She appreciated how he made it sound like her fault, too.
“I didn’t have any trouble,” she said. “Someone else, maybe. How did you hear?”
“Call from the police this morning. We don’t want trouble.”
Her eyes said it for her.
“Well. If you don’t need me...”
He carried on around her, like a ship at sail. She turned to watch his back. His trousers were creased and pouched at the back. He was only human, after all.
But there was something about him, she thought—not just about this case. He walked like a man with a secret pleasure in tow. Like he had plans.
The courthouse records room was down the hall from the district attorney’s office, and Ruby took a chair at one of the desktop computers. Behind the wide counter, a few clerks worked, pushing carts of brown string-tied files.
She opened the records portal, saw the state seal, and typed in the name Betty Dubois.
A few old files surfaced, and she clicked through the links. In recent years, courthouses had begun scanning case files, which made her work a lot easier.
Betty Dubois had had only a handful of citations, all seemingly minor.
The first was a traffic fine, dismissed.
The second was a citation for selling cigarettes to minors at the gas station. Ruby opened this file and saw that the teenage clerk had quit.Betty had written an apology to the court. She had fine penmanship, the kind they taught a generation ago.
The last item was a probate document. It opened to a small file, the pages crookedly copied.In the matter of Betty Dubois...
It was dated less than a week after Mitchell’s conviction.
There had been no will. Betty had not known she would disappear that night. She was hale and hearty—and overworked. She probably found it hard to make time for paperwork.
Decedent has been declared legally dead. Her estate includes the following...Ruby read. There was the gas station; a farmhouse with ten acres, fenced and cross-fenced, with a year-round creek; and a motel.
The Pickleweed Motel.
Ruby was so caught up in what she was reading she wasn’t aware of anything else. Someone could have been peeking in that open door and she wouldn’t have noticed.
The executor was one Frank Castle, a cousin of Betty’s. He was entitled to a share, but he had let his sister, Willa, take it all, including the motel.
Usually it was the job of the executor to locate any other relatives, but he had claimed there were no others.
Ruby looked for whoever had signed off.
Jerrod Tinsley.
Ruby had learned, over the years, that most people were easy to find. They had utilities. Property records. Driver’s licenses with current addresses.
But then there were the people like Frank Castle, who were as slippery as the wet blue Georgia sky. His last known address was a post office box. The one before that was an apartment building outside of townthat she drove to, finding it gutted and filled with graffiti. Behind it lay a wooded ravine. A sluggish river flowed past, crowned with yellow foam.
There were certain things Ruby could do, and she did them now, her shirt soon plastered to her back with sweat as she went to the local deed office, the telephone company, and finally a cool café in downtown Pickleweed, where she plugged in her laptop and ran searches on sites accessible only to police and licensed investigators.
She thought of a case she’d had once, where she had been hired to find not a missing woman but a missing man. She seldom took cases outside her bailiwick; they were a rabbit hole that never ended. She knew she could make a lot more money—a lot more—doing the work other investigators did. If she were willing to work for private attorneys, there was a never-ending stream of doctors who raped their patients and wealthy men who were on their twelfth DUI, and all of them wanted an investigator, which meant they were paying for someone to find dirt on the victims or create such chaos that the state would simply give up. Those clients wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card. That world was as different from this one as night was from day. The two leaked into each other, and shared the same planet. But they were not the same.
She had taken that missing man case, though, and she remembered it now, running searches, trying Franklin Castle and F Castle and everything in between, and then Willa Castle and Betty Dubois, looking for any information. She had taken the case because her heart always ached for the families of the missing, and she knew that a grown man could go missing, though they seldom did. Actually, she considered, men did go missing, but it was more often because they were a lost hiker, or a suicide that didn’t want to be found. Not many grown men disappeared because of foul play.
This one had—or so his sister had believed. That she was not hismother had moved Ruby, because mothers protect their sons, sometimes more than they protect their daughters. So Ruby had taken the case and begun the search.
His name was Norman Millican, she remembered as the databases, slow in the muggy heat, began spitting back the same useless data on Frank Castle she had already found. The same defunct address. A phone number that had been disconnected a generation ago. She shivered as the sweat on her shirt dried, and began wishing she had ordered a hot coffee and not an iced one.
