“I know. I’m going,” she said.
“You’re going home?”
She unscrewed the lid of the jar and held the glass in the air. Her fireflies discovered their freedom one by one, an expanding constellation in the dark forest. She put the lid back and gave the jar to Jo. “Come on, Little Bear,” she said.
Jo watched girl and dog walk up the slope toward the road. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going where you want me to go,” she said.
7
Jo worked an exhausting fifteen hours in the Shawnee Forest the next day, as much to purge Tanner Bruce from her mind as to make up for lost time after the rainy day. Maybe she also did it to prove she wasn’t sick. She monitored and searched for nests in all of her “natural edge” study sites, the most difficult to work in because they had to be far from human disturbances, and once she reached them, she often had to wade through riparian thickets of catbrier and stinging nettle.
The sun had dropped behind the treetops when she, and the variety of creatures that had attached to her, climbed into the Honda. Exercise and the green world had rejuvenated her, as they always did. Tanner and his loutish opinions were still with her but ignorable, like a malfunctioning idiot light on a car dashboard.
But she couldn’t clear the little alien from her thoughts. From the moment she awoke, Jo had chastised herself for not seeing the girl to her door, though she doubted the girl had gone home. When Ursa walked away she’d said, I’m going where you want me to go. The more Jo tried to interpret what that meant, the more ominous it sounded. Yet she’d just stood there and watched the girl disappear into the night.
She turned onto Turkey Creek Road, certain the girl would be at Kinney Cottage waiting for her. Then she would wish the girl had disappeared. In the last bit of gray twilight, she pulled up the gravel driveway. She looked at the hickory in the front yard. No girl. No dog.
She dropped her gear on the screened porch and walked to the fire pit. “Ursa?” she called. The only reply was the peent! of a nighthawk foraging over the field behind the house.
A car was coming. No one drove that far down the road unless they were lost. A NO OUTLET sign at the start of the road prevented most people from mistaking the road for another. Jo strode out front as Egg Man’s white pickup, barely recognizable in the late twilight gloom, rounded the corner. His tires crunched to a stop behind her car, and he turned off the motor. Whatever he had come to say would take some time.
Jo walked out to meet him as he stood out of the truck.
“I heard you come down the road,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She kept distance between them. “What’s up?”
He stepped closer. “I think you know what. You’ve dumped the alien on me.”
“I didn’t tell her to go to your house!”
“Why didn’t you take her to the police?”
“Did you?”
He walked nearer, close enough that she scented strong cooking aromas. Whatever he’d had for dinner smelled good enough to make her hungry.
“You should get this light fixed,” he said, looking up at the utility pole.
“It went out two weeks ago, and I decided I like it better dark.”
“It’s not better when some hooligans decide a dark house is an easier target than a lighted one.”
Hooligans. Who used words like that anymore?
He rubbed his hand back and forth over one bearded cheek. “This girl is a real piece of work. You know what she’s doing right now?”
“Reading War and Peace?”
“Then you know.”
“Know what?”
“How weirdly smart she is.”
“I told you that the day we talked about her.”
“Yeah, but now I’ve seen it up close. My mother thinks she’s really bright, too.”
“Your mother?”
“I take care of her. She’s sick.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, echoing what so many people had said to her.
He nodded.
“Did the alien tell you her name?” Jo asked.
“She calls herself Ursa Major because that’s where she’s from.”
“Same name she gave me. I’m thinking Ursa might be her real name.”
“So do I,” he said. “I looked all over the internet for a missing girl called Ursa.”
Jo moved closer to him. “Did you see that Missing and Exploited Children website?”
“I did,” he said.
“Did you see the picture of the shoes?”
“You saw that, too? How can that be? How is it no one misses that dead boy?”
“Sounds like you’ve been going through the same process I did,” she said.
“At least five times I nearly called the sheriff’s office. But I decided to talk to you first.”
“I have no advice,” she said. “Unless you’re willing to lock her in a room.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I called the sheriff the night you and I talked. She didn’t tell you about that?”
“No. What happened?”
“She ran away, like she said she would. The deputy never even saw her.”
“Damn,” he said. “I had a feeling that would happen if I called. What did the deputy say? Did he know of any missing kids?”
“He didn’t. He acted like I was wasting his time. He didn’t say he’d try to find her—even when I told him about the bruises.”
His body visibly tensed. “She has bruises?”
“On her neck, arm, and leg. They’re covered by her clothes.”
“Jesus. Do the bruises look like they’re from abuse?”
“There are finger marks in one of them.”
“Did you tell the cop that?”
“I made it clear I was certain someone had hurt her. But the guy is biased against kids being taken out of their homes. He told me a story about his friend in middle school. The kid was put with abusive foster parents, and he ended up killing himself.”
“He told you not to turn her in?”
“Not exactly. But he said people often take foster kids for the money. He said even if Ursa’s bruises were from abuse, she would lie about how she got them. He said a foster home might be as bad as where she came from, and she would know that.”
“What kind of screwed-up advice is that for a cop to give?”
“Is it?”
“You agree with him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t had time to think since I talked to the guy. I had visitors yesterday . . .”
“Ursa told me.”
“You know what I figured out yesterday? I don’t think she’s from around here.”
“Strange that you say that . . . ,” he said.
“Why?”
“I had the same thought today. When I showed her newborn kittens, she went nuts. She said they were a miracle. She’d obviously never seen small kittens, and country kids see lots of them.”
“She had another miracle?”
“Only three to go, she says.”
“Her first miracle was baby birds.”
“She told me,” he said.
“Like you said, a country kid would have seen baby birds at least once by her age. I think she’s from a city and maybe got dumped out of a car.”
“She talks like she’s from around here.”
“Maybe Saint Louis,” Jo said.
“They don’t have that much country twang over there.”
“Paducah?”
“I searched every southern state that might produce that accent, even as far as Florida,” he said. “She isn’t listed as missing.”
“If her caretakers dumped her out of a car, they obviously won’t report her missing.”
“Maybe she ran away,” he said. “She’s too smart for whatever idiots would do this to her. I never told you what she’s working on.”
“What?”
“She saw some books about Shakespeare on our shelves and asked if I liked him. When I told her I love Shakespeare . . .”
Jo lost his next few words while she absorbed that Egg Man loved Shakespeare.
“. . . she was going to name the six kittens after people in Shakespeare’s plays. She asked to use my computer to read about Shakespeare’s characters so she could decide which names to use. That’s what she’s doing right now, studying the plays.”
“She did this with me, sort of plugged in to my interest in birds—even read some of my Ornithology textbook. I think she does it to make people attach to her.”
“Maybe that’s how she survives her screwed-up family.”
“They obviously aren’t attached.”
“No shit.”
Jo leaned against the front of his truck and pressed her hand to her forehead.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I’m too tired to deal with this right now.”
“You look like you need to sit down.”
She stepped away from his truck. “I put in a fifteen-hour day. What I need is a shower, dinner, and sleep.”
“First, would you talk to her?”
“About what?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I have a confession. Ursa and I came over to look for you twice tonight.”
“Why?”
“She’s worried. She says you have cancer.”