The Search for Baby Ruby

by Susan Shreve

  Jess slipped quickly into the ladies’ room, opened a cubicle, locked it, and sat on the toilet with her feet up.

  Just in time.

  She heard the door open and Beet’s loud and raspy voice.

  “Danny and I are going to the bar to have a drink before we go upstairs,” Beet was saying.

  Jess heard a cubicle shut, the lock click — her heart beat in her mouth.

  “I’m going up to the room now. I’m dead tired and a little woozy from the wine.”

  It was Delilah.

  “I’ll check on Ruby, Beet, and see you in the morning.”

  “Great party, Delilah,” Beet said. “I had a blast.”

  Jess pressed her eyes into her knees, her hands hard against her ears so she could hardly hear anything but the beating of her own heart.

  She didn’t move at all. Her feet were on the toilet seat, her back against the tile wall, her legs bent, her forehead resting on her knees. Someone else from the rehearsal dinner was bound to come in, and so she waited.

  What terrified Jess was that soon, any moment now, her mother would walk into room 618.

  “Hello, hello,” she’d call in a raspy singsong voice as she walked into their hotel room.

  And no one would be there. Not the baby nor Jess nor Teddy.

  Then what?

  Delilah would go crazy.

  She would rush downstairs to the bar to get Danny and Beet, who would fly upstairs to find there was NO BABY.

  Maybe the woman smelling of rosemary had nothing to do with Baby Ruby. Maybe she had other reasons to hide, or maybe she and the man in the green shirt were together.

  Whatever was going on or would go on, Jess was stuck in the fourth cubicle of the ladies’ room, waiting for time to pass, for Teddy to come in and find her.

  Waiting for other guests at Whee’s rehearsal dinner to arrive and chat back and forth at the long sink.

  Jess discovered her special sense of smell when she was very young. She smelled the air, which always had the scent of flavored water — mint water or strawberry water or cherry water. The air everywhere smelled of something, and Jess was aware of it. The air in the ladies’ room at the hotel smelled of gardenias, so thick and sickly sweet that she wished the smell could be mixed with the smell of lemons to eliminate the sweetness. The air in Larchmont, especially in the spring and after a long rain, smelled of mold. Sort of like rats, she told her mother.

  “We don’t have rats,” Delilah said, “so how can the air smell of rats if we don’t have them? Or mold. Something is the matter with your nose, Jess, and maybe you need surgery.”

  “Larchmont smells moldy,” Jess said. “All the time, even in winter.”

  “Well, why don’t you keep what you’re smelling to yourself,” her father said. “It ruins my dinner.”

  And Jess did, most of the time, but that didn’t stop her from smelling something in the air every place she went. Even her pediatrician’s office, which was supposed to be the purest air of all.

  But when SLEUTH LLC started, Jess’s sense of smell turned out to be important to her work as a detective.

  She could tell if Delilah had been in the bedroom that day or whether Miss Sally, who did the sheets and towels and smelled of Good Cheer detergent, had been there. She could tell if the air in the house had a new smell, maybe cucumber or stale vegetables or mint, which would indicate either that there had been a visitor or that the criminal of the day had taken a shower in mint gel.

  Part of the excitement in discovering a crime had to do with smell, imaginary or real, and even Teddy loved that part of the game.

  Jess had a sniffer, and Teddy had a brain. They were a perfect team of sleuths. At least that’s the way Teddy described it to Jess.

  The ladies’ room filled up; maybe three or four women came in as a group and went into cubicles and locked the doors, talking back and forth, so they must have been at the same party.

  “Did you hear about the baby?” a woman said.

  “I didn’t,” another replied.

  “What happened?”

  “A baby seems to have disappeared. I overheard it in the elevator.”

  “No kidding,” the second woman replied. “From where?”

  “The hotel. I don’t know what floor,” the first woman said. “Just that the cleaning staff got wind of it.”

  “Awful!”

  “Yup.”

  “In any case, the baby is gone and the hotel will probably be turned upside down searching for it, which is going to be a nightmare.”

  Jess covered her ears.

  If these ladies had heard about Baby Ruby, maybe from the cleaning staff standing outside room 618, it was possible the police had already been called in, and maybe the O’Fines family had been notified.

  Teddy had been gone for a long time. Too long. She checked her phone, and as she picked it up, there was a whoop.

  Where are you?

  In the ladies next to the elevators on the first floor. Bad news.

  People know what happened.

  Whoop.

  I’m coming exactly now.

  Jess dropped one shoe on the floor and pushed it under the door so it would be visible to Teddy when she walked into the ladies’. She unlocked the door.

  Teddy saw the shoe, opened the door, and slipped carefully into the small space where Jess was sitting on the toilet seat, her face pale and stricken.

  Teddy leaned down, picked up the shoe, and dropped it in Jess’s lap.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered in Jess’s ear.

  Jess nodded.

  “They know at information.”

  “About the car?”

  “No. They know about Baby Ruby. One of the cleaning ladies on our floor reported it.”

  “How did she know?”

  “Either she overheard us or she guessed when I came into the room and found the dress and asked about you and Baby Ruby.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “And, Jess, the police have been called. The hotel reported that she was gone when I told them what had happened.”

  The women were still chatting back and forth, but the subject had changed to makeup and who wore blush and who used foundation and who was going to have an eyebrow lift like Fanny Burney in Rising Stars had done.

  “We’re going to make a run for it,” Teddy said. “I’ll go first and meet you in the corner by the plant where the elevators are. Count to one hundred and then go.”

  Jess waited to one hundred, and then she left, walking with a bouncy step so she would look confident and not at all the criminal that she was.

  Teddy was waiting.

  “Where now?” Jess asked.

  “Now is our problem.”

  “We’re kind of stuck,” Jess said. They had gone out the back door of the hotel and stood in the dark next to one of the pillars on the porch.

  “If stuck means we don’t have a plan, we are stuck,” Teddy said.

  Jess rested her head against the pillar.

  “I’m actually scared, Teddy.”

  “Me too.”

  “The guy in the green shirt was up to something or he wouldn’t have raced away from us,” Jess said.

  “And what do you think about the woman smelling of rosemary?” Teddy asked.

  “She was weird,” Jess said. “Kind of a girl-woman with long braids, stuffed into the corner of the hotel linen closet. Something was wrong.”

  In the game of SLEUTH, Jess and Teddy followed clues. They kept a list. They wrote down the facts exactly as they imagined them.

  Description of suspect. Color of hair and eyes and clothes. Anything unusual?

  Anything unusual. A zing in Jess’s brain. Something that came to her attention in just those few minutes in the linen closet, something that caught her eye and then slipped away even before she stood up to leave. She closed her eyes, re-creating the scene in her mind, and tried to imagine those few moments. Exactly what did she see? What had caught her eye in an instant
and faded just as quickly? Not her size. Not her long braids, and not her voice, which had been mannish for a small woman.

  But something about her feet. That was it. Rosemary’s feet.

  The whoop sounded on Jess’s phone first and then on Teddy’s.

  “Mom,” Teddy said.

  She checked the text.

  Baby Ruby has disappeared.

  “What does she say?” Jess asked.

  “Same thing she says on yours. I knew that’s exactly what she’d say,” Teddy said.

  “Me too.”

  Teddy could see Delilah with her torn dress, flying around the bedroom as if sheer movement had the capacity to make things better. As if by rushing around the perimeter of the hotel room, deep breathing and talking too much, Baby Ruby might materialize.

  “I don’t want to see any of them,” Jess said.

  “Of course you don’t.”

  They were quiet, side by side on the steps, their legs touching, pressing knee to knee.

  “What are you going to say?” Jess asked quietly.

  “What are you going to say?”

  “Nothing,” Jess said.

  “You have to say something.”

  “First I have to think.”

  “I’m always the one in trouble but this time what has happened is not my trouble.”

  “I know.”

  “This time it’s your trouble.”

  “I know that, Teddy, and I know you’re just helping me out, and I know this is completely my fault and that my life is over and over and over unless I find her.”

  There was another whoop on both phones.

  The staff tells me that Baby Ruby was KIDNAPPED and they’ve called the police and the police are here.

  “So now what?” Teddy asked, taking out a cigarette.

  “Now” — Jess threw her arm around Teddy’s shoulder — “we have to divide and conquer. You do one thing and I do another and one of us will find her.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Teddy asked.

  “I’m going to find the woman in the linen closet.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Because I have to find her and I think she must be in the hotel.”

  “And I’ll go up to the room and deal with Mom and Dad and Whee and Danny and Beet and the police. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s kind of a cop-out, Jess.”

  “If I go up there, they’ll scream at me and say terrible things and nothing good will happen. If you go, you’re not the one responsible for what happened. You will actually be able to help them. And maybe the police will find her.”

  Teddy rested her chin on her fists. Jess was right. Nothing good would happen anyway, but at least there was a better chance of finding Ruby if Teddy was with Delilah and Aldie and Danny and Beet, and all of them together could help the police.

  “I hope you don’t do anything stupid or dangerous,” Teddy said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Or run away.”

  Jess was an optimist by nature. Mostly, she believed things would work out. But tonight she could not stop the moving picture that floated across her brain.

  Baby Ruby gone for good. Days would pass without her. Weeks. Baby Ruby in the hospital. Or even worse.

  “You have to promise you’ll text,” Teddy said. “Anything could happen. These guys are criminals.”

  “If I’m in trouble, I will text,” Jess said. “And I’ll always answer the phone if you call me.”

  Teddy texted Delilah.

  Coming.

  “Stay in touch,” Teddy said, winding her arms around her sister’s shoulders. “Be soooo careful.”

  Since her parents’ divorce and the arrival of Delilah’s boyfriends, since Teddy’s departure for the Home for Girls with Problems, Jess had spent a lot of time alone. She had friends and parties and ice-skating and lacrosse camp in the summer, but after school, after sports and piano lessons, she came home to an empty house. Usually, she walked the dog first, and then, with trepidation, she checked the fridge to see what note Delilah had left for her. If she was going to be home to cook dinner, she didn’t leave a note. But if she planned to be out, there was a cheery letter scrawled on lined paper:

  “Dinner in the slow cooker, angel-puss. See you about ten. I’m on my cell so call if you need me.”

  Or best of all, sometimes there was a surprise note with good news:

  “See you at six, angel-puss, and let’s go get pizza. Finish your homework and maybe we can go to Sprinkles for a fudge sundae.”

  Angel-puss and ice cream! Angel-puss was her baby name, and ice cream — Jess hadn’t eaten ice cream since a little donut roll of flesh had accumulated on her hips.

  Nevertheless.

  Every day it was the same. Jess would pick up the key under the flowerpot, let herself in the front door, walk the dog, get a banana out of the fruit bowl, call one of her friends just to blah blah blah for a while, do her homework, which was easy, and then she’d sit at the kitchen table, making up the kinds of stories she used to imagine when she and Teddy played SLEUTH.

  Some nights, before her mother came home, she’d go up to her bedroom, the one she used to share with Teddy, and think about Teddy and how happy she had been when they played SLEUTH together after school. How she wished her sister were still in their house instead of the Home for Girls with Problems. How she wished Teddy had never started to shoplift so they could have had an ordinary life together as sisters and best friends.

  When Teddy stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor, she heard Delilah’s voice flying down the corridor as if her voice had tiny feet. Teddy could hear every word she said from two corridors away.

  “When is the last time anyone saw Baby Ruby?”

  Two policemen were standing by the door and a third one, Detective Van Slyde, was taking notes.

  “Where is Jess?” Delilah asked Teddy. “Do you know anything?”

  From the bathroom, a high-pitched wail — a single unbroken note, a long straight line of sound.

  Beet, Teddy thought, shivers down her spine. Teddy was not a calm girl, but she needed to be calm now.

  “Teddy.” Delilah’s voice was hoarse and cracking. “Officer Van Slyde is the detective in charge of finding Baby Ruby and he wants to know, where is Jess?”

  Teddy sat down beside her mother, a little breathless. The panic attacks she had been having, like the one at Whee’s rehearsal dinner, came out of nowhere. Out of the blue, no known cause.

  But this was a real emergency, and in a real emergency, she couldn’t have a panic attack. An act of will. A decision.

  “Have you seen her?” Delilah asked again, leaning on Teddy’s shoulder.

  “I have,” Teddy said. “Baby Ruby disappeared from the room while Jess was in the bathroom. Jess is on her own search.”

  “What was she doing in the bathroom?”

  “The bathroom door was closed.”

  “That’s not what I asked. I asked why she was in the bathroom with the door closed and why, when you discovered that Ruby was gone, you didn’t go immediately to the police or tell us. Come into the rehearsal dinner and tell me that she had been kidnapped.”

  Teddy hesitated, taking a deep breath.

  “We just didn’t. I came upstairs when I told you I was going to come upstairs.”

  “But you came back into the Bay Room as if nothing had happened after you knew.”

  “Teddy,” Detective Van Slyde said. “This is a serious situation and we must have the truth as you know it. Where is your sister?”

  “She has a clue. Not a big one. She’s following a hunch.”

  “Where did you last see her?”

  “In the lobby. I just came upstairs on the elevator and I could see her in the lobby leaning against a red leather couch as the doors closed. That was less than five minutes ago.”

  “They’re locking down the hotel any minute, and with any luck, she is still in the hotel and she wo
n’t be able to get out,” Detective Van Slyde said. “I’m going to radio a description of her.”

  “She’s small,” Teddy said. “A round face with freckles and slightly curly hair and bright blue eyes. A little plump. Just a little.”

  Detective Van Slyde called in the description.

  “Wearing?” he asked.

  “Pink shirt, jeans, and sneakers.”

  “Send out an alert and track her down,” he said to the officer on the phone. “So what happened when you came upstairs from the rehearsal dinner?”

  “I got a text from my sister more or less saying there was an emergency and I rushed up here to the room.”

  “And your sister was here?”

  “No, she wasn’t here. Whee, my about-to-be-married sister, has a wedding dress that had been hanging in the bathroom. When I got here, there was a cleaning lady and the dress had been thrown across the bed. In the bathroom, Whee’s new makeup was all over the place.”

  Beet was coming out of the bathroom, little hiccups of tears. She sat down with Danny on the side of the bed, holding his hand.

  “Whee doesn’t know yet,” Delilah said. “She and Victor are out with their friends. She’s going to die.”

  “My life is ruined,” Beet said, trying to catch her breath.

  Teddy sat down on the bed beside Beet and put her arm around her.

  “I am so afraid,” Beet said, resting her head on Teddy’s shoulder.

  Detective Van Slyde had pulled up a chair and was taking notes.

  “My sister was babysitting,” Danny said. “They were in this room and the door was locked and there was nothing Jess needed to do except give Ruby a bottle of milk — I’d left it all fixed for the baby. How could this have happened?”

  “Where is the babysitter now?”

  “My sister, my little sister, Jess,” Danny was saying. “I don’t know. They are both gone, right, Teddy?”

  “Baby Ruby is gone,” Teddy said quietly.

  She gave the detective information about herself, that she was the third child in the O’Fines family, that she should be in high school but was not. Instead, she was living at the Home for Girls with Problems, news that seemed only slightly interesting to the detective. He made no comment.