Page 51 of The Family Plot
But she keeps going, frantically tossing soil to the side. Momentslater, when her shovel clangs against something, Ruby drops to the ground. She flings the shovel away and claws at the dirt until a patch of silver appears. Slowly, carefully, like she’s excavating a fossil, she reaches into the earth and extracts a tin box. She rests it on her lap, skimming her fingers across it but leaving it unopened.
“What is that?” I ask. “How did you know it was here?”
“I put it here,” she says softly.
“Why? What’s in it?”
The wind circles us as I wait for her to speak. Dead leaves whirl.
“Andy’s birthday present,” she says, and I pull in a surprised breath.
She shakes the box and something slides inside it. “I gave it to him that night,” she continues, before adding an indignant huff. “I probably shouldn’t have bothered. I knew, before he even opened it, that he was distracted. Holding that key. Fidgeting with it.”
She whips her gaze up at me. “What was down there? Under the shed.”
I shift my feet, struggling not to see it: painted toenails, collarbone tattoo, a bolt of red hair. Ruby waits for me to answer, eyes wide and alert, but I can’t bring myself to tell her. More than that, there’s something in the way she watches me, so eager so soon after crying, that makes me think I shouldn’t. Elijah said he wasn’t going public yet, and no matter how good of friends she was with Andy, Ruby wasn’t one of us. It isn’t her right to know.
“It’s just a basement,” I lie.
Ruby’s brows pinch together. She cranes her neck to look toward the shed, its perimeter of police tape bright and unavoidable.
“The cops were here,” she says.
“Yeah,” I admit. “They were searching the shed.” My heart drums as I deepen the lie. “Seeing if there were clues about Andy. Since it’s so close to where he was found.”
She squints at me, skeptical, but I nudge my chin toward her box. “What was the present?”
She lingers on me for another moment. Then she drops her attention toward her lap, smoothing her hand over the box’s lid before sliding it off. “I made it for him,” she says.
She sinks her hand into a froth of tissue paper to pull out something familiar, an embroidery in a wooden hoop. I recognize the pattern of flowers from the one hanging in her living room:Ruby loves Grandpa, it said. This one is almost identical—same perimeter of yellow and purple hollyhocks, same white fabric, same navy thread for the letters. In fact, if not for one altered word, I’d think this was the one from Ruby’s wall.
But that altered word: it’s a name, actually.
Ruby loves Andy.
“It was supposed to be a kind of confession,” she says.
I sink down beside her, feeling punched, lungless, just looking at the letters of Andy’s name. They’re so smooth, so graceful, so unlike the ones he carved into my wall, or the inside of the credenza, or the handle of his ax. Those were skinny and sharp, quick cuts in the wood that surprised me a little when they didn’t bleed. But these—Ruby took her time with these. And I don’t know why it’s knocked the wind out of me, seeing his name like that, painstakingly stitched.
“I was in love with him,” she says, pushing her hair out of her face as the wind tousles it. “That’s probably not a surprise. But it was a risk, giving him this, even though I was pretty sure he felt the same.”
“Did he?” I hear myself ask. Because there are things I knew about Andy without him having to say a word: when his stomach hurt; when something simmered in his veins, ready to send him straight for his ax. And there are things he ran out of time to tell me: what he knewabout the Blackburn Killer, what he saw beneath the shed. But him loving Ruby—that doesn’t fall into either category.
“What made you think he loved you?” I say. I try to sound neutral, but I understand there’s cruelty in asking.
She narrows her eyes at me. “You know we were together, right? You know we weren’t just friends?”
I’m still for a moment. But then I straighten my spine, wanting to look as tall as a kneeling person can. “Andy never had a girlfriend.”
She laughs at me, dryly. “He might not have used that word,” she says. “But we were each other’s first kiss. First… everything, really.”
I shake my head, dizzy with the revelation, this piece of his life he never let me know. Did he keep it a secret because he didn’t believe I could take it? Because he knew I didn’t understand how to love, how to trust someone, outside the two of us? My eyes burn, remembering how he told Ruby I was too closed off to hang out with them. Closed off. Like an empty room. Like a dead-end road.
“It was supposed to be cute,” Ruby says, “telling him I love him like this.” She traces the embroidery with her finger. “He liked the one in my living room, so I just thought…” She trails off, seconds passing before she continues. “But he got weird as soon as he opened it. He said that I didn’t love him, that I couldn’t. That I didn’t even really know him.”
I feel a spike of satisfaction:See? This closeness was all in her mind. But when I notice her crumpled expression, like Andy’s rejection is happening now, I swallow my meanness down.
“I told him that wasn’t true,” she continues. “That Ididlove him, I wanted alifewith him, off this island, just like we’d talked about.” She stares off into the trees in a vacant way that reminds me of Dad’s dead deer. “I even told him I wanted us to get married someday. Start a family together. I wanted to have loads of kids—I still do—so I’d never,neverbe lonely.”
