Thirty who'd enlisted upon graduating from high school. Lola recognized the name of the town where they'd stopped for dinner before they'd delivered Pal.

“Wait a minute,” Lola said aloud. Bub opened an eye. “Tight-knit,” the story said. But Pal had told her she didn't know the man. Lola had assumed he'd been from a different part of Wyoming. She cracked a rueful smile and repeated the mantra of every editor for whom she'd worked: “Assume makes an
ass
out of
u
and
me
.” When would she ever learn? Apparently Pal and the suicidal soldier had gone to high school together. From what Lola had seen of Thirty, the high school couldn't have been that big. They must have known each other well in school, and even better after enlisting and serving together overseas in the same unit. Pal probably had just been trying to deflect conversation, Lola told herself. She read on. The soldier was, it turned out, the second casualty among the group from Thirty. Another had been killed in Afghanistan only a few months earlier.

“Maybe that's why he did it,” someone speculated in the newspaper story. “Survivor guilt. Isn't that what it's called?”

Lola flipped through the pages to the jump, checking out other stories along the way. Wyoming, she read, was in the midst of a drought. Ranchers were already importing hay from neighboring states. Oil prices were up, good news for the folks working in the on-again, off-again boomtown of Gillette. Seemingly every town of any size in the state was making preparations for its Fourth of July rodeo, a phenomenon that caused the holiday to be known throughout the West as Cowboy Christmas for its multitude of purses. But for the names of the towns, Lola thought, she could have been reading the
Daily Express
back
in Magpie, rural news the same around the region. She came to the jump of the Page One story. A companion headline caught her attention.

“Pair Charged in Bar Ruckus.”

Again, standard fare, albeit with more than the usual amount of ink devoted to such a recurring story. Only the bar fights whose circumstances were so ridiculous as to make for amusing reading rated a newspaper story. Lola checked the road ahead, assuring herself of the twin streams of brake lights, and bent over the story, searching for the quirky detail that she could text to Jan. Within two paragraphs, she knew it was a different kind of story. The two pugilists were veterans, fresh off the plane from Afghanistan. They appeared to have gone straight to a local watering hole and picked a fight that ended with their victim being airlifted to an intensive care unit in Seattle with head injuries so severe as to make permanent brain damage a possibility. The perpetrators'—the
alleged
perps, Lola reminded herself—names were unfamiliar. But the name of their unit was entirely too familiar. As was their hometown: Thirty.

Lola paged back to the front and re-read the story about the soldier who'd killed himself. A half-dozen soldiers from Thirty had gone to Afghanistan. Now, two were dead and two more in jail within days, hours maybe, of arriving home. She looked at the byline on the lead story, and turned back to the one about the bar fight. They were the same—Dave Sparks.

“Congratulations, Dave Sparks,” she said aloud. “You missed the forest for the trees.”

Because it was clear to Lola, as obvious as the pulse that thrummed with quickened interest at her wrists and temples, that the story was bigger than the recitation of events tragic in two cases, criminal in the other. She looked to Bub. He stood at full alert, as always divining any change in mood before she felt it herself. “What do you think, buddy?” she asked him. “What the hell happened to those folks over there?”

Twinges of empathy, for the people of Thirty, and of jealousy for the stories that lay ahead for Dave Sparks, sparred within her. In a town the size of Thirty, the death of any veteran would send ripples of shock and sorrow throughout the community. In Magpie, such funerals were elaborate affairs, beyond the capacity of the small churches, filling the high school gymnasium. Afterward, people lined the streets as the hearse rolled slowly past, motorists flashing their headlights in tribute. At least those other funerals had been years apart. She'd never seen a single community hit so hard in such a short time. The fact of two dead, one of them by his own hand, and two more in trouble of their own making, would increase the effect exponentially. People questioned themselves in such circumstances. Wondered what they could have done differently. And, inevitably, some turned on one another. A thin bright line of anger nearly always underscored grief. Stories about such situations were complicated, tangled affairs, the best of them reflecting larger truths about individuals in particular and humanity in general.

Steak, Lola labeled such stories, in comparison to her usual diet of the hamburger that comprised police briefs and weather reports. One or two such stories a year was the best she ever hoped for, but those one or two sustained her through the routine of the other months. She caught herself compiling imaginary headlines, her way of focusing her thoughts. “
War's Trauma Writ Large in Small Town.
Something like that,” she suggested to Bub. His head bob almost certainly had more to do with avoiding a particularly blistering gust through the window, but Lola decided to take it for assent.

The cars began to move again, crawling up a hill. Lola supposed there'd be another delay when people stopped to take in the view from the top. She banged her head against the steering wheel and groaned. Bub bestowed a quick, anxious swipe of his tongue upon her cheek. Her phone buzzed, a welcome distraction. Cell service in the park was spotty. Apparently the truck had just rolled into a hotspot.

She held the phone before her. A text—no, several texts—from Jan. “Call me.” “Call me.” “Call me.” “Goddammit, call me.”

Lola called. Jan's voice filled the cab.

Lola glanced in the rearview mirror. “Hush,” she hissed. “Margaret's asleep.”

Jan lowered the volume, if not the intensity.

Lola thrilled to the possibility that Jan offered. Knew better than to show it. “No way,” she hissed into the eventual pause. “I am not going back there.”

“You have to,” Jan said. “I've been trying to call her ever since she got back. She won't answer. I even called her neighbor to make sure she was still alive.”

“Why can't he look after her?”

“He's got his own issues.”

Lola wondered what those were. Was he an alcoholic, as Pal apparently was, or at least was on her way to becoming? Did he, too, cut up his arm? Refuse to speak? Because, as far as Lola was concerned, that would make him the perfect person to look after Pal. Birds of a feather and all that—thoughts that Lola deemed best kept to herself. A moment later, she was glad she had.

“His grandson got killed over there. Pal emailed me something about it, back when she was still in touch. But that was months ago.”

Another surge of blood warmed Lola's face. If she were writing a story—which she wasn't, not yet, anyway—the neighbor would go at the top of the list of people to interview.

“We're right in the middle of our vacation,” she protested, to herself as much as to Jan.

“You? Vacation? Bored out of your skull yet? How do you like Yellowstone? Making friends with all of the tourists?”

Jan knew her too well, Lola thought. Jan pressed her case. “Look. Go back to the ranch, stick around a couple of days, make sure she's doing okay. I can head down there the minute your furlough is over.”

Again, Lola delivered the expected reluctance. “What's my excuse for showing up again and imposing on her? Because I sure as hell wouldn't like it if some stranger just dropped in on me and announced she was staying awhile.”

Jan threw out one implausible reason after another. Margaret was sick. Bub was sick. They wanted to see more of that part of Wyoming. Lola was out of money.

“Why don't I just tell her the truth?” Lola said. “That you're worried about her and you asked me to check back in.”

“Because it'll piss her off.”

As far as Lola could tell, Pal existed in a permanent state of pissed-offedness.

Jan played her trump card, letting real need leak through. “Lola, please?”

Their friendship was based on the shared belief that each was self-sufficient, able to function without the relationships that burdened other people. Lola had slipped a rung on the alpha-female ladder when she'd taken up with Charlie, farther still when Margaret had come along. On the rare occasions when she admitted it to herself, that was partly why she'd resisted Charlie's frequent and until now good-humored proposals of marriage.

“Fine,” she said now. “The woman clearly has some sort of PTSD. In fact, from what I can tell, the whole unit was pretty messed up. I'll make sure she's not too out of control. And if it looks like she is, I'll call the VA. Okay?”

“Call me, too,” Jan said. “In fact, call me first.”

“Right.”

Lola hung up. The conversation had only used up a single mile. But suddenly she was glad for the syrupy traffic flow; hoped, in fact, for a grizzly sighting or two, maybe even a pack of Yellowstone's famous—or infamous, depending on whether you were greenie or rancher—wolves. Anything to give her time to figure out two things. First, where to pitch the story already taking shape in her mind. “The
Daily Express
,” she told Bub, “isn't going to go for something out of Wyoming, no matter how good it is. Which is just fine. A nice fat freelance fee will help make up for the furlough.” Never mind that freelance fees hadn't been fat for a long time. She'd take a trimmed-down one. She still had connections at big newspapers and, better yet, knew reporters who had moved on from those papers to the online sites that were an increasing source of long-form journalism.

And the second issue, the same challenge she'd faced repeatedly in places ranging from Baltimore's dicier neighborhoods to countries on the other side of the globe: how, in a strange place where she knew no one, to go about reporting the story that she was sure was there.