Copper River

  He nodded as if he understood. “How’s Ren holding up?”

  She lit up and dropped the cigarettes and lighter back in her purse. “He’s scared for Charlie.”

  “We all are. She’s a good kid.”

  “Who you think killed her father.”

  “They’ve already run the prints on that baseball bat. There were only two sets. Hers and Max’s. And Max didn’t kill himself.”

  “So it had to be Charlie?”

  “I didn’t say that. It just doesn’t look good for her.” He threw his hands up uselessly. “I’ve never worked a homicide investigation. The most I’ve ever been involved with here are a couple of suicides, and that’s different. I mean, things like this just don’t happen in Bodine.”

  “No? What about Tom Messinger?”

  “That was twenty years ago. But I get your point. The unthinkable can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone. Right?”

  She saw it in his eyes, the unspoken Daniel.

  After her husband’s murder, when the allegations arose that law enforcement officers were responsible, something happened in Jewell’s thinking. Police—all of them, every one—became deadly snakes to be watched for and avoided. The sight of the uniform itself was enough to send her anger spiking. She understood how irrational this was, but that’s how she felt.

  She looked for a place to tap the ash from her cigarette. Ned dug into his wastebasket and handed her the empty Dr Pepper can.

  “You know Charlie didn’t kill her father,” she said.

  “I don’t. And neither do you.”

  “If she did, she had a good reason.”

  “That may be. The important thing is to find her. If you or Ren hear from her, you need to let me know. I’ll deal with the sheriff’s people.” He leaned toward her again and his voice had an odd edge to it, sharp but not vicious. “Jewell, this is a case of murder. If you know where Charlie is, or if you find out and don’t say anything, it could get you into a lot of trouble. I’m serious.”

  “I’m sure you are.” She glanced outside and saw that Ren had been joined by one of his friends. “Why suicide?”

  “What?”

  “Why do the sheriff’s people think the girl in the lake was a suicide?”

  “For one thing, she wasn’t dressed for the weather. No shoes, no coat. So probably not accidental. Also she had no identification. I guess that’s something suicides do, remove anything that might identify them. And she’s a teenager with piercings everywhere and tattoos.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Seems to matter to Olafsson.”

  “Any marks on her body?”

  “The waves battered her pretty badly against the rocks. The ME’ll be able to determine if any of the damage came before her death. Why does this interest you?”

  “Just curious how a cop’s mind works. Me, I deal with horses and cows. Simpler creatures.”

  “And smarter?” He tried a smile, but gave up quickly. “It feels good to be talking to you again, Jewell.” He waited in a silence that got long and awkward.

  “Are we done?” she finally said.

  She saw the flicker of disappointment in his face, but she didn’t care.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  She dropped the butt of her cigarette into the Dr Pepper can, handed it to him, and left.

  Outside on the sidewalk, Ren had run into Stash, who was carrying his skateboard under his arm.

  “Dude, I heard about Charlie’s old man. That must’ve been, like, seriously fucked. You hear from Charlie yet?”

  “No,” Ren said. “Nothing.”

  “This sucks royally. I heard they pulled somebody out of the lake. I heard it was a chick.”

  “It wasn’t Charlie.”

  “Man, that’s a relief. Hey, what about that body we saw in the river?”

  “You saw.”

  “Maybe it was the same body.”

  Ren hadn’t really believed in what Stash claimed to have seen. Now he wasn’t so sure. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t you tell the flatfoot?”

  “The what?”

  “The constable.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Right now all I can think about is Charlie.”

  “Something else, dude. Some douche bag stole my weed from the picnic shelter.”

  Ren remembered the previous night when he’d kicked the cigar box under the leaves before he and Charlie fled.

  “Probably the wind,” he told Stash. “Maybe it fell. Did you check under the leaves?”

  “I checked everywhere. Zippo.” He squeezed his eyes together as if he’d felt a sudden pain. “My name was on that box.”

  Ren considered pointing out how many times he’d told Stash it was a stupid thing to do, but it didn’t seem worthwhile. He also felt responsible for the loss and wanted to get off the subject as soon as possible.

  “You’ve got more.”

  “I was just thinking of going over to Dunning Park, make sure I’ve still got weed there. Want to come?”

  “No, thanks. My mom’s inside.” He tilted his head toward the constable’s office.

  “‘I killed him for the money and the woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.’ Fred MacMurray, Double Indemnity. Catch you later, dude.” Stash dropped his skateboard, gave it a push with the Doc Marten on his right foot, and rolled off toward Dunning Park.

  In a minute, Ren’s mother came from Ned Hodder’s office. Even though she knew that it wasn’t Charlie’s body the police had pulled from the lake, she still looked plenty worried.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?”

  She looked at her watch. “Let’s see if we catch Charlie at Providence House.”

  19

  Jewell called to let Cork know the dead girl wasn’t Charlie and to say she and Ren were headed back to Marquette.

  Cork hobbled from the phone to the sofa. He caught sight of Ren’s sketchbook sitting on an end table where the boy in his haste had dropped it.

  “He likes you, you know,” he said, easing himself onto a cushion.

  Dina turned from the window where she’d been watching what blew past the cabin on the wind. “Who?”

  “Ren.”

  “He’s a nice kid.”

  “No, I mean he’s quite fetched with you.”

  “‘Fetched’?”

  “In my neck of the woods we still use that word. Means—”

  “I know what it means. You’re crazy, though. To him, I’m an old lady.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Great. All the good men are gay, married, or under fifteen.” She swept a few strands of hair from her face. The day had been so busy that she hadn’t had a chance to do much with it, but she still looked good. “I need some coffee. Want some?”

  “I’d take a cup if you made it.”

  He sat back and listened to the wind sweep around the cabin like a great flood around a small island. He felt marooned, out of touch with the world beyond the old resort. He also felt helpless. Although he’d proved to himself that he could get around despite his wounded leg, the reality was that he had nowhere to go, no way to move toward resolving everything that threatened.

  Which got him to thinking about the issues that were unresolved. Not all of them looked hopeless. His people, the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, were closing in on Lou Jacoby’s daughter-in-law, Gabriella, and her brother, Tony Salguero, for the murder of Gabriella’s husband. The case wasn’t nailed down yet, but everything was in place. The Winnetka police had good leads connecting Salguero with the murder of the other Jacoby son, Ben. Not enough for an arrest, but they were pushing hard in that direction. These were positive things.

  There was another issue, however, that was nothing but a deep well of rage. Cork had worked at keeping himself from thinking about it, because whenever he did, he started to go ballistic.

  The man who’d raped Jo.
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  Man? Hardly that. An angry rich kid who’d assumed Jo was something she wasn’t—Ben Jacoby’s lover. He’d used Jo to lash out at the man he hated—his father. Cork had that much figured, but knowing the motivation didn’t blunt the horror of the act or its effect. He couldn’t think about the young man, whom he’d never seen, without imagining his fists breaking the bones of the rich kid’s face, his knuckles covered in the rich kid’s blood.

  “You okay?”

  At the feel of Dina’s hand on his arm, he looked up.

  “I’ve been talking but you haven’t heard a word, Cork. For a minute there you looked like you were staring down a cobra. Are you all right?”

  He heard the wind again, felt the soft cushion of the sofa, the lingering touch of her hand, smelled the aroma of the freshly ground coffee beans, and he came back to the moment.

  “I don’t like this waiting,” he said.

  She smiled. “You’d make a terrible PI.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Four-ten. Fifteen minutes later than the last time you asked.” She headed back to the kitchen. “You ask me, you need to talk to your family.”

  “I’d love to hear their voices, but until this thing with Lou Jacoby is settled I won’t risk it. ‘An eye for an eye,’ he said to me. I don’t want him even thinking about my family. I’m afraid if he knows I’m in communication with them in any way, he might use them as leverage.”

  “Threaten them?”

  “Exactly.” He laid his head against the sofa back. “Maybe I should just head down there and kill him, eliminate the risk.”

  He heard the clatter of cups on the countertop, the gurgle of coffee being poured. Dina came to his side a moment later and handed him a full cup.

  “Go down there?” she said. “With that leg? I doubt it. And let me clue you in to something else. You’re a lot of things that probably aren’t good, but a cold-blooded killer you’re not.”

  She went back to the kitchen for her own cup, then returned to the window.

  “What things?” Cork said.

  “Huh?”

  “You said I was a lot of things that aren’t good. What things?”

  She looked back at him and rolled her eyes.

  Later, she stood at the open door. Beyond her the sky was going dark. The wind blew straight out of the north now, and a cool breeze came through the door screen. Dina was working on her third cup of coffee. She’d be up all night, Cork figured.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?” he said.

  She kept her back to him and shrugged.

  “What was your childhood like?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Something you said this afternoon made me wonder.”

  She turned back to the darkening sky. “I didn’t have a childhood. My mother was an alcoholic. I took care of her. Until I wised up and left.”

  “When was that?”

  “When I got tired of everything, including her boyfriends pawing at me. About Charlie’s age.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Relatives first. It didn’t take me long to realize where my mother’s problems came from. Then I was on the streets for a while.”

  “Harsh,” he said.

  “Reality check.”

  “And you got yourself together?”

  “Not without help. A social worker. Marcia Kaufmann. A smart woman with a dry sense of humor and a big heart. She helped me get a place to live, finish school. She worked with me until I was off to college. Sometimes you’re born into the wrong people’s lives. If you’re lucky, you stumble into the right ones.”

  Cork heard the sound of Jewell’s Blazer.

  “Here they come,” Dina said.

  A couple of minutes later, Ren walked in. His mother was a few steps behind.

  “Well?” Cork asked.

  The boy shook his head and looked down at the floor. “She wasn’t there.”

  20

  Death visited Ren that night. It came in the form of a girl with a body blue as lake ice. Her hair drifted behind her, lifting just a little now and then as if caught in a dreamy current. She opened her mouth and spoke to him, words that later he wouldn’t recall. She pointed at him in an accusing way, and the tattooed snake on her arm came alive. It crawled down her skin and hung from her wrist for a second before dropping to the ground, where it slithered toward him. He tried to back away, but his feet were sunk deep in black mud, cemented there. Broad, chestnut-colored bands marked the snake, and Ren thought, Copperhead, and panicked because he knew it was deadly. Thinking, too, in the middle of his fear, Odd, because there were no copperheads in the U.P. of Michigan. Thinking finally as the snake wriggled across the surface of the mud and coiled to strike, Dreaming …

  And he woke.

  It was raining, a steady downpour. The wind was still up and drove the rain against the windows so that the panes, as Ren stared at them from his bed, seemed to weep.

  Although he’d dreamed of the dead girl in the lake, it was Charlie on his mind when he woke.

  “Dead,” he whispered, out loud and hopelessly. “Oh Jesus, she’s dead.”

  He stared at the ceiling and he wondered what that meant, to be dead.

  His father had been murdered fifteen hundred miles away. He was just gone. He became the emptiness of the cabin, and that’s how Ren had thought of death. Emptiness. A grabbing at air. A conversation stopped in mid-sentence. A body from which the soul had simply departed. He’d learned in church that the soul could go to different places: heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo. His grandfather had told him the Ojibwe believed the dead traveled west on the Path of Souls to a beautiful place.

  But that was after. What about the slide into death? What about the dying?

  Until he saw Charlie’s father on the floor in a puddle of blood and brain, he’d never before thought about what his own father might have felt. His father, he realized, must have died in much the same way. Did he know what was happening? Did it hurt? Was he scared?

  The girl in the lake, what did she feel? She was just a kid, like Ren. He’d been in the lake before, but only for moments at a time because the water was so cold, so painfully cold. Suicide, the constable had said. That seemed terribly lonely, to feel all that pain, to sink alone into the darkness with the light still above you, to know that you were about to die.

  And Charlie? What about her?

  He’d begun to cry, softly, because he didn’t want his mother to hear. He didn’t mind crying when he was alone. It felt good. Sometimes it was the only way to let out everything that he kept squeezed inside.

  A thump at his window startled him. Something had hit the screen. A pinecone blown by the wind? He waited. The thump came again, sharp and deliberate.

  The night and the rain made everything outside impenetrable. He threw the covers back and crept across the room. He reached the window just as a fist came out of the dark and rapped on the screen. He lifted the pane.

  “Charlie?” he called hopefully.

  He received no response.

  Then Charlie’s voice: “Let me in, asshole. I’m freezing.”

  He hurried through the dark cabin to the front door and opened it. He stood on the porch waiting for Charlie to appear. Finally she slipped around the corner of the cabin and dashed toward Ren.

  As she reached the first porch step, a flashlight beam burst over her. The source came from somewhere behind Ren, from the direction of the other cabins. Charlie tried to stop, to halt her momentum in mid-stride and backpedal. Her feet slid in the mud. She managed a difficult spin and began to sprint toward the trees that marked the boundary of the woods that edged the resort. The flashlight followed at a dead run.

  Ren leaped from the porch and brought up the rear of the chase.

  Shit. Someone had been waiting, someone who knew that Charlie would eventually come to the old resort as she’d often done in the past. Ren’s heart galloped. His feet were bare, and alt
hough the cold of the ground penetrated his soles like icy needles, he hardly noticed. The rain instantly soaked his pajamas and the material clung to his skin. He held to one hope: that Charlie, the fastest runner in Bodine Middle School, would not be caught.

  His hope collapsed when he saw the flashlight hit the ground as Charlie was tackled twenty yards ahead of him. He lowered his head to run faster, not knowing at all what he’d do to help his friend, knowing only that he had to try.

  Then he heard a familiar voice come from the black shape that sat on top of Charlie, pinning her to the ground.

  “Charlene Miller,” Dina Willner said. “Or am I crazy?”

  When Dina brought her in, the girl smelled like roadkill. Jewell ran a hot bath and gave her a sweatshirt and sweatpants to wear afterward. Charlie sat on the sofa near the leaping flames of the fire Ren had laid in the fireplace. The flare and shadow that the fire created on her face gave her a restless, jumpy appearance. She drank hot chocolate and refused to look at Dina.

  Jewell fixed her a ham sandwich and gave her some Fritos. Charlie tore into the food.

  Ren, who’d put on jeans and a flannel shirt, sat beside her on the sofa. Cork could see the boy’s eyes were shining with delight. Every so often, Ren floated his hand toward Charlie as if to touch her, to be certain she was real, but he always drew up shy.

  While the girl was bathing, Ren had asked Dina how she knew Charlie would come.

  Dina had put on dry clothes—a lime green sweater and dark jeans—and she stood near the fire as it spread across the logs. “People are pretty predictable, Ren. I figured she was hiding and hungry and you were her best hope for food and safety. If she was afraid of being seen, she’d come at night. I just posted myself to watch your cabin and I waited.”

  Cork thought about all the coffee she’d drunk that afternoon. He realized she’d been planning her stake-out even then.

  “How did you know she was alive?” Ren asked.

  “I wanted her to be, Ren. That’s all.”

  She’d smiled at him across the room and Cork saw a flush of the boy’s face that had nothing to do with the heat of the fire.