said. “Let me talk to Jo about it.”
“The dinner was delicious. Thank you,” Jo said, rising from her chair. Gabe gestured her toward the front door, and when Ursa tried to follow, he said, “Will you do me a favor? Put Jo’s dishes in the sink and rinse them.”
“You’re just saying that so you can talk about me,” Ursa said.
“I’m saying it because I hate doing dishes. Go on.”
He led Jo out the front door and down the porch steps for further privacy. “She can’t stay here. My mother doesn’t know she slept here last night.”
“How could she not know?”
“I didn’t know either. When I went to milk the cow, the dog came barking at me from the barn.”
“She slept in the barn?”
“I guess so.”
“Poor kid. She’s been sleeping in Kinney’s shed.”
“I have a feeling she’s been through worse,” he said.
“Thank you for helping her. She looks like a different girl tonight.”
“Yeah, but she can’t stay. My mother will make me turn her in if she finds out we don’t know where she lives.”
“I guess we have to figure out how to do that. But I can’t take time off tomorrow. I have too many nests that need monitoring.”
“Well, don’t expect me to do it. I’m not locking her up like an animal.”
“I know. It’s horrible to imagine, isn’t it?”
He looked down at Little Bear, as tame as Jo had seen him, licking at the pork chop scent on her fingers. “What if we wait?” he said.
“Wait for what?”
“Don’t you think it’s odd that she set this deadline with the five miracles? Why do that?”
“To stall, of course.”
“But maybe there’s a reason. Maybe she’s waiting for someone she trusts to come home or something like that.”
“Haven’t we established she isn’t from around here?”
“She could have moved here in the last week.” He glanced at the door to make sure Ursa wasn’t listening. “Maybe a grandmother takes care of her and she’s in the hospital. Maybe when her grandmother got sick she had to come here to live with an abusive relative and she ran away.”
“I think up stories like that, too.”
“It fits the situation.”
“What if the grandmother never gets better?” Jo said.
“What if she does and we got the poor kid put in foster care?”
“How long would we wait for the theoretical grandmother to reappear?”
“I’m just saying we should think about it for a few days. Maybe she’ll learn to trust us and tell us the truth.”
Ursa stuck her head out the front door. “Are you done talking about me?”
“Nope. Get back inside,” he said.
The door shut.
“I think we could get in trouble for waiting,” Jo said.
“No one’s reported her missing. No one gives a crap about her, not even that cop you talked to. And like he said, she could get stuck in a shitty foster home, and I see no reason to rush that when we might find a better solution.”
“If we turn her in, we could make sure where she goes isn’t shitty.”
“How?”
She had no answer.
“If you want to turn her in, do it,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“Then take her back to Kinney’s.”
“And leave her alone when I go to work in the morning?”
“Drop her at my road as you drive by. I’ll be doing morning animal care.”
“That’s early.”
“I know. I hear you drive by. She’ll deal with it.”
“How will you explain her to your mother?”
“She’s a local kid who likes hanging out at our farm.”
“I don’t feel right doing this,” she said.
“Don’t you feel worse about locking her in a closet and calling the cops on her?”
“Damn it, I do.”
9
For four days Jo and Gabe surreptitiously exchanged Ursa. Sometimes it felt like she and Gabe were a divorced couple passing a child between their homes. But more often it was like some sort of illegal trade because they handed Ursa off in the dark hours of predawn and twilight. Jo checked missing children websites every night when she got home, expecting to see Ursa’s haunting brown eyes with every scroll of her finger. But after more than a week, no one had reported her missing.
On the third day, Gabe took Ursa to a yard sale to buy clothing, which resulted in a wardrobe heavily biased toward the color purple and screen prints of big-eyed animals. By the fourth day—dressed in decent clothing, well fed, and playing outdoors for long hours—Ursa didn’t look like a changeling anymore. The dark circles under her eyes disappeared, her skin turned a wholesome pink, and she’d gained a few pounds.
Each night after