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Ryan
My heart pounded. Where the hell was Ruby? I flipped on the lights and looked around. Her purse lay on the night table. I quickly unzipped it and dumped the contents on the bed. Her wallet. And her phone. She wouldn’t have left without either.
I turned my gaze toward the dresser.
And a cannonball hit my stomach.
Her gun sat on top of the wooden surface.
Wherever she was, she was unarmed.
I quickly called
9-1-1, but they told me what I already knew. They couldn’t do anything until an adult was missing more than twenty-four hours.
I couldn’t just sit here. She wouldn’t have left willingly without her phone and her gun. So I’d search. I’d begin at her apartment. The number from the text she’d received warning her not to go home hadn’t been traceable. Big shock there.
God, I was exhausted, but I had to go after Ruby.
I couldn’t imagine a world without her in it.
I traipsed downstairs and drove to Ruby’s apartment. Of course, it was locked. I called a locksmith and paid him a shit ton of green to open the door without any evidence that I lived there. Money still talked.
I entered the small apartment that consisted only of a tiny living room, a galley kitchen, and a small bedroom and bathroom. I turned on all the lights and started looking for something. I wasn’t sure what, but I’d know it when I found it.
I ransacked the tiny alcove, pulling up her sheets and stripping the bed. Then I went through her dresser drawers. Nothing except lots of plain cotton underwear. Her closet held more of her sensible clothes and shoes. Time to try the living room.
On one side of the wall stood a large bookshelf. I was determined to leave no stone unturned, so I pulled out each book and leafed through it, looking for anything that might be hidden inside.
Nothing.
I pulled out her sofa cushions and plunged my hands inside the crevices, searching. Some loose change, but that was it.
I looked under her sofa. Nothing except another book. I pulled it out. It was an old copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I’d heard of it. The author was the mother of Mary Shelley, who had penned the original Frankenstein. Written in the eighteenth century, it was an early treatise on feminism. I turned it over and let the pages open.
A small piece of paper fluttered to the ground.
I picked it up.
It was a pale pink, almost like the old-fashioned stationery my mother—or the woman I’d thought was my mother at the time—kept on hand for letters and notes. On one side were several drawings. I gulped as I recognized them. One was the female symbol. One was the symbol on Simpson’s ring. The others were variations.
On the other side, some words were written—a quote from the classical playwright Euripides.
There is no worse evil than a bad woman.
* * *
After going through her kitchen and finding nothing, I cleaned up as best I could and took the Wollstonecraft book and the paper I’d found in it back to the hotel. I texted Ruby, thinking if she was back she’d have her phone, but I didn’t expect a response.
I didn’t get one.
The book puzzled me. Ruby might well read early feminist literature, but the paper with the image and the quote was an enigma.
Someone had planted it. Perhaps the whole book, but certainly at least the paper hiding within its pages. Someone had been in Ruby’s apartment, and someone had warned her not to go there.
The quote rang in my ears.
There is no worse evil than a bad woman.
