Montana by Gwen Florio Read Free Book Online Page B

“You want to find out about it, I’d suggest you read the Daily Distress. Sorry, Miss Wicks. I forgot you were in that line of work. Daily Express , I should have said. Looks like they gave it a big write-up.”
    The boy pinched the money between his fingertips and drifted away. Lola had figured him for seventeen or eighteen, but his hairless cheeks and chin made her wonder if he was even in high school.
    “What’s his deal?” she whispered to Verle. “He seems so—” She wasn’t sure. “Worse than depressed. Almost like he’s grieving. Was he close to Mary Alice, too?”
    “Naw. His sister’s probably back in jail,” Verle said. “Best place for her.” Then, at Lola’s look, added, “Old story. Long story. We should be getting over to the sheriff’s office before he sends out a posse.”
    Lola grabbed the last piece of toast, wiped the egg yolk from the plate, stuffed it into her mouth and followed Verle out of the cafe. At the door, she glanced back. Joshua stood silhouetted against the window, cleaning rag dangling from his hand. Verle had seemed surprised to find out that Mary Alice and Joshua’s uncle were friends. Something had slipped across the smooth surface of geniality as he glanced around the room to see if anyone else had registered the remark. Lola ran through the moment in her mind.
    They were? Not quite a frown, but close. A couple of quick blinks before his gaze returned to her face. No. She hadn’t imagined it. Verle hadn’t known. And he hadn’t liked finding out.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he sheriff sat on one side of a grey metal desk whose heft and dimensions suggested an aircraft carrier.
    Lola gauged its immense surface and then the narrow door and wondered if someone had simply winched the desk down onto a piece of flooring and built the office around it. She perched on the edge of a folding chair, fingertips doing a drum roll against her knees, waiting for him to start. The morning newspaper sat to the left of the sheriff’s elbow, Mary Alice’s black-bordered photo looking up from it, her stare disconcertingly direct. Lola glanced away. A row of pencils lay beside the paper like small spears, freshly sharpened points trained upon her. The smell of graphite and cedar hung in the air. He picked one up and pulled a legal pad toward him.
    “I called her parents,” he said.
    Lola checked her percussive impatience. She’d never given Mary Alice’s parents a thought and she could tell that he knew it. In contrast to the previous night’s dishevelment, the sheriff was properly buttoned up, cowlicks slicked into damp submission. A couple of fresh cuts crosshatched his chin, as though he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of shaving. One of those fake-wood signs on his desk spelled out his full name: Charles Laurendeau. He didn’t look French, Lola thought.
    “Do they know I’m out here?”
    “Figured I’d let you tell them that.” Not letting her off the hook, presuming she’d have the belated good grace to call them herself.
    “How’d they take it?”
    “Quietly.”
    Lola pictured the home where Mary Alice had grown up, the parlor that resembled every other first-floor room in the claustrophobic rowhouses just far enough away from Baltimore’s newly fashionable waterfront to allow the neighborhood to cling to its Irish-Polish roots. Two sway-seated recliners facing the television, antimacassars on the sofa and hand-tatted doilies on the end tables. Pressed glass bowls of candied almonds and Easter-colored mints whose levels never changed. Every object in the room daily wiped free of dust, layers of wax so deep on the furniture that the grain lay wavy and indistinct beneath it. The television’s tinned laughter a constant backdrop from morning’s rise until late-night’s ceremonial thimbleful of Jameson’s. “Just a wee drop, girls.” Lola had spent an interminable Thanksgiving there with Mary Alice, the two of them occupying opposite ends of the inhospitable sofa, trying to