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  Goose tried her best to read the psychiatrist’s report, but it made her eyes swim. She looked up from the bed at the boxes she’d trucked up from Victoria, and for the first time that week considered whether starting to unpack properly would be less boring than the alternative. She hadn’t even peeled the tape off a couple of them, the ones containing the pictures (no hammer or pins to hang them with) and the kitchen stuff (too busy to cook, or so she’d told herself). The apartment smelled of microwaved MSG already, though not strongly enough to mask the undertone of whatever cleaning product it had been soused with before she moved in. It looked discouragingly temporary. Clothes on the floor, stuff lying sideways on the one shelf. She wondered whether it might be better to leave it like that. Not much point straightening the place up if she was about to be discharged.

  The only thing about the medical reports that caught her eye was the proliferation of negatives. No sign of . . . No evidence of . . . No indication that . . . Schizophrenic disorders can be ruled out . . . However many times they threw down their net, it always came up empty. Jennifer was unfathomable.

  They sent her home. It was nearly the holidays. The TV crew would have camped on the Knoxes’ doorstep if they’d dared, but with an aboriginal family that was never an option. The Band chief had publicly requested that they stay away, and no producer in Canada was going to pick a fight with the First Nations. The story went quiet. For a couple of weeks nothing was added to the file. Cope must have been praying that the case had drifted quietly to join all his other unresolved and forgotten failures. Every RCMP station had a hinterland full of cases like that. By then, too, wild conspiracy theories about a worldwide computer virus were starting to emerge. Someone had coined a suitably newsworthy name for it: the Plague. There were countries where government departments and major industries were beginning to deny they were affected, ensuring that the whole Internet assumed the opposite. The stories from England were getting more lurid by the week: people setting fire to piles of banknotes, bands of Satanists roaming the snow, students proclaiming the dawning of the Age of Something or Other. The news cycle moved on.

  And then it cycled back, with a vengeance. Goose remembered going out one morning not long after Christmas and passing the papers stacked outside the convenience store. There on the front page was a close-up of that first photo of Jennifer, looking stern and frightening and interesting, under the headline: MURDERER!

  Ms. Knox had changed her story completely. She’d been trying to protect her girl all along, she claimed, but she just couldn’t do it anymore. According to the new statement she gave Cope, what had really happened that night was that she’d come home to find Carl blundering around outside the house in the dark. He and Jennifer had had a fight and she’d locked him out and broken the light. When his mother arrived he’d been going through the yard, looking for something to break down the door. She shouted up to the bedroom; Jennifer swore at them and told them she’d kill them if they came inside. They broke the door down and went upstairs to try to calm her. She pushed Carl, he fell all the way down, and when she saw she’d broken his neck she passed out.

  Goose hadn’t appreciated it when she read the story online down in Victoria, but now that she’d worked through the police records in sequence she saw Cope’s dilemma very clearly. On the one hand the mother was a terrible witness. On top of that, she’d just spent two weeks at home with a baby, a ten-year-old boy with serious problems, and a daughter who (presumably) wouldn’t acknowledge her existence with so much as a word. It wasn’t hard to imagine her motive for coming up with this new story. On the other hand, the new version fitted the facts as well as the old one, if not slightly better, and it had the priceless bonus of doing away with the need for a suspect. If there’d never been an intruder, there was no housebreaker and child molester on the loose; there was no one Cope had failed to catch.

  Now, of course, everyone wanted a piece of the case again. The sarge was on TV every other day, visibly trying to remember media training courses he’d taken in the days when the Internet was a cult mystery known only to a handful of geeks. The Band insisted that tribal mediation and traditional justice should be the first resort. The word aphasia was introduced to millions of Canadians for the first time. Free Jennifer groups were formed before she’d even been accused. Goose had been hooked like everyone else, for a few days. The magic of television joined forces with the court of public opinion to turn Jennifer’s impassive, unsmiling face into the mask of a silent psycho.

  Her mother kicked her out of the house. Jennifer couldn’t go to school. They’d tried for one day, the first day of the semester, and (of course) she’d sat, saying nothing, doing nothing, freaking out the other kids so badly they sent her home at lunchtime. The younger boy, Cody, was becoming seriously disturbed by his sister’s behavior too, according to a badly spelled report from Child Welfare. The Band offered to take her in, but now Cope had another, easier option. Goose saw how strongly he must have been tempted by the thought of handing the whole business over to the courts. He took her into custody. The Girl Who Wouldn’t Talk became a juvenile accused of a serious crime.

  From that day in early January onward, the file bulked up like it was on steroids. The inspector came back, at least partly because he sounded so much better on TV than Cope had. There was a whole disk devoted to copies of the negotiations among various agencies over whether and how Jennifer was going to be tried, who was going to look after her in the meantime, and—this was the bit Goose tried to concentrate on, though it was hard to track details through the blizzard of officialese—where. The girl hadn’t gone home again, that was clear. It looked like the Band had taken responsibility for a while, before apparently giving up. Which made sense: aboriginal justice systems were good at what they were mostly needed for, which was dealing with stupid boys committing the kind of petty crimes where involving the police and the courts would only make things worse. Jennifer’s problem wasn’t a First Nations problem, no matter how much they wanted it to be. The problem was that she was the only person who knew what had really happened, and she wouldn’t tell anyone. Pretty much by default, the only way to find out the truth was to let a judge decide.

  Goose flipped papers back and forth, scrolled files up and down. It looked as if Jennifer had spent the time before they could get her into court the way anyone else accused of a crime would have: in custody, in the station. In a cell.

  Nowhere else to go. It was the zero option for juveniles, everyone knew that. If there’d been any alternative to custody they’d have taken it. But there was no sign of any alternative in the files. No fostering, no refuge. No one wanted her. No one, Goose imagined, could stand that terrible relentless silence within their walls.

  Once lawyers got involved the production of paperwork turned industrial. Goose sighed and checked the time on the laptop screen; ten already. She couldn’t see any point trying to wade through the court reports. If she did she’d probably still be sitting in a T-shirt on her bed when the ferry left tomorrow afternoon. Anyway, she knew roughly what had happened. Jennifer hadn’t spoken during the judicial proceedings, not even to identify herself, not even when the judge explained that the law required her to confirm her identity, not even when threatened with contempt of court or whatever they called it. So there’d been no trial. The judge had sent her for another psychiatric evaluation, down to a big facility in Nanaimo. Off she went for more interviews, interventions, diagnoses. The results were precisely the same as they’d been all along. However much paper was poured in, nothing came out. She was a psychiatric event horizon.

  Goose couldn’t stop thinking of Jennifer in her cell: sitting, staring, immaculately unresponsive, like an automaton perfectly disguised as a person, as impenetrable to medical or legal or judicial analysis as a black hole.

  She stood up, stretched. Her apartment was, she had to admit, unforgivably bleak. The excuse she gave herself was that she didn’t know anyone u
p here yet. No visitors meant no need to unpack or tidy up or make the place look like a home. Her domestic life had come down to the essentials: soap, clothes, and the Internet. She thought about Skyping Annie just to take a break, but it was one a.m. in Toronto and Annie would either be out or asleep.

  There were other places she could go on the Internet for a break, of course. She could go anywhere. That was why you didn’t really need a home once you’d unpacked the laptop. Just a private space with a reasonably fast line. You didn’t need to know anyone either. She could go on the Internet and log in as scrumgrrl, who could be anyone, anywhere, and talk and stuff with girls she didn’t know at all.

  She scowled at the scatterings on her bed. There was nothing in the file, nothing she didn’t already know. If there was a secret accomplice, some school friend of the kid’s maybe or some sympathetic adult who’d been waiting quietly all this time for a chance to bust her free, they’d left no traces in the paperwork.

  Besides, the accomplice theory was nonsense anyway. Cope and Jonas were both right. No one could walk into the station, even when it was unmanned, and unlock a cell. No one except her colleagues could unlock the front door of the station, come to that. The only thing that could have happened was that she’d left both doors open by mistake; but she hadn’t.

  Jennifer knew what had actually happened, of course. But she’d never tell, even if Goose could find her.

  Goose wondered whether anyone had tried making her talk. It must have been awfully tempting to squeeze a little too hard, push something back a bit farther than it was supposed to go. Just to get some kind of reaction, even if it was no more than a whispered ouch—

  Goose froze midstretch, a curious thought occurring to her. Where had she heard that rumor about the girl singing on CCTV? It must have been something in the news, which meant it could have come from anywhere; but of all the places Jennifer had gone, the only one with CCTV in the rooms was surely the big facility in Nanaimo.

  She sat down again and flipped through the relevant folders and disks. It took ten minutes to find the reference, a brief sentence at the bottom of the kind of one-page sheet that nurses left clipped to the foot of hospital beds. Beneath ticked boxes and blood pressure numbers it read: Security reports patient seen dancing overnight. No footage. Uncorroborated. The scrawl wouldn’t have caught her eye if someone hadn’t circled it with a different color pen and added in the margin SF 12/1. She spent another ten minutes hunting for further details, without success.

  She tried to remember the story. The security guard must have said something to the press, was that it? In which case . . .

  She realized she’d been waiting for an excuse to plug in the ethernet cable. Well, why not. She’d been going through files for nearly three hours. She’d tried. She should have known it was useless anyway. Jennifer had vanished and she wasn’t going to find her, any more than any of the people who wanted answers from the girl were going to get them. She might as well relax for a bit, try to get some sleep, be ready to face Cope with her failure tomorrow.

  She did at least Google the story first thing after connecting the laptop. There were pages and pages about Jennifer Knox, covering the usual spectrum from responsible to deranged. Sticking to the news sites, she found archived articles. A guy who monitored the CCTV overnight had indeed claimed that he’d seen Jennifer get out of bed and shuffle around the ward, mouth moving, but once it turned out there was no sign of anything of the sort in the recorded footage, everyone just assumed he’d been trying to get a buck or two from a gullible reporter. Goose must have only remembered half the story. Still, it made no difference to her either way. It was just a tiny thing she’d latched onto, something about Jennifer that might not have been a complete blank, the faint suggestion that there might be something going on behind those hard dark eyes of hers, but it was nothing. No help at all.

  She pushed the papers and disks back in the folder and dumped it on the floor. She’d get them back in the right order later. She smoothed back her hair and adjusted the Anglepoise lamp, bending its light against the wall, making the room dimmer and warmer.

  The laptop chimed at her. Skype. For a happy second she imagined Annie deciding to check in on her before she went to bed. Then she saw that the call was from her father.

  She sighed. It was another thing she’d been putting off for a few days. She pulled the T-shirt down so she was sitting on its hem and tilted the head of the lamp away from the wall to brighten the room. It made her pasty and weary-looking in the laptop’s camera, but she didn’t mind that. It might even help her keep the conversation short.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Séverine! Hold on . . .” Moving jerkily, even more badly lit than she was, her father’s head and shoulders wobbled and jerked around a corner of her screen, his eyes directed out of shot. She heard a mouse clicking. “How are you, angel? I talked with Thérèse earlier, thought I’d give you a try . . .” More clicking. His image had the peculiar gormless, distracted, washed-out quality she thought of as Skypeface. She inspected the picture her own camera was projecting, trying not to fall into the same wide-eyed and slack-jawed look, practicing for later. “Okay, what do I need to . . .” Her father leaned forward, making the dome of his head loom. He frowned, mouth half open. She could see the nicotine stains on his teeth. “I’m not seeing you. Is your camera working?”

  She waved. The mini-Goose in the white T-shirt waved back at her from her screen, microseconds later. “Uh-huh. Go to the menu, click on—”

  “I did all that. Look.” He stabbed a finger at the space below the camera, as if she was standing over his shoulder. “It says your name on the window, it’s just there’s no . . . All I can see is grey.”

  “Maybe the line here can’t handle it. So how’s Tess?”

  “Hmm?” He was still trying to make it work.

  “Tess. You said you were talking to her.”

  “Oh. She’s still with that guy.”

  “Get used to it, Dad.”

  “I’m trying. This is pissing me off. I hate these machines. Maybe if you call me?”

  “Just leave it, okay, Dad? I can see you fine.”

  “You’re not hiding something, are you?”

  “No, I’m not hiding something. So everything’s okay there?”

  “I guess. Not as busy as we ought to be, but I still got work. How’s up-­island?” He blinked at the screen and tapped keys, only half listening to her.

  “Good. We had a bear chase a couple of moose through town today.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “No, of course not. Dad, can you leave the computer alone and talk?”

  “Sorry, angel. It’s . . .” He leaned forward, squinting at whatever he was or wasn’t seeing on his screen.

  “Just close the window, okay?”

  “It’s weird. It’s not like static. It’s ripples. Looks like water.”

  “Close it, Dad.”

  “Yeah.” A click, and his attention settled on the camera. “Sorry. So, you’re good? Settling in?”

  She told him about the weather, the apartment.

  “Maybe I’ll come visit. There’s supposed to be lots of fishing up there.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “You got room for a guest in the apartment?”

  “No. There’s places to stay in Hardy. It’s cheap this time of year.”

  “I don’t take up much space.”

  “There’s no room, Dad. I’d show you if you could get the picture working.”

  “I probably can’t leave the business that long anyway. It takes all day to drive up there, is that right?”

  “There’s a flight once a week.”

  “I can’t afford a plane. Hey, did you hear about the airport in Montreal?”

  “No.”

  “They closed it. All flights canceled. Thérèse was supp
osed to go to New York.”

  “Shame for Tess,” Goose said, dutifully. She got on all right with her sister, especially at a distance, but she’d long ago stopped pretending not to resent her for being the glamorous one who got whatever she wanted.

  “Some security thing with the computers, that’s what they’re saying. She and that guy were about to check in.”

  “He’s got a name, Dad.”

  “Whatever. They were using those do-it-yourself machines that print your boarding passes? It printed junk.”

  Goose was getting impatient. “Uh-huh.”

  “She reckons it’s this Chinese virus.”

  “There’s no Chinese virus, Dad. I’m a law enforcement officer. If China was engaged in cyberterrorism, I’d have heard about it.”

  “You wouldn’t have heard jack shit, angel. This stuff goes way over our heads. Those guys are doing stuff people like us don’t know the first thing about.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about your own toaster.”

  “Maybe.” Even in the bad light of his desk lamp, with the dark brown bachelor decor of his den swallowing the back of his balding head, the whole scene sluggishly pixelated, she could see his stubborn face coming on. “I got a message from the bank today.”

  “Yeah. Me too. Same message, I bet.”

  “I don’t like it when they start sending messages about security. The ATM in town shut down yesterday too.”

  “We had the same thing.”

  “Up there?”

  “Yeah. It’s not a big thing. We spoke to someone about it. Just a glitch.”

  “Who did?”