“Who gave you the car and the cash?” Hurt asks Pearl, before he asks her anything else.

“He goes by Jane,” Pearl says.

“Did he attack you?” Hurt asks.

“No,” she says. “Kyle Metzger tried to attack me.”

Kateri leans over the table. “Ma’am, he did some significant damage,” she says.

“You should see him,” Pearl says, smug.

Kateri is afraid of pushing her. Pearl is beaten, dehydrated, exhausted. But Hurt keeps going. He just hammers her with questions so she has little time to think in between.

She was attacked by Kyle Metzger, a kid the same age as Shannon, who she bought drugs from, who she’d known since he was eight years old. She didn’t owe him money.

“I didn’t owe him a fucking thing,” she says to Hurt, her eyes wide and indignant. “He had no reason to come there the way he did.”

Hurt points to the defensive cuts on Pearl’s hands and forearms. “And then?” he asks.

“I beat his ass,” she says. “I fought back. I’m not going down for Kyle fucking Metzger. They were coming for my house.”

“Who was?”

“The county. I needed to get out of there, so I took advantage of the situation.”

“How so?” Hurt asks.

She rubs her nose with the back of her hand and then coughs, and Kateri pushes a plastic cup of water toward her so she can drink.

“I wanted to make it look like he killed me,” Pearl says.

“Inside the house?” Hurt asks.

“No, with the bones,” Pearl says.

“You planted the bones,” Kateri says. “And burned them,” she adds. “Where did they come from?”

“From Jane,” Pearl says. “I don’t know what they are. I thought they’d be unidentifiable. But you know,” she adds. “Suspicious. Maybe enough. Enough for me to take Bird and run.”

Hurt scribbles away on his open pad, his handwriting urgent, slanted, but small and neat. Kateri thinks of the map. Pearl and Birdie got as far as Brasher Falls, which is almost to Canada. She could have parked the car, crossed the border on foot through the woods. There are plenty of unpatrolled places to cross over.

“Why did you come back?” Kateri asks. It’s almost a whisper. She can’t imagine what this woman was thinking, so close to her own freedom with her little girl.

“Fuck,” Pearl says. She cranes her neck back, looking at the ceiling, and when she comes up again, she looks like she’ll black out from the rush, like she’s ready to collapse from the physical beating, the stress, the fleeing. “Fuck,” she says again.

“Pearl,” Kateri prompts. She refills the plastic cup from a larger plastic bottle.

“I saw it on the news,” she says. “At a Stewart’s, where they had the TV on behind the ice cream counter.”

“Your disappearance?”

“Shannon’s arrest,” she says. “I can’t,” she says then, and her face breaks, and Kateri thinks she will start to cry, but she doesn’t. She can’t be broken, Kateri thinks. Kateri watches her chew at her lip, mouth folded in on itself, and Pearl says, “I couldn’t let him go to jail for something he didn’t do.” Her shoulders go soft all at once, like she’s deflating. “I did it to Park,” she says. “And I couldn’t do it to Shannon.”