Dina leaned on the table and cupped her coffee mug with both hands. “The men who killed Charlie’s father weren’t necessarily his buddies. I’m willing to bet a lot of people in Bodine know who Charlie is. She doesn’t exactly blend into the woodwork.”
“But we’re all thinking it’s somebody local, right?” Cork said.
“Local,” Dina concurred.
“If it is about the body in the river, what is it about the body?” Cork went on. “Why go after kids who may have seen it?”
Jewell sat back, turning her mug slowly in her hand. “The body in the river, it’s probably the same one that washed up in Bodine?”
“Hard to believe there’d be two corpses,” Cork replied.
Dina frowned, thinking. “What could it be about the dead girl that would make someone come after Charlie and Stuart?”
Cork said, “It would be helpful if we knew who she was.”
Ren looked at Charlie.
“We do,” he said. “Tell them, Charlie.”
Cork listened along with the others as Charlie told them about Sara Wolf, the girl from Providence House. When she was finished, he said, “It’s time you talked to the sheriff’s people.”
“No.” Charlie backed away. “I’ll run away. I will.”
Cork spoke quietly but firmly. “Somebody killed your father. The same people may have killed this girl. And they’re probably responsible for your friend lying all torn up in a hospital bed. If that’s true, they’re after you, too. The sooner the investigators know all this, the better the chances of identifying these guys and putting them away.”
She spoke over Ren’s shoulder. “I don’t like police. I won’t talk to them.”
Cork looked to his cousin for help. “Jewell?”
Jewell took a breath and tried. “Charlie-”
“No!”
“I think Charlie’s right,” Dina said. “What we have are a series of events, none of which are connected except by proximity, circumstance, and speculation. At the moment, the sheriff’s people strongly suspect that Charlie might be responsible for her father’s death. If she goes to them with the story she’s told us, they’re going to hold her, question her, and because she ran once already, they’ll probably find a way to keep her in custody.” She eyeballed Jewell, then Cork. “You want that for her?”
“The dead girl may have family who are worried,” Cork said.
“Yeah, and monkeys fly out my butt,” Charlie tossed in. “She was in a homeless shelter. You think she’d be there if she had a choice? You think anybody would?”
“The police need to know who she is,” Cork persisted.
Dina shrugged. “Maybe they already do.” She glanced at Jewell. “That constable friend of yours. You think you could find out from him?”
“I can try.”
“Ned, it’s Jewell DuBois.”
“Jewell.” He sounded surprised and pleased. He also sounded distant and fuzzy.
“Are you in your office?” she asked.
“No. I’m at Fry Ahearn’s place. Goats got out again. We’re rounding them up. When I’m out of the office, I forward the calls to my cell. What’s up?”
“Ren and I just came back from Marquette. We went to see Stuart Gullickson at the hospital.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s not out of the woods yet.”
“Poor kid.” There was a disturbance, a grunt, the clunk of heavy wood. “Sorry, Jewell. Just putting the gate back in place.” He was breathing hard. “You know, I do an assembly every year at their school, talking to them about safety issues. Skateboarding in the street in the dark. Jesus. I might as well have been talking to the wall.”
“Ned, Ren’s pretty upset about all this. Charlie’s father dead, Charlie gone, Stuart in the hospital from a hit- and-run. Then there’s that girl they pulled from the lake. Have they identified her yet?”
“Yeah, they have.”
“Really? Who is she?”
“I can’t tell you that, Jewell.”
“Would the Marquette sheriff’s people tell me?”
“I doubt it. Last I heard, they were still working on notifying next of kin. Why would you need to know anyway?”
“Just concerned, Ned. Is it somebody I would recognize, or Ren?”
“It’s nobody from around here, I can tell you that much.” He was quiet a moment. Jewell could hear the bleat of goats in the background. “Say, you haven’t heard from Charlie, have you?”
“No,” she replied.
“And you’d tell me if you had?”
“Thanks for your help, Ned.”
She ended the call and turned to the others. “They know who she is.”
Charlie looked relieved. “So I don’t have to talk to them?”
“Not yet, anyway,” Dina said.
“She’s still a material witness,” Cork pointed out.
Dina gave a brief nod. “Before she talks to Olafsson-”
“Olafsson?” Jewell asked.
“The sheriff’s investigator,” Dina clarified. “Before she talks to him, it would be helpful to know how a girl from Providence House ended up in the Copper River. What’s the connection? If they understand that, they’d be more inclined to believe Charlie and less likely to put her in custody.”
“There’s no guarantee,” Cork said.
“We play the odds. What do you say?”
“Let me guess,” Cork said. “You have a strategy for this.”
Dina smiled demurely. “As a matter of fact, I have. How’s that leg?”
28
Jewell drove with Dina beside her and Charlie in back. They left Bodine and took the potholed county highway toward Marquette. The road was still wet from the rain the night before. In those stretches where the old asphalt tunneled through stands of deciduous trees, russet and gold leaves spattered the road. Jewell kept her eye on Charlie in the rearview mirror. The girl hunkered down in her seat, quiet, staring out the window as sunlight and shadow exploded against her face. Occasionally she brought her hand up and idly fingered the line of rings and studs that marked the piercings of her left ear, or she scratched the stubble on her head, the emerging ghost of her lost hair.
Charlie had shaved her head over football. When classes began in September, she sought a spot on the eighth-grade flag football team. She was firmly told that football was a boys’ sport. Her response-“Bullshit. Girls can compete just as good”-had earned her a reprimand from the principal. To prove her point, she’d goaded the coach, Mr. Morrow, who also taught earth science, into pitting her against his fastest players in a forty-yard dash. She’d beaten them all by a mile, after which Mr. Morrow explained once again that the issue wasn’t her ability but her gender. If she’d had money or connections, she might have filed some kind of discrimination suit. Instead, she’d protested in her own way: sacrificing her hair. She’d done it with Ren’s help. In his defense afterward, Ren had explained to Jewell that Charlie was hell-bent on doing it anyway and more than willing to go it alone. He’d helped only because he didn’t want her to hurt herself with the razor.
