Eli sank onto the couch and spilled a mess of papers on the cushion beside him. “Pike smothers the infant, or at least he thinks he does. He leaves it in the icehouse while he breaks the news to his wife. It autoresuscitates—”
“It what?”
“Just trust me on this. It starts breathing again, but then it sort of goes into standby mode since its body is so cold. It looks dead, but it’s not.”
Ross sank down. “Okay,” he said, listening more closely.
“Cecelia Pike wants to see her newborn’s body. She breaks out of the bedroom he’s locked her in, and finds the baby in the icehouse, where it’s cold and blue and looking pretty damn dead. She picks it up and cries over it . . . which is how Pike finds her. He goes off the deep end—here she is mourning for what he thinks is her lover’s child—and hangs her.
But the baby’s not dead
.” He tosses a photograph at Ross, a grainy study of footprints. “Someone walked on that sawdust after Pike did, someone who was wearing boots that were awfully similar to the ones taken off Cecelia Pike’s feet— a girl named Ruby.”
“Ruby?”
“Yeah. She was the housekeeper, some kid who lived with them. When I met with Duley Wiggs, that old cop, he mentioned it—although I didn’t realize it at the time. Said that Pike wasn’t up for a big funeral celebration at his house, with his
girl
gone. I thought he was talking about Cissy . . . but now I realize he meant the hired help.”
“Why hasn’t anyone mentioned her?”
“Because she was a servant, and servants are supposed to be invisible. And because she disappeared that night. Pike wouldn’t tell me about her, because she probably knows that he killed his wife.”
“So if Ruby took the baby and disappeared that night—”
“The baby might still be alive. In her seventies, and about to inherit a nice tract of land,” Eli finished. “Plus, Ruby might be able to fill in the blanks. I did a little digging on the Internet. A woman named Ruby Weber was born in the Northeast Kingdom, moved to Comtosook with her family in 1925, and disappeared from Vermont records in 1932. Now she lives at 45 Thistlehill Lane in Gaithersburg, Maryland.”
Ross could not seem to force the woman’s name out of his throat. Ruby Weber.
RW
. Lia had not been trying to tell everyone gathered at her grave that she loved him. She had only been pointing Eli and the others in the right direction.
When Meredith had been about Lucy’s age, her dog had been run over by a truck. Her mother had taken Blue to the vet to be put down, and instead of crying, Meredith had thrown herself into the art of prestidigitation. She made quarters vanish, red rubber balls slip out of sight, small paper bouquets of flowers disappear—before retrieving them magically from her ears, the cookie jar, the silverware drawer. She put on these shows for Ruby, who saw right through her. “Honey,” she had said to Meredith, “there are some things you just can’t bring back, no matter what.”
Years later, Meredith knew she was lucky to have reached the age of thirty-five and still have her grandmother around. After all, she had experienced firsthand her mother’s premature demise, and she knew how loss could eat away at you like a termite, tiny and insidious until your heart was nothing but dust.
She thought of death like the seam of a hem: each time you lost someone close, it unraveled a little. You could still go along with your life, but you’d forever be tripping over something you previously took for granted. If Ruby passed away, there would be no one but Meredith and Lucy. There had never been aunts and uncles and cousins; no family reunion or gala Christmas dinner. They had had each other, which had been enough.
“You are not allowed to die,” Meredith said, matter-of-fact. She squeezed her grandmother’s hand. “You are not allowed to die until I say so.”
She nearly jumped out of her seat as Ruby squeezed right back. Looking down, she saw her grandmother’s open eyes— and even better, the yellow heat of recognition in them.
“Meredith,” Ruby answered, her voice faint and thready, “who said anything about dying?”
After Eli left and Ethan went to bed, Ross holed himself up in his room. Shelby knocked on the door to bring him some food, which he turned away. She tried an hour later, hoping to just sit and talk, but he came to the door in his underwear, and said he really didn’t feel up to company.
She hated herself for doing it, but when there was no sound of movement from inside the room, Shelby jimmied the lock, checked Ross to make sure he was only asleep, and slipped his razor into her pocket.
She slept fitfully that night, dreaming in black-and-white about walking on a ground so hot it burned the soles of her feet. When she woke up, it was nine in the morning, she had a skull-splitting headache, and someone was playing a radio too loud.
Determined, she stomped down the hall toward Ethan’s room first, certain that he was to blame. But he was fast asleep, curled under the blankets and completely oblivious to the racket that was coming from down the hall. Shelby moved along to Ross’s room, and knocked on the door. “Ross,” she yelled, “turn that thing down!”
But the music did not stop. She pushed on the door, and found it unlocked. The radio blared on, a preset alarm.
The bed was made, the dresser clear, and Ross’s small duffel missing.
On the pillow was a piece of paper.
Shel
, she read,
I’m sorry for leaving this way. But then, if I
ever did do something right, I wouldn’t be the brother you know.
A scream rolled inside her. Ross had just left her a suicide note.
Ross sat in his car, looking at the neat line of Japanese maples and listening to the language of birds and thinking that it was fitting for everything to come to an end at a spot like this. He took a deep breath, aware that what he was about to do would change the lives of many people other than himself. But then, how
couldn’t
he do it?
He’d driven around Comtosook for a few hours, until he’d come to a decision and had gotten everything he needed to make it happen. He could say he was doing this for Lia, but it wouldn’t be the truth. Ross was doing it for himself, to prove that there was something—at last—at which he could succeed.
He reached along the passenger seat, picked up the piece of paper that had Ruby Weber’s address scrawled across it, and then got out of the car.
The mailbox said WEBER/OLIVER, and Ross found himself wondering if this woman might have a male companion, or for that matter, a female one. He walked up the brick path to the front door and rang the bell.
“They’re not home.”
Ross turned to see a neighbor watering the adjacent lawn with a sprinkler. “Do you know where they went?” he asked. “I’m sort of dropping in unannounced . . .”
“Are you family?”
Ross thought of Lia. “Yes.”
The neighbor came closer. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said sympathetically, “but Ruby’s in the hospital.”
Ross wandered the hospital’s administrative floors until he reached an office that had a secretary absent on a coffee break and a doctor’s extra lab coat hanging on a coat hook just inside the door. Costumed, he moved with purpose to the cardiac care unit and asked for Ruby Weber’s chart, which he scrutinized for a few minutes, memorizing her age, her condition, and the room into which she’d been put. When he got there, however, a woman was sitting with Ruby on the edge of the bed.
Not wishing for an audience, Ross busied himself in the hallway until the woman left the room, holding a little girl by the hand. As they headed away from him, Ross slipped inside. “Mrs. Weber,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you.”
She had battleship-gray hair and eyes as blue as the center of a flame. Her skin, so finely wrinkled, reminded Ross of rice paper. “Well, that would be a novelty. Being that all your friends seem to want to poke and prod me and take my blood.”
Ross tugged his arms from the sleeves of his coat, folded it, and set it on a chair. “That’s because I’m not a doctor.”
He watched her face as she struggled with the decision to push the nurse’s call button and have him evicted . . . or to simply hear him out. After a very long moment, Ruby hiked herself up on her pillows. “Are you a patient? You look like you’re in pain.”
“I am.”
“What hurts?”
Ross thought about how to answer this. “Everything.” He took a step forward. “I want to talk to you about 1932.”
“I knew it was coming,” she murmured. “That heart attack was the warning.”
“You were there. You know what happened to Lia.”
She turned her head in profile, and Ross was struck by how noble she looked. This woman, whose ancestors had been prominently featured in one of Spencer Pike’s degenerate family genealogies, could have been the prototype for a queen, the face on the bow of a ship, the figurehead on a golden coin. “There are some things that shouldn’t be talked about,” Ruby said.
Well, he couldn’t be blamed for trying. With a sigh, Ross picked up the borrowed lab coat and started to walk away.
“Then there are some things that shouldn’t have been kept secret in the first place.” She looked at Ross. “Who wants to know?”
He thought about explaining the development, and the Abenaki protest, and Eli’s investigation. But in the end, he simply said, “Me.”
“I worked for Spencer Pike. I was fourteen. Cissy Pike was only eighteen, you know—her husband, he was eight years older than she was. That night they’d fought, and she started in having her baby, even though it was three weeks early. Tiniest little girl you ever saw. When the baby died, Miz Pike went a little crazy. Her husband locked her in her room, and I was so scared I just picked up what I could and left.” She pleated the blanket between her hands. “I heard afterward that she had been killed that night.”
“Did you see her body?” Ross pressed. “Did you see the baby’s?”
Ruby opened and closed her mouth, as if trying to reshape her words. Color rose to her face, and one of the monitors began to beep more fervently.
The door swung open. “Granny? What’s that noise? Are you all right?”
Ross turned, an explanation on his lips. And found himself staring into the face of Lia Beaumont Pike.
“W
ho the hell are you?” Lia said to Ross, or not-Lia, or whoever she was. She didn’t wait for an answer, though, before she stuck her head back out of the door and screamed for a nurse. Suddenly the room was crowded with hospital personnel, jockeying for position in front of Ruby’s bed and assuring themselves that she was not going into cardiac arrest again. Lia turned her attention to the medical team, soaking up their technical jargon like a sponge. She stood rigidly until the monitor began to sway to its simple rhythm again, the crisis passed. Only then did she let her shoulders relax, her hands loosen from fists.
Ross slid out of the room, unnoticed. It wasn’t Lia. He knew this, because she didn’t recognize him. There were subtler differences too—this woman’s hair was longer, and curlier, more honey-colored than wheat. She had a little girl with her; there were fine lines of age bracketing her mouth. But those remarkable brown eyes were the same, and the sorrow in them.
She was too young to be Lia Pike’s daughter. But she was too much of a dead ringer for Lia to be anything but a direct relation.
The whitewashed nurses and doctors began to file out, a string of pearls. Ross peeked back inside the room. “He’s an old friend,” Ross heard, before the door swung shut and cleaved the conversation in two.
This much he knew: Ruby Weber was a liar. She was not an old friend of his.
And she had not left the Pikes without taking that baby.
Shelby learned that you cannot put out an APB on someone until they have been lost for twenty-four hours; that there are five major routes out of Burlington by car; that if you leave from the airport, you can get to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, or Albany.
And that 2,100 people are reported missing, daily.
Her brother being one of them.
She had not let go of his note, not since finding it five hours ago. The ink now tattooed the palm of her hand like hieroglyphs, a diary of loss. Eli had come at her call, and had promised to personally search every inch of Comtosook, and lean hard on the cops in Burlington. But Shelby knew that if Ross did not want to be found, he would simply make himself invisible.
Once when they were in high school, a football jock had killed himself by jumping off the edge of a gorge. The news had been all over the papers; guidance counselors had set up shop in the hallways of school; memorials of flowers and teddy bears decorated the site. Ross had wanted to go see where it happened. “Jesus,” he’d said, over the raging water and the broken rocks. “If you’re going to do it that way, you’re pretty sure.”
“How would
you
do it?” she had asked, with a morbid curiosity that, now, she could not believe they’d ever discussed. She also could not remember, although she’d tried so hard her head throbbed, how Ross had answered. Would he use pills, or a gun, or a knife? Would he lock himself in an anonymous motel room, jump from a train bridge, do it in his car?
When Ross had been in the hospital after the last suicide attempt, she had gone to visit him. Since he was doped up on medication, Shelby was certain he did not remember their conversation. “Try living on dry land,” Ross had said, “when you are a fish.”
The phone rang, and Shelby flew from Ross’s bedroom down the hall to her own. “Shelby?”
“Eli?” Her heart sank.
“Has he called you yet?”
“No.”
“All right, well . . . leave the line free for when Ross calls.”
She loved him, because he’d said
when
Ross calls, not
if
. “Okay,” she promised, and she hung up to find Ethan standing in the doorway of her bedroom, looking miserable.
“I think it’s my fault,” he confessed.
Shelby patted the bed so that he’d sit beside her. “It’s not, Ethan, believe me. I used to think that I was the one to blame, too, because I wasn’t doing something Ross needed me to do.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” His face twisted. “We were talking about it the other night—dying.”