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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, IfeltRuby 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.
Therewassomething 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 backthrough 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.
One I decided to keep.
Well, except from you.
That piece of newspaper is still there in the painting, wrapped gently in all of Ruby’s letters, and I think about it every time I look into the eyes Andrew Miller so lovingly painted all those years ago.
The love of his life.
And his doom.
Here’s one final secret for you.
Sometimes, when I look up at Ruby’s portrait, I thinkabout how happy she was when it was painted. She thought she’d beaten it then, the dark thing that was lurking inside her.
