Chapter 3

By gray light Wren knew where the girl would be. A runaway doesn't leave a harbor she's been living in. She just hides deeper in it.

Wren found her in the back lot, in a hull up on blocks under a tarp-a dead shed boat nobody had moved in years. She pulled the tarp back and the girl came up out of the bilge with a length of pipe in her fist.

"Easy," Wren said. "I brought food."

The girl didn't move. Her knee was scabbed fresh, her beanie stuck down flat, her eyes going over Wren's empty hands and her face and the lot behind her, all of it at once.

"You're the one that gave me up," the girl said.

"I'm the one that kept the sheriff from putting his hands on you. Different thing."

"Same thing."

Wren sat down on the rail of the boat, slow, and opened the paper bag. Egg sandwich, an apple, a bottle of water. The girl took the sandwich and ate it standing up, watching Wren the whole time, like a person who had learned that food could be a trap.

"Birdie," Wren said. "That right?"

"Birdie Fenn." Crumbs in the words. "I didn't steal nothing off them docks. I never took one thing. But they made it so it was me, so it was me."

"Okay."

The girl stopped chewing and looked at her hard, looking for the trick.

"You're not gonna say I did?"

"I don't know what you did," Wren said. "I know you ran onto my pier in front of two hundred people with a tape. Tell me about the tape."

Birdie took her time. She finished the sandwich, drank half the water, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. Then she pointed at the boathouse, down the gravel.

"I sleep up in the loft sometimes," she said. "Nobody checks it. Nine days ago he come in with a man."

"Grant."

"Him. The smiling one. And another man, bigger, burnt up like he works outside. The smiling one was mad. He said people don't get paid twice. He said the Meridian was all took care of and there was one loose end left, and it wasn't on no boat." Birdie's voice went flat and careful, reciting. "He said, next time, you handle it, or I handle you."

Wren's hands had gone numb.

"You recorded that."

"I had the machine." Birdie shrugged, small. "I found it in the fish-house dumpster. I keep it in my hat sometimes so nobody takes it. I pressed the red."

The red was record. A nine-year-old in a hayloft had pressed the red button on the worst conversation in Aurora Bay.

"And the copy?"

Birdie blinked. "The what?"

"You heard me ask the sheriff for the machine. You gave it up easy. Which means you know something he doesn't." Wren leaned forward. "There's another tape."

Birdie's face closed like a door. "If I say yes, you take it too."

"I don't want to take it, Birdie. I want to understand it."

The girl looked past her at the road, at the yard, at the whole town that had decided what she was. Then she looked at Wren-really looked-the way you look at the one adult who has walked up to you without a net.

"I dubbed it," she said. "There's a old radio-cassette in the fish house office. I did it at night. Two tapes." She touched the beanie. "I keep one on me. Always."

In the distance, a truck door slammed. Birdie flinched and shrank down into the hull. Wren understood the arithmetic of the girl's life in that flinch: sheriff, then yard, then the man on the tape, and somewhere far behind all of it, a foster placement in Marquette that had blamed her for everything and believed her for nothing.

If Wren turned her in now, she'd be doing exactly what everyone had always done.

"Stay here," Wren said. "I'll bring you a blanket and I'll say I didn't find you."

"That's lying."

"Yeah."

Birdie studied her a long moment. "Why?"

"Because I heard it too," Wren said. "And I think there's a man on that tape that I need to find."