43.
As the sun came up, Ruby sat in her car outside the gas station where the crime had happened. She had known, on this day of
execution, that sleep would not come.
Mitchell was slated for execution later that morning.
She pulled the map from her crowded bag, opening it in the pearly soft half-light. The trees looked thick with darkness. She
smelled distant woodsmoke and low rivers, the exposed mud. The cicadas were dwindling but still insistent.
She traced the route Mitchell had drawn from Oregon to Georgia, then found the spot where she was sitting now. It was mostly
farmland around here. Farmland and foothills, the misty morning rising.
Stretching her neck, she felt the bones creak. The take-out coffee cup at her side was empty. Someday, her friend Delaney
had once joked, they’d go to take Ruby’s blood and it would be coffee.
It was a forensic scientist joke, Ruby figured.
The woods were quiet. To the north was the Pickleweed Motel. Willa would be rising now, preparing for her day. She would be
placing tiny soaps alongside sinks, shaking out stale duvets. Turning pillows, looking for marks of life on the sheets.
Ruby stared at the map. She used her finger to draw her own path, from the bar to the gas station. It had been a clean shot.
Mitchell had followed the road straight here.
Something about that bothered her.
Feeling teary, she put away the map. She had failed, she thought, and it was too late to rectify that. Not just to save her client’s life but to catch the real killer, too. Not only of Betty, she suspected, but of the other women who had gone missing.
Ruby knew she could tell herself she would return here and work those cases. Maybe she would. But she also knew that as soon
as she was finished with this case, her phone would ring. There were too many missing women, too many men on death row, for
her to work them all.
Mitchell would be dead by then. Ruby had posthumously exonerated several men who had been executed, or died while on death
row. It gave her no satisfaction. If anything, it was the most painful aspect of her career. She felt their reproach. You were too late, those voices said.
She rummaged through her crowded bag, pausing at Mitchell’s job application. She remembered thinking how sometimes it was
one detail that broke a case. Like that section he had filled out on his challenge. How he’d gotten to know everyone around
Chinook.
Her hand found the copies of the ledgers, each one held together with a neat clip in the top left-hand corner. It was something
else she had promised herself to do: find the relatives of these people. She could even go looking for her own long-lost relatives,
find them somewhere in the fields of life.
She closed her eyes. They felt grainy and hot. It never got easier, to say goodbye to someone you had tried to save.
She thought of her last vision, and the matron in her chair, writing down a name. She would have noted each new person that
arrived, and all that died. The few that were born at the poorhouse, like her mother. The effervescent, purehearted Desirée.
Ruby opened the first ledger at random, and began turning pages. There were a lot of Ralphs, many Elizabeths. Popular names at the time. A Georgette appeared, an Englebert. A Samuel. She was wasting time, she was sure.
She stopped. In the vision, the matron had been writing a name in the front of the ledger.
Trembling, she turned to the first page. Here the matron had written her own name, with her title. The staff had their own
page, you see. Because they were not quite residents.
They were employees.
She saw it then, and she knew.