“He the kind to spread it around?”
“I’m sure he was.”
“You got any relatives by the name of Higginbottom?”
Cordelia drank her tea. “Not that I know. But clearly, there is a lot I do not.”
39.
It was quiet in the closed-up apartment. Ruby was gone so often that the coffeepot was covered in dust. The top of the fridge had a rind on it; the antiseptic insides held little besides a bowl of withered cherries, a half-empty yogurt, and a chunk of cheddar cheese, hardening in an opened wrapper.
If only Ruby could see, the bone thought. She had been right: There would be more victims. There was the pink flag for Charise, not far from the red flag for Desirée in Portland, and the new flag for Rosanna Higginbottom.
There was enough red for the cluster to be clear.
But there was something else.
Slowly, like a man traveling and taking his time, the red stream parted the Midwest, and here and there were other flags, also red, and then there was a sudden burst of color in Georgia. Especially in Union City, and in Hammock County.
Another cluster.
In Georgia, the red deepened into purple and then blue as the years passed, and Ruby would soon add flags to this map for the women whose reports she’d recently found—so many missing women.
There is one flag the bone wants Ruby to consider—it is a blue that matches the southern sky.
It is the flag that saysBetty Dubois,and the bone knows what happened.
40.
It’s the night of the murder.
Mitchell enters the bar, flush with his promotion and new life. He’s been on the job for two weeks, settling in, and he likes it here. He’s never lived or worked in a place with mostly Black faces, and had no idea how tense he had been before. Or how relaxed he could feel.
He takes a stool at the bar, orders a beer, grinning at the bartender. The place is starting to fill up, but there is still an empty stool next to him. An older woman sits at the end of the bar, drinking one of those huge, hideous concoctions with eighteen shots of cheap booze and a maraschino cherry and an umbrella on top. A handwritten sign behind the bar sayslimit: one all-day sipper per customer. But most of the patrons are drinking beer.
Down the bar, a man is eating a burger with fries. The bar offers food, from the grill in back, but Mitchell doesn’t have money for that right now. He’s focusing on getting ahead so he can furnish his new apartment. He didn’t bring much from Oregon. Life is cheaper here, though, so his dollar will go farther. He’s excited. He wants to fix up his new place so he can start dating. He’s heard there is a vibrant gay community in Atlanta. Black men, too. It’s a new start for him.
Someone puts a coin in the jukebox and chooses a song. Steve Winwood. Mitchell hums and sways with the music. He can hum and sway here and no one looks twice. He thinks of his grandfather, and feels a pang for leaving him behind. He thinks the old man would likeit here, too. But grandfather will never leave Chinook. He has his bone, and this thought casts a pall on Mitchell’s happiness.
“Is this stool taken?”
He turns to see a man above him, behind him, and the two of them stare at each other in shock. In recognition.
“Hey!” Mitchell blurts.
Then he apologizes. “You’re the last person I expected to see here. What are you doing in Georgia?”
The man stares at him for a long moment. He takes the stool, almost unwillingly, his own mind a churn of thoughts, and the biggest one is He cannot tell anyone he saw me.
A few beers later, Mitchell is telling a story. He is not sure if he has told anyone this story before. The man next to him has turned into a blur. The bar is a blur. At the end of the bar, the old lady watches with gimlet eyes, as if laughing that he cannot hold his liquor.
In truth, Mary Baldwin doesn’t like the look of the man talking to the happy young man. He gives her a bad feeling, and she remembers him later, and describes him in detail to the police. There was a district attorney present for the interview, a big man who seemed very interested in what she had to say. But they never followed up. Or maybe they called her and she didn’t answer. That is very much a possibility, too.
The odd part is, Mitchell doesn’t feel like he’s had that much to drink—he’s had a few beers before. When he was working at the factory in Portland, sometimes he’d go out with the others. They did fun things, like axe-throwing and bowling and billiards. He’s looking forward to making friends like that here. He should be tipsy by now—the hours have passed, along with the beers, and he’s gotten up to pee a couple oftimes, and drunk some water—but he should not be as inebriated as he suddenly feels. He gets a strange, cold and hot feeling all over. For a moment, he thinks, If I were a girl, I’d think I’d been doped.
But the thought passes. He cannot hold on to any thought for long.
“Anyhow, I never expected to get to know you,” he tells the man next to him.