“Well, stayed with,” Charlene said. “Yeah. That week.”
Lived or stayed with, Leith thought. Amazing how a slip of semantics could throw a case so badly off the rails. “What week?” he asked grimly.
Charlene was a girl of short patience, and already she was speaking loudly to show she didn’t appreciate the interrogation. “Sometime April last year. Thought I might move down too, but then we had a big blow-up and I came home. Why?”
“What was the fight about?”
“My drinking, that’s what,” she said, and added belligerently, “But I quit, you know.”
“Good for you.” He said it gravely, wanting her to know he meant it, that he admired anybody who got off that road to ruin, that he hoped she stuck with the program. He said, “Do you know she left Kispiox?”
“Yes, I know.”
“I’m looking to contact her. It’s important. Do you have a number or address for her?”
There was silence on the line, and she said, “Why are you asking about Charlie? What’s going on?”
“Just a few questions about the case. She’s not in trouble.”
She remained tense. “I haven’t heard from her since September. She called from a pay phone, but the line was bad, and all I got out of her was she’s got some big decisions to make, something about her music. Said she may go away a while, has a lot to deal with, not to worry. I didn’t know ‘a while’ to her is six fucking months. I’m this close to reporting her missing.” She paused, and she seemed to listen to his silence, and there was sudden stoniness to her next words. “She is missing, isn’t she?”
“To tell the truth, we thought she was up in Dease Lake with you till now, so we haven’t been looking too hard. Which means she’s probably okay, Charlene. I hear she’s an independent girl. What else did she tell you in that phone call?”
Instead of an answer she said, “We weren’t tight. You understand? You’d think we would be, after all we’ve been through. But it just got in between us, which is how he wanted it, right? Divide and conquer. He’s dead now, which is sweet, and like I said, I kicked the booze, and I think we’ll be okay now, me and her. Just wish she’d call.”
Leith asked her who “he” was and what he’d done.
“Uncle Norm. Norman Wesley. And what he did is none of your business. He’s dead now. It doesn’t matter.”
Leith knew the name, Norman Wesley, a Dease Lake resident who’d got himself murdered last September. He could guess what Wesley had done. So Wesley was Charlie’s uncle, and he’d been murdered in September, which was when she’d left home, which was interesting.
Charlene said, “Charlie’s got a way with words. You wouldn’t know it if you talked to her, but she does. And she wrote these songs, she says, and she’s got ’em on CD, and she’s going to go sell ’em to a recording company and get rich and famous. She was kidding, you know, about the rich and famous, but she wasn’t kidding about trying. Sounded to me like she was heading south, to the city. Scary place for a girl like her. I told her come home to Dease, but for the first time in her life she stuck to her guns, and I guess that’s a good thing. But I know what’s going to happen. She’s just going to get trampled all over again.”
“What d’you mean?”
Charlene’s answer was vague and peppered with language Leith didn’t quite get, but the sense he got was her wayward older sister knew what she wanted, but just didn’t have the strength to get there without being dragged back.
“Dragged back by what?” Leith asked her.
“By a man,” she said. “She’s with some fucking guy, probably. And she’s native, right? So she’s got nowhere to take cover when he gets mean, which they all do in the end. No cover in Dease, no cover in Vancouver. Really, when you come down to it, she’s got nowhere.”
“Sure,” Leith said, knowing what she meant.
Charlene paused, maybe to take a breath, maybe to puff at a cigarette. She said with forced cheer, “Anyway, this isn’t really about Charlie, is it? It’s all about that missing chick, Rilkoff, right?”
“Yeah, it is,” he said. Though really this was becoming more about Charlie West than Kiera Rilkoff. Well, actually it was about both. Two girls gone missing, two singers, mysteriously silent, as he was going to have to tell Charlene now, break the news. He’ d also have to get all she’d just told him taken down in a proper statement via the Dease Lake detachment.
The case was far from over, then. In a way it had just begun.
* * *
Leith had talked to Giroux, and they agreed to talk to Willy again, find out more about this song writing, because music, it seemed, was at the heart of this tragedy. They needed to learn how intimate Frank had been with this other singer, Charlie West.
Leith talked with Frank, but Frank had spoken to his lawyer again and was still saying nothing. Mercy Blackwood told him Charlie West had submitted a song, but Kiera didn’t like it, and it had been scrapped. As far as Mercy knew, Charlie had left town soon after that, and they’d lost contact. Rob Law had nothing to add, aside from a few words explaining how he met Charlie up north on an equipment-buying expedition. In the end, nobody had anything constructive to say about Charlie West, who seemed not much more than a ghost meandering through this whole affair, saying little but humming a tune.
Leith got Willy back in and brought in a translator for the translator, a serious Nisga’a girl who was studying the language. She did a good job of it, Leith thought. Translating in bits and pieces, she relayed a whole raft of rhetoric on Willy’s behalf. Like, “If you don’t teach the children the language, how will they speak to their ancestors, and if they can’t speak to their ancestors, how will they be taught right from wrong?”
Leith had been brought up Catholic and still swore on the Bible in court, but deep down, he knew the job had more or less bullied the religion right out of him. These days he had little patience for spiritual types of any make or model, to the dismay of his parents and brother, all churchgoers who still prayed over every meal.
“There was a time,” the Nisga’a girl translated, “people knew right from wrong.”
Leith highly doubted that too. He asked for more about Frank and Charlie, how they acted together that day they visited the school. The girl translated that Frank and Charlie seemed to be good friends. But no, they didn’t hold hands, didn’t kiss, nothing like that.
Leith asked for more details on the music itself and learned Charlie West was shy about her singing. She told Willy she had made a CD of the songs she wanted to translate, and she’d bring it next time. She sang one song, and it was a good and beautiful thing, Willy said. He had told her that translation would not be easy, that really she would have to learn the language, be fluent at it, before she could sing those words in a meaningful way, but that he would help as best he could.
Leith asked if Willy remembered any of the words to that song.
The translator spoke to Willy and then spoke to Leith. “It was a love song.”
Every other song, in Leith’s experience, was a love song. But then every other thought in a young person’s mind was about love. And this was about love, as it should be. “Did Frank say anything through all this?”
The translator spoke to Willy some more — it was a lot of back and forthing this time — and finally gave Leith the gist. “Frank said nothing, except forgiveness. He kept telling Charlie about forgiveness.”
Forgiveness? Leith thought, startled. About what? Kiera? This was last September, long before Kiera went missing. Was it no crime of passion, then, but a long-planned act, a conspiracy between