“I don’t remember hearing about a historic or preserved site here.”
Stephanie laughed. “That’s because there isn’t. They fought a good fight but they didn’t have the funding, the support, or the power to dig there. There were a few times they tried to go down in the middle of the night and find something that would change people’s minds. They thought if they could dig up something and prove they were right, people would finally listen. Sherriff Sheppard actually arrested them twice for it. It got ugly. In the middle of that was a girl trying to fit in with a bunch of people who thought she was crazy. Ruby always carried around these albums. Traveling so much, she had photographs from all over the world. That should have been enough to impress people, but Ruby couldn’t leave it at that. When she showed everyone a picture of a mummy from Egypt, she told the story of how it had grabbed her during the night when she and her father were exploring in the area. Her photograph of some Aztec wall art wasn’t enough. Ruby told everyone they still do the same barbaric human sacrifices, and she witnessed one. It wasn’t long before people started calling her Rubbish Ruby. The name stuck around for years. They tortured her, but she never stopped telling these stories. You hardly ever saw her without an album or a camera.”
“I don’t understand; why did she lie?” Patrick asked, finding it hard to believe people could treat Ruby so poorly. He’d found her charming and kind from the first time he knocked on her door to do a story on her.
“I don’t know.” Stephanie shrugged. “It didn’t help matters. People knew she was lying. It wasn’t convincing stuff. You could present facts contrary to her stories and she still wouldn’t waiver. She had some serious willpower. I don’t know how her folks dealt with it. But I guess they didn’t, considering how fixated they were on their own things.”
“Where are her parents now?” Patrick asked, trying to keep from getting swallowed up by how Ruby must have felt as a child in a new and unwelcoming place.
“They moved off island when Ruby was about eighteen. But she didn’t go with them. I’ll never understand why. I think they were headed for a desert in Israel. I thought Ruby would be excited to get out of here. Mostly everyone who grows up on an island this size can’t wait to leave. I was always counting the days until I could get out of here. I left for college and only came back a couple of times to visit. Every time, Ruby was right where I left her. When I moved back to start my company and focus on the environmental challenges here, I reconnected with Ruby. She’s been so supportive of my work. She designed my website. Helped me write my mission statement. She’s brilliant. But she’s also fighting a pretty big battle within herself, and you can’t come around and make that worse.”
Patrick was still not convinced. “She’s an adult. I don’t see how helping her is going to cause problems. You bring her groceries, isn’t that enabling her?”
“That’s different. I’m keeping her from starving to death. What you’re doing, feeding into whatever story she’s cooked up in her head, that’s where the real danger is. I used to think engaging in her delusions would help, but now I know better. The last thing she needs is some kind of impossible mission that doesn’t have a chance at success. Failure crushes her. The setbacks can be devastating.”
“She already doesn’t leave the house; how much worse could it be?” Patrick asked. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Stephanie, it was more that he didn’t understand the picture she was trying to paint.
“It can get worse, trust me. Right now Ruby gets up every day and talks to people from across the country for her work. She takes a shower, works in the garden, reads, cooks, studies languages, sews. She might have shrunk her world, but she makes the most of it. Much of that can go away and with it her health and well-being.”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” Patrick admitted, sipping slowly from his piping-hot coffee. “Maybe I don’t know enough about Ruby or her troubles. Couldn’t the drive for success and finding answers expand her world? Especially if she has help from me?”
“For how long?” Stephanie accused. “I don’t think guys tend to stick around very long when they don’t get their way. With Ruby you can’t apply logic, you can’t beg, you can’t tell her what’s best. So when you try all those things and fail, am I supposed to believe you’ll stick around?”
“Have you tried all that?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said, sounding a bit insulted.
“And you stick around. What makes you think I won’t?”
“I’m assuming I’m a better person than you are,” she replied flatly, finally taking a bite of her donut. “And my instincts are very good.”
“I like Ruby,” Patrick admitted without hesitation. He wasn’t one to play games. “I’m not going to back off, but I do hear you. You clearly care a lot about Ruby, and you know her well. I’m smart enough to take it to heart. I swear on this donut; I’ll do my best to put Ruby’s best interests first.”
“It’s a donut,” she argued, narrowing her eyes at him. “Who swears on a donut?”
“I personally believe donuts to be the greatest food ever invented. I have one every morning. If I fail to uphold my end of the bargain, I’ll swear off donuts forever. Trust me, it’s a big deal.”
“Just don’t push her,” Stephanie sighed. “Don’t try to run her life or force her to change. And whatever you do, if you can’t love her just the way she is right now, don’t fall in love with her at all.”
“Whoa, no one said anything about love,” Patrick balked. “I said like.”
“If you can’t like her the way she is right now, don’t go any farther down that road. It’s not fair to fall for the idea of what a person might be if they get better.”
“That’s pretty good advice,” Patrick agreed. “You earned yourself a second donut.”
Chapter 7
Ruby paced the kitchen floor, cleaning up invisible crumbs from the counter. Bobby and Piper wouldn’t be by for another hour, and Patrick was taking forever with the coffee. Nothing was any closer to being solved than it had been the day before. She stacked the slightly off-kilter napkins neatly and sighed loudly with relief when Patrick’s car finally approached. It took all her willpower not to stand in the doorway and usher him in anxiously.
Instead she busied herself with folding and refolding her dish towel and hung it just as he knocked and let himself in.
“Coffee and donuts,” he called out with a wide smile. “Sorry that took me so long.”
“I assumed Stephanie had your ear,” Ruby said, watching his face for any reaction. The flinch in his brows made it clear her guess was correct. “I figured when she ran off it was you she was chasing.”
“You could have warned me,” Patrick teased, but she was relieved to see he looked mostly unaffected. “She cares about you. You’re lucky to have such a loyal friend.”
“She didn’t convince you to leave me alone?” Ruby was already digging the pictures and notes out of the drawer and laying them across the table.
“It’ll take a little more than some persistent nagging to keep me away. I could tell it was coming from a good place so I made peace with her over some donuts.”
“I hate when people talk about me like I’m a child or some kind of broken dish that needs to be glued back together.” Ruby focused on the information on the table rather than the expression on Patrick’s face.
“Will it make you feel better if I tell you how you and I are more alike than different?” Patrick began arranging the photographs in some kind of order that made sense to him, but she couldn’t see it.
“How are we in any way alike?” Ruby laughed. “We’re light years apart.”
“You’ve asked me a few times why I left my job in Boston.”
“Right, and you’ve told me you wanted something more exciting so you moved here to write about the thrilling things that can only be found here on Bolton Bluff.” She laughed at the idea of him dressing up the boring headlines. “I’ve let you get away with tha
t too. I should have pressed.”
“Obviously my humor was just to shield my pain.” Patrick fell serious but Ruby could see he was only teasing. “I used to love my job. It was my entire life for five years. I chased the stories no one else wanted. I crawled into sewers to find people living down there. I told the stories no one wanted to believe were true. No matter what I had to do, I got the story.” Patrick slid her a donut. “After my last story a couple years ago I never went back to my office. I don’t even know what happened to all the stuff in my desk. It’s probably in some storage closet collecting dust.”
“You quit and never went back? That must have been one bad story.” Ruby took notice of Patrick’s nervous fidgeting as he continued.
“It was six months of research, lots of coffee and late nights. I was going to tell the story of a homeless little girl trying to make it through the winter in Boston. I found Serena one night in front of a convenience store and her mother agreed to allow me to tell their story. It’s not like it hadn’t been done before. People knew about poverty and child hunger on the streets, but I was going to do it differently.”
“How?” Ruby asked, leaning in, pulled fully into his story by his sudden tone and seriousness.
“I was embedding myself. They allowed me to be part of their family, to feel their pain and fight their fight. I documented things most fluff pieces about poverty never touch. I made it about twenty days. The story was coming together; it was compelling and heartbreaking.”
“So what happened?” Ruby asked, watching Patrick’s face fall a little more.
“Serena was killed out behind some pet store in her neighborhood. Someone stabbed her in the throat. She bled out alone. Seven years old, dead by some trash cans.”
“Oh no,” Ruby gasped. “Wha—I mean how?”
Patrick shook his head, surely trying to remove the images flashing through his mind. “Uh, for a while they thought it might be gang related. Then they focused in on the mother, but I knew that wasn’t the case. Her grief was real. I watched it, up close; she was shattered. Serena was a good girl, the kind of kid who would have made it out of that neighborhood if she had lived.”
“Did they ever find out what happened?” Ruby reached her hand across and covered Patrick’s arm comfortingly.
“Yes.” Patrick’s head dipped low with what looked like guilt. “I killed her,” he said somberly.
“What?” she asked, a sharp dagger hitting her heart.
“My story killed her,” he corrected. “When you chronicle someone’s life, especially someone in need, it’s likely once the story garners attention the person will be showered with support. I knew that when I picked Serena. She and her family would have been well taken care of after my story went live. I wanted that for them. People who feel guilty for not giving back to the community feel better when they can take what they’ve read and do something about it. It’s shallow and shortsighted, but it’s how it works. Serena’s friend Bayley was ten years old. They’d move around to different shelters together and went to the same school. I actually interviewed Bayley a few times for the piece; she was very interested in it. One day she heard her mother talking about how Serena’s family would be taken care of once the story was finished. Bayley wanted the same for her family. I guess she thought if Serena was dead, she’d be the next likely choice for me to write about.”
“That’s twisted and awful,” Ruby said, her face puckered with the horrible details. “But that wasn’t your fault. You were trying to help.”
“That’s what I told myself at first. That’s how I got through the first day or two, but when I started to really examine my role in all of it I knew better. I was exploiting their story to sell papers and get my name out there. I knew the byproduct of my work would help them, but it certainly wasn’t why I picked the piece. When it all hit me, I called my boss and quit. I grabbed my bags and caught the ferry out here. We’d come here once on vacation when I was a kid and it was so sleepy and quiet, I knew it was perfect.”
“Perfect for what?” Ruby asked, an ache in her heart.
“Hiding,” Patrick admitted. “You and I are far more alike than you know. I can appreciate what it feels like to need so much distance between you and the stuff you’re trying to forget that you’ll physically run from it. I’m not judging you or pushing you, because I know what it feels like. I’m sure leaving this house elicits the same sensations for you that I get when I think about seeing Serena’s mother again.”
“And yet you jumped at a chance to deal with these?” Ruby asked, pointing at the photographs. “It seems like maybe you miss doing something with substance.”
“The fate of these girls are already determined. Nothing I do will change that. Maybe I miss the thrill of chasing down a lead, but I can’t see myself going back to that life of writing for the sake of selling papers. Not at others’ expense.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ruby reiterated earnestly. “You were doing your job. Some little girl, desperate to change her own circumstances, made a very sad choice.”
“I can’t blame Bayley. She was hungry and tired of having to fight every day for what should have been basic necessities.”
“What happened to the story and Bayley?”
“Obviously it became more about the murder than the original piece I intended, though it was widely noted as the motive. Someone else at the paper picked it up and sensationalized it. Bayley was committed to a long-term psychiatric facility. She’ll be there for the foreseeable future.” Patrick sighed. “Everyone lost.”
“So we’re not that different then,” Ruby said in agreement, allowing him to make his point.
“Everyone is hiding from something,” Patrick said, turning to glance out the small window. “Piper and Bobby are back. Guess we’re really doing this.”
“You don’t have to,” Ruby insisted. “You can go now and forget this.”
“Hell, if we’re going to hide, might as well do it together. Maybe we can actually get something done.”
Chapter 8
“Do you know how hard it is to find a working printer on this island?” Bobby asked, his gruff voice full of annoyance. “I’ve got a list of possible victims matching the identifying features from the photographs. There are seven locals in the timeframe we’ve identified. I used the New England coastline as a starting point. All seven girls were thought to have run away, and no bodies have been found.”
“Sounds like it could line up,” Patrick said optimistically. He was still leery of the idea of four mostly unqualified people collaborating to solve some crime from decades ago. In the past he’d always worked alone. It was him, a back pack, and a notebook.
“I’ve looked through the case files on each of the girls, and there isn’t much to go on. No common thread in their disappearance besides their age and the fact that each had been considered a high-risk runaway.” Bobby grabbed a donut and handed the papers over to Patrick.
“What made them high-risk?” Ruby asked, glancing over Patrick’s shoulder.
“Some were in trouble with petty stuff, others drugs or a boyfriend.”
“How many were from islands or small towns?” Ruby asked, the space between her brows wrinkling with heavy thought.
“All of them,” Bobby remarked, a bit of excitement lifting his shoulders as he seemed to realize she was having an important thought.
“It’s natural in a place this small or similar that kids have a strong desire to leave. Most adolescents find island life suffocating. There’s a chance some of these girls did just take off.” When everyone looked at Ruby quizzically she explained further. “I read a lot of books about psychology. Always trying to figure myself out.”
“There’s a chance all of them did,” Patrick agreed. “This one here is noted as having a record for drug use and shoplifting.”
“It doesn’t mean she deserved to die and be chopped up,” Ruby scolded sharply.
“That’s not at all what I was saying,” Pat
rick defended, worried by Ruby’s defensive tone. “I just meant that there is a chance she took off and never looked back. Are these cases all considered open?”
“They’re considered pending. It’s basically a way to say there is no fire under anyone’s ass about them. Without bodies or more information these would get pushed to the bottom of the pile.”
“What about the parents?” Piper asked. “I know cases you’ve worked on before where the parents can’t stop checking in, begging for answers. Who can blame them, really?”
Bobby nodded his head in agreement and spoke between bites of donut and sips of coffee. “There are notes about a few inquiries, but for the most part these cases would be considered cold and unassigned to anyone in particular. The parents wouldn’t even have a point of contact to call.”
“That’s sad,” Ruby said, gently touching one of the more gruesome photographs.
Patrick cut in, feeling some strange obligation to be the voice of reason for Ruby. “We have absolutely nothing tying these bodies to any of the missing girls. At this point it’s pure speculation.”
“Sure,” Ruby said, sounding unconvinced, “but how do we change that? We should call the parents of these girls and ask them more questions. If they were believed to be runaways maybe there wasn’t a thorough enough investigation.”
“Whoa,” Bobby said, tossing his hands up in a stop right there motion. “You can’t start calling the parents of missing people to ask questions when you have absolutely no new evidence in the case. It’s cruel, and we’re not doing it for the sake of crossing potential matches off the list. We have to take a different approach.”
Just For A Heartbeat (Piper Anderson Legacy Mystery Book 2) Page 5