31.
Ruby spent a restless night. As she did so often as an execution grew close, she didn’t sleep at all. She drove, aimless,
feeling the warm wind whip outside the car, and her mind was filled with snapshots of the past—it was filled as if with flotsam.
Like the tide was coming in, to sweep everything away.
Eventually she stopped in at an all-night diner, on the newer highway that curled around the town, and she drank tea from
a heavy white mug while picking at a slice of pecan pie à la mode, the ice cream slipping across the plate, and watched a
truck driver take the crown of whipped margarine from the top of his dinner-plate-sized cinnamon roll and plop it whole in
his mouth. The jukebox played, and she could have been in any time in the last seventy years. The cook had a hairnet, the
waitress a soft belly. Ruby was nowhere. She was here.
The cicadas blasted as she left, the warm night surrounding her, just the inkling of a dawn rising in the east, centering
the trees and this place on earth. I am here, she corrected herself. I am here, and Mitchell Brown is slated to die in four
days.
Tired, her eyes hot and aching, she pulled into a truck stop for a nap. She had found that truck stops were good places for
a rest. Truck drivers were—mostly—a friendly lot, willing to look out for a woman napping alone in her car. There were a lot
of women truck drivers now. They were fearsome on the road.
Curled up in her back seat, she thought of Mitchell. Which made her think of Betty, and the fact that she had never been found.
She sat up, not having rested at all.
Breathing deep of the cool morning air, she left the car for a table near the concrete restrooms, where a church lady was
selling Styrofoam cups of hot coffee from a giant metal urn. The coffee was scalding hot, and Ruby drank it carefully, looking
toward the swampy woods.
Bodies, she thought.
The Pickleweed police station was in a deserted industrial park on the outskirts of town, where, Ruby thought without irony,
no one could hear you scream. She pushed open the heavy door to find a girl behind the counter, wearing the spit-and-polish
uniform of a junior cadet. Oregon had had a program like this once, she remembered—until cases of older male officers taking
advantage of the teenagers came to light, and the state shut it down.
This girl was maybe sixteen, her hair as bright as brass. She smiled tentatively at Ruby, but the officer rising from his
desk behind the counter did not smile. He was one of the officers who had come to the motel, and he looked discomfited by
Ruby’s arrival.
“If you’re here about that shooting, we haven’t—” he began.
“I’m not here about that,” Ruby said, resting her elbows on the counter. “Though I’m pretty sure I know who it was.”
“Yeah? Who?” He sounded confrontational, because he was nervous.
She thought of Willa, stepping into the front office that Ruby had broken into, saying, Frank. She didn’t want to tell that story.
“Maybe ask Willa,” she said.
“Willa thinks you stole a motel key.”
“She say why I would need to do that?”
She turned to the cadet.
“I was thinking about how we never found Betty,” she said, speaking directly to the girl. She liked to say we because the world was a we. “I’d like to know about other women reported missing down here.”
The officer looked very young, too. He couldn’t have been out of his early twenties.
“It’s all public record,” Ruby said. “All I want is for you to run a search in your system. Just type ‘missing’ into your
search bar, and then add ‘women.’”
We know how to run a search, his face said.
The cadet looked up at him, her face questioning.
“Go ahead,” he said. He retreated toward a back hallway, where she knew he would be calling the district attorney.
Ruby stayed, leaning against the cool, firm counter, as the cadet typed. There were brand-new computers on the desks. The
carpet was new, too, the office chairs ergonomic and plush. Blinds covered the windows, and an air conditioner filled the
air with crystal coolness. A gumball machine was in the corner for the visiting school groups.
Ruby’s eyes went to the back hallway the officer had disappeared to. Back there were the holding cells, she thought. That’s
where they would have taken Mitchell. She imagined the concrete cells, the one inmate—since there was always an inmate given
this task—assigned with washing them out with bleach.
The printer in the corner hummed. The cadet rose, nervous, to fetch the printout. She handed the warm papers to Ruby, smiling,
hopeful she might leave now.
Ruby glanced at the results. She rifled through the listings. There were plenty, but she had suspected there would be more.
“These don’t go back very far,” she said. “Let’s check your hard copies, too.”
“Not today.” The officer was coming back. He looked stern. He had been told to be tough—to get her moving.
“How come?”
“They’re in the archives.”
“The limestone vaults?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Yes.”
“All right. I’ll get to them later.”
She stopped to get a gumball on the way out of the station. She was hoping for grape, but the machine spit out a pink one.
The officer and cadet watched her go sit in her car in the lot, which was nearly empty except for all the brand-new police
cars lining the edges. The fancy cars for chasing criminals that never came, the tanks in the back for drug lords that never
arrived. The lines of riot gear. All the money spent in policing that never seemed to make anyone safer.
I really need coffee, Ruby thought, feeling woozy from lack of sleep. It had been two days. She hadn’t slept at the motel,
either.
She held the printout in her lap, seeing dozens of names that organized themselves into letters and then broke apart. I am
too tired to read this list, she thought. I thought it said—
She shook her head, clearing it.
She had read it right. The most recent report had been called in that very morning. The Georgia state police had taken the
call, and entered it into the system. At least that part had changed for the better.
A woman named Emma Griffin, née Higginbottom, had called to report that when she was a little girl, her mother had disappeared. But her mom had not disappeared from Georgia. She had gone missing in Oregon.
Complainant alleges her father told her that her mother ran away. Initial searches have not located any signs of Rosanna Higginbottom,
née Bouchard. Last known location was Chinook, Oregon. There is a wedding certificate.
The sheriff, Ruby thought. His wife.
Emma Higginbottom was waiting in line at the hotel breakfast buffet. She had a solitary croissant on her plate, and was watching
as her lover took waffles from the steamer, watching with love as she dolloped them with fresh butter and poured on hot syrup,
blueberry and maple. Two kinds, because Patricia said conferences were madness.
They made their way to a square white-cloth-covered table, among the others. The newscaster on the television hanging in the
corner droned on about heat waves and humidity, crime and a state recession. The baby panda at the zoo was celebrating a birthday.
“You need to eat more than that,” Patricia chided Emma, before she saw a woman with a lanyard around her neck approaching
them, and knew that their life was about to change.
“I thought I recognized you,” Ruby said, taking the extra chair at their table after introducing herself.
“How did you know it was me?” Emma asked. She still had the pink cheeks of youth, ruddier now with worry.
“I looked you up,” Ruby said. People were still getting used to how the internet made them easier to find. “Your picture was
in the Alaskan Herald. It was from when you won that teaching award. Then I found a listing of you here, this week, as a conference attendee. So
here I am.”
Emma looked at her white plate and the croissant, clearly overwhelmed. She had made a call, maybe even impetuously, and suddenly a woman wearing a license and black trousers appeared in her life.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said.
“Do you know something about her mother?” Patricia asked. She was steadily eating her waffles. Ruby looked over at the buffet,
at the teachers lining up for scrambled eggs, biscuits, and gravy.
“Maybe. I’m working the Mitchell Brown case.”
She watched Emma’s face.
“That’s what started this,” Emma said. “We saw the article.”
“Did you know him, back in Chinook?”
“I wasn’t allowed to play with him,” Emma said. There was hesitation in her voice. “But I did get to know him more in school.
He was a few years older than me. He was a nice guy. Not that it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t . . .”
“Kill someone and make them disappear?”
“Yes.”
“What can you tell me about him?” Ruby asked.
Emma looked down. “I don’t want to break a confidence.”
Her lover spoke gently, wiping syrup from her chin.
“He’s going to die soon, honey.”
Emma cleared her throat. “Mitchell is gay.”
Ruby was shocked. For whatever reason, that was not what she had been expecting, and she had to question her own prejudices
as to why.
“How do you know that?”
“He told me. It was in high school. I think we . . . just knew.”
Ruby nodded.
Emma took a deep breath and continued. “He was a good kid. I mean good inside. I just have a hard time believing that he would . . . anyhow, I was the one he confided in. I don’t think he told anyone else.
At that time, in that school, in that area, you didn’t say you were gay.
Everyone who was had to stay closeted. That included Mitchell, and that included me. ”
Her lover snuck a glance around the room to make sure no one was listening, and put her hand over Emma’s fingers under the
table, where no one would see.
“Some things don’t change,” Ruby said.
“No, they don’t. Mitchell was scared, and I didn’t blame him. I don’t think he dated anyone from around there. I know I sure
didn’t. We both waited. I didn’t really see much of him after he graduated. He got that job, and I moved after graduation.”
Ruby thought of prisons and how this would be the last thing Mitchell would tell his attorney.