The Heiress(8)

“You’re in Daddy’s office!” she cried, triumphant. “I’m gonna tell him!”

“I’ll say you’re lying,” I fired back. “You’re just a baby. He won’t believe you.”

Her narrow face creased into a frown. Christ, I’ve just realized it’s the same expression she wears ninety percent of the time now. How tragic for her.

“He will, too!” she replied, her voice shrill. “He’ll believe me over you. You’re not even my real sister.”

Every argument with Nelle reached this point eventually. It was her favorite weapon, even though the one time Mama heard her say it, Nelle had gotten a whooping with a belt, a punishment neither of us had ever received before or since.

But, apparently, even that wasn’t a deterrent.

“I’m gonna tell Daddy you said that.”

Her little face flushed, and she crossed her arms over her chest, lower lip wobbling. If she started crying, she might wake Mama up from her nap, and then we’d both be in trouble.

“Or-r-r,” I said, drawing the word out, “I won’t tell, and you won’t tell anyone I was in here.”

It was always like this with Nelle. Attack, counterattack, and then, eventually, a reminder of mutually assured destruction, and we headed back to our corners until the battle began anew over something else.

It was exhausting, frankly.

It’s still exhausting. How are two women our age still locked into such silliness? I sometimes think about asking her. Was there ever a time when we could’ve broken this pattern? Been something more than wary enemies? There must have been. Obviously, there was no chance of it after everything with Duke, but maybe before that.

Maybe that moment in Daddy’s office was our chance, and I’d missed it.

Ah, well. No use in trying to undo what’s long been done. And besides, I can admit that I could never forgive Nelle for voicing my greatest fear so often.

That I wasn’t Ruby McTavish. That I was Dora Darnell, a cuckoo in the nest, and that’s why Nelle hated me, had always hated me, wailing her head off when she was just a baby anytime I came near her. Because she knew, even then, that I wasn’t her sister.

What chance did we ever have, with something like that between us?

In any case, she slunk out of the office, and I carefully replaced the papers, picking up my doll as I went, forgetting the paper clip altogether. Although now that I think about it, I never played with that doll again after that day.

It sat there with my other toys, one eye forever half-open until I was old enough not to have toys anymore.

I wonder where it ended up.

But you didn’t ask for childhood memories, you asked for the truth! That’s what you’re saying to yourself right now, aren’t you?

Darling, I’ve given it to you.

The fear that I was not Ruby McTavish was an open wound, one Nelle knew to pour salt in and one that I, with my newspapers and my dreams I called memories, was forever trying to heal. It was a fear that I could never speak aloud myself because even as a child, I knew it would shatter something inside my family for good.

Because what would that mean?

Too many horrors to contemplate.

Even for me, even now.

Especially when there are still so many horrors to come.

-R





HOPE DIM, BUT NOT YET

EXTINGUISHED FOR

FAMILY OF BABY RUBY

Tavistock, North Carolina

When Anna Ashby McTavish was a young girl, she tells us, the only thing she ever wanted for Christmas was “ribbon candy and a sack of oranges.”

A modest wish for a girl born to one of the finest families in Wichita, Kansas, but in keeping with Mrs. McTavish’s character. This is a woman who offers reporters tea poured by her own hand rather than relying on the maids that surely people the halls of Ashby House, and whose anguish is only visible in the slight redness of her eyes, the elegant fingers reaching up to touch a delicate diamond cross around her neck as she tells us of the one wish she has for Christmas 1943.

“I want my baby to come home to us,” she says, her voice cracking slightly. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to have Ruby back.”

Ruby McTavish has been missing for over three months now after disappearing on a family picnic. Even now, Mrs. McTavish tells us, she can hardly bear to think that such a lovely day ended in tragedy.

“It was such a pretty afternoon, and Ruby was so sweet in her little sailor dress. She’d fallen down at one point and scraped her knee, but she didn’t even cry. I think she was as happy as her daddy was to be out in these mountains.”

The Blue Ridge Mountains surrounding the McTavish mansion are indeed stunning, but they are also full of hidden dangers—steep cliffs, boggy areas, and, of course, wild animals.

Faced with such perils, it’s no wonder the Tavistock County Sheriff’s Department says that, while the search is ongoing, they do not hold much hope of finding the child alive.

“With children this young, if we don’t find them within the first few hours, we don’t anticipate a happy ending,” Sheriff Nicholas Lewis told this reporter.

But Christmas is the season of hope, and Mrs. McTavish clings to it with all the tenacity of her pioneer ancestors.

“Ruby is out there,” she says, her aquamarine eyes shimmering with tears, but her words firm. “This is her home. She belongs here. And we will do whatever it takes—anything it takes—to bring her home.”