“What is it, honey?”
“Maybe my mother didn’t run away,” Emma said.
She had never said it before, not even to herself.
“This Mitchell guy was a little kid when she went—”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Oh, Emma.”
“I never really believed my dad. I mean, how many moms just disappear and never contact their kids again?”
“Did he ever file a report?”
Emma was ashamed to admit that she did not know.
“He was so angry with her for leaving. I just... accepted whatever he said. Then later, I had no idea how to find her. I thought maybe she didn’t want me to find her.”
“You could file a report now.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
The hotel phone, bland and beige, beckoned. Patricia stretched,all pink and white, and Emma appreciated her physical form in that moment—the tenderness of flesh—but more than that, she appreciated the steel in her lover’s eyes. People, she thought, are delicate machines. You never know when we might end.
Or begin.
She made the call.
31.
Ruby spent a restless night. As she did so often as an execution grew close, she didn’t sleep at all. She drove, aimless, feeling the warm wind whip outside the car, and her mind was filled with snapshots of the past—it was filled as if with flotsam. Like the tide was coming in, to sweep everything away.
Eventually she stopped in at an all-night diner, on the newer highway that curled around the town, and she drank tea from a heavy white mug while picking at a slice of pecan pie à la mode, the ice cream slipping across the plate, and watched a truck driver take the crown of whipped margarine from the top of his dinner-plate-sized cinnamon roll and plop it whole in his mouth. The jukebox played, and she could have been in any time in the last seventy years. The cook had a hairnet, the waitress a soft belly. Ruby was nowhere. She was here.
The cicadas blasted as she left, the warm night surrounding her, just the inkling of a dawn rising in the east, centering the trees and this place on earth. I am here, she corrected herself. I am here, and Mitchell Brown is slated to die in four days.
Tired, her eyes hot and aching, she pulled into a truck stop for a nap. She had found that truck stops were good places for a rest. Truck drivers were—mostly—a friendly lot, willing to look out for a woman napping alone in her car. There were a lot of women truck drivers now. They were fearsome on the road.
Curled up in her back seat, she thought of Mitchell. Which made her think of Betty, and the fact that she had never been found.
She sat up, not having rested at all.
Breathing deep of the cool morning air, she left the car for a table near the concrete restrooms, where a church lady was selling Styrofoam cups of hot coffee from a giant metal urn. The coffee was scalding hot, and Ruby drank it carefully, looking toward the swampy woods.
Bodies, she thought.
The Pickleweed police station was in a deserted industrial park on the outskirts of town, where, Ruby thought without irony, no one could hear you scream. She pushed open the heavy door to find a girl behind the counter, wearing the spit-and-polish uniform of a junior cadet. Oregon had had a program like this once, she remembered—until cases of older male officers taking advantage of the teenagers came to light, and the state shut it down.
This girl was maybe sixteen, her hair as bright as brass. She smiled tentatively at Ruby, but the officer rising from his desk behind the counter did not smile. He was one of the officers who had come to the motel, and he looked discomfited by Ruby’s arrival.
“If you’re here about that shooting, we haven’t—” he began.
“I’m not here about that,” Ruby said, resting her elbows on the counter. “Though I’m pretty sure I know who it was.”
“Yeah? Who?” He sounded confrontational, because he was nervous.
