20.
“Greetings,” the grandfather said.
He was sitting outside his cabin, in the kind of cane-bottom chair she had once learned to weave. A cool breeze floated up
from the river. It was almost hypnotically green.
Ruby had come straight from the airport, after a red-eye flight. She felt fusty, and her mouth tasted like ashes. She figured
this would be her last trip back to Oregon for this case. When she returned to Georgia, it would be for good—until the case
was over.
“Your son tells me you have a bone that talks to you,” she said.
She said it like it was an everyday thing, to have a talking bone.
“I was wondering when you’d figure that out.”
“You didn’t want to tell me?”
He turned his glossy dark face up to her, his endless eyes.
“She told me to tell you, but I was afraid you’d take her.”
“Can I see it?”
He got up, reluctantly, and felt his way into the cabin. After a moment, he came out, holding the bone reverentially in his
hands. It was wrapped in a long cloth. Ruby saw that the cloth was a scrap of a childhood quilt, and she knew instinctively
that it was a remnant of history.
He opened the quilt to reveal a femur bone. It was yellowed with age, and the surface was pitted.
“Sheriff said it was no one we knew, just some old remains from the poorhouse. But she still has something to say.”
“Like what?”
“Here. You listen,” he said, holding out the bone.
The moment the bone was in her hands, Ruby felt a power surge through her that was so strong it was almost nauseating. The
colors were brighter—they were different, and she saw with eyes that were no longer limited, which was odd, because her own
eyes had closed. It was like she had exchanged one set of eyes for another, and could see even if hers were shut. The world
swayed: It was dark, and then it was light. She was in a dark forest. There was a line of feral pigs, all with whiskered cheeks
and dirt-rubbed snouts: They raised up on their cloven hooves, hairy tails dangling, pink-mottled bellies showing, and they
advanced. In a circle they ran, and in a circle she felt like she was—
Fainting.
“There now, I got you,” the old man said, and it was instinct that had made him move close, and feel the air around her move
as she fell and he caught her in his arms.
Ruby was still holding the bone, as if it were soldered to her hand. She felt sick all over, but it was a premonition: a premonition
of a past that kept happening.
“Where exactly did you find this?”
She crossed the river using an old footbridge made from a railroad trestle that had been unused for over a century, after
the loggers finally left the region. People of the past had laid boards over the trestles, but the boards were rotten now,
and she took care.
Below her, the green water rushed over the rocks, slippery and dangerous. The pools were deep, and the water eddied.
On the other side of the river were the woods, with a narrow, overgrown path. She took the path, plunging her into darkness. There was the sweet smell of ferns, the pungent odor of spruce, and the strong, proud scent of cedar.
Ruby felt for the gun she wore under her arm. She never told people about the gun, kept in a discreet holster. She was licensed
to carry it, trained to shoot, and yet she never had, outside of the range. In some ways, the gun had become another part
of her—an appendage she didn’t use, an extra rib.
The sun barely came through the trees, and where it did, it was the soft white color so close to the mountains. It was like
it had lost all yellow. The flowers were all a dusky pale purple, or gray. It was a land of darkness but beauty. A brown sparrow
danced up a mossy tree limb, but she saw no other signs of life. The sound of the river faded behind her.
The old man had warned her about the feral pigs. Ruby wasn’t worried about them. She had the gun.
The path went deeper into the forest. She passed spruce trees where long, silvery hair was caught on the bark. The pigs had
been there, rubbing on the trees. She touched their musky hair and watched the woods.
She thought about what had happened between her and the bone. She didn’t have a hard time believing it, actually. So many
strange and unbelievable things had happened in her line of work. It was a wonder that so many people lived in the middle
of chaos, where the world could split and take them: It was a wonder how survivors kept on living. She had seen people survive
the most terrible heartbreak, and she had seen them fail for no reason.
If anything, what surprised her was that more people didn’t believe in magic. Not the magic of tarot cards and palm readers.
The magic of a world that could be as beautiful as this—this moment of time in which she walked.
The overgrown path ended, abruptly, at the poorhouse.
Before her were the vast, empty fields. The crops had gone to weeds, and the finches were here, delighting in the early seedheads.
The building she had once imagined had largely collapsed, with great holes in the asbestos roof.
The compost pile behind the kitchen was hardened, and the metal merry-go-round was smashed to the ground.
She took a deep breath. In all her searching for her mother, she had never come here: the place of her mother’s beginning.
She started all her cases at the beginning; why had she never started her own?
She knew why. To come back to the beginning was to acknowledge the end. An end she still didn’t want to face.
She walked across the rutted fields toward the decaying building. The door of a shed hung open, the rusted chain dangling.
She peered inside and smelled the long-ago scent of car oil. The metal shelves held worthless tools, frozen into shapes with
rust.
The front door to the home was boarded shut. She looked at the buckled porch and punched-out windows and knew that the floors
would probably be so rotten from water that had dripped from the holes in the roof, she would fall into the basement.
The wind had turned cold by the time she retraced her steps across the fields. She looked up to see heavy rain clouds. The
snowcapped mountains looked close enough to touch. Up there, she thought, people would be hiking. In bright jackets and using
poles, bought in the city. There would be a ski lodge selling expensive cups of hot chocolate. She felt like a stranger in
situations like that, and then felt bad for it. Those people were just having fun. There was nothing wrong with that.
She stopped back in the clearing. It was here, the grandfather had told her. The burial ground.
The ground was covered with rotting tree limbs and ivy. Ruby had an experienced eye. She could tell that the soil had been worked over. She knew the sunken, pitted appearance of graves.
The sheriff station was closed. A “gone for the day” sign hung in the window, and cheerful lights were left on inside. There was an emergency number on the sign, but that was
not what attracted Ruby’s attention. It was the flyer posted near it, written in the impatient hand of a man with anger on
his mind.
Hunters needed, it said. Pig killing.
In case the words weren’t clear enough for the locals, steeped as they might be in booze or depression, he had added a picture
of a wild pig.
Ruby visited the sheriff at his home, which was a lot meaner than she had expected. It was a cottage at the end of town. Like
a lot of men, he kept a shop in the garage, and it was there that she found him, working on an old Ford Maverick.
“I wouldn’t have taken you for a Maverick fan,” she said, standing in the doorway. The rain was now falling, light and misty
cold. It made the distant sun look metallic.
“Why not?” he asked, hard at work under the hood. He wore coveralls for the job, and looked a bit like a ball wrapped in denim.
She could feel his sadness—she could feel it clear as day.
“I dunno,” she said, lapsing into the vernacular of the region, though she had not been raised here.
“I always liked working on cars,” he said. He stopped and wiped the grease from the screwdriver on his pants leg. “I fix them
and resell them. More a hobby than anything else.”
“Who covers you when you’re off shift?”
“Emergency sends calls to the state police, if there’s an emergency,” he said. “The 911 operators know that one man can’t do the entire job. I get coverage when I need it. I can even take a vacation if I want.”
She knew she could ask, Why did you lie about testing that bone, because I know there wasn’t that kind of DNA testing back then? Or I plan to test that bone myself; what do you say to that?
But she knew that those questions wouldn’t help, and she felt oddly sad for this man in his garage, next to a house with spotted
windows. That place needs a woman’s touch, she heard her mom say, and then laugh in that way she did, as wild as the wind. Then add, with a whisper in her daughter’s
ear: Most men don’t clean shit.
“Mitchell listed you as a reference when he applied for the job at the factory,” she said.
He stopped working, standing up as straight and tall as he could in the gloaming light, the misty rain falling outside. She
could see the pouches around his eyes, the tiredness that came from never feeling quite well.
“Why not?” he asked. “I’m not such a meanie I’d say no.”
“Did you give a reference?”
“Sure. He seemed like an all right kid.”
“That flyer in your window. What’s that all about?”
“Going to clear out those wild pigs,” he said, turning his head sideways to look at her. “The local historical society wants
to exhume those graves. Give those poor folks a proper resting place.”
She felt cold, standing there.
“Who gave them that idea?”
“Me, probably. They’ve been talking about it for a time. Thought we might as well go ahead.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to cremate what we find, then make a nice plaque somewhere, to honor the dead.”
Ruby was watching the back of his head.
The sheriff had just said they would effectively destroy any evidence, a week before a man was slated to die. She wondered
if he knew that.
His pale eyes rose in the shadows of the garage and told her he did. If not to protect himself then to shed this undying weight
around his neck, this feeling of disconnection to a past he could not own, could not control, he would kill it and put a plaque
on it.
“When is this pig hunt?”
“In a few days.”
“And the exhumation?”
“Soon as we get rid of the pigs.”
“And this historical society?”
“Main street. Brick building.”
The rain was really coming down now, sheets of cold.
“What makes you so curious about all this? Charise and the dead?” he asked, and he sounded genuinely curious. He wiped the
blade of the screwdriver on his pants leg again. “I thought your job was exonerating innocent men.”
“It is my job. But I’ve been finding missing women just as long.”
“Why not make that your real job?”
“It is a real job, too. It just doesn’t pay.”
“So you find innocent men for money, missing women for no pay.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the way of the world, I guess,” he said, turning back to his car. “Men will pay to get each other out of prison; women
will pray to get out of hell.”
She gazed at him, surprised.