36.
The next morning, Ruby was standing in front of one of the buildings in downtown Pickleweed, this one housing the Pickleweed Current. She was drinking coffee from a large to-go cup and looking at the mural painted on the wall outside.
The mural showed only white people: a happy history of a town devoid of the people who built it. There was a man strolling
in a conspicuously white suit with a toothpick in his mouth, a distant plantation with a colonial mansion, and girls in pinafore
dresses frolicking in the sun. An ice cream parlor served only white children. Pickleweed Through the Ages, said the colorful title splashed across the top. The artist had added his proud scrawl.
She yawned. She had spent the night at the truck stop again, this time treating herself to a longer shower.
She reached for the front door, surprised that the paper was still alive. The front office was empty. She picked up a fresh
paper off the counter. It was very thin, more the size of a circular than a real paper. Still alive, but dying like papers
across the country, she thought.
She thumbed through the few pages. “Swimming Pool Repairs to Take Longer than Expected.” Death notices.
“School Notes: Students Are Writing Essays About the Strength and Courage of Robert E. Lee.” She wasn’t surprised to see a profile of Jerrod Tinsley.
She skimmed through it. It was a pure puff piece, much of it a tribute to his work on the Mitchell Brown case, and a mention of his press conference scheduled for after the execution.
She moved on. “Jump Rope Club Gets Hopping.” “Ladies’ Luncheon a Savory Success.
” “Town Pushes for Stronger Dog Control Laws After Mauling.” This interested her, and she began reading.
Animal control says it stopped hiring their own police after an internal audit showed a dismal conviction rate from the last
sworn officer.
“Can I help you?”
The man who’d spoken was large, with ink-stained fingers and frowzy white hair that stood on end in a circle on his head.
He had a big wen by one eye. His glasses had slipped down his nose.
She knew instantly that any friendliness would evaporate once she identified herself and he heard the North in her voice.
“I’m trying to learn more about a few people,” she said, showing him her notepad, where she had written names.
He peered at them, then at her license.
“Not sure I can help.”
“Maybe they’re mentioned someplace in your paper,” she said.
“Maybe, but we don’t have an index like that.”
“How do you store the older papers? Microfiche?”
He looked unwilling. “Yes.”
“Then that will do.”
The microfiche reader was in the back of his office, the machine grimy. The grime was not dirt but ink from the editor’s inky
hands; he’d come to look up something before the paper went to bed.
She turned on the ancient reader, wishing for an aspirin and reading glasses. These things always gave her a headache. She
turned up the light, but at best the screen was a dark gray.
She inserted the first reel and began, there, in the town of Pickleweed, when the paper was much bigger, and Betty Dubois
was a young woman.
By noon, when the editor was ready to hang his “gone for lunch” sign in the window, Ruby had found three articles.
The first was about Betty Dubois, spinster of Pickleweed. The term spinster wasn’t used anymore, but it was back when she participated in a dance contest and won the High-Flyin’ Award. The picture
showed an ecstatic Betty, her skirt flaring high as she spun in the air, a look of pure bliss on her face.
The second article was on the newer highway, and it quoted a Miss Betty Dubois saying the highway would kill her gas station
by diverting all the traffic.
The third article contained the only mention Ruby had found of any of the other names on her list, which included Frank Castle.
It featured a picture of people outside the courthouse, on a sunny day when everyone was forced to squint. The man in the
front was big and bluff, and he was wearing a white shirt, no jacket. Behind him was an array of court staff.
District Attorney Elected, the caption said. Jerrod Tinsley Takes the Reins. The people in the photo were named—the clerks, the few security guards—which was how Ruby learned that Frank Castle had once
worked as a courthouse security guard. He wore an old-style uniform; the shirt had wider lapels, and there were neat button
flaps over the pockets.
In the photo, Frank Castle had his hands along his belt, his head lowered against the sun washing out most of his face. He
was in his forties then, she guessed. She could barely make out that tiny dot of black and white, but she saw enough to recognize
him.
Ruby watched prosecutor Tinsley heading up the street for lunch, surrounded by several professional-looking men.
She stopped, watching them. They were dressed in expensive suits, and had that swagger that told her they were not locals, or courthouse staff.
They looked like the kind of wealthy men who sat on the boards of very rich companies. Yet they had dust on their shoes.
She frowned, and made her way into the courthouse.
There she found an elderly but spry security officer, checking the courtrooms as part of his rounds.
“I’d like to know about Frank Castle,” she said, after introducing herself.
“He got fired,” the lead security said.
“Fired for what?” Ruby asked, enjoying the feeling of the cool halls. It was mercilessly hot out.
“Everything. He’s the kind of guy who shows up late and picks a fight over nothing. Everything was trouble with him. Don’t
know how he got hired in the first place.”
He rattled a locked door, then moved on to the next.
Apparently, Tinsley had not warned others not to talk to her. That would be a risky move, she knew, because she could and
would call people to the stand to prove interference. It was easier for him to bide his time, she thought, and let the final
hours drain away. The execution was set for the day after tomorrow, after all. The chances of her stopping it now were close
to nil.
“You see much of Frank outside work?”
“Me? No,” he said, derisively. “Frank Castle is the kind of guy who hits you up for a beer at the bar, saying it’s his turn
next, then disappears. Besides, we got nothing in common.”
“When was he fired?”
“Well, let me think on that,” he said, his shoes squeaking down the hall.
He tried another door, this time to an old-fashioned press room.
The door opened, and she glimpsed a room that looked like it had been lifted from a movie starring Cary Grant.
At one time, courthouses had these rooms for reporters during major trials.
They would come here to type their stories, and rush to a bank of phones to call them in to newspapers across the country.
“Someone missed this one,” he said, pulling out the massive key chain on his belt and locking it. “If I’m remembering right,
Frank didn’t last long. He got fired after a year or two. Not many stay in this line of work. It’s dull, when it’s not stressful.”
They could hear the rattle of a custodian’s bucket behind them as the man dragged it down the hall. The custodian was wearing
a prison inmate uniform, Ruby noticed. The mop swished.
She and the guard went down a flight of stairs.
“Got any idea where he lives nowadays?”
“No idea, sorry.”
“He’s someplace.”
“Country like this, there’s a million places a man can live. Hunting cabins in the woods. Abandoned prepper compounds. We
got plenty of land a man can eke out a life, especially if he got a supply of firewood. You got places like that where you’re
from?”
Ruby thought of the rural areas of Oregon.
“We sure do,” she said, warmly.
“Working in a place like this, we get all beliefs. I try to be reasonable with people. I let them know that.”
“You ever see Frank back here, later?”
His hand froze on a doorknob he had probably touched a thousand times. His key chain shook.
“Not sure I have,” he said, and she felt he was lying.
“Jerrod Tinsley sign your checks, or the courthouse?”
“Miss.”
She thought of the exhibit boxes as they made their way down the final hall, where he checked doors.
“You all have a service entrance here?” she asked. “For staff to come through?”
“Yes. In the back.”
That was where the boxes left, she thought. They didn’t even have to go through the front. Where the lead security would have
been that day, watching the last of the excited jurors leave, while people celebrated outside. No one would have witnessed
it. There would be no need to lie and say, I never saw it. Because he never did.
They stopped back in front of the café, with an almost-empty glass case. In the corner was the table where she had sat, drinking
her coffee and reading the dockets.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, earnestly. “It’s your job, which is why I’m talking to you. But that man is guilty. You
really shouldn’t be helping him like this.”
“What makes you think Mitchell is guilty?”
“The jury said so, didn’t they? And that evidence, it may have gotten lost, but it was there. They caught him red-handed.”
After the courthouse came a series of bars, where men shook their head, or told aimless stories that never got to a point.
Ruby had found that investigations were like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole. You kept hitting the pop-ups until somehow, something
worked and you hit the right one.
Or the game ended.
Her last stop was the local library, where she first spent some time ruling out any local investigators named David Morgan. Then she spread the missing women reports from the police station and the archives across a table.
There was a pattern—she could see it right away. The disappearances had started decades ago when a handful of women went missing
from local bars. Then the pattern abruptly stopped. The few missing women of the next fifteen years could be explained by
other causes, like hikers getting lost on the Appalachian trail. Then suddenly the pattern resumed—and increased. Most of
the women had disappeared after visiting a tavern or bar, but never the same one. Others had simply vanished. There were no
witnesses. No leads. But on the other hand, there was little police work, either.
Ruby ran the women’s names on the library computer. She wasn’t surprised when nothing came up for most of them. As usual,
most had not been reported as missing in the papers. Ruby didn’t blame people for not knowing there were so many missing women.
How could they? Even if the families made a stink, it was hard to get attention. This was doubly so for women of color, trebly
if they had difficult histories or were known to drink.
She stopped, feeling headachy. Getting up, she packed her bag and strolled over to where the librarian was getting ready to
close up for the day. If truck drivers were her eyes and ears on the road, librarians were the bartenders of the community,
often tapped into every local issue and political plot. The woman smiled at her, skeptical but eager to help, as she approached.
Ruby leaned against the desk.
“I’m new in town.”
She was leaving the building—the librarian locking the doors behind her—when her phone rang, jangling her from her thoughts.
The sticky air hit her like a wet towel to the face. The sunset was a rusty banner.
It was Delaney.
“I’m still working on the bone,” Delaney said right away. “DNA breaks down over time, and with exposure, so this has been
a tough one. I had another reason to call you.”
“What is it?”
“It happened when I entered your client’s DNA into our system.”
“Yeah?”
There was a long pause.
“There was a match. To someone we already have in the database.”
Ruby was puzzled.
“What do you mean?”
She could hear Delaney take a deep breath.
“He’s related to a woman living in Georgia. She sent in her DNA in case anyone ever found remains of her missing relative.
You’re not going to believe this.”
The sky was now the color of blood.
“Her last name is Dubois.”