Where the Forest Meets the Stars(9)

The fist pounded again. Jo went onto the porch and faced a uniformed man through the screen door. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “I’m Joanna Teale.”
“Did you call about a girl . . . a ‘homeless’ girl, you said?” the man said with a local drawl.
“I did. Come in.” She led the deputy onto the porch. He looked toward the open wooden door, his face sallow in the glow of the bug bulb. “Is she in the house?”
“Come inside,” Jo said.
The deputy followed her into the living room, closing the door behind him to keep in the air-conditioning. Jo faced the man. His nameplate said he was K. DEAN . He was in his midthirties, balding, a little pudgy, and his plain, round moon of a face was eclipsed by a deep scar that ran from his left jaw up his cheek. With the casualness of habit, the man dropped his gaze to Jo’s chest. Certain he’d find nothing as riveting as his scar there, Jo waited for his eyes to return to hers. Two seconds, maybe less. “The girl ran away when you knocked,” she said.
He nodded, peering around the house.
“Do you know of any missing kids or AMBER Alerts around here?” she asked.
“I don’t,” he said.
“There aren’t any missing children?”
“There are always missing children.”
“From around here?”
“Not that I know of.”
She expected him to ask questions, but he was still looking around as if evaluating a crime scene. “She showed up yesterday. She’s around nine years old.”
He turned his attention to her. “What made you think she’s homeless?”
“She had on pajama bottoms . . .”
“I think those pants are what kids call a ‘fashion statement,’” he said.
“And she was hungry and dirty. She wasn’t wearing shoes.”
His slight smile didn’t move his scar. “Sounds like me at age nine.”
“She has bruises.”
Finally, he looked concerned. “On her face?”
“On her neck, leg, and arm.”
Suspicion tinged his green eyes. “How did you see them if she had on pajamas?”
“I let her shower here.”
His eyes narrowed even more.
“Like I said, she was dirty. And I had to keep her busy while I waited for you to arrive. I gave her dinner, too.”
The way he was looking at her, as if she’d done something wrong, was infuriating.
“I still don’t see how you came up with her being homeless,” he said.
“By homeless, I meant she’s afraid to go home.”
“So . . . she isn’t homeless.”
“I don’t know what she is!” Jo said. “She has bruises. Someone is hurting her. Isn’t that all that matters?”
“Did she say someone hurts her?”
The girl’s alien story would muddle the already exasperating situation. “She wouldn’t tell me how she got the bruises. She wouldn’t tell me anything, not even her name.”
“You asked?”
“Yes, I asked.”
He nodded.
“Do you want a description of her?”
“All right.” He didn’t take out a notebook, only nodded more as Jo described the girl.
“Will you look for her—in the morning when it gets light?”
“If she ran, she doesn’t want to be found.”
“So what? She needs help.”
His contemplation of her seemed judgmental. “What kind of help do you think she needs?”
“Obviously she needs to be removed from whoever hurts her.”
“Send her to a foster home?” he said.
“If necessary.”
He mused for a moment, stroking his fingertips on his scar as if it itched. “I’m gonna tell you something,” he said, “and you might take it wrong, but I’ll say it anyway. One of my friends in middle school was taken from his mother because she drank and pretty much let him run as wild as he wanted. He was put with people who took foster kids for the state money—which happens more than you’d think—and he ended up a lot worse off than if he’d been with his mama. The foster father hit him, and the mother verbally abused him. My friend died from an overdose when he was fifteen.”
“What are you saying . . . you think she should be left in an abusive home?”
“Now, I didn’t say that, did I?”
“You implied it.”
“What I implied was, don’t pull that girl outta the pan and drop her into the fire. Those bruises might be from climbing a fence or falling out of a tree, and if you turn her in, she’ll probably say that even if it isn’t true. Kids are smarter than we think. They know how to survive the shit that’s dealt them better than some welfare worker who never spent a day in one of those kids’ shoes.”
Were those the unspoken rules Jo had sought? Or were they only the opinions of one bitter man who’d lost a boyhood friend?
“I guess this means you won’t look for her?” Jo said.
“What would you have us do, get the dogs out after her?”
She showed the deputy to the door.


4

Jo took a flashlight out the back door and looked for the girl. A front that was expected to bring rain the next day had moved in, its clouds conquering the moon and stars. Jo already smelled a hint of rain in the warm humid air. But she found no trace of the girl.
The rain arrived a few hours later, a hard patter on the cottage that woke Jo out of a deep sleep. She thought of the girl, possibly alone in the dark woods in the rain, and she wished she hadn’t called the sheriff. She looked at her phone. 2:17 a.m. Just a few hours into her mother’s birthday. She would have been fifty-one.