45.
The farm that had once belonged to Betty Dubois was outside Pickleweed, in one of the many hollows of the region. It felt
like a place lost in time, the trees dripping green. The sky was a smudge of hot blue.
At one time, Ruby could see, Betty had painted the fence white, and planted roses along it. The roses were ungainly now, overgrown
and covered with black spots, and their rotting petals fell as Ruby’s car passed.
Ruby parked outside the farmhouse, which looked empty. The windows were cracked, the gutters hanging. She imagined how Betty
would feel, seeing her beloved property this way.
Ruby’s knees tingled. She made her way up to the buckled front porch and pounded on the mud-smeared door. There was no answer.
She walked around the house, trying to peer in the windows, but they were covered with old curtains, gone to grease. There
was an old washtub on the back porch, with a ring of dirty water in it, and a lot of empty beer cans strewn about. The beer
cans had a bright, metallic look in the foggy morning.
She stepped back, examining the house. There was no basement, only a crawl space. She got down on all fours and peeked into
it. It smelled musty, but not of the dead. She would recognize that smell. The stages of decay had particular odors that Ruby
recognized even from a distance. Even buried, remains had a stench that permeated the soil, and besides, the crawl space was
too low for anyone to crawl into and bury a body. There was no one here.
She backed out and stood up, looking beyond the back field to the brambly, thick woods. Fenced and cross-fenced, she remembered the probate document saying. There were ten acres of woods here, all private property. A bad feeling began to grow inside her.
The cicadas had stopped buzzing, she suddenly realized. She looked down and saw that the ground was strewn with their dead
husks.
At the back of the overgrown yard was a decaying car, almost drowning in the high grass. Ruby walked closer, looking at the
dirty windows. The tires were collapsed.
It was the brown Datsun.
A quick look at the license plate confirmed that she was right. She wiped dirt from the back window and peered inside. The
back seat was empty. She put her hand, briefly, on the trunk.
The bone was singing to her now.
There was a distant sound of tires grabbing the road.
He was coming.
The man slid out of the same truck that had chased her. His black hair had gone almost entirely silver, with black still showing
as streaks. His wide face was lined with age, and his once red lips had paled. His dark eyes took her in as she stood in front
of his house.
Suddenly he didn’t look so much like Tommy Lee Jones. He looked like—
“Frank Castle?”
“Yeah.”
He was carrying a six-pack of beer. She took in his ropy arms, and saw that he was wearing a knife in a sheath on his worn
leather belt. His dark eyes fixed on hers, and she thought of her mother.
She was aware that she and Frank were alone.
She held out her investigator license, looking into his eyes. She was looking to see if he recognized her last name. He did not, and she thought, Why should he? He never bothered to find out.
“You got balls coming here,” he said.
His voice was not friendly.
“I want to talk.”
Once inside his place, he put his beer away, and she sat on the blanket-covered couch, the coils springing even under her
light weight. He grunted at the sound and popped his first bottle of the day. He did not offer her one.
“All right, go ahead,” he said, drinking.
Ruby felt inside herself. Usually in these moments, she became another person, part of herself and yet different. She was
the open vessel where men could deposit their pain, the final womb where they could confess. She specialized in this. It was
one reason she was so good at her job.
But it was not happening now. The wide openness was not there. Instead she felt the constriction of pain. She knew she was
looking at the man who had taken her mother. She knew she was looking at him.
“My job is to assist men on death row.”
“Yeah.” He drank again, long and noisily.
“I’m working on a case involving a man named Mitchell Brown.”
“I know, all right.”
“Your cousin went missing. Betty Dubois.”
“Know that, too.”
“They never found her body.”
“Yeah.”
“The execution is this morning.”
He held his bottle of beer, his eyes cold.
“Going to fry him?”
“They use lethal injection now.”
“Hmm.”
“My mother’s name was Desirée.”
She saw it then, just a twitch in his left eye because he hadn’t seen it coming.
“You were the caretaker at the poorhouse,” Ruby said.
“You’re—”
“Your daughter.”
Terrence Fulks arrived early to the death house, as he always did on the day of an execution. It felt like all the air had
been sucked out of the place. No one breathed on the day of an execution. They all waited, and when the horn sounded, they
knew that another one of them had gone. It was like a cell leaving a body—like the last exhale.
He sat with Mitchell in the visiting room. He could see the stress aura around the man. It was time.
“Have you seen Ruby?” Mitchell asked.
“No,” Terrence said, with surprise. “I was expecting her here.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe she’s on her way.”
“We don’t have long,” Mitchell said, as if the attorney were getting executed, too, and maybe in a way he was.
The warden appeared outside the door. It was time for Mitchell to go back to his cell. There he would be asked to change into
a disposable jumpsuit. Men often voided themselves in the final moments, from fear as much as the poisons, and the prison
liked to save on laundry.
Mitchell looked ill. You were never prepared, Terrence thought. People wanted people to think the condemned were at peace when they were executed. The truth was, most went with hands and knees shaking. Some were so incapacitated by fear they could not walk, and had to be carried to their death.
Frank Castle had not moved. He held the bottle in one hand, his face a mask of surprise—and fury.
Ruby thought of all the men she had caught, and how anger was the one thing that tied them all together. They could be young
or old, rich or poor, but what connected them was they hated women and loved nothing. They didn’t feel the dawn or the specialness
of the day. They were empty inside, except for that swirling, cold tornado.
“Did you know I was alive?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I always figured she got rid of you.”
He was upset, she could see, that her mother had never told him about her, not even under duress.
“Mitchell’s mom didn’t have an abortion, either,” she said.
“So?”
“Does it bother you?”
“Why should it?”
“Because I suspect you did the same thing to Charise that you did to my mom. Nowadays they call it rape, to take advantage
of a child like that.”
His eyes glinted. “Oh, she wasn’t a child. Your mom neither.”
She felt a sickness, a revulsion.
“Here’s your life story,” she said. “I think you started killing women when you were still young, and lived around here. Maybe you got scared. Maybe you were afraid of getting caught. So you hit the road and ended up in Oregon, and you got the caretaker job at the poorhouse. It would have reminded you of where you had come from. A place to exact revenge for all that had happened. I have experience with men like you. You don’t turn against the men that hurt you. You turn against women.”
He was staring into her eyes. He did not like this story.
“I’m sure you killed plenty there, finding women hitching on the highway, or picking them up in the city, where you later
tracked down my mom. You buried them in that graveyard along with the poorhouse dead. But then the poorhouse closed, and you
had a decision to make. Maybe you were homesick. Or just tired of those cold winters. So you decided to come back to Georgia.
You killed Rosanna Higginbottom and took her car. Because you had her car, her husband assumed she’d run away. Once you got
back here, you kept on killing. This is why there was a fallow period during the years you were gone. And a spike after your
return. Did that worry you, or did you know this was the safest kind of murder to commit?”
He gave a mean little shrug.
She took a deep breath. “Which leads us to that night. You followed Mitchell from the bar. He drove to the gas station, and
you saw an opportunity. Two birds, one stone. But one part doesn’t make sense to me. How did you know Mitchell would be at
the bar that night?”
Terrence was in the viewing room. None of the relatives of Betty Dubois had decided to come. One of her school friends did
show up. The press had set up cameras outside for the press conference. In a black sedan parked nearby, Jerrod Tinsley waited.
Terrence took a seat and looked through the viewing window. The death chamber was empty at the moment. The gurney was ready. The doctor had already checked the machine. He would be there to watch the death, and record the final moments.
Terrence shifted in his chair, waiting.
Outside Mitchell’s cell, the two officers assigned to making sure Mitchell didn’t kill himself had turned their chairs, signifying
the end. Wicked Willy watched from his cell and said nothing. He might be next, but he still had plans—he was the kind of
man who always had plans, and had never stopped to ask where they had gotten him.
Shaking so hard he could barely make his hands work, Mitchell changed into his paper jumpsuit. Willy turned away, as the men
always did when the others changed, or used the naked toilet. You built walls in your mind. Life would go on, Mitchell thought.
That was the most terrible part. Life would go on.
He went to the toilet bowl, thinking he would be sick, but he was not. He leaned against the cold concrete wall, feeling it
on his skin for the last time. He wiped his eyes.
The officers were back. It was time.
Terrence watched as the door on the other side of the death chamber opened and the warden led Mitchell in, dressed in his
thin jumpsuit. The young man looked to be in shock.