22.
The bells above the door jingled, and Ruby entered a storefront stuffy with the smells of old books, deer heads, and a dusty
stuffed bear in the corner. At the counter was a glass-topped display case, and inside was a collection of polished opals,
jasper, and Native American arrowheads. In another corner was a carved totem pole with peeling paint, and a sign on the wall
said potlach is chinook for potluck.
“Can I help you?” A little wren-like woman with silver hair came out of the back room, making the bead curtain jingle.
“Is this the Chinook Historical Society?”
“Why yes, it is.” The woman looked proud.
“I hear you’re going to exhume the graveyard.”
“Yes, once we get rid of those pigs. They’re dangerous.”
Ruby thought of the circle of pigs, the vision the bone had brought.
“You’re going to cremate the remains?”
The silver-haired woman peered closer at the license the dark-haired exonerator held out, then smiled uncertainly.
“It’s our only option. We don’t have a way to match the dead to names. I mean, apparently they tumbled the bodies in raw,
as they say around here. It’s going to be a jumble. A mess.”
The woman smiled at her apologetically, her eyes slightly fearful. She was afraid of doing something wrong, and being reported.
“Did you take the necessary steps to exhume a burial ground?”
“I—don’t know, actually. The sheriff didn’t mention that.”
He wouldn’t have, Ruby thought.
“You need to file for permission with the court, and ask an environmental health officer to be present, to make sure you’re meeting health and safety regulations,” said Ruby, who had needed to dig up more than a few bodies in her time.
“Oh.” The woman looked lost.
“The reason is, you never know what you will find,” Ruby said. “It could even be a crime scene.”
The woman blinked.
“Or,” Ruby added, “there could be pathogens.”
Now the woman looked worried.
“You said you don’t have a way to match the remains with names. Do you have names?”
Here the woman nodded, and blinked brightly. She hustled back through the bead curtain and returned with a stack of ledgers.
That sheriff was a fool, Ruby thought. He had told her right where to find them: the names of the people who had lived at
the poorhouse.
She’d had no idea these ledgers even existed.
The woman stacked the books on the glass-topped counter, above the ancient arrowheads. Some were so delicately carved they
were like springy lances, and Ruby knew that these had been for the freshwater eels of the river.
“The poorhouse closed years ago. It’s quite a piece of Oregon history. Yet ignored.” The amateur historian sounded defensive,
like she was only trying to do good, which Ruby knew was true. “Before the sheriff boarded the place up, we went in and found
these ledgers, in what had been the office for the matron. It’s all we have. But we don’t have a way to match their names
to the dead.”
Ruby sorted through the leather-bound ledgers. She opened one and looked at the dates, delicately turning the brittle pages while the woman watched. The handwriting was spidery, and seemed filled with pain as the years passed, the letters becoming spiky.
Ralph Green, Herbert Cooper, Eleanor Fields . . .
She stopped, her hands suddenly trembling.
There it was. There she was. Her mother, Desirée Spencer. Born on a summer morning, as fresh as the sunrise, her mother greeting the world.
“Do you know her?” the historian asked, seeing her face. “We’ve had such a hard time finding any survivors. We’d love to write
a history of the place, record it before all is lost, but finding these people . . .”
“This was my mother,” Ruby said.
“Can she speak to us?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I have an idea,” Ruby said. “A way I can help.”
“You can?”
“Sure. But first I’ll need copies of all these pages.”
The bone sizzled in Ruby’s hands all the way across the immaculate Reed College lawns, watered green with summer, to where
a small set of stairs led down to an unmarked door. A small skull and crossbones plaque outside warned of danger.
Ruby opened this door to find a narrow hall, with a fan releasing the air of lab odors. Here Reed College students and staff
worked on all sorts of projects, including the only nuclear reactor run by undergraduate students in the country.
But it was not nuclear power that interested Ruby. It was the small lab that lay at the end of the hall. Her best friend—arguably
her only friend—had fought for a miniscule funding stream to create the lab, the first and only one of its kind in the country.
Ruby opened the heavy metal door and stood in the tiny area marked with orange tape where visitors were allowed without decontamination or a jumpsuit.
Her friend Delaney Ford was the only person in the lab, which was white on white. White floor, white shelves, white computers,
white machines. The only color was the brown of the stacked body bags, all neatly labeled and numbered, on the white shelves.
Delaney was a vision of white, too, wearing a white jumpsuit, white sneakers, and a white bonnet over her hair. Her face was
covered with goggles and a mask.
She had not heard Ruby, because she was drilling.
The jawbone she was drilling had been placed in a metal vise on the white table where she worked. The molars glared across
the room like malevolent eyes. Delaney was using a dental drill to bore into the core of one of the molars. It was here, Ruby
knew, that she could potentially extract a DNA sample. The smell of burning bone filled the air, before being whisked away
by the fans. It smelled like a dentist’s office.
Ruby waited, patiently watching the back of her studious friend. There were even more body bags than the last time she had
visited. They were stacked all over. Some were full-sized bags containing entire skeletons, or close to it, while others were
small parcels containing a single bone. In one corner was a stack of parcels, all labeled Willamette River. Thousands of unidentified bones had been pulled from the shipping river over the years. No one had any idea to whom they
belonged, but Delaney planned to figure it out.
Ruby remembered the day they had met, years before at a public defense conference.
Both had been invited for their work helping the innocent.
Delaney was a single mom, trying to balance her job as an adjunct professor at Reed College with using her expertise in the growing field of DNA to exonerate the falsely convicted.
Ruby was making a name for herself as an exonerator—and earning an income, which helped pay for the missing women work—for her hands-on and often fearless investigations.
They had sat together at lunch, eating from the usual tray of stale sandwiches. Ruby had grabbed a dry and tasteless ham and
Swiss, and Delaney was nibbling on a square of egg salad. Both drank black coffee and bottled water.
“There must,” Delaney had said, “be a better way.”
“What do you mean?” Ruby had asked.
“Imagine if instead of approaching each case piecemeal and testing for DNA like we’ve never had a murder case before, we had
our own lab? We could create a system. One part of the system would be a DNA database. In upcoming years, we’re going to see
a spike in testing, trust me. The other part would be collecting unidentified remains.”
Even now, Ruby could still see the dry sandwich in her hand. She could see the paper cup of coffee. Certain moments were like
that. Gold-plated.
“You’re not just talking about false convictions,” she had said.
“No. I’m talking about righting a wrong. Do you know we literally have hundreds of thousands of unidentified remains in this
country? What if we knew who they were? Some might just be lost, unknown to history. But don’t those people deserve names,
too? Others are victims of crimes, and we don’t even know it. Think of all the innocents we could exonerate. Think of all
the cases we could solve.”
In that moment, Ruby knew they would become great friends, because they would have this, a mission to unite them. They thought
alike.
It had taken years, but now Ruby was looking at it, the lab they had created.
The molar had split, and Delaney carefully removed a sample, dropping it in a glass tube. She stood up, stretching her back, and saw Ruby.
In a few long steps, the forensic scientist crossed the immaculate lab and smiled at her friend. Ruby smiled back—a huge smile,
warm and happy. She held out the bone like a gift.
“What you got there?” Delaney asked.
“An old man found it in Chinook.”
Delaney looked into her friend’s eyes. She knew Ruby’s story.
“That had to be a hard place for you to visit,” she said.
She gently took the bundle and carried it to an exam table. She opened up the scrap of quilt. Ruby was waiting to see if the
bone spoke to her, but she saw no reaction.
Delaney turned the bone over, examining the ends.
She frowned.
“These look like tooth marks.”
“There are wild pigs up there.”
“You lead the most interesting life.”
Ruby placed Mitchell’s DNA results from her bag on the evidence table next to the door. The grandfather had been nearly unwilling
to let the bone go until she told him where she was taking it—and what it might tell them.
“These are the DNA results from my client,” she said, explaining.
“Got a deadline?” Delaney asked, still examining the bone.
“He’s being executed in a week.”
“Will this exonerate him?”
“Most likely not. But I’d like some answers, and I think the family deserves them, too.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
In the computer database, Ruby knew, there were now thousands of DNA samples.
For years, she and Delaney had sent letters to the families of the missing, asking for their help.
Thanks to some magazine articles, the word was getting out, and people across the country were sending in samples.
Ruby had dropped her own spit in a tube, and left it to whirl into the system.
Her arms felt strangely empty now that the bone was gone.
“After we’re done with this case, I have a favor to ask,” she said, and told Delaney about the burial ground and the bodies.
Delaney looked excited. Bones always excited her.
“That’s not a favor,” she said. “That’s an opportunity. You say you have the names of all the deceased?”
“At least some,” Ruby said, patting her bag, which now also contained copies of the ledgers. “What will take work is locating
their relatives for DNA samples. But I can do that part. We’ll identify those dead and give them a burial—my grandmother included.
I’m pretty sure she’s there.”
“What about the plans to cremate them?”
Ruby thought of the threat of prosecution she had left hanging over the historical society lady’s head. But then there was
the sheriff to contend with.
“We’ll see,” she said, uncertainly.
Delaney set the bone on a metal shelf.
“Want to come over for dinner tonight?” she asked. “I can make spaghetti. I know you love spaghetti.”
Ruby knew that Delaney faced her own kind of loneliness, as a single mother. She didn’t like giving up what little time she
had with her boy, so she often invited Ruby over to visit. Those visits, to that warm and cozy home, were some of the most
precious in her life.
“Zachary would love to see you,” Delaney added, about her eccentric son who had a passion for Polly Pocket dolls and transformers.
The electrical devices, not the toys. Any visits to Delaney’s crowded house came with plenty of excited lectures about the transformer industry and low rated and high rated, single phase and high phase.
“I wish,” Ruby said, with real regret. “But I need to get back to my place and get some sleep. I’m on an extra-early morning
flight back to Georgia.”
Her place was still a studio apartment, only now downtown. She kept the lights low, because she liked darkness. She dropped
her bag on the floor. She left almost everything in it. She did this on all her cases, as if it were a magic talisman bag.
She would not let anything go until the end. A woman was in that bag, and a man.
Maybe more than one of each.
Slowly, she went to her desk and removed another colored flag from the drawer. This one was cobalt blue.
“I forgot to put you up, before,” she said apologetically to the tiny flag, before writing Betty Dubois on it in tiny script. “The police never reported you missing. Everyone said you must be dead. But the dead can be missing,
too.”
She pinned Betty on the map, among all the other flags in the Deep South. But crime doesn’t discriminate. The hatred and contempt
for women knows no boundaries. Betty was now a tiny spot of blue in a mélange of colors, stretching from coast to coast.