“I’ll do all I can,” he reassured her.
Years later, she would discover that he never went to the hotel where her mother worked. He never interviewed the other hotel cleaners, or pulled the list of who was staying in the hotel. By the time Ruby looked into her mother’s disappearance herself, many years later, all those records were gone.
“I’ll call a social worker for you,” he said.
Her mother had joined the ranks of the 167,389 persons reported missing in the United States that year. One of them stared at her now, from the carton of milk the sergeant had left on the counter, after pouring some into his coffee.
18.
Ruby was thinking of that now as she sat across from Mitchell. She had given him all her updates, which added up to nothing. They were eight days until his execution, and she could see that he was not really there.
The inside of the death house smelled bad today. They had killed someone the day before, and the stench of death and fear hung in the air.
“You know, my mother went missing, too,” she said.
His eyes rose out of his death fog. There were three stages before an execution, Ruby had found. There was hope, then contemplation, and finally panic. Mitchell, she thought, was still in contemplation. Panic had not yet arrived. But it would.
“Yeah?”
“It was in Portland. I was thirteen.”
“I was seven.”
“It’s more common than people think.”
She saw the painful, wistful longing in his face. Having your mother disappear is more than a loss. It is a hole cut in your heart.
“I should have known,” he said.
“How so?”
“I don’t know. A feeling I have.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Maybe the bone is telling me.”
“The bone?”
“You haven’t met the bone? No, that makes sense. My grandpa wouldn’t tell you. He’d be afraid you’d take it away.”
He spoke with bitterness, and with fear and resignation.
She remembered the feeling she’d had in that cabin—like there was someone else there.
“Is it—in the basket in the corner?”
He looked surprised, then smiled. “See? Maybe it was already talking to you. It never talked to me before. Maybe I was in too much pain to hear it. But I’m starting to hear it now.”
“What does this bone tell you?”
“It’s more like visions, actually.”
“What kind of visions?”
He looked reluctant. His eyes went away.
“It’s better if you find out for yourself.”
“Where did the bone come from?”
“My grandfather found it one day in the woods, a few years after my mom disappeared. He took it to the sheriff. I think he hoped it was from my mom. Isn’t that a terrible thing to hope? But the sheriff told my grandpa it wasn’t my mom. He said it was just some dead person from the burial ground at the poorhouse and he should return it.”
