I’d been terrified, and more than that, angry.
How unfair it all seemed, to be alone in the world at nineteen.
I almost threw that card away, but for whatever reason, I shoved it in my purse, forgetting about it until I was searching for a ten-dollar bill I thought I’d stashed away. Still, it had been another week or two before I was curious enough to google Ruby McTavish.
There was much more to find than I expected. I spent night after night at my computer, reading about her husbands, about Ashby House. Wondering what in the world my grandmother had had to do with a person like that.
And then, finally, I stumbled on the story about her kidnapping, about her miraculous recovery. About the poor family in Alabama who had stolen this golden girl.
Suddenly, the pieces clicked into place, and the rush I felt as I realized who this woman might be to me––it still sends chills up my spine, just thinking about it.
I somewhat regret that stupid, heedless phone call––but miraculously, it led to me standing here in this house with this man, this child just months away from being born.
I will tell him, I promise.
But you’ll keep my secret for now, won’t you?
I think you will. I trust you.
Here––I’ll even tell you one more secret, for good measure.
When I cut that slit in the back of Ruby’s portrait to hide her letters, I discovered I wasn’t the first person to use it as a hiding spot.
As I’d shoved the papers inside, my fingers had brushed a crinkled piece of newsprint. When I’d pulled it out, it was yellowed with age, the date at the top reading August 18, 1987.
The article that had been carefully clipped out was some fluff piece about a parade in some small Iowa town called Bishop, the faded color photo showing people lined up along a flag-bedecked street as an old car drove by, a beauty queen waving from the back.
I couldn’t figure out why Ruby had cut it out, much less hidden it, but I knew it had been her handiwork. I recognized her elegant, spidery script in the blank space alongside the photo.
F & L （R & G?） she’d written, and then, underneath, a list.
Iowa, 1987
Missouri, 1970–1987
Ohio, 1962–1970
Kentucky, 1960–1962
Before:??
It didn’t make any sense to me, and I’d turned the clipping over in my hand, hoping for more clues, but there was only an ad for the local Ford dealership. I looked more carefully at the picture, studying the beauty queen. She was pretty, her red hair curled back from her face, but there was nothing familiar there, and my eyes drifted to the crowd.
It took awhile—all the faces were a little blurry, and several were wearing sunglasses—but finally, I saw a dark-haired woman standing just at the edge of the photo, her hand shading her eyes.
Mrs. Faith Carter watches the parade with her mother, Mrs. Lydia Hollingsworth.
Faith and Lydia. F & L.
I swear to you, I felt Ruby in that crinkled old piece of newspaper. I could almost see one shiny red nail tapping the picture, and those dark hazel eyes—my eyes—settling on those two women.
There was something familiar about the dark-haired one, something about the way she stood, the set of her shoulders, the slight purse in her lips as she watched the parade.
She looked, I realized with a dawning horror, exactly like Nelle. The older woman at her side—her mother, according to the caption—was taller, her hair twisted into an updo that was old-fashioned even forty years ago, and her hand was resting on her daughter’s arm.
I stared at that picture for a long time, thinking back through everything I’d read about Baby Ruby and her kidnapping. About the nanny, Grace, who had vanished from North Carolina only days after Ruby went missing.
R & G?
In her letters, Ruby had imagined what must have happened to the other Ruby, thinking of that poor baby sent off to find her nanny, searching the woods for Grace, before stepping off a cliff, plunging into all that dark, thick greenery, swallowed up forever.
But maybe …
Maybe there had been another story there all along.
A woman—a girl, really; Grace had been only about twenty—seeing the sickness in Ashby House before anyone else had known to look. A woman who loved a child enough to try to save her from it. Who had found a way to make them both disappear.
Or maybe this was simply another fantasy of Ruby’s. Nothing more than a delusional hunch, a wish that the real Ruby, Dora Darnell’s spiritual twin, had been a fighter, too. That she had, perhaps, survived.
In any case, it was another one of Ruby’s many secrets.