“Case like that, once they finish, they want the glory, not the aftermath. If they had any doubts about that evidence, they knew better than to let it get to storage. Getting rid of it? Solves a lot of problems.”
The line trembled harder, but he did nothing. He appeared lost in thought, in memory.
“I told myself it wasn’t my business, that Mitchell’s defense attorney could handle things. I was lying to myself, and I knew it. I left the conference room, and when I got back down to the courtroom, the jury was back. They acquitted her, by the way. My word against hers. That was the day I figured out the real reason they’d hired me.”
She waited for him to tell her.
“They didn’t want change.”
She thought about what he had said. It was his word against Tinsley’s, and she knew who would be believed.
“Did you hear again from the district attorney?”
“Why, I sure did! How did you know, miss?” His voice was sardonic.
The line stopped trembling. Now it went taut.
Still he did nothing.
“You know, down there, right now, there’s a mile-long catfish with a doughball in his stomach. He’s starting to feel peculiar. Soon I’ll pull the reel, and once it really goes sharp, he’ll know what pain is.”
He gave her a look. “It was a few years later, after it came out on appeal that the evidence was missing. I get this Christmas card in the mail. Don’t say nothing on the inside. Just a picture on the front.”
He picked up the reel, and suddenly yanked. The catfish fought, but soon it came, Pettibone wrangling it from the deep, his arms trembling with its weight. It was as long as his arm, yellowish, with ashort, snubbed snout, sad eyes, and a hairy chin. It looked at her like an old man facing death.
“What was the picture?”
“You’re smart, you know. You know these things just like I used to know how to talk to the old ladies. I remember thinking he must have had to search for it. It had a picture of ferrets on the front.”
That night, Ruby and Alonzo Pettibone ate sizzling catfish, served with gritty cornbread cooked in a cast-iron pan, and iced tea from a jar, and just before the menu went completely Georgia, he added a mound of storebought macaroni salad, saying, sacrilegiously, that it tasted better than homemade to him.
The smoke from the fire outside drove away the bugs, and she had grown so used to the sound of cicadas that she almost no longer heard them. He told her of his wife, now passed, and she told him about a few men she had dated, but she really didn’t think she had it in her to be in a relationship.
“No problem with that,” he said.
“Were you and your wife happy?”
He toyed with his fish. “I can’t say we really were. She was a different woman. I always felt bad for her. The world never quite made sense to her.” He ate a chunk of fish, pulled a bone from his mouth. “I was glad we didn’t have kids.”
The world suddenly felt like it was reaching out around them, holding them tenderly in its cupped hand. Ruby relished this feeling. This moment in time, sitting at a fire with a man she had just met, who had caught and cooked a wild fish for her, and the smell of it steaming up in the air, the soft, gritty, dry corn cake.
“This would be good with jam,” she said, and he laughed.
He was quiet for a bit, stirring the fire with a stick. He returned to his plate. “I don’t go out much. The market, the doctor. But one day I had to go all the way into Pickleweed, to the hardware store there, for some new fishing line. I usually avoid that town, especially now that I’m out of uniform. Anyhow, I saw this one fellow walk in. I’m pretty sure it was that same fellow. You know that older actor inMen in Black?”
“Tommy Lee Jones.”
“Spitting image of him. Only not so nice around the eyes.”
Ruby spent the night in Alonzo Pettibone’s cluttered living room, her back curling to fit the collapsed couch. She had spent the night on many a couch during her cases. Mothers, most often, the very air filled with their grief, asked her to stay. Sometimes she was invited to sleep in a missing person’s room, which she always declined to do. The energy there was too strong. But she took a couch, not just because she often couldn’t afford a motel room—her death row cases were capped at indigent rates—but because it was a solace to the family, to know she was working. They wanted to show her pictures. They wanted her to feel their feelings.
They didn’t know they didn’t need to ask, she thought, as the night crawled from the swamp and she heard Alonzo Pettibone’s sleep mutters from the bedroom through the wall. In the narrow kitchen, the remains of their supper were piled high in the sink. His stove held a can of bacon grease, and the cast-iron pan held the crumbs of cornbread. A fish skeleton rose up in the dark, making her think of the people she had saved—and those she had not.
In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, feeling the pokey springs of the couch, she made her way, barefoot, silently, out the unlocked front door. Officer Pettibone understood the crucial fact about life: Locksdid nothing when you were unsafe. She stood at the edge of the swamp, breathing in the rich, fecund, living air. Bullfrogs plopped into the water and night birds coasted among the dark trees, which merged with the black sky.
She felt the old sadness whipping up from the past, and she knew that it would always be a part of her, because a sadness like the one she carried could not be put down. It would bowl the world over if she did. Instead, she reached with her bare toes to touch the rowboat, moored there in the shallows. Night creatures swam out there, she knew. There were deep caves.
There were women missing, and one of them was her mother.
