The Butterfly Sister (20 page)

He cleared his throat. “Psych ward?”

“She tried to kill herself a few days ago.”

A long pause. “I see.”

I heard nothing on the other end and wondered if he hung up. “Hello? Detective Pickens?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you ask me if Beth was depressed? Or tried to hurt herself?”

He let out a cross between a sigh and a groan. “Look, I didn't want to get into this with you right now. Not yet. But . . . there's a possibility Beth Richards killed herself.”

Saliva stuck to the back of my throat. I pushed it down with a painful swallow.

“I just talked with Janice Richards,” he explained. “Apparently, Beth e-mailed her the day she left for Pittsburgh. A suicide note. For some reason, she just got the e-mail today. We're not sure why there was a delay, but we're looking into possible scenarios. Our tech experts are looking over the e-mail, verifying its origin.”

“But . . .” I was at a loss for words. Something Janice said came back to me then. Beth hadn't been feeling well before she went to Pittsburgh, she'd said. She'd been fatigued and lethargic. She'd also withdrawn from her friends, like Sarah Iverson. The symptoms of depression were there all along.

After the detective and I hung up, I couldn't help but wonder: Was Mark attracted to emotionally unstable girls? Or did he make us that way?

I was considering the answer to that question when a pair of hands flashed in front of my eyes before I was blinded by a white rag. I suffocated in its thick terry cloth texture.

I squirmed and kicked and thrashed until I grew dizzy.

Then everything faded to black.

December Diary Five

December

I can't stop thinking about the baby. Our baby. My baby. I wonder if he—or maybe it was she, I'll never know—has forgiven me.

Then again, I haven't forgiven myself.

When my stomach rumbles from hunger or gas shoots inside me like a pinball machine, I imagine it is him, or her. Kicking me. Flipping over. Doing somersaults. Waving its tiny fingers through amniotic fluid. When this happens, I rub my belly and say, in a singsong voice, “I love you, baby.” And every time, my voice echoes off the hollow chamber, and the emptiness consumes me. There is no baby, I realize for the hundredth time.

There is no baby.

There is no baby.

There is no baby.

Chapter 16

H
er voice—high-pitched and sweet—woke me like a robin chirping outside your bedroom window on an early spring day.

“Ruby,” she whispered. “Ruby, wake up.”

I couldn't lift my eyelids; they were swollen with lethargy. Obviously, I was still under the effects of whatever chemical had saturated that white rag. It all seemed so distant: the boulders, the lake, the hands, the struggle. Had that been a few hours ago? A day? A week? In the wake of temporary blindness, my other senses heightened, and I took in the damp, almost sweet smell of mildew, of water aging in floorboards like cabernet in oak barrels. I lay on a soft surface, what seemed to be a bed, and I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking it to dislodge me from sleep.

“Ruby,” she whispered again. “Please. You need to wake up.”

Wherever I'd been taken, I was not alone. And this girl with the soft, syrupy voice was not my captor. Trying to open my eyes once more, I saw her like a silhouette, hazy and dim.

“Who are you?” I whispered back.

“It's me.” She paused. “Beth.”

A spark of mental clarity zipped through me then. My eyes shot open and I blinked repeatedly to keep them that way. I saw her then, slightly gaunt, her lily white skin a shade lighter, her blond hair darker and oily. It was tucked behind her ears on each side.

“You're alive,” I said.

“I'm alive,” she repeated.

“Where are we?” I asked as she pulled me to a seated position.

But I knew the answer to my question as soon as my eyes adjusted to our surroundings. The room was dark—the boarded windows let in only a stream of light through the slats—but I saw white paint chipping off the floorboards, a stone fireplace, wall-to-wall wood.

We were inside Mark's cabin.

He had changed a few things since I'd been there last, though. The twin bed with a frilly comforter on which I sat, set flush against the wall like a daybed, was new. So was the rustic table and three chairs in the corner. There were valances above the windows; a shag carpet to warm the floor; pictures on the wall.

“Beth . . .” I started, my voice gaining strength in tone and volume.

But she placed a finger to her lips and shook her head as she eyed the door to the front of the cabin, where the kitchen was.

“We need to be quiet,” she whispered. “She'll hear us.”

“S
he?
”

Beth paused before whispering the name. “Meryl.”

A
s Beth and I whispered back and forth, I sensed night falling outside the cabin. The beams of daylight peeking through the slats of the boarded windows diminished. Beth sat mere inches away, but the details of her face grew fuzzy.

“Can we escape?” I asked, maintaining a whisper.

She shook her head. “Don't think I haven't tried. She dead bolts the door.”

I eyed the windows. “Can't we kick those boards through?”

“I've tried that too. I think she double boarded them, thick wood and fat nails. They don't budge. When she's not here, I scream and scream, hoping someone, someday will hear me. I screamed so hard my throat was sore for days. We're in the middle of nowhere, Ruby.”

We'll call for help on my cell phone
, I thought. But where is it? And where's my purse? I had both with me on the boulders. I patted my pants pocket and the bedspread beside me in vain. Meryl must have taken them.

“Can't we wait for her by the door,” I suggested instead. “And attack her when she comes in? Is there anything we can use to hit her with? One of these floorboards?”

“She has a gun, Ruby.” Beth hugged her stomach protectively. “I can't risk it.”

I recognized her gesture. “You're not . . . Beth, are you pregnant?”

She nodded.

“Is it Mark's?”

She nodded again. “And I think Meryl wants it.” Her voice cracked then. She was on the brink of sobbing. “I think she's keeping me alive until I give birth. And then . . .”

“We'll escape by then,” I whispered. “Or someone will find us.”

I thought back to reading the words
Like Cassie's Cabin
in the margin of
A Room of One's Own
. A sudden chill quivered my body at the thought: Beth had left a clue to her whereabouts without even knowing it. I wondered who else knew about the cabin. Heidi came first to mind. Had I told her about it? I couldn't remember. Were Heidi and Professor Barnard looking for me? Would they have called the police?

“The police are probably looking for me right now,” I assured her.

“And what about me? Are they still looking for me?”

“There was this serial killer,” I tried to explain. “And you fit the description of his other victims, and at first, they thought you were . . .”

“Dead?”

I nodded. “But your mom—”

“My mom?”

“Your mom swore you were alive, Beth.”

I told Beth about the suitcase then. “You probably didn't think I put my name on the tag, since I never went on my trip.”

She gasped. “I left your tag on my bag?”

“You didn't know?”

“I packed quickly. Wait. My bag was on the plane?”

“Of course it was. Didn't you check it?”

She shook her head. “Meryl took me from the airport. She must have . . . Oh my God, she checked my bag to make it look like I was on the plane.”

“I think she did more than that,” I said. “She pretended to
be you,
Beth. The police thought you were on that plane, that you went missing in Pittsburgh. Well, until today.”

I told Beth then about the woman who'd sat next to her, or rather, next to Meryl on the plane. The woman had been keen enough to realize the Beth Richards she'd sat beside was not the same girl she'd seen on the news.

“So it's only a matter of time before they figure out what happened,” I reassured her. I was trying to convince even myself of that fact. I retraced everything I had said and done over the weekend, every clue I might have left for the police to find me. Find us. And that's when I remembered my phone conversation with Detective Pickens and realized Meryl must have faked the suicide note to Beth's mom. I didn't want to mention the note to Beth, though. It would only upset her. She could find out later, after we escaped.

“You knew about me,” I said instead. “And the other girls? You wrote our names down.”

“Meryl told me about you. All of you.”

“Did you know Mark stole my work and passed it off as his own?”

She nodded, then placed her hand on top of mine. “But, Ruby, for the record, I didn't know Mark was seeing you when we got involved. I never meant to hurt you.”

“I know.” I thought of Madeline Kohl. “You fell in love with the wrong guy. We all did.”

“But I didn't. I never loved Mark.”

“You didn't?”

She scrunched up her nose, her lips turned downward. “I was just trying to pass English.”

“You used him?”

“I'm a biology major. I should have known better than to take English Lit to fill my stupid humanities prerequisite. Shakespeare and Wordsworth?” She rolled her eyes. “I was close to flunking. And I couldn't have that on my transcript. So when I caught Mark looking down my shirt one day, I thought, hey, maybe it would work. It wasn't hard. A few giggles and winks, and he took me out to dinner.”

“And you passed his class.”

“I got an A.”

I couldn't help but feel slightly resentful, since Mark had given me a D on my thesis. “But you still dated him, even after the semester was over,” I noted, remembering Beth's many trips to Tarble over the summer. “Why didn't you break up with him?”

“The sex was good,” she said frankly. “And he was so over the moon for me, he did anything I wanted. I'm not gonna lie, I took advantage of that. Plus, I was afraid he'd just end up hounding me if I broke up with him during the school year. He seemed so obsessed with me, I wasn't sure how he would react if I called it quits. So I decided to wait until summer to do it. And then the summer came, and, I don't know, I guess I was a little bored, so I kept it up.”

“You told your mom you were staying with Heidi Callahan,” I added.

“Yeah, Heidi was my cover, because she worked at the college. But once school started up, I knew it was time to end the whole charade. So the last time I went to Tarble, I broke up with him.”

I couldn't imagine anyone cutting Mark loose; he seemed to be the one who broke hearts.

“He didn't take it well,” she went on. “Crying. Pleading. On his knees, even. Begging me to give him another chance. He said he'd just asked Meryl for a divorce. He was leaving her for me. He even rented a house in town, thinking I was going to move in with him. He was delusional.” She made that disgusted look again. “It was pretty pathetic. At one point, he wouldn't let me out of his office, said he wouldn't let me go until I agreed to stay with him. I got so pissed off, I threatened that if he didn't let me go, I would tell President Monroe about our affair. I'd get him fired.”

“Did it work?”

She nodded. “But on my way home, I stopped for gas, and that's when Meryl confronted me. I left one psycho only to deal with the other one.”

“She followed you?”

“She was on campus. Apparently she heard everything that went down between us in his office.”

“What did she want?”

“That's the weird thing. I assumed she was going to tell me off or slap me or call me a whore, but she didn't. She was actually really pleasant and understanding. That's when she told me Mark had slept with a lot of his students. And she asked if I was serious about reporting him to the Tarble administration.”

“Were you?”

“Not then. I just said that so she'd let me go. But the following week, Mark starting stalking me. Waiting for me outside my anatomy class, sitting out in front of my house at night, calling me and e-mailing me nonstop. It was so bad, I had to change my number and my e-mail address.”

“You should have gotten a restraining order.”

“But how embarrassing is that? Going to the police? Having to tell them about me and Mark? And I didn't want my mom to find out. It was hard enough to hide the fact he was stalking me. So I tried to take things into my own hands. I figured the only way to get him to leave me alone was to threaten him. So when Meryl called to see if I'd reconsidered, I agreed to meet up with her to discuss how to get him fired. She gave me the list of names. You. Tina. Madeline. Some girl named Julie Farris. She said if we all came forward, we could ruin him and his career. She showed me the paper he'd written for that journal and swore it wasn't his writing. She was sure he'd stolen it from one of you.”

“It was me.”

She nodded. “You know, I really didn't want to get him fired. I didn't want anyone at Tarble to know about our relationship. I just wanted him to leave me alone. But I figured the more information I had, the more ammunition, the better chance of him backing down.”

I remembered what Julie had said at the hospital: she'd never spoken to Beth. “Did you ever talk to any of the girls on the list?”

“I went looking for that Julie girl but couldn't find her, and then shortly after that, I found out I was pregnant. I couldn't believe I had been so careless. I didn't even love Mark, would never, ever have considered having his baby in a million years. So I stopped my pseudo investigation, because I had bigger things to worry about. I wanted him out of my life.” She paused. “Out of my body.”

“You wanted to have an abortion?”

She paused again, and I heard in her delay the weighty sigh of remorse.

“It's not that I didn't want
a
child; I just didn't want
his
child,” she finally said. “I tried doing it at a clinic in Milwaukee, but I chickened out when I saw this girl I knew from Sunday school working in the building next store. I couldn't do it, not so close to home. I didn't want a physical memory—a place I'd have to drive by all the time and remember what I did. So I picked Pittsburgh. How random is that? I'd never been there before, didn't know anybody from there. I never planned to go there in the future. It just sounded like a dreary, horrible place where you could go to have an abortion.”

“Your mom said you were going to take a photography workshop,” I noted.

“It was my alibi.”

I formulated a timeline in my mind. “So Meryl kidnapped you
before
you could do it? How did she know you were pregnant?”

“I told her. That was my stupid mistake. She kept hounding me, asking how things were progressing and when I planned to present my case to the bigwigs at Tarble. When I told her I had changed my mind, she flat out asked if I was pregnant. It's like she knew. And I don't know why—maybe I felt guilty for having the affair with her husband—but I told her the truth. How could I have known she'd want to take my baby?”