28.
Willa was up bright and early, eager to be rid of Ruby. She came down the walkway with a worried look on her face and stopped
“I’m ready,” Ruby said through the open door. She picked up her bag, and that was that.
On the ride into town, Willa glanced over, examining her face. Ruby looked serene. Whatever had happened in the night, she
was not saying.
“That car place I told you about,” Willa said nervously.
“I’d like to go to the courthouse first,” Ruby said.
Willa swallowed. Ruby looked at her sympathetically. She didn’t just look sympathetic, she was sympathetic for the woman’s predicament. Willa was trapped in the same system they all were. You played along, thinking all
was great. Or you woke up. Ruby didn’t blame anyone for staying asleep.
“Going to see if the police found anything?” Willa asked, too brightly.
Ruby gave a sardonic smile. “That would be the police station, not the courthouse. That’s where they beat a false confession
out of Mitchell Brown. They probably have the bloodstained room immortalized. The Mitchell Brown interrogation room.” Her
words were bitter, but the delivery was sweet. She smiled at Willa, letting her know she bore her no ill will. The woman was
giving her a ride, which was certainly more than she needed to do.
“I’m sure they were doing their best,” Willa said.
Ruby had no reply to that. She didn’t believe in the adage that everyone was doing their best, including her. If that were
true, the world would be a different place.
Willa breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled in front of the courthouse. She didn’t want to be involved. She wanted this
to be over. Five more days, she thought.
“There’s no parking here. If you could just—”
“Thank you for the ride,” Ruby said.
“It would be better if you didn’t come back. To the motel, I mean.”
“I can find other lodgings,” Ruby said, grabbing her bag. She paused. “I do appreciate you, Willa.”
The woman turned away.
“Hello,” Ruby said.
Jerrod Tinsley, coming down the fine marble stairs, gave a jump. Then he looked mad. He didn’t like women having one up on
him, his florid face said. He reserved that power.
Ruby stood directly below him, blocking his way. Of course, he could go around her. He thought, for one annoyed moment, that
she had a way of looking much bigger than she was. His mother would have said, That girl’s as big as a minute. But she acted bigger, and this bothered him, a whole bunch.
“Excuse me,” he said, waiting for her to move.
A flicker of a smile appeared on her lips, but she did not really smile. Nor did it reach her eyes. She had an unusual look,
he thought, with that pale skin and her naturally dark lips. She looked a bit like a vampire. No, he thought, more like—
“Here for more questions?” he asked.
“Not for you,” she said.
“I heard you had some trouble yesterday,” he said, almost unwillingly.
She appreciated how he made it sound like her fault, too.
“I didn’t have any trouble,” she said. “Someone else, maybe. How did you hear?”
“Call from the police this morning. We don’t want trouble.”
Her eyes said it for her.
“Well. If you don’t need me . . .”
He carried on around her, like a ship at sail. She turned to watch his back. His trousers were creased and pouched at the
back. He was only human, after all.
But there was something about him, she thought—not just about this case. He walked like a man with a secret pleasure in tow.
Like he had plans.
The courthouse records room was down the hall from the district attorney’s office, and Ruby took a chair at one of the desktop
computers. Behind the wide counter, a few clerks worked, pushing carts of brown string-tied files.
She opened the records portal, saw the state seal, and typed in the name Betty Dubois.
A few old files surfaced, and she clicked through the links. In recent years, courthouses had begun scanning case files, which
made her work a lot easier.
Betty Dubois had had only a handful of citations, all seemingly minor.
The first was a traffic fine, dismissed.
The second was a citation for selling cigarettes to minors at the gas station. Ruby opened this file and saw that the teenage clerk had quit. Betty had written an apology to the court. She had fine penmanship, the kind they taught a generation ago.
The last item was a probate document. It opened to a small file, the pages crookedly copied. In the matter of Betty Dubois . . .
It was dated less than a week after Mitchell’s conviction.
There had been no will. Betty had not known she would disappear that night. She was hale and hearty—and overworked. She probably
found it hard to make time for paperwork.
Decedent has been declared legally dead. Her estate includes the following . . . Ruby read. There was the gas station; a farmhouse with ten acres, fenced and cross-fenced, with a year-round creek; and a
motel.
The Pickleweed Motel.
Ruby was so caught up in what she was reading she wasn’t aware of anything else. Someone could have been peeking in that open
door and she wouldn’t have noticed.
The executor was one Frank Castle, a cousin of Betty’s. He was entitled to a share, but he had let his sister, Willa, take
it all, including the motel.
Usually it was the job of the executor to locate any other relatives, but he had claimed there were no others.
Ruby looked for whoever had signed off.
Jerrod Tinsley.
Ruby had learned, over the years, that most people were easy to find. They had utilities. Property records. Driver’s licenses
with current addresses.
But then there were the people like Frank Castle, who were as slippery as the wet blue Georgia sky.
His last known address was a post office box.
The one before that was an apartment building outside of town that she drove to, finding it gutted and filled with graffiti.
Behind it lay a wooded ravine. A sluggish river flowed past, crowned with yellow foam.
There were certain things Ruby could do, and she did them now, her shirt soon plastered to her back with sweat as she went
to the local deed office, the telephone company, and finally a cool café in downtown Pickleweed, where she plugged in her
laptop and ran searches on sites accessible only to police and licensed investigators.
She thought of a case she’d had once, where she had been hired to find not a missing woman but a missing man. She seldom took
cases outside her bailiwick; they were a rabbit hole that never ended. She knew she could make a lot more money—a lot more—doing
the work other investigators did. If she were willing to work for private attorneys, there was a never-ending stream of doctors
who raped their patients and wealthy men who were on their twelfth DUI, and all of them wanted an investigator, which meant
they were paying for someone to find dirt on the victims or create such chaos that the state would simply give up. Those clients
wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card. That world was as different from this one as night was from day. The two leaked into each
other, and shared the same planet. But they were not the same.
She had taken that missing man case, though, and she remembered it now, running searches, trying Franklin Castle and F Castle
and everything in between, and then Willa Castle and Betty Dubois, looking for any information. She had taken the case because
her heart always ached for the families of the missing, and she knew that a grown man could go missing, though they seldom
did. Actually, she considered, men did go missing, but it was more often because they were a lost hiker, or a suicide that
didn’t want to be found. Not many grown men disappeared because of foul play.
This one had—or so his sister had believed. That she was not his mother had moved Ruby, because mothers protect their sons, sometimes more than they protect their daughters. So Ruby had taken the case and begun the search.
His name was Norman Millican, she remembered as the databases, slow in the muggy heat, began spitting back the same useless
data on Frank Castle she had already found. The same defunct address. A phone number that had been disconnected a generation
ago. She shivered as the sweat on her shirt dried, and began wishing she had ordered a hot coffee and not an iced one.
Norman Millican had gone camping in a popular campground in California, high up on the craggy cliffs above the sea. No one
saw him leave. His belongings were still in his tent.
For over three years, she had worked that case, alongside her others. Sometimes she had to take a break for a time, to exonerate
another innocent or find another missing woman, but she always returned to Norman Millican. He began to fill her dreams. It
was odd, having a man in her dreams, because honestly it seldom happened, even when she was in a relationship or working a
death row case. She usually dreamt of missing women. Or her mother.
In her dreams about Norman, she remembered, there was always caution. Something about his case was wrong. The facts didn’t
add up—just like with this one. On the surface, he was a young man, depressed, who disappeared. He could have thrown himself
off the ocean cliff. It wouldn’t have been the first suicide there. Or he could have slipped. That happened, too. There were
warning signs along that sandy, high cliff, but people still climbed over them, to pose with their arms out like the eagles
floating in the distance. Or they went when no one was looking and took their own swan dive, and the sea washed the blood
from the rocks.
That was what the police assumed had happened, and Ruby didn’t blame them one bit. Every sign pointed to it. But his sister had dreams, too, and it was enough to keep Ruby going.
Until she found the truth.
Norman Millican had not jumped to his death. He had vanished for a reason. He had done something terrible to a girl in their
town, and decided to disappear. That was when Ruby learned that there were other reasons men went missing, and those reasons
were usually the opposite of why women went missing. The day she found Norman Millican was the same day she led him into a