County Line (14 page)

“How long does it take her?”

“In high school, between eighty-four and ninety minutes. But I don’t think she’s gotten much running in since she opened Uncommon Cup.”

“What else did that woman tell you?”

“A lot of things.”

The road dips into a shallow, wooded depression and crosses a weed-choked stream over a culvert. To our right, the terrain climbs into trees, but south the land spreads out in a broad fan. Peter is going about thirty miles an hour. I don’t know if he wants to make sure he doesn’t come upon Ruby Jane so suddenly he startles her, or if he’s afraid to find her at all. We pass a house here, a house there. White clapboard with hundred-year-old windbreaks, some with barns and outbuildings. I see bikes in front yards, a dog sleeping in grass, a woman in a white sun hat working in her garden. Within a couple miles, Chicken Bristle Road T’s at a stop sign, still no sign of Ruby Jane.

“Preble County Line Road.”

“Turn right.”

“You sure she came this way.”

“No.”

He blows through his teeth, but he makes the turn. Out the window I hear a strange singing hum. Bugs, birds. I don’t know. Everything looks normal enough to feel utterly exotic. The road climbs. Corn, I decide. Woods. Farmhouse. More corn. A mailbox shaped like an old red barn. The fields are edged with heaped stone, like walls which have eroded into formless debris. At the far edge of a field a tractor as big as my house chugs, green and gleaming in the sunlight. Beside me, Peter draws a sudden sharp breath and the car slows. Momentum throws me forward. I see a figure ahead at the side of the road. Auburn hair, long legs and running shoes.

My eyes go wet. She waits at the end of a driveway.

“What should I do?”

The question doesn’t require an answer. He slows to a crawl, edges out to the center line. She doesn’t react until Peter stops beside her. The quiet which descends when he shuts the engine off is almost too painful to bear. I listen for the hum, but all I hear is a distant popping like gun fire. Ruby Jane rubs her eyes, then looks into the car. Her face registers nothing, no surprise, no anger. No pleasure.

“RJ—”

She turns away. I can see the tension in her shoulders. Pete shifts beside me, makes a little sound in the back of his throat. He wants to talk. I want to talk too, but I’m not sure what to say after coming so far.

When Ruby Jane turns back, she looks from me to Peter and back to me again. I believe I catch the faintest hint of a smile in her eyes, a sad smile. I hope it’s not wishful thinking on my part. “I understand why you’re here.”

“We were worried—”

“You don’t have to say it. I understand.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. I can see a sweat stain on the neck of her t-shirt, a thin film of perspiration on her upper lip. She blinks in the clear air, her eyes glinting sapphire. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“Can we—?”

She shakes her head. “Tell Peter to stay in the car.”

I turn and look at him. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again. His eyes get hard and his hands grip the steering wheel.

“Give it a minute, Pete.”

His voice is so sharp it cracks. “Hey. I got nowhere else I need to be.”

I climb out, don’t close the car door. Now that we’ve reached this point, found who we are both looking for, the girl of our dreams, I don’t have the heart to close Pete out. I can’t pretend I’m not pleased to be the one she wants to talk to, even if I fear what she might say. I’ve tracked her across the country, ignorant of what brought her so far. The one thing that’s clear is if she wanted me to know where she’d gone, she’d have left a message. As I look at her, my heart pounds in my chest. I think about Mrs. Parmelee, and wonder what it would have been like to know Ruby Jane when she was in high school.

She’s half-turned away from me. I can smell the shoots of corn behind me, a scent green and airy. I don’t know how long she’s been here, if she was able to run all this way, so far, so many years from a time when this was routine. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair a wind-blown disarray.

“You’ve come a long way.”

“So have you.”

I swallow. “I spoke with Mrs. Parmelee.”

“She’s always been so kind to me.”

“She seems very nice.”

Ruby Jane shrugs, her eyes remote. “What did she tell you?”

“She said a lot of things. You had a hard time, she said. Your father—”

She throws a hand up, cutting me off.

“It was such a dark night. There were thunderstorms all around, but by the time I got out here they’d tapered off to a steady rain.” She draws a shuddering breath. “It was right about here.” I follow her gaze up off the road into an open stand of trees. There’s a house at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two stories of faux colonial, brick and white shutters, broad porch and tall columns. A free-standing four-car garage is off to the side, flagstone patio between. In the gap between the house and garage I can make out the edge of an above ground pool in the backyard. Though the nearby trees are tall, the landscaping has an antiseptic perfection, the lawn a checkerboard of establishing sod, the bushes under the tall windows head-sized balls. The flowers in the beds are no bigger than the nursery pots they came from. This house wasn’t here a year ago.

“We tried to bury him right about where the garage is, I think. It’s been a while. Jimmie stopped digging. He ran away. He drove off and left me here.”

Even now, despite the recent development, the location is remote. I can’t imagine what it must have been like twenty years earlier on a dark night under rain.

“Jimmie your brother?”

“What other Jimmie is there?”

I’ll have to tell her he’s dead, but I can’t bring myself to say anything about it now. I’m too busy trying to make sense her words …
tried to bury him right about where the garage is
…

She looks from me to Pete, runs her fingers through her hair. “Do you love me?”

She could be speaking to either of us. I can feel Peter at my back, burning, a dark flame. A thick gob gathers in my throat and conspires to cut off my voice—long enough for Pete to speak if he’s going to. He doesn’t.

I swallow. “Yes, I love you, Ruby Jane.”

She looks down at her hands. Her fingers are winding themselves into knots. Off in the distance over the sound of wind through the trees I hear a car approaching, a low diesel rumble. But I keep my eyes on Ruby Jane. “I never thought I would have to come back to this. I hate being here.”

“Then let us take you away. Come on.” I reach out to her. The rumbling engine draws nearer. The throttle drops as the driver shifts. A truck, I think, but I can’t take my eyes off of Ruby Jane. I feel as though I’m falling, but I don’t care. I don’t care about Peter seething behind me, I don’t care about Chase Fairweather or James Whitacre or the strange and ordinary landscape, the high vault of the sky, the whispering leaves, the soil. I’m staring into her fathomless blue eyes when the truck rams the rental car from behind. I’m still looking into the blue abyss when the sky jumps at my feet and goes black.

PART TWO

August 1988 – April 1989

Roo

- 13 -

Interview, April 1989

They came for her on Chicken Bristle Road, a quarter mile short of her second turn. Two police cars pulled off to the side in front of her, one a Farmersville vehicle and the other from the township. Werth Nash, the cop who did the DARE presentations at school, drove the Farmersville car. The chief sat next to him in the passenger’s seat. Together they made up forty percent of the full time Farmersville police force. Lute Callan, a Jackson Township officer, drove the second car. She didn’t know the man with him, or why it required so many cops to chase her down. So what if she broke Clarice’s nose? It wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong.

Ruby Jane glanced at her watch and checked her heart rate with two fingers on her neck. She was three miles into her run, a planned eleven at an eight-and-half minute pace. Easy, an unconscious pace. She doubted she’d get to finish.

Nash climbed out first. Callan and the stranger followed from the township car. The chief stayed behind. Heart rate: 105. Hardly worth the effort.

“Ruby? How you doing, darling?”

She eyed Nash for a long, uncomfortable moment, then turned her attention to the stranger. He wore a Farmersville patch on his shoulder and three stripes on his shirt. His face was pale, and a wattle hung below his chin. “Who are you?”

The men gaped at each other. Nash took another step.

“You know Officer Callan. This gentleman is Sergeant Grabel. He’s new to the department.”

He wore sunglasses, had prominent veins on his forehead and slicked-back hair the color of steel wool. Sweat gleamed on his cheeks despite the cool morning.

“A city boy.”

Grabel’s head popped up. Nash forced a quick laugh. “Sergeant Grabel did serve in Dayton before joining us.” Nash shifted from one foot to the other, crunching gravel under his heel. “He needs to ask you some questions.”

“How’s he gonna manage that? He’s obviously a mute.”

Ruby Jane shook her head a fraction of an inch at the predictable shock on their faces, then turned to look across the cornfield beside the road. The cool morning air hung heavy above the green rows, new shoots barely ankle high. She could feel the policemen close by, seething with energy. Overhead, the power lines hummed.

Nash broke the silence. “Ruby, everyone knows you’re a smart girl when you wanna be.”

She took a breath thick with the scent of soil. “I want to see ID. For all I know, he’s one of those perverts you hear about who can only get it up with teenage girls.”

Grabel took a step toward her and thrust a finger at her chin. “That’ll be enough out of you, missy.”

“You
can
talk.”

Nash’s lips curved downward. He and Callan exchanged a look. Callan had taken the call the night of the Princeton game. “I told you she would be a pain in the ass.”

Grabel scowled. “Then cuff her and let’s get the hell out of here. It’s too damn hot to be jawing with a smart-ass kid out in the boondocks.”

“What are the charges, Detective Pervert?”

Grabel’s wattle quaked in response and blotchy color rose on his neck. He opened his mouth but Nash took a step forward, both hands out. “Let’s everybody calm down. Ruby, please. It’s just a few questions.”

“I got nothing to say.”

“We’ll see about that. Now come on.”

“ID first.”

“I can pick you up on my own authority, Ruby. You know that.”

“This is township, not town.”

“Ride with me, ride with Callan. Either way, you’re coming in.”

If anyone ought to be answering Turkey Neck’s questions, it was Clarice. But that’s not the way things worked in the treacherous ecosystem of Valley View High School. Clarice Moody sat atop the food chain. Everyone else was either her quarry or her confederate. What happened to Gabi Schilling wouldn’t change that. The first two knuckles of Ruby Jane Whittaker’s right hand couldn’t change that either.

Sudden heat surged down her spine and into her legs, a sharp reminder of thoughts her run was meant to help her escape. She studied the heaped rock wall on the far side of the field, looked for gaps into the woods beyond. The muddy field would slow her down. She estimated twenty seconds to the trees, fifteen if the ground was firm. What could they do? Shoot her in the back, maybe. But they could never catch her on foot. Not Ruby Jane Whittaker, three miles into her run. She smiled, and then smiled wider as she realized her smile made them nervous. Nash bounced on the gravel, Callan’s finger tapped his holster. Grabel breathed through his nose.

Try and catch me
.

But she didn’t run. She was a smart girl, like Nash said. They wouldn’t shoot her, and they wouldn’t chase her either. They’d get in their cars and catch her on Gratis Road or in the mobile home park at Lake of the Woods. Or wait her out. It’s not like she had anywhere to go. The morning chill nibbled at her bare arms as if to drive home the point.