Candace took the wallets and opened them up with shaking hands. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s been so long. Tom was—or is—my brother. He and his wife, they disappeared sixteen years ago. Along with their daughter.”
“Daughter?” Ruthie’s throat tightened.
“Wait here. Just a minute.”
Candace hurried from the room, the soles of her running shoes squeaking on the tile floor.
Ruthie’s sense of unease grew. A voice in the back of her mind hissed out a warning: Leave this place. Run.
She was standing up, hesitating, when Candace came back with a photo in a gold frame. “This is them,” she said, thrusting the framed picture at Ruthie.
Ruthie looked down at the now familiar face of Thomas, identical to his driver’s-license photo. The air felt thin and strange. The room seemed to get smaller and darker. Ruthie took an extra gulp of air as she stared down at the photo.
Beside Thomas was a woman with tortoiseshell cat’s-eye glasses and curly hair.
The woman from Fitzgerald’s.
What do you choose, Dove?
Between the couple, a toddler with dark hair and eyes who had her hand clamped around her mother’s. She wore a burgundy velvet dress and matching headband. On her wrist was a tiny gold bracelet. Her hair was neat and combed, her cheeks were pink, and she wore a smile that said she was the happiest kid on the planet.
Ruthie couldn’t breathe.
“I’ve gotta go,” she whispered, stepping away on shaky legs and running from the kitchen, back down the hall with its empty picture hooks, to the huge paneled wooden front door.
“Wait,” Candace shouted after her. “You can’t go yet!”
But Ruthie was out the door, jogging to the truck. She hopped in and slammed the door. “Punch it,” she said, gasping for breath.
“What happened? Did she know something?” Buzz asked.
“The lady’s nuts. She can’t help us.”
She watched in the rearview mirror as Candace came down the driveway, chased after them on foot, flailing her arms, yelling, “There’s something you need to know!”
Ruthie
“What are you even looking for?” Buzz asked.
“I’m not sure exactly,” Ruthie told him.
It was just past eight, and they were back at home. Ruthie was tearing through bookcases, drawers, and shelves while Fawn and Buzz watched from the kitchen table, where they’d set themselves up with his laptop. Buzz was teaching Fawn how to play an alien-hunting game. Fawn was a quick learner and was using the arrow keys to guide her own spacecraft through the galaxy, shooting lasers with the SHIFT key.
“Oops! No, Fawn, the green aliens are the good guys. You don’t want to shoot them. They’re our allies. There’s a red one—blast it!”
Ruthie gave Buzz a warm smile. “Thank you,” Ruthie mouthed, and Buzz smiled back. She meant it. He’d taken the day off of work to drive her to Connecticut, and now here he was, still hanging out with them, entertaining Fawn.
Ruthie found the family’s one photo album and several shoeboxes full of pictures, and brought them all back to the table.
“Hit F6 and you go to hyperspace,” Buzz said.
“What’s hyperspace?” Fawn asked.
“It’s where you go really fast. You can outrun just about anything.”
Ruthie flipped through the album, which began with baby pictures of Fawn, then moved forward: Fawn’s first steps, first tricycle, first lost tooth. Mom and Dad were there, too, along with Ruthie, but clearly Fawn was the star of the show. She flipped back to the first page, showing Mom and Dad each holding Fawn as a newborn. She had a red, scrunched face, and her big wise-owl eyes were wide open, taking everything in. And there, in the bottom corner, was Ruthie—a scowling twelve-year-old with one of her mother’s famously bad home haircuts.
The only people in the photos were the four of them. Mom and Dad had no living relatives, so there was no grandma’s house to go to on Thanksgiving, no cousins to fight with at Christmas.
Ruthie dumped out the shoeboxes.