“You’re going to cremate the remains?”
The silver-haired woman peered closer at the license the dark-haired exonerator held out, then smiled uncertainly.
“It’s our only option. We don’t have a way to match the dead to names. I mean, apparently they tumbled the bodies in raw, as they say around here. It’s going to be a jumble. A mess.”
The woman smiled at her apologetically, her eyes slightly fearful. She was afraid of doing something wrong, and being reported.
“Did you take the necessary steps to exhume a burial ground?”
“I—don’t know, actually. The sheriff didn’t mention that.”
He wouldn’t have, Ruby thought.
“You need to file for permission with the court, and ask an environmental health officer to be present, to make sure you’re meeting health and safety regulations,” said Ruby, who had needed to dig up more than a few bodies in her time.
“Oh.” The woman looked lost.
“The reason is, you never know what you will find,” Ruby said. “It could even be a crime scene.”
The woman blinked.
“Or,” Ruby added, “there could be pathogens.”
Now the woman looked worried.
“You said you don’t have a way to match the remains with names. Do you have names?”
Here the woman nodded, and blinked brightly. She hustled back through the bead curtain and returned with a stack of ledgers. That sheriff was a fool, Ruby thought. He had told her right where to find them: the names of the people who had lived at the poorhouse.
She’d had no idea these ledgers even existed.
The woman stacked the books on the glass-topped counter, above the ancient arrowheads. Some were so delicately carved they were like springy lances, and Ruby knew that these had been for the freshwater eels of the river.
“The poorhouse closed years ago. It’s quite a piece of Oregon history. Yet ignored.” The amateur historian sounded defensive, like she was only trying to do good, which Ruby knew was true. “Before the sheriff boarded the place up, we went in and found these ledgers, in what had been the office for the matron. It’s all we have. But we don’t have a way to match their names to the dead.”
Ruby sorted through the leather-bound ledgers. She opened one and looked at the dates, delicately turning the brittle pages while thewoman watched. The handwriting was spidery, and seemed filled with pain as the years passed, the letters becoming spiky.
Ralph Green, Herbert Cooper, Eleanor Fields...
She stopped, her hands suddenly trembling.
There it was. Thereshewas. Her mother, Desirée Spencer. Born on a summer morning, as fresh as the sunrise, her mother greeting the world.
“Do you know her?” the historian asked, seeing her face. “We’ve had such a hard time finding any survivors. We’d love to write a history of the place, record it before all is lost, but finding these people...”
“This was my mother,” Ruby said.
“Can she speak to us?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I have an idea,” Ruby said. “A way I can help.”
“You can?”
“Sure. But first I’ll need copies of all these pages.”
