AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She rattled the ice in her glass. “But he did. She never knew how he got in touch with your family, but your daddy sent someone down in a fancy suit to look at you, and then he came himself.”
I pictured Daddy—mydaddy, with his big mustache and his Acqua di Parma and his white suits that never got dirty—sitting across a table from Jimmy Darnell, and suddenly I could see that table.
No, I couldn’t just see it. Irememberedthat table. One leg just a little shorter so that it always wobbled when someone leaned against it.
“His wife was beside herself, he told Daddy. Or that’s what Mama said he told Daddy anyway. Mrs. McTavish blamed herself, I think. She was the one who told Ruby to go find the nanny, to leave her alone for a little while. Said she saw her walk up the hill and out of sight, but thought the nanny was just on the other side. Only the nanny had already started packing things up and carrying them back to the car, and she didn’t know Ruby was headed her way.”
I could picture that, too. The little girl, toddling along theforest path, her eyes searching for a familiar figure, but not seeing any. Her little brain whirring, her legs carrying her deeper into the forest, thinking her nanny—Grace—must be there.
I waited for that image to have the same whiff of memory, but it didn’t. It was just my imagination. And my imagination kept going, carrying the child deeper into the forest, until there were too many trees, until she was confused and scared, sweating and whimpering, looking around for Grace, not seeing the drop ahead…
“He was afraid it was going to eat her up,” Claire continued, and my mind, still fixed on Baby Ruby, conjured up a bear now instead of a steep cliff; a mountain lion, maybe. But then I realized she meant Mama, and her guilt.
No, not my mama. Not if what Claire was saying is true.
Anna. Anna McTavish.
“Mama never would’ve let you go,” Claire said, and the air-conditioning clicked off, the room suddenly quiet. “Even after it was all agreed on and the money was stuffed under the mattress, she kept telling everyone you were hers. Nobody listened, though. Not with Daddy confessing.”
She lifted one hand off the table, zooming it through the air. “So off you went to North Carolina, Daddy right behind you. Only you went to a mansion and he went to the county jail.”
A headache started behind my eyes, sweat soaking through my silk blouse. “And what? That was your father’s grand plan, to just go sit in jail? Go through a trial for something he didn’t do?”
“Of course not,” Claire scoffed. “McTavish told him he’d fix it. Said if Daddy confessed and just sat tight in the county jail for a couple of days, he would make it so that Daddycould ‘escape,’ and get him back to Alabama. He’d given us enough money to start a brand-new life somewhere else. Mama said Daddy kept talking about Mexico, maybe South America.”
She scoffed again, took another sip of tea. “That would’ve been nice, I guess. Growing up down there. Wasn’t in the cards, though.”
“The escape was planned, then,” I said slowly. “And went wrong.”
The look Claire gave me is one I’ve never forgotten. In part, because she had my eyes, a dark hazel that changed from green to nearly black in the light.
But mostly, because it was the first time in my life anyone had ever looked at me with such pity.
“There was no escape plan,” I said, understanding washing over me.
Claire made a gun of her finger, fired it at me. “McTavish had what he wanted. He had you. He didn’t need some Alabama farmer who could barely read holding a secret like that over your heads for the rest of his life.”
I told myself there was no way Claire could know that for sure. She was a baby when all this happened; plus, it was coming to her from her mother, a woman who’d had her life shattered by Baby Ruby’s disappearance. Of course, she’d think the worst of Daddy. Of all the McTavishes.
But here it is, darling: I knew it was true. I felt it, as certain and primal as I’d ever felt anything. And I knew that Daddy had that man killed. I could practically see Jimmy Darnell dashing through the dark woods of Tavistock County, thinking to himself that just through the trees, he’d find a car, ready to take him home to his wife, his baby girl, and all that money.
I bet the last thing that went through his head before that bullet hit was a vision of crystal-blue water and white sands.
And the reason I knew? It’s exactly what I would’ve done, if I were Daddy.
“The real kicker,” Claire said, sighing as she rested her elbows on the table, “is that Mama had proof of the deal. She had all that cash. Like I said, I never really knew how much it was. Thousands of dollars, for sure. But the night they took you and Daddy, she burned every last bill. Big stacks of cash, going up in smoke in the yard.”
Claire pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “‘What kind of mother would I be if I took that money?’ she always said. ‘What kind of mother sells her own child?’ Sometimes, I’d be like, ‘Well, hell, Mama, probably a bad one, but at least you would’ve been a rich one!’”
She laughed, but the sound faded quickly, her smile dimming. “That was before I had Linda, though. I understand it better now.”
Heaving a sigh, she stood, the chair squeaking across the linoleum. “We’ve managed okay, as you can see, but Mama never got over it. She died last year, but I sometimes think she’d been dead for forty years before that. She was just marking time.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and Claire looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “You were just a kid. Although I admit, I used to be jealous of you when I was younger. We didn’t get much North Carolina news down here, but sometimes you made the bigger papers, and I used to dream about what it would be like to live in a big house and have all that money. It wasn’t very nice of me, but when your first husband died, I thought, ‘Well, that’s what she gets, isn’tit? Her daddy had my daddy shot, and now someone’s shot her man.’”
She kept looking at me, her gaze steady. “And then I read about your second husband, and thought, ‘Shit, maybe God really does dole out vengeance.’ And when the third died, I thought, ‘How is one womanthisunlucky?’ It wasn’t until the fourth one that I understood.”
