The Search for Baby Ruby

by Susan Shreve

  At first, Teddy was a statue, immobile except for rolling the end of her green blouse into a long tube, concentrating on it. But gradually her body gave, and she pressed it into Jess’s, slipped her hand between their hips where Jess’s hand was locked, and held it.

  “Thank you for coming, Jess,” Teddy said under her breath.

  Teddy opened the door under the exit sign and sat down on the step next to Jess.

  “You haven’t changed your mind about the police?”

  “I haven’t,” Jess said.

  “Mom and Dad? Danny? We need to tell them, Jess.”

  “I think you should go back to the rehearsal dinner and check it out, see what is happening, tell Mom you feel too sick to be there. We can’t tell them yet. It will RUIN Whee’s whole wedding.”

  “We have to,” Teddy said. “We’re losing time.”

  “Please, Teddy, give me one chance to check the linen closet where I saw this woman with long braids who looked as if she were hiding and see if she’s still there. I just have this feeling I’ll find out something.”

  “No, Jess.”

  “I’m going to do it. It’s weird to find a woman who doesn’t seem to work for the hotel hiding in the hotel’s linen closet. You have to agree that it’s weird! Please!”

  “Okay, I’ll go tell Mom, you check the linen closet, but only if you promise to tell an adult what’s happened RIGHT afterward. Five minutes. No more, Jess. Promise.”

  “I promise. I totally promise I’ll tell an adult,” Jess said, breathless, her heart throbbing in her throat.

  Jess got off the elevator, walked down the corridor to the end, and turned left. Room 618 was halfway down the hall, and there appeared to be a flurry of activity just outside their room.

  Maybe, Jess thought, she should go back to the lobby, leave the hotel by the rear entrance facing the water, walk the path from the hotel to the Pacific Ocean. And swim to China.

  But she kept walking.

  The door to their room was open, and in the hall, three women wearing the hotel’s grass-green uniforms were speaking Spanish too fast for Jess to understand, although she was in her second year of Spanish at school. They stopped talking when Jess arrived and then smiled and said, “Hello, hello, lady.”

  Inside the room, another woman in uniform was sitting on the bed. Whee’s wedding dress was no longer there.

  “Have you seen a dress that I left on the bed?” Jess asked the woman, who was sitting there as if the room were hers.

  “In the bathroom,” the woman said.

  “And cleaned up the makeup that I left in the sink?” Jess asked, hoping her voice sounded as calm and normal as it did in her ear.

  “It was already cleaned up.”

  The woman had turned toward the corridor, hushing the chattering women gathered there.

  “Thank you.”

  Jess headed into the bathroom. She needed a moment to think. Just a moment. She had promised Teddy. She shut the door behind her, put the seat of the toilet down, and sat. Checking her cell phone — nine forty-five — she guessed the rehearsal dinner would be over in two hours just as Danny had said.

  Outside the bathroom, she heard a din of voices, as if more people had arrived. Certainly the word was out among the staff, and she guessed they were all talking.

  Ruby had disappeared a little more than an hour ago, but Jess couldn’t allow herself to think that she was lost for good. She needed hope, and then she would have the energy to search and search and search. It was unlikely that one twelve-year-old girl with some experience as a detective, but not enough, could do this job alone.

  But with Teddy’s help, Jess would find her.

  The door to the room was still open when Jess came out of the bathroom. The group was larger now and included the woman who had been sitting on the bed. They watched Jess as she walked out the door and shut it behind her.

  “See you later,” she said, sidestepping the group, all women and one man holding a broom, resting his chin on the handle.

  “So sorry about the trouble,” one of the women with a heavy accent said, and the others muttered in sympathy.

  How did they know? she wondered. Had Teddy said something to them, had she asked where Baby Ruby was?

  Certainly no one else in the O’Fines family could have heard.

  She headed down the corridor to the linen closet.

  Teddy hurried across the lobby to the rehearsal dinner, checking her phone.

  No text from Jess yet. Five minutes, almost six had passed.

  “Where have you been?” Delilah asked when Teddy sat down. “I went to the bathroom to look for you and you were gone.”

  “I went upstairs to the room to lie down.”

  “Is everything okay up there?” Delilah asked.

  “Everything’s fine. I had a panic attack and threw up, but otherwise I’m great,” she said, a little breathless. “So I’m going back up but I just wanted to tell you. Tell Whee I’m really sorry.”

  “You’ve been watching TV. I can tell. At your sister’s rehearsal dinner.”

  “Leave her alone, Delilah,” Aldie said. “If she doesn’t feel well, then she doesn’t feel well. Button up.”

  “Button up?” Delilah began, but Beet had gotten up and was walking toward them.

  “Here comes Beet,” Teddy said.

  Everyone in the O’Fines family was a little afraid of Beet, tall and thin as a string bean, with long, thready brown hair.

  She leaned over the table.

  “Everything okay upstairs, Ted?” she asked.

  “Everything’s good,” Teddy said. “At least it was when I left to come back downstairs.”

  “Baby Ruby sleeping?”

  “Yes, sleeping.”

  “Cool,” Beet said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

  And she slithered her long body back to her table, ruffled Danny’s hair, and gave him a kiss on the top of his head.

  “I’ll try to come back to the dinner before it’s over,” Teddy told her mother, “but not likely.” And she slipped out the side door to the room.

  She was heading toward the elevators when she heard a whoop.

  Jess!

  Meet me in our room. I think I have a clue.

  The linen closet was dark. The tiny woman would certainly have gone by now, but Jess noticed a smell. She reached along the wall for a switch to turn on the light and the room lit up. No one was there, not even a trace that someone had been there except a depression in the stack of sheets where the woman had been sitting. She checked around the sheets to see if there was something the woman might have left, something to identify her. But there was nothing that Jess could find, even lifting up the sheets and running her hands along the cracks between them.

  There was a smell: something sweet and familiar that didn’t come from the sheets, which actually smelled of Clorox.

  She took her cell out of her pocket and texted Teddy.

  Meet me in our room. I think I have a clue.

  Maybe Teddy would be able to identify the smell.

  Something suspicious about the woman tucked away in the corner of the linen closet like a discarded rag doll.

  And now, this smell.

  Jess wasn’t sure what it was, but it could be a clue to who she was and why she was hiding in the linen closet.

  She walked around the rest of the sixth floor, which was almost too quiet for a Friday night. But as she walked by room 645, she heard the familiar sound of a baby’s cry.

  A baby’s cry. What she had been listening to hear. Some possibility that Ruby was just down the hall in another room.

  Jess knocked.

  A woman in a pink flowered robe came to the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I just heard a crying baby,” Jess said.

  “You are looking for a baby?”

  “Well, more or less.”

  “Is my baby keeping you up?”

  The woman was not in a good humor.

&nb
sp; “I haven’t gone to bed,” Jess said.

  The woman started to shut the door but changed her mind and stepped out of the room, speaking quietly.

  “Are you telling me you’ve lost a baby?”

  “Temporarily,” Jess said. “No problem, really.”

  “Temporarily? Temporarily you’ve lost a baby. Is that what you’re telling me? Are you the babysitter?”

  “The baby is not lost,” Jess said quickly. “And I am not the babysitter. I’m the aunt.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” the woman said and went back in her room.

  For as long as Jess could remember, she had been sensitive to smells.

  “You’re like a dog, Jess,” Delilah had said to her. “Sniffing and sniffing. I never knew a child with such a nose.”

  But she wasn’t like a dog at all. Dogs sniffed for food and evidence of other animals, especially other dogs. Jess sniffed for memory.

  She remembered places for how they smelled. Her grandmother’s house in New Haven smelled of sugar cookies baking, and her uncle Tom’s house smelled of ginger. Delilah smelled of Calvin Klein Eternity toilet water, and her father’s apartment smelled of fried bacon. Her junior high school smelled of Lysol, and the Grosses’ house smelled of gas. Standing on the sidewalk in front of their house, Jess always smelled gas.

  So if she smelled sugar cookies, she thought of her grandmother, and if ginger, she had a picture of Uncle Tom, and even the kitchen of her own house smelled of Eternity toilet water, whether Delilah was in the kitchen cooking or not.

  The smell in the linen closet of the sixth floor was distinct and familiar, but she could not name it.

  “No luck?” a cleaning woman asked Jess as she came back to room 618.

  “Not so far,” Jess said.

  The woman shrugged a weary shrug, as if she somehow had access to information that Baby Ruby would never be found.

  “Too bad,” she said.

  Room 618 still smelled of Baby Ruby. The lingering smell of warm milk. The smell of spit-up and poop and baby powder.

  There was a knock, the door opened, and Jess’s heart leapt up.

  Teddy was not a hugger, too cool to be a hugger, but she hugged Jess hard.

  Jess could feel the tears in the back of her throat. She took a deep breath all the way down to her belly. If she started to cry, the tears would never stop.

  “A clue?”

  “Maybe it’s a clue,” Jess said. “It’s a smell.”

  “Oh, Jess, you and your crazy smells.”

  “Follow me,” Jess said, and they left the room, passing the cleaning ladies in the hall, and went down the corridor to the linen closet.

  She opened the door, turned on the light, and Teddy followed her to the corner where the tiny woman had been sitting.

  “She had long braids, so long they looped, and she was sitting on a stack of sheets and her feet didn’t even touch the floor. It wasn’t normal.”

  “What do you mean not normal?”

  “She seemed to be hiding in the sheets and she certainly didn’t want me to be there.”

  Jess bent down and touched the depression in the sheets where the woman had been sitting.

  “There,” she said. “See that dent in the sheets?”

  “Sort of,” Teddy said.

  “Well, it’s kind of a hole that was left since she was all scrunched up so no one could see her. But I could see her. Now smell the sheets.”

  Teddy leaned over and sniffed.

  “Rosemary.”

  “Rosemary?”

  “Christmas, remember? When Mom fills the dinner table with rosemary wreaths.”

  Jess leaned down and smelled the sheets again.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  “But a smell isn’t going to be a clue to anything unless the woman reappears smelling of rosemary. And what difference would that make? You’d recognize her anyway. So now we’re out of here and going to tell the concierge about Baby Ruby. As you promised.”

  “Okay,” Jess said. “But remember, everything makes a difference when you’re trying to solve a crime.” And she turned off the light.

  As she left the linen closet, a man rushed past.

  Jess slipped into the corridor with Teddy behind her just as the doors to the elevator were closing. But she was not too late to see the man she recognized, the same man she had seen earlier walking down the corridor toward room 618 when she had backed into the room with Baby Ruby.

  He had seen her.

  He was looking at Jess when she walked out of the linen closet.

  They had made eye contact.

  Quickly, Jess lowered her eyes and slung her arm around Teddy’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered.

  “Where’re we going?” Teddy asked.

  Jess checked the direction of the elevator. Headed down. She pushed the DOWN arrow.

  “The man I told you about who was standing at the elevators when you and Whee were on your way to the rehearsal dinner?”

  “The little guy in the green shirt.”

  “That one — I’m sure he saw me with Baby Ruby and headed in my direction and I stepped back into the room and shut the door.”

  The elevator opened and Teddy followed Jess inside.

  “Or maybe I shut the door.”

  “I remember.”

  “I just saw him going to the elevator and he saw me.”

  “He recognized you?”

  “I was standing outside the door to our room with Baby Ruby.”

  “But how do you know he recognized you just now?”

  “Our eyes met. He knew it was me.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I didn’t shut the door to the room all the way. That I just pulled it almost shut and I put Ruby on the floor, and I went in the bathroom and shut that door, and he stood outside room 618 and pushed the door and it opened.”

  “And you think he took Baby Ruby?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “Honestly, Jess. You have a wild imagination.”

  The elevator doors opened onto a lobby crowded with people. Jess saw the collar of the green shirt winding its way through the crowd and she followed it. Teddy followed her past the concierge’s desk and the information desk, past the girls in their party dresses. He was still in front of them, breaking free of the crowd, hurrying down a long corridor, and then he dropped out of sight.

  Jess thought she saw him turn left, just ahead, a half a corridor ahead, but she couldn’t be sure because it happened so fast.

  “This is insane,” Teddy was saying, hurrying to keep up.

  “It’s not insane, I promise.” Jess came to the place where she lost sight of the green shirt, an exit sign above a door that opened to narrow stairs. She ran down the stairs, Teddy behind her. Down and down and down. Three floors down and then Jess saw him. He rushed through a door that shut behind him. By the time Jess got to the door, which was heavy, and pulled it open, he was a splash of green in the distance, running through the garage, in and out of the lines of parked cars.

  Then they lost him.

  “He’s getting in his car,” Jess said.

  They’d stopped now, standing amidst the cars in a garage empty of people as far as they could tell.

  “Duh!”

  “Why would he run away from us unless he knows where Ruby is?”

  “I don’t know why, Jess,” Teddy said. “Maybe he has to pee.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Jess said. “He has Baby Ruby somewhere, maybe in the car, and he’s headed on his way out of here to Los Angeles or some other town. Follow me.”

  In the distance, but not that far away, they heard a car starting up.

  “I don’t want to follow,” Teddy said. “We could be killed.”

  Jess didn’t stop. She followed the sound of the engine starting up, winding through the cars. Two lanes away, a blue boxy car — she didn’t know the names of cars but thi
s was bright blue and square — was pulling out of its parking space, and she hurried in that direction.

  “Jess,” Teddy called. She was no longer following. “This is very stupid. We need the police.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “You don’t. This is real. It isn’t SLEUTH.”

  But Jess was on a tear. She slid between a bank of cars, coming out into the open just as the blue car headed straight out of the garage, and she caught a glimpse of the green shirt, of the top of the man’s head. A blue box car, she’d tell the police later, but the man was driving fast, too fast to be driving in the garage, and when Teddy called Get his license number, he was already too far away from Jess for the license plate to be anything but a blur.

  “We have to tell the police, Jess. Now, while there is a chance of catching him.”

  Jess was out of breath.

  “I’ll tell them,” Teddy said. “A bright blue, overweight car built in a square.”

  “I really don’t want to talk to the police,” Jess said.

  “That’s why I’ll talk to them.”

  Teddy opened the door that led from the garage upstairs to the hotel.

  “I thought I was the gutsy one between the two of us. But turns out you’re the gutsy one and I’m just a regular run-of-the-mill kleptomaniac.”

  Behind her, Jess was crying. She couldn’t help herself.

  It was ten thirty on the clock over the main desk in the lobby when Jess and Teddy walked by, Teddy on her way to the information desk.

  “Are you going to mention Baby Ruby?” Jess asked. “Please, not yet.”

  “We’re both going to tell what’s happened to Ruby. You know that.”

  “I can’t,” Jess said, leaning against a wall next to the ladies’ room. “I’ll wait for you here.”

  Jess closed her eyes. She had a funny feeling in her body, as if her insides were quivering, her kidneys and liver and intestines, the organs she’d studied in life sciences that year. She couldn’t stop the shaking.

  Teddy had taught her about deep breaths, and she tried it now.

  Swallow the breath deep in your belly, hold it, breathe out slowly.

  When she opened her eyes, there, just a short distance away, was her brother, Danny, his arm around Beet, talking to Delilah. They were headed in the direction of the elevators.