6.
Mitchell’s grandfather had a cabin above the Chinook River, in a rocky place where no one else had built because the land
frankly wasn’t good. It was craggy, and the topsoil was thin and acidic from the trees.
Ruby had flown back to Oregon the night before. She was used to flying, and used to driving long distances. It was a huge
country, and her work took her across it, a road map of poverty and despair. There were many weeks she spent in a kaleidoscope
of towns and cities—in culverts and mobile homes, homeless camps and courtrooms. She didn’t mind. She felt most at home when
on the move.
It was morning again, thirteen days before Mitchell Brown was scheduled to be executed, and now she was outside his childhood
home. Below the cabin the Chinook River flowed, a brilliant clear green, ruffled with rapids. On the other side of the river
were the dark woods, and somewhere beyond them, she knew, was the poorhouse where her mother had been born. She stared in
that direction, filled with a sense of foreboding. She had never visited the poorhouse. It would have been too much.
The old man sitting inside the cabin was blind, his eyes as white as smoke. His skin was dark and leathery, and when she knocked
on the open door, she saw his head bob up.
“Come in,” he called in a melodious voice. “Unless you’re the tax collector.”
He gave the wheezy laugh of someone who found pleasure in telling the same joke a thousand times.
She crossed the threshold, feeling the air shift.
Something felt unsettling. It wasn’t the deeply set windows, covered with stained curtains, or the unused fireplace with the scars of unseen spitting embers on the thin rug in front of it.
And it wasn’t the old man, from whom she felt only a wave of kindness.
It was—she didn’t know.
“I’m not the tax collector,” she said, making sure there was a smile in her voice. “I’m an investigator working for your grandson.”
He sat up, smiling in the dark.
“Not a cop?”
“Not a cop. His attorney hired me.”
“All the way from Georgia?”
“Actually, I was raised here, in Oregon. In the city.”
Everyone knew what that meant. Portland.
He nodded eagerly, his head bobbing. He struggled to sit up enough to hold his cane in front of him.
“Have a seat,” he said, and she sat down on the comforter-covered couch. “You can turn on the light if you need it.”
“It’s light enough.”
“No one ever came before. Well, except the police when it first happened. It’s been ten years.”
“No one from the defense has ever been in touch?”
“Oh, a few called over the years, but what could I say? I wasn’t there. If I could fly like a bird and release him, I would.
But I got no evidence. After it happened, I went to visit him once. Took the Greyhound the entire way, just to be told family
visiting time was over for those in the death house. They got regular days they can have visitors and it’s only those days
that start with the letter n. For never.”
He was clever, and in pain. His eyes turned her way, his long nose sniffling. He was trying to learn more about her. So she told him, just a little. How she liked to walk in nature, and how she was in her thirties now but had gotten into this work in her twenties. She didn’t say why.
He felt it. Or maybe it was just this strange cabin.
“Odd choice for a career,” he said, turning his head toward her. “Not saying you’re odd, but just listening to you, feeling
you here in the room, it don’t feel like you’re very big, and that’s a big job you got.”
“It is a big job. But sometimes small people carry the weight easier.”
“Souls don’t weigh much, do they?”
“They can be very heavy.”
“True, true.”
The long hands on the cane trembled. She saw that the cane head was carved. She wondered about Mitchell’s early life, and
asked.
“His mother was my daughter. She was a fine woman. Had my grandson young. The fella must have ran off. She never told me about
him.”
He rose, with shaking knees, and felt along the darkened mantel. He handed her a heavy framed photograph.
It showed a handsome woman with a young boy. It was the first childhood picture of Mitchell that Ruby had seen. The woman
wore a long, old-fashioned dress and was standing outside the cabin. Mitchell was wearing a gray shirt, his face smeared with
blackberries. There was a bowl of the fruit at his feet.
“Where is she?” Ruby asked.
“She went missing,” he said, and for a moment it felt like her heart had stopped.
“When was that?”
“When Mitchell was little. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Of course you do.”
“Came home one day and she was just gone. I had been shopping, you know. Mitchell was at school. No sign of a struggle. That’s what the cops say, isn’t it? It was like she walked out and vanished into . . . nothingness. Only I know she didn’t go into nothingness. Her spirit is still out there.”
A coldness had filled Ruby. Her lips were numb.
“What did local law enforcement say?”
“I wouldn’t call him that. Got the same fat sheriff now as we did back then, and to answer your question, he said nothing.
Absolutely nothing.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“You got me. I tried, miss, I did. I went everywhere. Got to be a pest. You see Charise? I’d ask everyone. Over and over again, until people started crossing the street when they saw me coming. I went into Portland
and talked to the police there. They told me it was a local matter.”
“Was a missing person report filed?” she asked, thinking that it wasn’t in Mitchell’s file—but then, why would it be? More
important to her, it wasn’t in her own copious files of missing women.
“So the sheriff said. I tried to get the newspapers interested, do anything I could. But no. Nothing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I can tell you mean that, miss. Thank you.”
She was quiet for a moment, trying to get her own beating heart under control. This house, the startling similarity to her
own life—it had briefly unmoored her.
“I raised Mitchell after that,” he said. “It always felt like he was my boy. God gave him to me to raise.” His thin lips trembled
just a little, and his voice caught. “Now God is going to kill my son.”
She got up and put the photograph back on the mantel. Something in the corner of the room caught her eye. It was a tall, dark basket, sitting in the shadows, and it gave her the haunts.
She sat back down again, wondering what to ask him next. Getting backstory on the client was important—when you had months
to work up a case. But every moment counted now.
“After he lost his mother, did Mitchell act out?”
He knew what she was asking.
“No. I told him, Go cry at the river, son. Let it all out.”
“What about therapy?”
His face creased into a hundred wrinkles. “Here?”
They fell into a warm silence, but she felt unnerved in the home. She couldn’t tell what it was, but it felt like someone
else was listening.
“You’ll come again?” he asked.
“I’ll come again.”
“Maybe . . . maybe if they do it, you can come be with me,” he said. “Or will you be there?”
“I’ll be there. Would you want to go? They would let you then.”
He turned away, and she saw the glimmer of tears.
“I don’t think Mitchell would want that. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen my boy. It would pain him, to have me watch him
go.”
After Ruby left, the old man stayed in his chair for a long time. When he was certain she was gone, he got up and made his
sure, trembling way to the basket in the corner. He lifted the woven lid.
“How did I do?” he asked the bone.
The bone hummed an answer.
He lifted the bone, reverentially, and carried it in its shroud of quilt—a remnant of his own childhood quilt, made by his grandmother and passed down to his own daughter—to the chair. He sat, tucking down his trousers. He could feel his soft belly. His own bones responded to this one.
He held the bone, and he listened.
The town of Chinook was a few blocks of buildings, divided by a rain-washed street. Most of the shops were for the seasonal
tourists who came to fish the river, or wade its icy pools during hot summers.
The office of the sheriff was in one of the nicer buildings, and when Ruby opened the door, it presented like all cop shops:
It was a contained place, with contained ideas.
The man at the desk looked to be in his sixties, a good old boy, with ruddy skin and thick red hair going to silver. She knew
better than to assume he was a bad man, or even a lazy man. She had worked with many police and knew the culture.
She explained herself, quickly, holding out her license.
He examined it, with cautious interest.
“Mr. Brown told me that his daughter went missing, back when her son was little,” she said. “I need that report.”
“His grandson ended up murdering someone, right? Is that why you’re here?”
“I’ve been hired on his case, yes.”
Of all things, police understood this. She was a professional, and one of the oddities of her work was that law enforcement
often respected her more than the citizens they were supposed to protect.
“It’s in the archives. Might take me a few days to find it.”
“I can wait,” she said, as if she were prepared to camp out in his office until the report appeared.
He rose from his desk, stretching. He had bulky arms that strained against his uniform, and she saw that it was time for him to get bigger trousers—he was out of notches on his belt. He saw her looking and flushed. She couldn’t help it. She saw things.
He opened a locked door behind him. When the door opened, she saw a copy machine and rows of metal cabinets.
In a few minutes, he was back, the beginnings of anger in his face. He had clearly thought about it. If he didn’t give her
the report, attorneys might get involved, and that meant court summonses and orders. Cops didn’t like being cornered. They
didn’t like being told what to do. It wasn’t that they thought they were above the law—they thought they were the law. Not the words in books. Them.
“I didn’t get around to scanning it in yet,” he said.
The report was only two pages, stapled in the corner. The photo underneath the words missing person was black-and-white and blurry. You wouldn’t have been able to tell Charise Brown from a dozen other women.
Underneath were her details.
Last seen: Chinook, Oregon. Height: 5'6". Weight: 160 pounds. Eyes: brown. Hair: black. Scars/marks: chickenpox scars on belly
and arms.
Ruby turned the page.
She could hear the sheriff breathing. He wanted her to leave.
The next page had a paragraph. That was it. She read it. He had talked to a few neighbors, walked the river, looked for any
floating corpses.
Which was silly, she thought: Anyone who grew up near a river in Oregon knew where it was safe to wade and where the rapids
might take you. Charise Brown was the mother of a little boy. She would not have gone wading on a cold winter day when the
water had chunks of ice in it.
The sheriff was waiting for her to finish, and he didn’t flinch. She saw the scald of shame and defensiveness rise in his cheeks.
Back at home, she sat up late, a lamp illuminating her desk. Above her desk was a massive map of the United States, covered
with tiny brightly colored flags.
She had printed out everything from Mitchell’s case, and it was now stacked across her desk in neat piles. She had not taken
it all to Georgia because it would have been too much. There were hundreds of pages of trial transcripts, DNA results from
Mitchell, and interviews of witnesses from the bar that night. One thick ream was the evidence list from the police, another
a list of grand jurors the defense had fought to get.
Every case was like this. There was a sameness about them, a march to bloody injustice, and she worried that eventually it
was this sameness that would take her down. It would kill her. The weight of the world would do her in.
To the top of a pile, she added the missing person report for Charise Brown. Was it relevant to the case? Probably not. But
it was relevant to Mitchell. It was relevant to her.
She had already scanned it and sent it to the attorney, whose name was Terrence Fulks. She didn’t add a note.
What was obvious didn’t need to be stated. The sheriff had done nothing, and then buried the report.
She knew he could argue that it had been decades ago, before the internet. Law enforcement conferences had felt boards pinned
with missing person reports, largely ignored while the officers had coffee. It was missing children, not women, who got the
attention, but even then their photos were confined to the back of milk cartons.
But he could have uploaded the report in later years, when the internet made sharing information easier.
Or when the FBI created their database for the missing.
Or when the National Institute of Justice began assisting in missing person cases.
Or when the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System was developed.
Instead, Charise Brown had stayed in her metal drawer, and the opportunities to find her had floated downstream, like silverfish
after the spawn. The door had closed to interviews with killers now dead; unidentified bodies buried and lost. All gone.
Reaching into her desk drawer, Ruby took out a little flag. These were color-coded for each year. The decade when Mitchell’s
mom went missing was in hues of red; her year was a bright pink. She wrote the date Charise had gone missing on it, and then
her name. This she pinned neatly onto the map where Chinook was, and the tiny flag glimmered along with all the rest—thousands
of missing women in different colors waving at Ruby as she rose, heavy with thought, and readied herself for the next day.