Firekeeper's Daughter

Daunis plans her explanation for why she was snooping around Grant’s office as he leads her upstairs. Daunis doesn’t find herself in his master suite, but in a random hotel room instead. Once inside, Grant sexually assaults Daunis. Daunis tries to get out from under Grant, but he has her pinned to the bed. As he rapes her, he tells her he has a weakness for “hockey girls.” This makes Daunis think of Robin before she completely dissociates from the experience. After the rape, Daunis takes the elevator back to the ballroom alone, seemingly having decided to not speak of what happened to her to anyone; if she doesn’t talk about it then it isn’t real. Back on the dance floor, the DJ plays an honor song and Daunis bounces on her feet, the closest she can come to dancing during her time of grief for Lily. She raises her father’s necklace in her hurt arm.

When Jamie and Daunis leave, Daunis declines the invite to the afterparty and asks Jamie to park behind the school for a moment. In the car, Daunis thinks about Grant’s offer of something for her shoulder pain and then thinks of Robin’s painkiller addiction that turned into an addiction to meth. She also connects what happened to Robin with Grant since Robin was also a “hockey girl.” Daunis wants to tell Jamie what happened to her, but when she plays it out in her head she finds herself wondering, through Jamie’s imagined response, why she wasn’t smart enough to not follow Grant to his room, why she didn’t scream for help, etc. Daunis instead confronts Jamie about the origins of their relationship and the idea he presented to Ron about getting close to Daunis as a way to get closer to the investigation. Jamie isn’t given the opportunity to defend himself, and Daunis punches him in the nose right as Ron shows up. Ron throws Jamie off the case completely on the spot and takes Daunis home. Jamie, bewildered, asks her aloud what happened to her. Daunis thinks about telling him the truth but instead replies, “What happened to me, Jamie? You did” (378). 

On the ride back to her house, Daunis wonders why she is upset with Jamie but isn’t upset at Ron for also putting her in danger through this investigation. Daunis knows that her involvement in the investigation is what led to Grant’s interest in her and sexual assault of her. When Daunis gets home, she sees that her mom left a note that she would be staying at GrandMary’s for the night. Daunis realizes her mother wanted to give her and Jamie privacy in case they wanted to spend the night together. Daunis is touched by her mother’s thoughtfulness, which she suspects originates from her own need to sneak around as a teenager. That evening Daunis dreams again of the last time she saw Travis and Lily, except this time Travis is telling the truth about what happened with the BB gun. Travis tells Daunis that it was Levi who shot the BB gun but that he convinced Travis to take the blame, swearing that he would be so grateful if he did. Instead, Travis was shunned by Levi and the whole school and community. Lily was the only one who knew the truth and believed Travis. Travis tells Daunis how much everyone loves Levi, on and off the ice. Daunis wakes up and remembers the other gift that Levi talked about leaving at her house. After she opens the box that was left on her desk, a framed photo of her, Levi, and their dad, she wonders if Levi is not the person she thinks he is, if all the terrible things others have said or alluded to are actually true.

Daunis checks the bank account activity and sees that over the course of the month Levi has deposited another 20,000 dollars and then wired it to a bank in Panama. Daunis now knows without a doubt that Levi is the drug mule. She decides to break into his room while he and his mother are still at the gala hotel for the weekend. In Levi’s closet, Daunis finds the bank statements from the entire year. They show that Levi started making the wire transfers when he became a Supe. She also notices that the most money was moving during the hockey season; this aligns with the FBI’s suspicion that these drugs are circulating through hockey teams made up of Native kids. What Daunis can’t figure out is how Levi started wiring money while he was still 17. Right before Dana comes into the house, Daunis realizes that Levi may have been making the transfers in her name because the money was coming in and out of a joint bank account. Daunis had just turned 18 when the transfers started.

Dana sees that someone is in the house, but she doesn’t have a key to Levi’s locked door, so she calls the cops. As Daunis is trying to cover her tracks in his bedroom she comes across her father’s scarf, the one she asked Levi for, hidden in his laundry basket. Daunis flees out the window and runs down the street, not knowing if Dana saw her or not. Daunis is sick to her stomach. This whole time, the person she was looking for was right next to her: Levi. Her mother finds her in the bathroom puking and tells Daunis that she can share things with her, that if she’s in trouble, her mother will help her. Daunis finally reveals the reason she keeps so much from her mother is because she doesn’t want to burden her with anything else—she feels like she’s the one who made her mother and her mother’s life so sad. Daunis tells her mother that she feels like the first of all the bad things that happened to both of her parents. Her mother assures Daunis that she is the greatest joy of her life, and that adults are responsible for their choices—that Daunis was never the one to blame for how things ended up. She also tells Daunis that her decision to remain rooted in the past is her own, that her refusal to move forward is not something she is victim to or something that Daunis caused. Daunis is already having flashbacks of Grant raping her and remembers that he told her no one would believe that he assaulted her because the hotel videos caught her walking to his room willingly. Before Daunis’s mother leaves for EverCare, she tells Daunis that Levi showed up with two boxes yesterday. Daunis eventually finds the second box hidden under her hockey bag. The box is filled with the pucks Grant has been donating to Native hockey teams. When Daunis feels that they aren’t regulation weight, she opens one up and finds it filled with crystal meth. Daunis realizes that Levi may be intending to frame her. At this exact moment, Dana shows up at the door crying and asking for Daunis’s help because Levi is in trouble. 

Daunis tries to comfort Dana, who is panicked and shaken, while also concealing her own nerves. Daunis gets tea for the two of them while Dana explains how Levi seems to have gotten mixed up in some bad news with Travis, who he had been visiting on Sugar Island a lot last year. Dana tells Daunis that Levi has completely changed in the last year and she doesn’t know what to do. As Dana is telling this story, Daunis starts to feel strange. It isn’t until Dana is ushering her out the door that Daunis realizes that Dana has drugged her. As she carries Daunis to her car, she says, “All you Fontaines ever do is mess things up” (404). This is when Daunis realizes that the lightbulb symbol in her Uncle David’s notebook wasn’t Stormy, it was Levi. And unlike she previously suspected, Uncle David didn’t go see Angie Flint right before he disappeared, he went to see Dana.