Free Montana by Gwen Florio Page A

card. Which Lola’s newspaper had just canceled. A kilted man cradling a bagpipe stepped to the front of the church.
    “Andy Macleod,” Verle said. “His family runs sheep.” Pronouncing sheep the same way she’d heard those words pop and sizzle in her mind. “He’s always looking for an excuse to put on a skirt and screech away on that thing.”
    Andy Macleod closed his lips around the reeds, and the opening strains of “Amazing Grace” wailed toward the rafters. People rose in a deep, rustling sigh. A framed photo of Mary Alice stood atop the casket, the same smiling shot from the newspaper, her eyes coolly surveying the crowd. Lola imagined the elbow in her side, the breathy voice in her ear. “Get a load of this, Bub. Half of them are here to make sure I’m really dead.” An elbow nudged her again, real this time. Verle extended a folded linen handkerchief. “Go on. It’s clean.” She handed it back to him. “I don’t cry,” she said. Voices lifted around them.
    “ Through many dangers, toils and snares
    I have already come.”
    The interminable dirge finally ended, the last notes subsumed in a murmur tinged with excitement. Johnny Running Wolf made his way up the aisle, shaking hands along the way. The toothless man waved, trying to catch his eye, but Johnny kept moving, nodding to Verle, his gaze flicking across Lola’s face as he headed for the pulpit. The minister, mouth open in preparation to speak, stood frozen as Johnny commandeered the only funeral service for a murder victim the minister was likely to conduct. Johnny paused before him and the minister closed his mouth and stepped aside. Johnny waited until the rustling ceased.
    “Mary. Alice. Carr.”
    He tolled her name, waiting for each word to fall away before intoning the next. Lola shivered. He was going to talk about Mary Alice and it was going to be in the past tense. Mary Alice was gone. Johnny paced before the front pews like a lawyer at a jury box, making no noticeable effort to raise his voice, which nonetheless easily reached the rear of a church gone hushed and still as the moment before daybreak. “Mary. Alice. Carr. That name was on top of a lot of stories in the newspaper about me. I didn’t always like those stories.” He waited as a few quick knowing smiles ran their course through the crowd.
    Lola’s eyes narrowed at the practiced pause. Mary Alice’s voice in her ear again: “What’s up with that, Bub?” Verle put a hand on Lola’s shoulder, the gesture warm, steadying. Lola shook it off. She didn’t want any distractions. The sheriff had said Verle was a suspect and Johnny wasn’t. Lola wondered if he’d gotten things backward.
    “No, I didn’t like many of them at all. But she always told both sides. She made a lot of people mad. They thought she was poking around in places she didn’t belong. But she was fearless. She kept on writing those stories and a lot of other ones, besides. We don’t know if that’s why she was . . .” He left it there, the word worse for being unspoken. Lola sat up straight within the collective held breath.
    “We hope not. All we can do, in this time of tragedy, is to hold tight to our memory of Mary Alice Carr, a woman who called it as she saw it.” An emphasis on she, leaving open the possibility that other people might not see it that way at all. Lola wondered if she’d imagined it. Knew she hadn’t. A half-dozen people in the front pew shifted in their seats. Mary Alice’s colleagues at the newspaper, Lola decided. She’d need to talk to them after the service. A young woman sitting among them raised a camera and fired a series of shots of Johnny Running Wolf, the shutter’s sliding clicks sounding unnaturally loud, intrusive. Johnny faced the camera.
    “She went after the truth. And now she’s gone. I guess that’s what the truth gets you nowadays.”
    He stood at the front of the church a few moments more, then shook his head and walked back to his seat. Lola