“I was thinking of going out for lunch. Maybe you could join me? Are you allowed?”
“Sure, if no one is coming. I know a place not far.”
Which was how they ended up eating hamburgers at an old roadside stand she would have never found herself, alongside a creek with a falling-down dock, the trees heavy with vines. The warm air smelled like forever, and they had their own picnic table, where the records officer opened each box and the names flew out ahead of the papers, and Ruby caught them in her hand and said it would be okay.
“I think you found your treasures,” Ruby said.
“How?” Jacob asked. They had finished their burgers and were now organizing the dozens of reports they had found into neat stacks across the picnic table. The girl at the window watched, curious.
From the stacks, they were winnowing out those reports that were clearly not foul play. There were not many. There was more of a chance, Ruby thought, that a missing woman wouldn’t even get a report. Once, she had located a missing woman whose baby had been left in a Safe Haven Baby Box outside a fire station. Ruby was troubled by those boxes, because in her experience, few women left their infants out of choice: Many times an abusive man forced them to, or a captor dropped off a child from a woman he had locked up somewhere. There were no investigations into where the babies came from.
“These are the treasures,” she said, picking up a report. She was quite sure none of them had ever been downloaded into the system. More flags for her map, she thought.
“I doubt the women feel like that,” he said. “If they are still alive.”
“Probably not,” she agreed. “That’s odd,” she said.
“What’s odd?”
“Look at this.” She moved her hands over the stacks.
“Look at what?”
“There’s almost nothing for these years,” she said.
“Could it be, you know, a natural variation?”
“I don’t think so.” She frowned.
“What does it mean?”
Ruby sat back, thinking. He leaned forward, eager, and she thought what a caring young man he was. Under her breath, she sent a wish that he would find his path in life.
She thought of a case she had solved involving a killer who rodethe trains. He called himself the Vagabond, which pissed off true vagabonds, who were generally misfits but harmless. Riding the trains allowed him to stop in different places and kill women, and no one had tied the murders together. Until one day, working an exoneration involving a man blamed for killing one of the Vagabond’s victims, Ruby noticed clusters of missing women near freight train hubs.
“Maybe this,” she said now, putting her hand on a smaller stack, “is actually the norm for around here. And this,” she said, moving her hand to what came later, “is what happens when a killer comes to town.”
His eyes widened. “What can I do to help?”
She smiled at him. “You could help me make copies of these reports.”
The Union City factory supervisor had a deep, rumbly cough. It was a cough that told of years of menthols, and his teeth were stained from them, too. He wore his hair natural and styled close, and his throat was laced with dark lines from years of hard living. His hands looked like mitts.
Ruby had come here straight from saying goodbye to the records officer, copies of the reports now in her bag. She was talking to the supervisor amid the clamor of the factory floor. The machines making the sneakers were very loud, and along the rows were dozens of employees—all Black—cutting the sneakers and lacing them together. The sneakers looked very bright in all the solemn grayness, the harsh lights overhead and the cold concrete floors.
“You keep records of the cars the employees drove?” she asked him.
“Sorry, miss—no.”
She nodded, thinking. She had stopped by here in part to cross his name off her list—and because she sensed this place was part of a puzzle she was trying to piece together.
“Had another one of you come ask about him,” he said, coughing. She watched his chest heaving under the stained blue shirt. This could be Mitchell, she thought, if he had stayed. Then she thought, no—Mitchell was too deft at living for that. His life was on an upswing and he was going with it.
She didn’t remember any reports of defense team members coming here—or the police, either. But those records were spotty.
“An investigator?” she asked.
He frowned, trying to remember. “Can’t really say.”
