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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