Copper River co-6

by William Kent Krueger

“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 under-funded, 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 make 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 ha
ve 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?”

  “All the kids liked her. She was our poster child for self-improvement.”

  “The uncle who abused her, did he know she was here?”

  “No. Absolutely not. We guard the kids’ privacy fiercely, and there’s no way Sara would have told him. As far as I know, she’d had no contact since she left them. But it’s my understanding the police are checking out that possibility right now.”

  “If she wasn’t at school or work, was there anyplace special where she might have hung out?”

  “Yes. Muddy Waters. It’s a coffeehouse a few blocks from here. Downtown on Main Street. She liked to study there.”

  “So no reason you can think of for her to be in Bodine?”

  “None.”

  Dina looked at Jewell. “Anything you’d like to ask?”

  “How old was she?”

  “Just shy of fifteen,” Mary Hilfiker replied. “She hadn’t even started menstruating.”

  “Just a kid. My God.”

  “You think someone killed her and put her body in the Copper River?” the woman asked.

  “That’s what I think,” Dina replied.

  “And these same people killed Charlene’s father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to tell the police?”

  “Eventually. Right now it’s all pure speculation. As soon as we have something solid, we’ll go to the authorities.”

  “I’m guessing you found Charlie. Or she found you. How is she?”

  “Safe,” Jewell said.

  “Keep her that way.”

  Outside, Delmar Bell was still mowing the lawn. He glanced their way as they descended the steps, and he killed the engine. In the quiet that followed, he sauntered toward them, his shadow sliding before him like a black snake over the cut grass.

  “Morning, Jewell.”

  “Del.”

  “Any luck finding Charlie, eh?”

  “No.”

  “She’ll turn up. Always does.”

  “It’s different this time, Del. Her father’s dead.”

  “You work here?” Dina said.

  He looked her up and down. Then up again. His eyes hung too long on the curve of her breasts. He wiped his hands on his oil-stained T-shirt. “Who’s asking?”

  “My name’s Willner. I’m a private investigator.”

  “A PI? For real?”

  “For real.”

  “You’re a lot better looking than Rockford, eh.”

  “Thanks. You’re in charge of maintenance here?”

  “In charge?” He smiled, his teeth long in need of a good cleaning. “I like the way you put that. Yeah, I’m in charge.”

  “You get to know the kids pretty well?”

  “Not really.”

  “You know Sara Wolf?”

  “Sure. She was around for quite a while.”

  “But not anymore.”

  “Haven’t seen her for a week, maybe two.” He squinted, lines at the corners of his eyes like the tines of a rake. “That what you’re doing here? Looking for Sara?”

  “If I were, would you be able to help?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, I don’t really know any of the kids.”

  “Not even the ones who are around for quite a while?”

  “They pretty much keep to themselves. Look, I got work to do, eh,” he said. “Jewell, always good to see you.”

  He headed back toward the mower.

  “You know him,” Dina said.

  “He’s from Bodine. Graduated same year as me, same year as Charlie’s father. They were drinking buddies. In fact, he’s the one who told Charlie about Providence House and suggested she think about using it when she needed to get away from her father. It was a good suggestion.”

  “Does he live here?”

  “In back. An old carriage house.”

  Bell yanked the cord, and the mower engine sputtered and shot out a cloud of oil smoke.

  “He didn’t touch me with anything except his eyes,” Dina said. “But I still feel like I need a bath.” She started toward the side street where Jewell had parked the Blazer, writing a note in her pad as she walked.

  “What now?” Jewell said.

  “We find more people, ask more questions.”

  In the Blazer, Charlie was napping in the backseat, curled in a blanket of sunlight.

  “She looks peaceful,” Dina said. “She looks like the kid she really is.”

  “She’s had to grow up fast. I’d love to believe the worst is behind her now.”

  Dina studied Charlie with a soft gaze. “Let’s do our best to see that it is.”

  29

  Before she left, Jewell had removed the Penrose drain from Cork’s thigh, closed the wound with butterfly bandages, and taped a sterile gauze pad over the site, this at Cork’s request. She cautioned him that if he wasn’t careful, the wound would open again.

  “There’s work to do,” he’d told her, “and I can’t do it with a lot of plumbing hanging out of my leg.”

  Although he didn’t like the idea of being less than a hundred percent lucid, he’d taken a Vicodin to help deal with the pain of what he knew was ahead of him. Now he stood in the lane between the cabins waiting for Ren, who’d gone to fetch the ATV from the equipment shed. The plan was to head along the Copper River Trail as far as they could and look for places that might be likely candidates for dumping a body into the river. It was a pretty nonspecific plan and didn’t have a lot of potential for solid payoff, but it had to be done, and Cork and Ren were available.

  Cork watched as the boy swung the shed door wide and went inside. At almost the same moment, he heard a vehicle approaching from the main road. He thought maybe it was the women coming back for something they’d forgotten, but he didn’t want to risk it and slipped back inside Thor’s Lodge. He cracked the curtains and watched as a dusty red pickup came into view. Michigan plates. NMU sticker on the windshield. Locals. Cork pulled the Beretta Tomcat from where he’d snugged it in his belt at the small of his back.

  The truck stopped in front of the cabin and two men got out. The driver stood well over six feet, with carrot-colored hair and a long face. The other man was also tall and had a well-trimmed mustache and black-rimmed glasses. He held what appeared to be the plaster cast Ren had made of the cougar print. The men started toward Thor’s Lodge, but stopped when they heard the roar of the ATV from the equipment shed. They turned and watched Ren bring the machine up the lane. The boy killed the engine and got down from the seat. He smiled broadly and came forward. Cork moved to the door, which he’d left slightly ajar, so he could hear what was being said.

  “Hi, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Hey there, Ren. I dropped by school. They told me you were home today. Feel all right?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “I brought someone who wants very much to ask you a few questions about that cougar of yours. This is John Schenk, a friend from Northern Michigan University. John, this is that remarkable young man I’ve been telling you about.”

  Schenk shook the boy’s hand. “Ken showed me this cast you made of the track. Nice job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Mind if I ask you about it?”

 
“That’s okay.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Over here. I’ll show you.”

  Ren led the man to Cabin 3 and pointed out the track he’d used to make the cast. “This is the one, but there were lots I could have used.”

  “They were all over?”

  “They still are. It’s come at least twice, maybe three times.”

  “Really? When?”

  “The night before last, and again last night for sure. But I’m pretty sure it was here yesterday morning as well.”

  “In the daylight? You saw it?”

  “I heard it. Kind of a scream.”

  That wasn’t the truth exactly. He was relating what Cork had told him.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Why?” Ren asked.

  “For several reasons. First of all, the preferred hunting technique of cougars is stalk and ambush. It’s unusual that a stalking cougar would make its presence known with a scream. Also, they tend to be crepuscular, which means they prefer to hunt at dusk or dawn. And, generally speaking, a cougar in these parts is probably well aware of humans and would tend to avoid them. Ken says you don’t have any pets around here. Is that correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  Schenk furrowed his brow and said, “Hmph.” He looked down at the cast in his hand. “From the size, I’m guessing this is a male. Four and a half inches is about as large a track as you’re likely to find. Probably weighs in at well over two hundred pounds, which is good sized for a cougar. There are a couple reasons I can think of that would bring a big cat this close to humans repeatedly. One would be food-a pet, farm animals, that kind of thing.”

  “We don’t have any,” Ren said.

  “Have you killed a deer or some other animal lately that you’ve dressed and hung somewhere around here?”

  Ren said, “No.”

  Schenk glanced around. “I thought maybe the smell of blood.”

  Which made Cork think about the piss-colored Dart behind the shed with his blood soaked into the seat and carpeting.

  “Another possibility is that it’s been hurt and can’t hunt in its usual way and is looking for garbage or anything else that might provide an easy meal.”

  “It tried our garbage bin,” Ren offered, “but we keep the lid closed and locked.”

  “Sounds like it’s definitely hungry, which makes it potentially very dangerous. Like I say, normally it probably wouldn’t attack humans, but I wouldn’t take any chances.”