They confirm that they didn’t want the police and never intended for them to come. They tell us they wanted to help her, and the police don’t help anybody. The police are who you call when you want to get someone into trouble.

“When someone’s mean,” Anya says, “and you have to lock them up in jail.”

Marino and I realize without having to say it that the girls weren’t deliberately misleading us about the phone and who they did or didn’t call. It’s clear there are limitations in what they comprehend, and an emergency isn’t the same thing as a crime. One requires medics. The other the police. What this might suggest is that at first the sisters weren’t sure the victim was dead, and they weren’t assuming she’d been attacked. Their immediate thought was she’d had an accident, and their response was to get medical help, which is exactly as their mother has taught them, it seems.

“You weren’t asking for the police to come.” Marino makes sure. “You wanted an ambulance.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think she was alive?” He’s going to keep asking until he gets a satisfactory answer.

“She didn’t move.”

“And the bad smell.” Anya in pink wrinkles her nose.

“Can you describe it?” I ask.

“It smelled like mom’s blow dryer when it won’t work.”

“You noticed an odor that reminded you of your mother’s blow dryer?” I try to decipher what she means, pretending it’s the first I’ve heard of a strange smell.

I’m not going to let on that Barclay told me something similar.

“It gets too hot,” Enya says.

“An electrical smell?” I suggest as I think of the broken lamp.

“If you thought somebody had done something bad to her would you have called the police?” Marino then asks, and after a pause the girls shake their heads in unison.

They shrug and say they don’t know. Then he points toward the clearing, asking them to remember their initial impression when they saw the bike and the woman on the ground. They continue to assert that they thought she was in an accident at first.

“You wanted to help her,” he says, and they nod. “You saw she was hurt,” and they nod again.

“We didn’t want her getting more hurt.”

“Like if another bike might run over her,” Anya in pink says, and her handoff couldn’t be smoother.

“That’s the danger when someone’s down in the middle of the path, right?” Marino doesn’t miss a beat. “Maybe you moved her out of the way a little? So no one would run over her?” he asks, and they nod.

It’s as simple as that.

“What happened to make you sick?” Marino asks either one of them since we don’t know who did what.

“My stomach,” Enya says.