21.
Ruby’s lifework had started one morning when she made her usual cup of coffee and drank it in her studio apartment. Ruby had
just graduated from university, and she knew she wanted to find missing women. She had applied for an investigator’s license
but wasn’t sure how to start.
By then, hundreds of flags had gathered on her map.
She had been drinking the coffee, looking at the map with a slash of morning sun across it, thinking of nothing and everything
at once, when all of a sudden she saw it.
A cluster.
It was in shades of green, and it was in Michigan. She got closer to the map, her feet tingling, and saw that the heart of
the cluster was in Harbor Springs.
She had stepped back, barely breathing. Now that she had seen it, she could not unsee it: A group of women had gone missing
in Harbor Springs decades ago. She began pulling their reports from her files, spreading them across her then-empty desk.
Louanne, Sarah, and Beth. Leah, Jennifer, Debbie, and Dawn. All were in their early to late teens when they went missing.
There was something else they had in common, too, she learned from reading the reports: All of them had gone dancing at a
teen club called the Zone before they disappeared.
The first girl had gone missing on a hot summer night, Ruby remembered, exiting the plane in the Traverse City airport. She wore her new investigator’s license on a lanyard around her neck.
Louanne Arnold, age sixteen, had snuck out of the house against her parent’s wishes to go dancing at the Zone. Louanne had
never come home. Her parents had stayed up late, worried. The police interviewed a friend who’d seen Louanne talking to a
strange boy outside. But the boy had an alibi: He had been waiting for his mom, who’d soon picked him up, and he had not gone
back to the club.
There were no other leads.
A few months later, the second woman went missing. Sarah Chowder, age eighteen, was a clerk at the local bank. She didn’t
come to work on the Tuesday after a long holiday weekend. Since she lived alone, no one knew how long she had been gone. She
had gone dancing at the Zone that Saturday night. Friends had seen her there. No one had seen her since.
Over the next six years, five more women in the area went missing. Ruby, parking her car outside the Harbor Springs police
station, didn’t expect the police would be much help. Most police insisted on treating each case as an anomaly. They didn’t
want to see a pattern because if they saw a pattern, they’d be forced to recognize that missing women were not anomalies.
They were an epidemic.
But the Harbor Springs police turned out to be much different. They had taken the missing girls seriously. The people of the
town, which was boxed in by the brutal winters and the wind howling off the icy lake Michigan, were close and tightly knit.
Ruby learned that the chief, now deceased, had done his very best.
The Zone had been on Pleasant Drive, and Ruby went there after her friendly visit to the police station. The club had burned down years before, and all that remained was an empty lot that was for sale.
Her next step was meeting the families of the women. They gathered in a large, cold high school auditorium, and Ruby listened
and asked questions. Even after decades, the family members’ pain spilled out, and themes emerged. More than a few of their
daughters had talked about a handsome young man who worked the club. His name was Raymond Stepper. He had been interviewed
back then, but so had everyone who worked at the club. There was no reason to suspect Raymond more than any other man, except
that Ruby had a sense for these things. She also found a reform school file that had never been looked at before, which showed
his history of sexual assault of girls.
By the time she tracked Raymond down a few states away, he was an old man, dying of AIDS from using shared needles. It was
then that she discovered her secret gift. She was someone the guilty would confess to. In those moments, she channeled that
person. It was in her eyes. It was in her voice. It told them, I understand because for a moment in time I was so close to you I could almost touch you.
The dying Raymond told her he’d met the girls at the club and asked them if he could walk them home. It had been the last
walk of their lives.
He said he’d dumped their bodies in the lake. The Harbor Springs police dredged it, the families waiting at the windy shore,
but too much time had passed, and nothing was discovered. A few years later, Ruby heard that a silver ring belonging to Louanne
had washed up.
The case was closed. She removed the flags representing those women from the map on her wall, and in a secret ceremony known only to her, she took the flags to the top of Mount Tabor, not far from her home, and waited for a gust of wind to take them away, so the women could revel in having been found.
There was one more detail offered by Raymond. After he had burned down the Zone club in a fit of spite, he had moved to South
Dakota, where he had killed over a dozen women, dumping their bodies in the Badlands. Those bodies had been found, but it
wasn’t Raymond who was named the killer but rather a local man, who had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death.
Which was how on the day she solved her first missing women case, Ruby also saved a life, and her career began.