She knew he could argue that it had been decades ago, before the internet. Law enforcement conferences had felt boards pinned with missing person reports, largely ignored while the officers had coffee. It was missing children, not women, who got the attention, but even then their photos were confined to the back of milk cartons.
But he could have uploaded the report in later years, when the internet made sharing information easier. Or when the FBI created their database for the missing. Or when the National Institute of Justice began assisting in missing person cases. Or when the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System was developed.
Instead, Charise Brown had stayed in her metal drawer, and the opportunities to find her had floated downstream, like silverfish after the spawn. The door had closed to interviews with killers now dead; unidentified bodies buried and lost. All gone.
Reaching into her desk drawer, Ruby took out a little flag. These were color-coded for each year. The decade when Mitchell’s mom went missing was in hues of red; her year was a bright pink. She wrote the date Charise had gone missing on it, and then her name. This she pinned neatly onto the map where Chinook was, and the tiny flag glimmered along with all the rest—thousands of missing women in different colors waving at Ruby as she rose, heavy with thought, and readied herself for the next day.
7.
It was a rare month at the poorhouse when someone didn’t die, and when Desirée was twelve, she lost her mother. She found her in her cot one morning, a growth protruding from her stomach, her face white, and her eyes bulging.
Desirée covered her with the sheet and went, crying, to the matron. She wiped her tears away before knocking on her door.
There was no ceremony. The new caretaker wrapped the body in the sheet and carried it across the fields to the burial ground, shovel in hand. Desirée, frozen with fear, watched, unable to understand. She had seen it happen before, but those were other people’s dead, and most of them didn’t have families to mourn them. Her own father had been drafted to fight in the Korean War while she was still in her mother’s belly. She had no one else.
The matron, watching her, held a hand to her own painful middle and said, “The best thing for you right now is work.”
Maybe she’s right, Desirée thought. She went to the kitchen. She cooked. She served breakfast. My mother is not here, she thought.
She walked back to the kitchen on numb legs. One of the men tried to josh her, saying he still had her nose, and Desirée whipped around, fury in her eyes. He recoiled.
“No,” she spat. “You do not.”
“She’s got you there,” one of the other men chuckled.
The caretaker came back, black dirt on his hands. He went into the kitchen to wash them, and the soil poured down the sink whereDesirée washed the dishes. He watched her out of the corner of his eye.
Months later, Desirée, now thirteen, crossed the fields with a pitcher of cold raspberry juice, pressed from the fresh berries. The men watched her approach, the swinging dress, the soft new breasts. They drank deeply from the pitcher, thanking her. They wiped the sweat from their eyes and looked at her speculatively.
Carrying the empty pitcher marked with the grease of their lips, Desirée walked along the edge of the woods. She had explored them before, but she’d never gone in too far. She was afraid of the dark woods.
The shade under the trees felt good. The air smelled of fir and summer.
She almost tripped, and she looked down. It was a small white bone. It looked like part of a rib. It lay there like a curving white shadow, like a rock. It appeared to be human, and it hissed at her:I was once alive.
She looked around and saw the raw, overturned earth, the shovel leaning against a tree nearby, flecked with dirt and streaked with clay.
“Hello.”
The caretaker came out of the woods. He was a tall, strongly built man with dark skin, pulled taut over his cheekbones, and hard eyes. He had oddly red lips for a man, and when he smiled, like he did now, they showed regular teeth.
“Hi. I guess,” she whispered.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was walking,” she said, holding the pitcher tight to her chest.
“Is that for me?” he asked playfully.
“It’s empty.”
“I see that.”
He saw her looking at the rib bone. “There’s feral pigs in these woods. They come digging. Did you know that?”
“No.” She swallowed.
He kicked dirt over the bone, and she knew he would bury it again.
