Dakota by Gwen Florio Read Free Book Online Page B

The mileage alone is going to wipe out petty cash.”
    “We’ve got a petty cash fund?” Jan asked.
    Jorkki ignored her. “Leave Monday so you’re back by Friday.”
    “What the hell?” Jan bounded up from her desk. “Why does she get to go? You’ve never sent me anywhere and I’ve been here three years. She’s here all of what—three months? Besides, how am I going to write the whole paper by myself?”
    Something shifted in Jorkki’s face, not quite a smile, but a shade less dour than his usual death mask. “You never asked. We reward initiative here. Or at least we would, if anyone ever showed any. As for writing the paper, Tina’s been doing just fine on feature stories. Time we threw some news her way.”
    Tina glowed quietly. “That’s a great idea,” Finch enthused. “One of your best ever.”
    “Shut up, Finch,” Jan and Lola snapped in unison.
    “Can’t I at least go along and watch? I want to see how Lola here handles that bunch over on the eastern plains and beyond. They’re a different breed of human. Tough. More than tough. Got to be, to live in that godforsaken place.”
    Jorkki spoke to Lola. “How do you feel about sleeping in your truck? Because there won’t be a vacant motel room within a hundred miles of where you’re going. Oh, and pack your woollies. You think it’s cold here? That wind’s been rolling across the Hi-Line for five hundred miles with nothing to stop it by the time it hits the patch. When you get back, this place will feel like Phoenix.”
    Lola doubted it. But she was too relieved to care. Even if it meant nothing more than trading one frozen wasteland for another, she was finally escaping the increasingly suffocating confines of Magpie.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    “W hy the sudden interest in the patch? Can’t it wait until spring?” Charlie stood in the bedroom doorway as Lola added underwear and socks—and then more socks—to a duffel bag. Bub shadowed her, alternately radiating suspicion and excitement. The candle flickered beside the bed, redundant in the glare of the overhead light that Lola had switched on so that she could see as she packed.
    “It’s a better story in the wintertime. Shows how desperate people are for work. Jorkki said it would be even colder there than it is here. How is that possible? Do you think I should get one of those facemasks that make people look like bank robbers? Do you have one? Can I borrow this?” She reached for the coyote-fur-trimmed hat that sat on Charlie’s nightstand and put it on. She unfolded the earflaps, tied them beneath her chin and stood before the mirror. The brim came down over her eyebrows. “I look like an idiot. But maybe if I wear my watch cap under it, it’ll fit.” She took off the hat and tossed it beside the duffel, then rooted through the contents of the single dresser drawer she’d allowed herself at Charlie’s. Most of her possessions were in boxes in the barn. Lola may have acquiesced to Charlie’s pleas to join him in Magpie, but she’d insisted to him and to herself, too, that their living arrangement would last only until she found her own place. But summer had turned to fall, and then winter arrived with a ferocity that made any effort beyond work and simple survival unthinkable. When Charlie suggested she delay her house hunt until spring, she’d shoved another log into the woodstove that kept the living room bearable and agreed that was a fine plan. Now, noting the rigidity in Charlie’s shoulders, the set to his jaw, she wasn’t so sure.
    “Jorkki liked the idea,” she told him.
    “Jorkki doesn’t know you like I do. He’s about to find out. You won’t stop at anything when it comes to a story.”
    “That’s generally considered a good thing.”
    Bub whined, looking from Charlie to Lola. He had belonged to Mary Alice, but had finally transferred his loyalties to Lola. Bub had one brown eye and one blue, and guilt shot through Lola when he trained the blue one on her. She