Rubie’s Search

The mound of earth on the open plain had unmistakable traces of having been seared. Was it by lightning? Rubie now understood why that possibility had occurred to the authorities. She did a slow 360-degree turn and saw mirages dancing on the horizon where the sun was sinking softly. Reddish clouds hung low on the opposite side. There was nothing to attract lightning for miles around. Except, perhaps a body as loaded with metal implants as she knew her father’s was.

The media had reported that the victim’s remains looked like overcooked meat, giving off an unbearable stench. The policia said they’d wait for the autopsy report before concluding on the victim’s identify.

“Come back Tuesday”, they’d instructed, as nobody there worked weekends while Monday was reserved for catching up on paperwork.Rubie hired a room in town and asking around, located the brothers. For a handful of pesos, they happily took her back to the location where they had discovered the charred body. Her guides were teenagers. She wasn’t taking chances after dark with those two, even if they didn’t look like the types to take advantage of a lone woman in the middle of nowhere. She told them she’d give them a bonus as soon as they drove her back to town, where her money was kept. That worked.

Her weekend passed in a stupor, filled with liquor, cigarettes and a deliberate effort to keep out of trouble at the local bars, because Rubie was pretty enough to attract attention from men and women alike.

She made it to Monday without answers to the difficult questions – what was her father doing on this side of the border, what business did he have out on the flat plains, whether it really was him, and could something other than lightning have left the body in the condition it was found.

The coroner’s report was late. Finally, on Wednesday morning, she was told by a morose member of the policia that unfortunately, the DNA profile of the burnt individual, found on the plain, did not match her father’s.

Feeling less relief than she should and no happiness at all, Rubie wandered back onto the dusty street, wondering where her father was and if she should first go get herself a drink.

She’d stopped going through metal detectors in airports since she was a teen as it got too difficult to explain why her body set it off each time. She’d learnt not to panic if she felt herself being pulled by the magnetic forces from large objects. She’d stopping visiting hospitals as doctors asked awkward questions on her body’s unnatural iron content. She refused to take X-rays. Any object with powerful electromagnets frightened her. It was a fear she had learnt through experience.

Sick of her fruitless search for her father, Rubie wanted answers.