Copper River (18 page)

She turned and went back into the warm cabin.

Cork stood alone in the cold wind, wondering if his was really the voice of reason, or simply the rumble of a grumpy old man.

“R
en?”

He woke up, groggy. “Huh?”

“You asleep?”

He tried to focus and through a drowsy murk saw Charlie standing next to his bed, dressed in the blue sweatsuit his mother had given her. He rubbed his eyes. When he looked at her again, even in the dark he could see the worry on her face.

She sat on the bed and shoved him with her hip so that he made room. They both sat with their backs against the head-board.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “Whenever I close my eyes I see him.”

“Who?” Then he understood. “Oh.”

She drew her legs up and hugged them, as if protecting herself.

Ren said, “I saw him, too, Charlie. I went looking for you at your place and I found him. I was really scared that something had happened to you, too. Where’d you go?”

“The old mine.”

Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it? Two summers ago, while they were hiking along the Copper River a couple of miles outside of town, they stumbled onto an old mine dug into a steep, rocky ridge overlooking the river. They’d been picking blackberries and had felt an unusually cool pocket of air that seemed to have its source somewhere behind the thicket. Charlie scaled the ridge and dropped behind the vines, then hollered for Ren to do the same. He found her standing at the mouth of an excavation, a hole not much taller than they but wide enough for both of them to fit in together. Sunlight penetrated the tunnel, revealing a collapsed ceiling a dozen feet beyond the entrance, which blocked further access. The beams that had been used to shore up the opening were still in place and seemed solid. That whole summer they’d used the old mine—which Ren suspected had been the work of one of the early gold prospectors—as a hideout. Mornings, they’d head off with a packed lunch, swim in the river where the water pooled below the ridge, then hike to the cave and eat in the cool shade it provided. From there, unseen, they watched fishermen and canoeists and kayakers, and once saw a couple of teenagers swim naked in the same stretch of water they’d just enjoyed.

“You stayed there this whole time?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You should have told me or something. I was going crazy. I thought you were…” He didn’t finish, didn’t want say the word
dead.

“I freaked. I wasn’t thinking.” She put her chin on her knees and stared at the window, which was streaked with rain. “Not really.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, I
was
thinking. And one of the things I thought was that I knew it was going to happen.”

“Like, psychic?”

“No, just that someday because of his drinking he’d be dead like that. Just like that.”

She grabbed the pillow from behind her back and put it close to her face and spoke at it angrily.

“I wanted to yell at him, Ren. I wanted to kick him and yell at him and tell him, ‘I told you so, you total screwup. You and your drunk buddies. Why couldn’t you just stop?’ ” She buried her face in the pillow.

A moment passed, then Ren ventured quietly, “Alcohol’s like that. It doesn’t let you go.”

“Other people stop. Why couldn’t he?” She threw the pillow across the room. It hit Ren’s desk and something toppled to the floor. “Sorry.”

“It was just my Hellboy model.”

“Sounded like I broke it.”

“A little glue, it’ll be okay.”

“Ren?” Her voice got soft. “What if I’d been in there?”

“You weren’t.”

“I could’ve been.”

“But you weren’t, and I’m glad.”

“Maybe everything would be better if I had.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What am I going to do? I’m, like, an orphan.”

Orphan.
It was an odd word to Ren, archaic somehow, from a different era. It made him think of that comic-strip character with orange frizzy hair. But Charlie was right. That’s exactly what she was.

“You can stay with us,” he said.

“Oh yeah, like those social service freakazoids are going to let that happen.”

“I mean it. We’ll figure a way.”

Lightning flashed somewhere in the distance, an instant of blue light that filled the room and made Charlie a bright, solid presence in his bed.

“I thought for a while you were dead,” he said.

She turned her head, her face dark, unreadable. “Why?”

“They pulled a dead girl from the lake today. We heard she was a teenager. I thought at first it was going to be you.”

“Who was it?”

“They don’t know.”

“Ren.” She drew in a sudden breath. “Maybe it was the same body Stash saw in the river.”

“I was thinking that, too.”

“Was she from around here?”

“Constable Hodder said he didn’t think he’d ever seen her before. He said he would have remembered because she had this weird tattoo on her arm.”

“What kind of tattoo?”

“A snake or something.”

He felt Charlie stiffen.

“Which arm?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Left?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

She turned to face him, tucking her legs under her. “Did he say anything else?”

“Like what?”

“How big was she? Small like you?”

“I’m not small.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why are you asking all these questions?”

“I might know her. There’s this girl at Providence House. She’s there all the time. Her name’s Sara Wolf. She has a big—I mean really big—snake tattoo on her left arm.”

Ren thought back to that afternoon and remembered something. “The constable said it was big for such a small girl. He also said she had lots of piercings.”

“Oh shit.” Charlie sank back. “How?”

“They think suicide.”

“Bullshit. That’s bullshit.”

“
Shhh.
Keep your voice down.”

“No way she’d off herself.”

“Don’t get mad at me. I’m just telling you what they said.”

Another flash of lightning, so far away the sound of the thunder took forever to reach them. In the long quiet, Ren heard Charlie crying. Charlie never cried. He wasn’t sure what to do. Awkwardly he reached an arm around her shoulders. She laid her head against his chest, and he felt her shaking.

“The world is fucked, Ren. Totally, screamingly fucked,” she sobbed.

After a minute, she pulled away and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her borrowed sweatshirt. She lay down next to Ren and rolled over so that her back was to him. He gently nudged his pillow under her head. In a little while, he could tell from her breathing that she’d gone to sleep.

Ren lay a long time staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the storm outside, thinking Charlie was probably right about the state of the world.

Totally, screamingly fucked.

C
ork didn’t sleep well. The pain in his thigh kept him uncomfortable and he had fevered dreams: that his house in Aurora was full of mud and his children were sinking into it and he couldn’t find Jo anywhere; that he was driving a car and couldn’t get the brakes to work no matter how hard he pressed the pedal; a brief one in which instead of bullets he was loading wads of toilet paper into the cylinder of his revolver.

He woke up and the first thought he had was about what Dina Willner had said to him the night before: that sometimes he wasn’t a very compassionate human being. She might have been talking about recent events, but Cork suspected it went a bit further back.

She’d entered his life as a consultant hired by Lou Jacoby to see to it that Cork didn’t screw up the investigation of Eddie Jacoby’s murder. Dina had made it clear early on that she found him seriously attractive. Cork, devoted family man though he was, had found himself sorely tempted in return. He’d held back from acting on that temptation, but in the end he’d used Dina’s feelings against her. Briefly he’d led her to believe that she’d charmed him into submission and in doing so had laid a trap she’d stepped into. His motive had been understandable—to unravel the tangle of misdirection the Jacobys had looped around the case and to get to the truth of Dina’s involvement—but he’d hurt her badly and he knew it. Although the situation probably justified his actions, he wasn’t proud of his behavior. Especially considering all that Dina had done since to help him.

So sometimes he lacked compassion. Big deal. Hell, what did she expect? What could anyone expect of him now? It had been a tough couple of weeks. Three times someone had tried to kill him. He’d been suspended as sheriff, suspected of murder, was on the run from people trying to fit him into a coffin, and because of his wounded leg he was useless to everyone who needed him. To top it off, his family didn’t have the slightest idea of his current situation, whether he was alive or dead.

The wind had stopped and he couldn’t hear the rain anymore. Birds were just beginning to sing, and he knew dawn wasn’t far away. He thought about getting up, but instead lay there thinking about being a good cop.

A good cop. It was something that had been important to him, the line he followed to get through a lot of tough situations. He was a cop largely because his father, whom he’d loved fiercely, had been one.

He was still tired. He closed his eyes.

And his father walked out of the dark across four decades and stood beside him. He wore a tan chamois shirt, dungarees, and Converse high-top tennis shoes. He was tall and clean-shaven. His hair had recently been cut. He held a football in his big hands.

Day off?
Cork asked.

Thought we’d toss the pigskin
. His father smiled, displaying an incisor outlined in silver.

Cork loved Saturday afternoons in the fall when the leaves were like drops of butter and brown syrup on the grass, and the chores were done, and for an hour before supper his father directed him on passing routes in the backyard—down and out, post, buttonhook—floating the ball into Cork’s hands. “Little fingers together,” his father would call out. “And bring the ball into your body. Cradle it into your body.”

I can’t play today,
Cork said.
Bum leg.

His father tossed the ball straight up a couple of feet, giving it a twist so that the laces spun. He caught it with a soft slap of leather against his palms.

I screwed up,
Cork said
.

You think so?

I should be with Jo and the kids. I should be protecting them.

I thought you were. Isn’t that what this is about?

Did I do the right thing?

I can’t answer that for you.

There’s a girl here. She ought to be talking to the police.

Isn’t that you?

Out of my jurisdiction.

Doesn’t stop you from helping.

I’ve missed you,
Cork said.

He could smell the leather of the old football, the scent of raked leaves clinging to the chamois shirt, the bay rum his father used every morning as aftershave.

Then it was gone.

An instant later he was aware of a pounding at his door that brought him awake in the faint light of early dawn.

“Cork?” It was Jewell.

“Yeah?”

“We need you. Something’s happened.”

He hobbled into Jewell’s cabin dressed in the jeans he’d borrowed the day before and a clean shirt that Jewell had given him that had also been Daniel’s. Everyone else had already gathered around the dining room table. Cork could smell coffee brewing.

Gary Johnson, the newspaperman, had called early and given Jewell some bad news. A friend of Ren’s, a kid named Stuart Gullickson, had been hit by a car the night before and was in critical condition at a Marquette hospital. Johnson thought Ren would want to know.

Jewell poured coffee for Cork and topped off what was already in Dina Willner’s cup. Ren and Charlie were drinking orange juice.

“I’m taking Ren to Marquette to see Stuart,” Jewell said.

“I’m going, too,” Charlie said. From her stubborn tone, Cork gathered it wasn’t the first time she’d put forward that proposition.

“I’ve told you, Charlie, it’s too great a risk,” Jewell replied. “If someone sees you, we could have the police here in no time.”

Charlie gripped her juice with both hands as if she were trying to strangle the glass. “He’s my friend, too.”

“I understand,” Jewell said. “But you’ll just need to be patient until Ren and I get back. I doubt they’re letting anybody but family see him anyway.”

Charlie sat back hard and crossed her arms defiantly. “We’re family, Ren and me.”

“They won’t see it that way, Charlie. You’re not going.”

Ren said to her, “I’ll call you from the hospital.”

Charlie stared at the table with stone eyes.

“Cork,” Jewell said. She gave a nod toward the front door.

He stepped onto the porch with her. The morning was cool and wet from the night storm. Leaves stripped from the trees littered the ground, and the bare patches of dirt had been turned to black mud. The sky was a promising blue, however, and honey-colored sunlight already dripped over the tops of the Huron Mountains.

“You’ll need to watch her,” Jewell said. “I’m afraid she might try to get to Marquette on her own.”

“I’ll put Dina on it. She already ran Charlie down once.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “We’ll feed her breakfast and do our best to keep her mind off things. She’ll be fine until you get back.”

Jewell looked tired. It had been at least a couple of nights since she’d had an uninterrupted sleep. With all the grief she carried, Cork figured it might have been even longer. Her eyes were dark circled and her black hair needed a good brushing. Yet, there was a strength in her voice, a determined sense about her actions that Cork admired.

“If what Gary told us yesterday is true, we might get other reporters out here,” she said.

“We’ll handle them,” Cork replied. “You and Ren do what you have to do.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. How’s the leg this morning?”

“All this activity actually seems to help.”

“I’ll take a look at it when I come back.”

“Deal.”

She turned toward the door and started inside, then hesitated. “Cork, I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“I’ve been hard on you. But I’m glad you’re here.”

He smiled and shrugged. “Family,” he said.