Words wanted to tumble off my tongue, but I took Ruby’s advice to stay quiet. I didn’t want to upset Dale. Talon and Jade had packed up everything from the boys’ room at the house they’d lived in with their mother, along with anything else of value they might want someday. No rock collection had been among those things, as far as I knew. Dale had never mentioned them until now. Clearly he’d had a lot more on his mind.
What had happened to Dale’s rock collection? And why would a similar rock be here, where he allegedly saw a strange man he thought he recognized?
Ruby put the rock in a zippered bag and smiled. “May I keep this? Just for now. I’ll give it back to you soon if you’d like.”
He nodded.
“Thank you. You’ll make a good detective someday, Dale,” she said. “Seeing things that don’t belong is a big part of it.”
Dale smiled.
A big smile.
Which made me smile.
Had I ever seen him smile like that before? No, I hadn’t.
The rock might turn out to be nothing. But he had found it. He had helped Ruby. He had helped himself.
This was huge.
Huger, though, was the fact that Dale’s rock collection was missing, and a similar piece was here. Why would anyone want a little boy’s collection? And why would someone leave a polished rock here?
Ruby knelt again. “Just want to give this one more look. After all, sometimes things hide in plain sight.” She moved her gloved hands over the dirt. “Nothing that I can see. Let’s walk around a little. If there was a slight breeze, something could have blown away.”
Dale and I followed her as she scanned the area. Every other step or so, she’d stop and look at something. I had no idea what she was looking at, but she was the expert. Finally she zeroed in on what appeared to be a small piece of paper. She knelt down and picked it up, staring.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A baseball card,” she replied. “I don’t follow baseball. Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you, Dale?”
“Not really. I like it and all, but I don’t know the players.”
Ruby sealed the card in a zippered bag. “Could be nothing again, but I want to cover everything.” She continued walking around the area. Finally, after about fifteen more minutes, she stopped. “I think we’ve seen everything there is here. The cops would have stopped a half hour ago.”
“What are you going to do with that stuff?” I asked.
“Take it to a friend of mine for analysis. It’s a long shot, but you never know.”
A cigarette butt, a gold cufflink that was probably planted, a polished piece of snowflake obsidian, and a baseball card.
Not a lot to go on, but more than we had before.
I ushered Dale back to class.
He was still smiling.
“I don’t know what you did, Marj, but Dale has been more animated today than he’s ever been,” Jade said in the kitchen while I prepared dinner.
“All because he found that stone,” I said. “I think that’s the thing. He found it. He took some initiative in his own healing.”
“Because he found a rock?”
“Well…yeah. He found it and saw that it didn’t belong there. Of course anyone could have dropped a piece of obsidian on the ground, and it’s probably nothing. But Dale found it. He took action. He helped Ruby, and that made him feel like less of a victim.”