It was—she didn’t know.
“I’m not the tax collector,” she said, making sure there was a smile in her voice. “I’m an investigator working for your grandson.”
He sat up, smiling in the dark.
“Not a cop?”
“Not a cop. His attorney hired me.”
“All the way from Georgia?”
“Actually, I was raised here, in Oregon. In the city.”
Everyone knew what that meant. Portland.
He nodded eagerly, his head bobbing. He struggled to sit up enough to hold his cane in front of him.
“Have a seat,” he said, and she sat down on the comforter-covered couch. “You can turn on the light if you need it.”
“It’s light enough.”
“No one ever came before. Well, except the police when it first happened. It’s been ten years.”
“No one from the defense has ever been in touch?”
“Oh, a few called over the years, but what could I say? I wasn’t there. If I could fly like a bird and release him, I would. But I got no evidence. After it happened, I went to visit him once. Took the Greyhound the entire way, just to be told family visiting time was over for those in the death house. They got regular days they can have visitors and it’s only those days that start with the lettern. For never.”
He was clever, and in pain. His eyes turned her way, his long nosesniffling. He was trying to learn more about her. So she told him, just a little. How she liked to walk in nature, and how she was in her thirties now but had gotten into this work in her twenties. She didn’t say why.
He felt it. Or maybe it was just this strange cabin.
“Odd choice for a career,” he said, turning his head toward her. “Not saying you’re odd, but just listening to you, feeling you here in the room, it don’t feel like you’re very big, and that’s a big job you got.”
“It is a big job. But sometimes small people carry the weight easier.”
“Souls don’t weigh much, do they?”
“They can be very heavy.”
“True, true.”
The long hands on the cane trembled. She saw that the cane head was carved. She wondered about Mitchell’s early life, and asked.
“His mother was my daughter. She was a fine woman. Had my grandson young. The fella must have ran off. She never told me about him.”
He rose, with shaking knees, and felt along the darkened mantel. He handed her a heavy framed photograph.
It showed a handsome woman with a young boy. It was the first childhood picture of Mitchell that Ruby had seen. The woman wore a long, old-fashioned dress and was standing outside the cabin. Mitchell was wearing a gray shirt, his face smeared with blackberries. There was a bowl of the fruit at his feet.
“Where is she?” Ruby asked.
“She went missing,” he said, and for a moment it felt like her heart had stopped.
“When was that?”
“When Mitchell was little. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Of course you do.”
