“Were you outside today?” I asked her.

Her eyes darted over to the left, a sure sign she was fibbing.

“Without Mom?” I added.

“No,” she said. I watched her cheeks get hot and bright pink.

“Bird,” I said.

She crossed her arms over her chest.

“You can’t go out,” I told her.

She looked at me, point blank, with her big light eyes and her jaw tight.

“Why not?” she asked.

I didn’t have an answer for her. I stalled, and I heard my mother snoring.

“It’s like you’re Mom’s favorite doll,” I said. “And she doesn’t want to share you.”

She got to the bottom of the juice box with a loud, rattling suck.

“You can go out,” she said to me without looking up.

I smiled a little. “I’m not her favorite.”

I thought it would make her laugh, but she started to cry, just a little at first, her lip wobbling and her eyes filling up, but then it roiled into a full-blown sob and she needed to be held, rocked in the living room with her head on my shoulder.

“Bird,” I whispered.

My mother slept through all of it.

When Birdie settled, she lay still on my lap. I raked her hair off her sweaty, damp cheek.

“It’s not fair,” she said.

“It’s not,” I answered. I patted her back, no longer the round curve of a baby but still just the width of my hand.

“You should be a favorite too,” she said.

SEVEN: KATERI

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17

Kateri checks her phone in the parking lot of the Hub while she watches the waitress get in her own car and leave, the lot a mess of potholes and gravel. She has a text from Hurt that says Remains. Please call me.

She tries, and it goes straight to voice mail each time. Hurt phones her finally from outside the park. “There’s no service in there,” he tells her. “I didn’t think there was any point in waiting. They’re bagging and bringing everything to the morgue.”

“You couldn’t wait for me to get there?” she says.

“It’s just bones,” Hurt says.

Kateri looks to the heavy gray sky, as if she can tell time by the passing of clouds. “That’s advanced decomposition,” she says. “She hasn’t been dead that long. The blood was fresh.”

“The body was burned,” Hurt says.

“How far into the woods?”

“Quite a ways, and way off trail. We found some clothing,” he says. “Some articles that we’ll need to confirm but I’m sure are Pearl’s.”

It’s possible, she knows. You can burn a body in the country, in the woods, in a way that you can’t in a bigger town or city. There are fires all the time, especially in the fall. Bonfires, burning leaves; rural folks still burn trash.

The team continues to dig, and Kateri follows Hurt to the county morgue. The building has been built into a hill, the back of it accessible from a lower parking lot below where ambulances and hearses can pull into a garage to collect or drop off a body.