Montana by Gwen Florio

make small talk past the TV. Giving up.
    And yet. Mary Alice was their only child. Even after moving to Montana, she paid the punitive fares to fly home for Thanksgiving and back again at Christmas. Telephoned them twice a week, sent chocolates on birthdays and fruit baskets for anniversaries, and postcards and letters for no reason at all. The funeral in Magpie would be in two days, the sheriff had told her when she arrived for her interview. No doubt her parents would schedule a memorial later in Baltimore. Lola made a mental note to call the airlines to push back her flights so that she could stay the extra day. She’d send Mary Alice’s parents a bushel-size bouquet. And a card. With a note, a long one.
    “What about your parents?” the sheriff asked.
    “What about them?”
    “Have you spoken with them? You might want someone to talk to under the circumstances, seems like.”
    “Dead. For years now.”
    “Friends?”
    She thought about that one. She had foxhole friendships with the cadre of foreign correspondents in Kabul, traveling with them in convoys for safety, sleeping with one or another on occasion, and organizing the softball games in courtyards ringed by armed guards. But those ties generally vanished upon departure. The departure in this case being hers.
    “No. Mary Alice was it.”
    He picked up a pencil. “Ready?” He established her full name—“No middle name? Really?”—raised an eyebrow at her exotic address and showed no reaction whatsoever when she told him she was thirty-four. Which, Lola supposed, meant that Afghanistan had taken its toll and she finally looked her age.
    “What brings you all the way out here?”
    “Vacation.”
    “You’re a long way from home. Couldn’t you have found something a little closer?”
    She fought an urge to rearrange the pencils, to set something askew on that orderly desk. “Mary Alice and I haven’t seen each other for five years. Montana seemed like a better vacation spot than Kabul.” No reason for him to know about her job situation.
    “For someone on vacation, you sure travel light. They said over at the Sleep Inn you’ve only got the one bag and the book bag.”
    Lola thought back to the proprietress at the motel, a tiny alert woman with inquisitive darting eyes, and wondered whether the sheriff had called her, or she’d called him first. “Why are we talking about me? Can we get to Mary Alice?”
    His chin crimped in disapproval. Like everything else in his face, it was too big, mouth too wide, eyelids too heavy, nose deserving of its own listing in the U.S. Geological Survey. Lola had known men who managed, through force of personality, to turn their homeliness into an asset. The sheriff was not one of them. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” he said. “And you were the last one to see her alive.”
    “Alive?” Verle was right. Charlie Laurendeau didn’t know squat about sheriffing. “I hope to God you’re calling in some help on this one.”
    The pencil snapped in his fingers, the halves spinning across the desk, wobbling at the metal edge before gravity won out and jerked them floorward. He watched them go, turning his head first one way, then another. “What do you mean?”
    “You saw the back of her head.”
    He picked up a new pencil. His fingertips went pink where he clutched it. “I did. But there was no rigor mortis.” She heard the boy in him then, his tone protesting that what he’d seen didn’t fit with the way things should have been. “So I asked the medical examiner. Everything is very preliminary. He hasn’t completed a full autopsy. But he said as bad as that looked, the bullet missed a lot of important things. It’s not impossible that she lived for several hours afterward, probably unconscious, but maybe not. I thought there might have been a chance she was alive when you got to her, that she might have said something. I almost stopped by the Sleep Inn at two in the morning on my way back from the