She saw it then, and she knew.
44.
Back in Chinook, the sheriff stood on the bluff outside the cabin, watching the sun rise over the river. Grandfather stood next to him. He was missing the bone, but he knew it was for the best. It still talked to him.
“I guess today is the day,” the sheriff said, and the grandfather stared, sightless, feeling the memories of the river. He was remembering Mitchell as a child, chasing dragonflies down the shore.
“Is that why you’re here?” the grandfather asked. The sheriff had never willingly visited before.
“Yes. I... wanted to let you know I was thinking of you. At this time.”
“You never cared before.”
“That’s true. I was so wrapped up in my own pain, I couldn’t see it.”
“See what?”
“That maybe neither of them ran off.”
There. It was said.
The grandfather listened, his nose alert, his white eyes seeing. He couldn’t actually see, of course, but he knew in that moment that the sheriff was having a rare moment of honesty.
And it was too late.
The sheriff thought of his daughter, Emma. He wanted to call her, say,Come home, Emma. I will fix everything. But he knew he never would, because that was a promise he couldn’t keep. He could not change the past or himself. The die was cast. People changed, he had found, one small step at a time, and he had never taken the first step. His wife,Rosanna, had wanted him to. She had railed at him often enough,You can change, Jim. You can change.But he did not, and now it was too late.
The grandfather was silent, sniffing his memories.
The sheriff looked at the river. He saw a lifetime spent near it, in a town he had tried to protect—and failed. That’s mostly what he saw.
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.
