35.
It was lunchtime by the time Jacob and Ruby got the file boxes to the cage above the vaults. Her blouse was covered with dust,
and dirt covered her arms. Wiping her brow, she left a streak.
“Is that your lunch?” Ruby asked the officer. His lunch box waited on the metal desk in the small cage. It was the old-fashioned
metal regulation kind. In jails and prisons, she knew, the lunch boxes were now required to be clear plastic. So the staff
couldn’t smuggle drugs or other contraband inside. A metal lunch box like this could also be used as a weapon.
Her mind was crowded with such facts. Sometimes she wondered what niceness would fill it if she were in a different line of
work. But then who else could live in this moment, with the smell of the elevator and the sight of the sun over the hills?
“Yeah. Why?”
“I was thinking of going out for lunch. Maybe you could join me? Are you allowed?”
“Sure, if no one is coming. I know a place not far.”
Which was how they ended up eating hamburgers at an old roadside stand she would have never found herself, alongside a creek
with a falling-down dock, the trees heavy with vines. The warm air smelled like forever, and they had their own picnic table,
where the records officer opened each box and the names flew out ahead of the papers, and Ruby caught them in her hand and
said it would be okay.
“I think you found your treasures,” Ruby said.
“How?” Jacob asked. They had finished their burgers and were now organizing the dozens of reports they had found into neat
stacks across the picnic table. The girl at the window watched, curious.
From the stacks, they were winnowing out those reports that were clearly not foul play. There were not many. There was more
of a chance, Ruby thought, that a missing woman wouldn’t even get a report. Once, she had located a missing woman whose baby
had been left in a Safe Haven Baby Box outside a fire station. Ruby was troubled by those boxes, because in her experience,
few women left their infants out of choice: Many times an abusive man forced them to, or a captor dropped off a child from
a woman he had locked up somewhere. There were no investigations into where the babies came from.
“These are the treasures,” she said, picking up a report. She was quite sure none of them had ever been downloaded into the
system. More flags for her map, she thought.
“I doubt the women feel like that,” he said. “If they are still alive.”
“Probably not,” she agreed. “That’s odd,” she said.
“What’s odd?”
“Look at this.” She moved her hands over the stacks.
“Look at what?”
“There’s almost nothing for these years,” she said.
“Could it be, you know, a natural variation?”
“I don’t think so.” She frowned.
“What does it mean?”
Ruby sat back, thinking. He leaned forward, eager, and she thought what a caring young man he was. Under her breath, she sent
a wish that he would find his path in life.
She thought of a case she had solved involving a killer who rode the trains.
He called himself the Vagabond, which pissed off true vagabonds, who were generally misfits but harmless.
Riding the trains allowed him to stop in different places and kill women, and no one had tied the murders together.
Until one day, working an exoneration involving a man blamed for killing one of the Vagabond’s victims, Ruby noticed clusters of missing women near freight train hubs.
“Maybe this,” she said now, putting her hand on a smaller stack, “is actually the norm for around here. And this,” she said,
moving her hand to what came later, “is what happens when a killer comes to town.”
His eyes widened. “What can I do to help?”
She smiled at him. “You could help me make copies of these reports.”
The Union City factory supervisor had a deep, rumbly cough. It was a cough that told of years of menthols, and his teeth were
stained from them, too. He wore his hair natural and styled close, and his throat was laced with dark lines from years of
hard living. His hands looked like mitts.
Ruby had come here straight from saying goodbye to the records officer, copies of the reports now in her bag. She was talking
to the supervisor amid the clamor of the factory floor. The machines making the sneakers were very loud, and along the rows
were dozens of employees—all Black—cutting the sneakers and lacing them together. The sneakers looked very bright in all the
solemn grayness, the harsh lights overhead and the cold concrete floors.
“You keep records of the cars the employees drove?” she asked him.
“Sorry, miss—no.”
She nodded, thinking. She had stopped by here in part to cross his name off her list—and because she sensed this place was
part of a puzzle she was trying to piece together.
“Had another one of you come ask about him,” he said, coughing. She watched his chest heaving under the stained blue shirt. This could be Mitchell, she thought, if he had stayed. Then she thought, no—Mitchell was too deft at living for that. His life was on an upswing and he was going with it.
She didn’t remember any reports of defense team members coming here—or the police, either. But those records were spotty.
“An investigator?” she asked.
He frowned, trying to remember. “Can’t really say.”
“Would you have any records?”
“Come to the office, and we’ll see.”
The main office was above the finishing room floor, and a large window overlooked the finishing line below. Ruby watched as
the fresh sneakers came off the line and were inspected by a manager wearing a white bonnet, before they were tucked into
boxes with crisp sheets of tissue paper.
The tissue paper, unloosened from its stacks, blew around the concrete floor, catching in the bonneted feet of the employees,
who looked like a sea of legs from here. You could see the heaviness in those legs. The tiredness.
Ruby tore her eyes away from the scene to the supervisor rooting through his metal cabinets. There was nothing on the walls.
There was no pride here, just work.
He pulled open a scratched drawer. “I know he gave me a card,” he said. “I keep everything, just in case. Management likes
to know everything that happens.”
“When exactly did this man appear?”
“Back when it happened, after your guy got arrested.” He coughed again, opening another drawer, this one filled with a litter of small items. “You said you come from Oregon?”
“Yes.”
“That’s headquarters. Never been there, but I hear it’s nice.”
Ruby thought of the wide, cool lobby, with its scented air and the marble statues of athletes in the corners, the soaring
windows. The duck pond nearby.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“Here you go—I found it,” he said, handing over a card.
Ruby took the small business card. It said David Morgan, Private Investigator on it, and she knew just from looking at it that it was probably fake. The SOS number—from the Georgia licensing agency for
investigators—was missing a digit. It wasn’t something a lot of people would know, and it didn’t take much to make up a fake
business card.
“You ask for other identification?”
His face screwed up and told the answer.
“It’s all right. We seldom think of that.” She smiled at him warmly. “People see my license, they never ask for more identification.”
“Should I?”
“It’s too late now,” she joked.
She turned over the card. Whoever had made it was smart, she thought. He’d picked a name that would be impossible to track
down. There were probably a thousand David Morgans in the South. There might even be a real David Morgan or two licensed as
an investigator in Georgia, and she could—and would—waste valuable hours checking.
It could have been a cop, she thought, hiding what he was doing. Or, she amended, it could have been anyone.
“Were you are the bar that night?” she asked.
“Me? No, miss. I’m married.” He flashed a dull silver ring. “I go right home to the wife or there’s hell to pay.”
Ruby thought of the bar, right down the road, and the apartment building Mitchell had moved into, directly across the street.
She had already stopped by there. It was a dull, depressing place, with dark hallways and burned-out lights and a bad smell.
Many of the factory employees lived there, she had learned.
“I bet a lot of the employees here go to that bar,” she said.
“Sure, I guess.”
“How many got interviewed later, by the police?”
“Don’t know, miss.”
Ruby thought of headquarters, the man she had met there. “I’m going to guess the name of the man you report to. Ronald.”
His face broke open with a smile. “Well, yes, miss.”
“Did you tell him about this investigator?”
“He wasn’t working for the company back then.”
They weren’t involved, her instincts told her. None of these men were. Except maybe that fake investigator.
“Any chance you saw the car this man was driving?”
The Pickleweed DMV was the usual small, crowded, and unpleasant space. Ruby pulled her ticket, glanced at the wall clock,
took a seat on a hard plastic chair, and closed her eyes. She had learned to do this in foster care to deal with her grief.
She left this world and went into her imagination, where creatures roamed and the sky split with joy. In her daydreams, when
she was younger, she had found her mom, and the two of them were reunited. These dreams she replayed over and over again.
The moment. The scene. The happiness.
As she got older, the fantasies changed.
Her mother had survived—she had never been taken.
The two of them were as Ruby was now. Walking in a park.
Or playing with a baby. Ruby had never had a child, never wanted one, and she wondered if that would have been different if her mom were still here.
She didn’t have an answer to that. What she did know was that she was happy in these daydreams; she was whole.
In some of the fantasies, she and her mom were traveling.
In others, she was at her mom’s deathbed, and she was saying a proper goodbye. She was thanking her for all the years.
She blinked back tears, there in the impossible chair, and then her number was called.
A helpful if exhausted-looking clerk glanced at her license.
“You can access the Oregon DMV from here, correct?” Ruby asked.
The woman looked over her shoulder at the clock. She had five minutes until closing. “We’re all linked now,” she said. “Can’t
tell you everything, but I can give you basics. Including registrations.”
“Let’s start with Charise Brown.”
The woman typed. It took a few moments.
“Looks here like she has a state identification. No driver’s license. Last renewed, wow, years ago. Nothing since.”
Ruby nodded. Since Charise had never been scanned into the system, she had never been declared dead. She was a nonentity.
“How about a Jim Higginbottom?”
“Oh. Says here he’s law enforcement. I’m not sure I can give you information.”
“No?”
“I’d have to check—you know how it is. People go looking for police, sometimes. He wouldn’t want anyone tracking down his
private vehicles.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t. Let’s try his wife, then.”
The clerk had begun to look uncomfortable. She glanced at the clock again. They had two minutes left. The security guard was
ushering people out and getting ready to lock the door.
“Rosanna Higginbottom.”
“Okay. But this is the last one.”
“Fair enough.”
The woman typed.
“Looks like she had a license. Expired now. Last car she had, let’s see—ooh it’s been a time.”
“Let me guess. A Datsun.”
“That’s right. Do you want the plate number?”
“I sure do.”