“Do you want to move?” Ruby’s mother kept asking her.
They still lived in Old Town, in a larger but decayed apartmentabove skid row, and the place had a claw-foot tub that felt massive to little Ruby, and linoleum that peeled in the corners. Ruby had found pennies in the back of a cupboard, and the closet was bigger than many modern kitchens. On one shelf, her mother had placed a small blue bottle, and the sun caught it when the rays came in through the lead-glass windows.
Ruby loved it there. She didn’t want to move. This was her poorhouse, and it was better, different, and her mom agreed.
Here they had space, and movement. Desirée had risen through the ranks of hotel cleaners, and now supervised other women like her. She had a deft hand with other women. She knew to be not their friend but their boss. Other women liked that. The secret to sisterhood was to know whose side you were on, and friends could be malicious. They sacrificed each other every time a man caught their eye. If a woman was working to support a husband who spent all his money on drink, well, that was fine. If she was pretending to be a widow with a fake wedding band washed with silver from the local pawn shop, sure, why not. Desirée never trafficked in gossip because gossip is the way men have trained women against each other, and she knew it.
In the old warehouse district along the Willamette River, Ruby ran as free as a bird. She played among the breweries polluting the air with the rich, redolent smell of hops. She made friends with men playing dice and whist outside corner shops. She learned to weave a cane chair from an old man without legs on her floor of their building. She pried windows open with butter knives for old ladies. She felt like her legs were loose here. She was free.
“No,” she told her mother, time and again, when she asked if Ruby was interested in the beyond: a circular place where the kids all looked the same, and wore starched clothes like the Brady Bunch, anddid thesame things,like attended the same school, and had men with faces like butchers for dads.
Here in Old Town, the kids who lived in the old apartment buildings went to whatever school they could, usually riding the city bus, and in the summers they earned extra money by taking the rickety berry bus to the fields outside of town, where farmers paid them a quarter a flat, and she ate berries and felt the fine sun on her face. She could discover the world here, and the world was wonderful: It was big and actually without danger. Of course, there were creeps and cretins, as her mother cautioned her: Desirée had told her about the men where she had grown up, always stealing her nose, but Ruby knew about them—and she knew how to run.
She could run here.
14.
From the low country, Ruby turned her car back toward Hammock County, to the courthouse in Pickleweed. The courthouse had been hewn of the same white limestone as the police vaults. It sparkled in the hot summer sun. On the police car license plates outside were so many peaches. Ruby thought about the irony of that as she made her way through the metal detectors, up to the fourth floor where the district attorney waited.
“I’ve explained it before, in depositions,” District Attorney Jerrod Tinsley said.
He was a big, fleshy man who looked like he didn’t miss his share at supper. He had a rough-and-tumble laugh, but Ruby watched the eyes of his clerks. You could tell a lot about a man by how his clerks acted in his presence.
“I’d still like to walk through what happened, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“Well, all right.” He looked annoyed, checked his watch.
Ruby followed him down the carpeted hall.
“This was the conference room where we used to staff the cases.” He opened the door to a shadowy storage room. File boxes were stacked in the corners. He caught her eye. “We pulled the place apart looking for those exhibit boxes, trust me.”
He gently closed the door.
“From here,” he said, “the evidence would be taken to the serviceelevator. We got hand trucks for the heavier exhibit boxes.” He pushed the elevator button, and they rode down a floor. They were in a courthouse hall. “This is where the trial was held. Courtroom 32B.”
She rose to her tippy-toes to look in the courtroom window. “Would the boxes be there?” She pointed to where a prosecutor was giving his closing argument to a bored-looking jury.
“Yes. Like I said, I explained all this before.” His patience was beginning to wear thin. “At the end of the trial, the exhibit boxes go back on the hand truck, and back up the elevator. They would be stored in the conference room until police took them to the vaults. We have no idea what happened to them in this case.”
“You were the prosecutor on the case.”
His blue eyes went hazy. “Yes.”
“Do you remember bringing the boxes back up?”
“I’ve answered this before. I don’t remember. We were very busy that day. Lots of trials, and this courtroom was full. Lots of media, too, people asking questions outside the courtroom.”
It sounded like he wanted her to believe that someone snuck into the courtroom and stole several boxes of evidence. But Ruby knew that even ten years before, they had guards on the front door. No one could have just walked out with a bunch of exhibit boxes. This had to have been an inside job. He knew it, and so did she.
“Let’s pretend we have the boxes now,” she said.
They walked back to the elevator. She pushed the button this time. They rode up with the imaginary trial exhibit boxes from Mitchell’s case. The power of her imagination was so strong, the district attorney could see the trial boxes on the hand truck she pushed in her mind.
She wheeled them back down the carpeted hall, seeing the way thehand truck would mark the rugs. He opened the door again, and she stepped inside.
“Who had access to this room that day?”
“Everyone that works here.”
