“Was I supposed to?”
“No.” She smiled. “You seem like an awfully nice young man. Whatgot you sent here—to the Misty Mountains, where you might find mythical metals?”
He smiled, delighted by her.
“My mom wanted me to be a cop. I don’t know. The captain said I wasn’t good with people. He’s right.”
Ruby thought of her friend Delaney, and Delaney’s young son, recently diagnosed with autism.
“What didyouwant to do?”
His youthful face flushed. “I was the Lego champion in school.”
“Then you should go be a Lego champion somewhere.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“I bet you could research it,” she said.
He shined the light on the shelves. They had come to a place that felt like a box at the end of a maze, surrounded with thick walls of paper.
“Your records should be around here. I was always good with numbers. With remembering things like this. Right there.” He pointed his light. “Those file boxes there. We can take them back up top, if you want, and we can look through them there.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He looked happy. “It doesn’t look like there’ll be a lot in those boxes, but trust me, there will be plenty.”
“Well, then, give me a hand.”
34.
The sheriff was nettled. Jim Higginbottom was often nettled. If veins were brambles, his would have had thorns, his insides always pricking at him in distaste. In irritation. He’d been like this since he was a young man, and felt like his body didn’t quite fit in the world. Little things other people took in stride irritated the shit out of him. Like the way they coughed—though he coughed, too—or the opinions they had, though he knew that his opinions could be wrong, too. He moved through his days in a cloud of anger and couldn’t even say why. It was like anger wasn’t even an emotion anymore.
It was a state of being.
He had carefully arranged everything: the pig hunt, the exhumation. He was well aware of the laws regarding exhumations, and knew that excavating a burial ground could cause all sorts of headaches and complications. It was far easier to do as he had learned to on a farm, growing up: as long as you did quality work, rules and regulations be damned. But that investigator had put the fear of God into the woman at the historical society and now he had to wade through all the ridiculous red tape. He had spent the better part of one morning in a headache-inducing exchange with the health department, and now half the women in town were complaining about the pig hunt, because their kids wanted to join and he had said no. It wasn’t a merry fucking holiday.
Now, oiling his hunting rifle in his station, readying for the pighunt tomorrow, he thought of his daughter, Emma. He remembered one Christmas morning, getting up early, trying to cook some bacon so he could at least make it festive. Emma was maybe eleven by then, and he had looked out his window to see Mitchell Brown, trying to learn how to drive his grandfather’s rusted old truck. The boy was maybe fourteen or fifteen at that time, and hisblindgrandfather was sitting next to him, giving instructions. It was a Christmas fucking miracle that the kid hadn’t hit anything.
Jim had run out, still in his plaid robe and slippers, though it was icy, grabbed ahold of the driver’s side door, and asked them what the hell they were doing. The grandfather had cackled, whiskey on his breath, and said he was teaching his grandson how to drive. It was his Christmas gift.
So the sheriff had them pull over, and his Christmas, followed by a tangle of bacon, was sitting in the truck with Mitchell Brown and his grandfather, with Emma, excited, squeezed in next to him, while he taught the young man how to drive. Slowly. Surely. Safely.
Later, Emma had said, “That was the best Christmas ever, Dad. Since Mom went away.”
He thought about Rosanna lately, too. Sometimes he wondered. Sometimes he knew. It was like his brain was one of those old-fashioned cabinets they had in the hardware store, with a tiny drawer for each size of screw. Who knew what was in each drawer? You had to open it to find out. Maybe someone had misplaced one screw, and you would find a 5/8-inch one with the 3/4-inch ones. You might find your wife gone, her purse and car keys gone, and you might wonder if you did it. Because you know you didsomething. That was part of the irritation you carried. Irritation at yourself.
He shook his head. The rifle was ready. It had been ready for a long time. He wondered why he hadn’t ever planned the hunt before, and then he knew: He liked the fact that the pigs were in the woods. It kept the locals from going there too much. It wasn’t their land, after all. People should stay where they belong.
35.
It was lunchtime by the time Jacob and Ruby got the file boxes to the cage above the vaults. Her blouse was covered with dust, and dirt covered her arms. Wiping her brow, she left a streak.
“Is that your lunch?” Ruby asked the officer. His lunch box waited on the metal desk in the small cage. It was the old-fashioned metal regulation kind. In jails and prisons, she knew, the lunch boxes were now required to be clear plastic. So the staff couldn’t smuggle drugs or other contraband inside. A metal lunch box like this could also be used as a weapon.
Her mind was crowded with such facts. Sometimes she wondered what niceness would fill it if she were in a different line of work. But then who else could live in this moment, with the smell of the elevator and the sight of the sun over the hills?
“Yeah. Why?”
