William Krueger - Copper River

“Looking for Charlie,” Dina said calmly.

That stopped him. “Charlie?” He looked at her with the same befuddlement that had been there when he first found Jewell. “Here?”

“Ned, please listen,” Jewell said. She put her hand gently on his arm, but he shook it off. “We were thinking,” she struggled on, trying for the right words, “that there might be more people involved than just Stokely and Bell.”

“And you naturally thought of me,” he threw back bitterly. “How flattering.”

Cork came into sight now, too. He stepped from the house and stood beside Dina.

“You, too? I should have guessed. Find anything interesting?”

“Stokely didn’t kill Bell,” Dina explained.

“Hell, I know that,” Ned said. “In a few minutes you would have, too.”

“What do you mean?” Jewell asked.

“I tore my shirt at the lumberyard,” he said, turning so that Jewell saw the rip. “I was coming back here to put on another one and to call you guys. I think I’ve got a suspect.”

“Who?” Cork said.

Ned didn’t reply immediately. He turned on Jewell. “You think I had Charlie? How could you believe I’d do something like that, Jewell? And all those kids buried up there? Do you really think I’m capable of that kind of butchery? Jesus, after all these years you don’t even know me.”

“Ned, I’m sorry. I didn’t think…all this is so confusing and scary…”

“Am I scary? Is that why you don’t talk to me? Don’t look at me on the street? Am I some kind of monster to you?”

“No, Ned, no. It’s not that. I’m just not ready-”

“Have I pushed you? Have I pressured you?”

“No, no. You’ve been nothing but sweet.”

“Then why this?” He waved toward Cork and Dina and the opened door.

“It was us,” Dina answered. “Jewell defended you down the line. We overruled her objections.”

“What made you think I might be involved?”

Dina carefully laid out for him their reasoning. At the end, she said, “You’re a good cop. I’m betting you’d have done the same.”

“I wouldn’t break into someone’s house.”

“Even if you believed you might be saving Charlie?” she asked.

Jewell thought he softened a little, though he still kept his distance from her.

Cork spoke up. “You said you had a suspect.”

“Yeah.” The late-afternoon sun was in his eyes and he turned so that he didn’t have to squint. “I got to thinking after I dropped you all off. Like you, I figured from what Wes said that Stokely probably didn’t kill Bell. There might be a lot of reasons someone would put a bullet in him, but for my money it was all about those buried kids. So if Stokely didn’t do it, who did? I went back to thinking about twenty years ago, too, thinking like you that if Tommy Messinger and Calvin and Del were all involved in that girl’s murder, there was a good chance someone else might have been with them.”

Jewell said, “I looked at the team photo, Ned. I couldn’t see anyone else still here except for you and Calvin and Del.”

“The guy I’m thinking of wasn’t on the team, Jewell. At least not that year. Who was Tom Messinger’s best friend, do you remember? The same guy who spoke at his funeral and who wrote that long editorial the Courier published, pleading for understanding about what Tommy had done and about his suicide. It was very moving and persuasive, as I recall.”

Jewell felt as if the sky had suddenly opened. “Gary Johnson.”

“Johnson,” Ned said. “He couldn’t play football that year because he broke his leg in August. He fell from a ladder while he was working for my father here in the orchard, remember?”

“And he was in a cast through most of the season,” Jewell added.

“Right.”

“I thought he was an all-American at Michigan,” Dina said.

“A walk-on,” Hodder replied. “He had to prove himself because the scouts had nothing to look at. But he was at every game with the team that year, and he was at the banquet in Marquette and at the private party afterward. If he wasn’t in the car with Tom Messinger, I don’t know who else it could have been.”

Jewell said, “He’s been out at the cabins, very interested in Charlie. He said it was because it was news.”

“More likely he was desperate to get his hands on Charlie,” Dina threw in. “But since he couldn’t, and he knew that things were coming apart, I’ll bet he decided to get rid of his slimy partners and sever his connection, let it all go down on them.”

Jewell said quietly, “This is Gary we’re talking about.”

Dina gave her a brutally cold stare. “If you have a better idea, let’s hear it. If not, we need to move and find Charlie.”

“What do we do?” Jewell said.

“We should take all this to Olafsson or the state investigators,” Hodder suggested.

“That doesn’t help Charlie if Johnson has her,” Dina said. “I prefer the direct approach. Where does he live?”

“You tried the direct approach here,” Hodder pointed out. “Haven’t you trespassed enough?”

“Look, if we’re wrong, it’s embarrassing and we’ll apologize. But what if we’re not wrong? What’s he doing to her now even as we stand here?”

Jewell said, “Gary’s got a home on Lake Superior a few miles south of town.”

Hodder nodded. “He’s probably there now. I stopped by the Courier office yesterday afternoon to talk to him, but they told me he’d gone home sick. I tried again this morning and got the same story.”

“Hiding?” Dina suggested.

“Let’s find out,” Cork said.

I t had been a hard day for Ren. Although his mother insisted he miss no more school, he wasn’t able to concentrate. At lunch when Amber Kennedy dropped her notebook beside the table where he was eating and bent to pick it up giving him a clear view down her blouse, he barely noticed. His worry about Charlie consumed him.

He ditched his afternoon classes and searched for her. He tried her father’s trailer, then in a moment of brilliant deduction thought about the abandoned lumberyard next door. She wasn’t there, either. He checked the old freight warehouse on the harbor that had most of the windows broken out and pigeon droppings spotting the concrete floor. No Charlie. The only other possibility he could think of was that she’d broken into one of the summer cabins on the lake or along the river, but there were way too many to check them all.

He stopped at the Farber House and Mrs. Taylor let him use the phone to call home. No one answered. He left a message saying he was hanging out in town for a while, and not to worry. He’d be home in time for dinner.

He went to the picnic shelter where he’d got high with Stash and Charlie and where all the trouble had begun. He sat on the table and watched the river sweeping past in striations of white and black water.

Where was Charlie?

He’d been worried before, only to find that she’d taken care of herself just fine. He shouldn’t be worried now, he tried to tell himself, but he couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling. Everything important in his life seemed to have changed or be changing. His father dead. His mother lost in grieving. Charlie getting weird. Bodine suddenly a scary place. He wished he could go back and stop time, freeze everything in place. He longed for it all to be comfortable and familiar, like the ground under his feet.

He finally got up, followed the Copper River to the old mine, and checked it again. Empty.

It was late when he started home. The Huron Mountains were eating the sun. The woods were full of long shadows. Far to the east, a few feathery clouds were already tinted with the glow of sunset. His mother was probably home from work, making dinner. She’d be worried. Still, he walked slowly, weighted. By the time he reached the Killbelly Marsh Trail, the sun had gone down and the path he followed was a tunnel of cool blue light. He turned off the trail and headed through the trees toward the cabins, past the shot-up car behind the shed. His mother’s Blazer was parked in front of Thor’s Lodge, but the Pathfinder was gone. Ren stepped inside the cabin and found it empty. The evening light through the windows illuminated the place with a steely grayness. Ren sensed something was wrong and wondered if an emergency had pulled the adults away. He left the door open and hurried to the kitchen, hoping for a note.