“I’m a S.C.Y.T.H.E. administrative coordinator,” said Nora. “Was an administrative coordinator,” she corrected, mostly to herself.
“I see,” said Ruby. She fidgeted uneasily with her dishcloth, going over the spot where the water had spilled again as if there was any moisture left.
“You took all those files. Files from the late sixties.”
“Yes,” said Ruby.
“Andyourfile’s in there.”
Ruby stopped fidgeting but still didn’t look up. “And I suppose you intend to turn me in?”
“What? No,” said Nora. “I just need to understand it. I need to know why you have those files here.”
The front door opened then, Patty’s voice reverberating from the next room.
“Anybody home? My oven’s doing that thing again, and I’ve got a chicken so frozen it might as well be a penguin at this point.”
Ruby held up a finger to Nora. “Later, all right?” she whispered.
Nora nodded as Patty appeared in the kitchen doorway, a chicken on the tray in her hands.
* * *
Patty ended up staying for dinner, joined by Vince from the farm and Charles a short while later. This seemed to be somethingof a routine. Despite the little red house’s position at the far end of town, it appeared to be a hub for both the Birds and the few neighbors who weren’t related. Nora kept one eye trained on Ruby over forkfuls of Patty’s chicken. The flash of fear, or possibly anger, in her grandmother’s eyes when she confronted her in the kitchen set Nora on edge. Not that that was particularly hard to do.
Could Ruby have felt threatened somehow by the twins’ arrival in Virgo Bay? Would the otherworldly consequences of violating death-industry protocol—the same consequences she herself was running from—be enough to make her want to kill Charlie? It was about as likely as any motive she could think of for Phil, which was about a three out of ten on the motive-plausibility scale, but she couldn’t shake the sense that there was more to Ruby’s story. The question now was how much of that story Ruby was willing to share.
This time, as dinner finished, neither Nora nor Ruby moved to do the dishes. Instead, Charlie and Patty were saddled with the job. Ruby, meanwhile, insisted on a nice stroll down the beach, just the two of them, which meant Nora was either going to get some answers or get knocked off. Which, she supposed, was still getting answers in a way, though it was definitely not her preferred method. She would have to be vigilant.
The sun was already a distant memory when their boots hit the sand, a silver-speckled sky winking down at them. The waves tumbled gently on the shore. Nora sent them a warning glare. When she and Ruby had made it far enough from the house for their voices to be swallowed by the wind, Ruby chanced a look at her granddaughter. It was the first one since their conversation before dinner. Nora, for her part, had barely taken her eyes offher grandmother. Ruby was in her mideighties, if Nora had to guess. Not exactly who you’d expect to see in a mug shot. But people in desperate situations were capable of a lot more than they would be otherwise. Nora knew that fact firsthand. It was the same fact that had left her stranded here at the end of the world with her brother, a bird, and a murderer.
“I never expected to have to talk about it again,” Ruby said. “It was all so long ago.”
“But you knew that, even all these years later…if it came to light…you could face some serious consequences,” said Nora tentatively. She understood the threat all too well. It had made her reckless in her own way. Had it done similar, or worse, to Ruby?
“I love this place,” said Ruby, as if they were having a completely different conversation. “I knew from the first day I came here it was special. And just how lucky I was to have it.”
“Ruby, why do you have those files?”
“It was your grandfather’s idea for me to come,” said Ruby, still lost in a separate exchange. “He was the only one in his family to go away to university, you know. His father did not like that, not one bit. We met the year he graduated. I was two years into my job with the organization. It all happened so fast.”
“What did?”
They rounded a bend, and the thick woods down the path came into view. Nora could swear she could see movement among the trees, even from all the way down on the beach. When she looked back, Ruby had a hefty piece of driftwood in her hands. Nora swallowed a growing wave of panic. Why did she agree to come out here alone in the dark with someone who could be a killer? If Ruby had wanted Charlie dead due to some abstractthreat about her past life, surely a more direct one meant Nora had a target on her back by now. One made of neon lights and fun little sound effects set to go off for hitting a bull’s-eye.
“Everything,” Ruby replied, though Nora could barely remember what she was replying to. The old woman’s grip on the driftwood tightened. “I was going to die.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what the system’s like now, but back in my day, all the daily cases were left on one desk in the middle of the room. Every morning, we’d go in and grab a bunch from the pile and get to work. Which was all well and good until I found my own file. Nora, I was only twenty-two. I had barely lived yet. I couldn’t accept that I had to die. But I didn’t have a choice. I was going to have a heart attack from some sort of genetic abnormality I didn’t even know about until that morning. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Richard. We’d only just started going together, but I knew somehow I could trust him. Just a few hours later he’d brought me and my brothers—all the family I had left—to Virgo Bay. I wasn’t thinking clearly and I took my files with me. They were already in my car, and it was all such a scramble.”
“But I don’t understand,” Nora said, wondering for a very brief and potentially certifiable moment if circumventing the afterlife could be a hereditary ailment. “Why would Richard bring you here? How could that prevent your death?”
But Ruby wasn’t looking at her now. The old woman’s eyes were fixed on the house down the beach.
“Ruby?” Nora tried again.
In reply, Ruby flung the driftwood behind her. It nearly knocked directly into Nora’s head, walloping her in the shoulderinstead before thudding into the sand. Nora shook her nearly injured head and looked back to where Ruby had been standing, but she was gone. Nora blinked into the darkness. Was that just a murder attempt?
