Copper River

44

D ina parked her Pathfinder on the side of the road at the edge of the orchard. They couldn’t see the house, which was deep in the trees.

“If Stokely’s there,” Cork explained, “we don’t want him to spot us coming. We’ll approach through the trees. Jewell, maybe you should stay here. Things could get tricky.”

“I’m going with you,” Jewell said.

“Then you need to do exactly as we say.”

Jewell nodded. She was scared. The whole situation, all the horrible possibilities, terrified her. But she absolutely didn’t want to be left behind.

They closed their doors quietly and crept into the orchard, circling carefully toward the back of the house. Ned’s father, who’d been a lawyer, had kept up the orchard as a hobby, and as a teenager Jewell had spent many fall afternoons hired-along with other of Ned’s friends-to harvest the fruit, which the Hodders sold from a roadside stand. The apples were Northern Spy and McIntosh, still Jewell’s favorite varieties. Ned had often lamented his own inability to keep the orchard in shape, but he was alone in the house and busy with his duties as constable, so the fruit simply fell to the ground. This late in the season, most of the apples had already fallen, and the rotting fruit filled the orchard with a vinegary smell.

As soon as they could see the house, they paused, hidden in the trees.

“I don’t see a vehicle anywhere,” Dina said.

“Garage?” Cork pointed toward a small structure just east of the house.

Jewell nodded.

He indicated the other outbuilding. “Equipment shed?”

“Ned keeps a tractor in there and other stuff for working in the orchard. Ladders, props, pruning things. He doesn’t use them much anymore.”

“Let’s check the garage first,” he said to Dina. “I’d like to know if Calvin Stokely’s truck is in there.”

“I’ll go,” she said. “You cover.”

Cork took the handgun from his ankle holster, slipped behind an apple tree, and waved Dina forward. Jewell stayed back, thinking how horrible this was, coming at Ned as if he were the enemy. It felt so wrong. Dina dashed across the backyard to the side of the garage, which couldn’t be seen from the house. She edged her way to a window and peeked in. She turned back and gave her head an exaggerated shake. Cork pointed toward the shed. Dina went to the corner of the garage and peered carefully at the house for a full minute, watching, Jewell supposed, for movement at a window, an opening door. Then Dina sprinted for the shed. She stood on tiptoe and peered through a dusty window. Again she gave her head a shake. She pointed toward the house.

“Okay,” Cork said over his shoulder to Jewell, “now we check the house. You should stay here.”

“Oh, no,” Jewell said. “I’m coming with you.”

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

Jewell ran hard, passed Cork, and joined Dina at the side of the house, breathless. Cork was several seconds behind.

“You okay?” Dina asked him in a whisper.

“I know what that wounded cougar must feel like,” he said, grimacing.

“Back door or front?” Dina said.

“Back.”

They crept there together. Cork opened the screen and tried the door.

“Locked,” he whispered.

Dina urged him gently aside, reached into an inside pocket of her jacket, and pulled out a small leather case. She took out a couple of items that looked to Jewell like dentist’s tools. She worked on the lock a moment and swung the door open.

Cork put his lips to Jewell’s ear. “Stay here,” he said softly. “When we’re sure it’s clear, we’ll call you in, okay?”

The house swallowed them without a sound.

Outside, Jewell felt suddenly alone and vulnerable. The idea of being afraid of Ned Hodder was alien, yet that’s what she felt. Did she even know Ned anymore? When was the last time they’d had a meaningful conversation? Why had he written a poem about her? How could she have missed so much?

On the road beyond the orchard, a car passed. Jewell heard the sound of the engine mount, plateau, diminish as it sped on.

After that, everything was distressingly quiet. She watched a hawk circle above the orchard, then curve away without a stroke of wing.

Another car approached on the road. This one didn’t pass. The sound of the engine simply died.

What did that mean? Jewell wondered in a panic. What should she do? Shout to Cork and Dina? Where were they? They’d been inside too long, she was sure. Something was wrong. She looked toward the empty drive that wound through the orchard, expecting any moment for Ned to appear. She was a sitting duck, she realized.

She turned to run for the orchard and bumped smack into Ned Hodder. He caught her in his arms. She struggled to break free and stumbled back.

“Jewell?” His boyish face held a look of absolute bewilderment. “What are you doing here?”

“We…I…just…” Her eyes bounced toward the house.

Ned followed them. “That’s Dina Willner’s Pathfinder parked on the road. Is she inside?” He spoke in a deep, menacing tone that Jewell had never heard from him before.

“Ned, listen-” Jewell tried.

He didn’t listen. His face had turned an angry red, and he stormed toward the back door just as Dina stepped out.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

“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.