Ruby placed Mitchell’s DNA results from her bag on the evidence table next to the door. The grandfather had been nearly unwilling to let the bone go until she told him where she was taking it—and what it might tell them.
“These are the DNA results from my client,” she said, explaining.
“Got a deadline?” Delaney asked, still examining the bone.
“He’s being executed in a week.”
“Will this exonerate him?”
“Most likely not. But I’d like some answers, and I think the family deserves them, too.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
In the computer database, Ruby knew, there were now thousands of DNA samples. For years, she and Delaney had sent letters to the families of the missing, asking for their help. Thanks to some magazine articles, the word was getting out, and people across the country were sending in samples. Ruby had dropped her own spit in a tube, and left it to whirl into the system.
Her arms felt strangely empty now that the bone was gone.
“After we’re done with this case, I have a favor to ask,” she said, and told Delaney about the burial ground and the bodies.
Delaney looked excited. Bones always excited her.
“That’s not a favor,” she said. “That’s an opportunity. You say you have the names of all the deceased?”
“At least some,” Ruby said, patting her bag, which now also contained copies of the ledgers. “What will take work is locating their relatives for DNA samples. But I can do that part. We’ll identify those dead and give them a burial—my grandmother included. I’m pretty sure she’s there.”
“What about the plans to cremate them?”
Ruby thought of the threat of prosecution she had left hanging over the historical society lady’s head. But then there was the sheriff to contend with.
“We’ll see,” she said, uncertainly.
Delaney set the bone on a metal shelf.
“Want to come over for dinner tonight?” she asked. “I can make spaghetti. I know you love spaghetti.”
Ruby knew that Delaney faced her own kind of loneliness, as a single mother. She didn’t like giving up what little time she had with her boy, so she often invited Ruby over to visit. Those visits, to that warm and cozy home, were some of the most precious in her life.
“Zachary would love to see you,” Delaney added, about her eccentric son who had a passion for Polly Pocket dolls and transformers. The electrical devices, not the toys. Any visits to Delaney’s crowded house came with plenty of excited lectures about the transformer industry and low rated and high rated, single phase and high phase.
“I wish,” Ruby said, with real regret. “But I need to get back to my place and get some sleep. I’m on an extra-early morning flight back to Georgia.”
Her place was still a studio apartment, only now downtown. She kept the lights low, because she liked darkness. She dropped her bag on the floor. She left almost everything in it. She did this on all her cases, as if it were a magic talisman bag. She would not let anything go until the end. A woman was in that bag, and a man.
Maybe more than one of each.
Slowly, she went to her desk and removed another colored flag from the drawer. This one was cobalt blue.
“I forgot to put you up, before,” she said apologetically to the tiny flag, before writingBetty Duboison it in tiny script. “The police never reported you missing. Everyone said you must be dead. But the dead can be missing, too.”
She pinned Betty on the map, among all the other flags in the Deep South. But crime doesn’t discriminate. The hatred and contempt for women knows no boundaries. Betty was now a tiny spot of blue in a mélange of colors, stretching from coast to coast.
23.
The bone lies on the metal table of the laboratory. It is alone. Outside, birds sing the small quiet songs of the falling night. In the morning, they will shout that the sun is here, like it is a great surprise, but for now, they have no idea of tomorrow.
The bone tells a story to Mitchell, across the miles. It flies in the sky. It curls down on a breath of wind and finds Ruby’s ear as she curls up in her bed, restless, her feet tangled in her blankets, thinking that she cannot feel, she can never heal, she can never justbe.
Shhh,the bone says, and opens a door for Ruby and Mitchell, who see a pale taupe sky. It is late spring, and the wind smells suspiciously like a special kind of soap. It is a tender smell, almost too tiny to notice, but the birds have caught the scent, and they carry it in their wings high into the shadows of the trees.
