Copper River

  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.

  Her protest got her suspended for two days. For a while the whole incident was a hot topic of conversation in Bodine. Gary Johnson had written a fine editorial supporting Charlie’s position, but it didn’t change a thing.

  Although Jewell often worried about the young woman, she also knew that there was an extraordinary depth to Charlie’s strength, which was good because coming into this world she’d been given little else to help her along.

  Dina Willner was busy writing in a small notepad.

  “What are you doing?” Jewell asked.

  “Preparing an interview, making notes on the questions I want to be sure to ask. I can fly by the seat of my pants when I have to, but I prefer to go in prepared.”

  Jewell nodded, liking the way this woman operated. “How is it you know my cousin?”

  Dina glanced up from the page. Jewell saw that her green eyes held a g
uarded look. “We worked on a case together in Minnesota.”

  “The Jacoby murder, right? The one in Aurora.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He trusts you.”

  From the rear, Charlie said, “He likes you.”

  Dina twisted around in her seat. “What?”

  Charlie kept her eyes on the scenery out the window and spoke in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were something anybody could see and probably everybody had. “The way he looks at you. And the way you look at him, it’s the same. You like him back.”

  “He’s married.”

  “Big whoop.” The girl crossed her arms, then said more darkly, “Ren likes you, too. Must be the boobs.”

  “That’s enough, Charlie,” Jewell snapped.

  “I’m just trying to figure why guys like her.”

  “There are lots of reasons to like people of the opposite sex besides physical attraction.”

  “Yeah?” Charlie leveled her gaze on Dina, who was still turned toward her. “So what is it you like about the gimp?”

  Dina replied calmly, “This is not a conversation I’m going to have with you.”

  “Fine.” Under her breath, Charlie whispered, “Bitch.”

  Jewell braked and pulled to the side of the road. “That calls for an apology. Now.”

  Charlie stared out the window and offered a grumbled “Sorry.”

  “If you’re going to do this with us, Charlie, you’re going to be civil, understood?” Jewell said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s better.”

  The rest of the way into Marquette, Charlie didn’t say a word. They drove past Providence House and parked on a side street a block away. Jewell and Dina got out.

  Charlie leaned out the window. “Why can’t I come?”

  Jewell answered, “Because if anybody sees you with us they may feel compelled to report it to the police, okay?”

  “They’re good people in Providence House,” the girl protested.

  “They also want to preserve the good relations they have with the authorities, I’m sure. And I’d rather not put them in an awkward position. We won’t be long.” She glanced at Dina. “Ten, fifteen minutes?”

  Dina nodded.

  “Charlie.” Jewell reached in and put her hand over the girl’s hand. “Promise me that you’ll wait and that you’ll be here when we get back.”

  “Where would I go?” she asked, surly.

  “Promise me.”

  Charlie tossed her head back and blew out a loud, frustrated breath. “All right. I promise.”

  As Jewell and Dina approached Providence House, a gas motor roared to life in back, out of sight. A moment later, Delmar Bell appeared pushing a power mower along the edge of the yard. The lawn still looked wet, and Jewell could see that the wheels picked up a skin of cut grass as they rolled along. She climbed the porch steps with Dina, found the front door locked, and rang the bell. While they waited, Dina stepped back and appraised the structure, the yard, and the handyman with his mower. Jewell had no idea what interested her, but Dina took her notepad from her back pocket and wrote something down.

  The door opened and the same woman with whom Jewell had spoken the previous day appeared and eyed them warily. “Yes?” A light came into her eyes. “You were here yesterday. Looking for Charlene Miller.”

  Jewell said, “May we come in?”

  “I can’t tell you any more about Charlene than I did yesterday.”

  “We’re not here about Charlene,” Dina said. “We’d like to ask you about another client. Sara Wolf.”

  At the name, the woman’s face went ashen. “I can’t talk about her.”

  Dina held out her hand and magically a business card appeared. “My name is Dina Willner. I’m a private investigator from Chicago, and I’m looking into the disappearance of Charlene Miller and the death of Sara Wolf.”

  “You know about Sara?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, we know.”

  She studied the card, then the faces of her visitors. “Come in,” she said at last, and turned back toward the dark inside the house.

  She led them to a sitting room full of worn—probably donated—furniture.

  “Please sit down.”

  She took one of the shabby stuffed chairs. Dina and Jewell sat on the old sofa. The angle of the sun kept any direct light from entering the windows, and the room felt gloomy. From outside came the drone of the mower, growing louder whenever Bell approached the house and fading as he moved away. The woman still held Dina’s card in her hand.

  “You’re a private investigator?”

  “Yes. And you are?”

  “Mary Hilfiker. I’m the director of Providence House. Who hired you?”

  “I did,” Jewell leaped in. It was close to the truth.

  “To look for Charlene?”

  “Yes,” Jewell said.

  “What does Charlene have to do with Sara?”

  “If we tell you the whole story, we need to have your promise that you’ll keep it to yourself.”

  Mary Hilfiker weighed her choices and finally replied, “You have it.”

  “The police have been here?” Dina asked.

  She nodded. “An investigator. He left a little while ago.”

  “That’s the first you knew of Sara’s death?”

  “Yes. What about this story?”

  Dina told her about the body in the Copper River, about the kids seeing it, about the search at midnight and the mysterious boat, about Charlie and the attack on her father, and finally about the car that had hit Stuart.

  “We think the body the kids saw was Sara. It was carried down the river to the lake, and the storm that night brought it ashore in Bodine.”

  “How would her body have ended up in the river?”

  “We’re wondering the same thing. That’s why we’re here. When was the last time you saw Sara?”

  “A week ago last Friday. She left the shelter in the morning to go to school and her job and never came back.”

  “She was in school and had a job?”

  “You’re wondering why she’d be in a shelter for homeless youth.”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “A lot of good people have an idea about homeless kids, or the homeless in general, for that matter. That chemical dependency or disability or some inherent weakness in them is responsible for their situation. The truth is, I see mostly kids with great potential struggling against staggering odds. Abuse, broken homes, every kind of family dysfunction imaginable. Sure, some of them are users. And some are chronic liars. And some are schemers. All of these are coping mechanisms to deal with a life they didn’t ask for. Removing themselves from that life is often both the best thing they can do—and the scariest. The system fails them, a system overwhelmed and underfunded, and they end up on the street.

  “We have programs for those who find their way to Providence House. One of these programs helps kids finish school and get a job. It takes a lot of guts, believe me. They live here on an extended basis, some for as long as two years. So long as they stay in school and show up for work, we give them a bed and food.

  “Sara had been with us nearly a year. She’d had a hell of a life, but there was something in her that refused to be beaten down. There was a fire in the way she talked about her future, a very real dedication to change and growth. She had hope. God, hope just flowed right out of her.”

  “And then she suddenly vanished?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t that seem unusual?”

  “For many of the kids who come here, this is just a momentary refuge. They stay briefly and are gone—back to their old lives or on to something different. Something better is always my hope. They show up one night, they’re gone the next.”

  “That happens a lot?”

  “Yes. I’d love to have the wherewithal to find them, bring them back, keep them on track, but we barely ma
ke it as it is. Three-quarters of a million children go missing every year.”

  “They don’t all stay lost?”

  “No, but many thousands do, and in my thinking even one is too many.”

  “You said Sara was in a special long-term program.”

  “That’s no guarantee of anything. We’ve had kids here I thought would make it, and despite our best efforts, they still end up back on the street.”

  “So you did nothing when she disappeared?”

  “I called the police, which is something I seldom do, but in this case I was concerned.”

  “Does she have family in the area?”

  “She was originally from a reservation in Wisconsin, but she’d been living with an aunt in Clovis. That’s a little town south of here. It wasn’t a good situation. Her uncle not only abused her, he pimped her. That’s why she came here.”

  “She was Indian?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what tribal affiliation.”

  “Any idea where she hung out when she wasn’t at Providence House?”

  “School and work mostly.”

  “Where did she go to school?”

  “ALC. The Area Learning Center. It’s a special program the school district runs for at-risk youth. It’s on Baraga.”

  “And work?”

  “Spike’s Pizza on Washington Avenue, just a few blocks away. She put in four hours there three afternoons a week.”

  “How’d she get to school and work?”

  “She walked or took a bus.”

  “Can you think of any reason she would have been in the Bodine area?”

  “I can’t. But the police …” The last words had a bitter edge.

  “Go on.”

  “The police believe she may have gone back to prostitution.”

  “Why? Once a prostitute, always a prostitute?”

  “That’s not what they said, but I’m sure that’s what they’re thinking.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ve been wrong sometimes about kids. I believe they’re going to make it and then they just fall apart. But Sara? I was so sure. She was so full of hope. If she was having sex, it wasn’t for money.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “Not that I knew of.”

  “Was there anybody Sara was especially close to here at Providence House?”