Upon arriving by ambulance at Kenosha General, Beth and Mark were whisked away to more intensive areas of the hospital, while I ended up in an ER room with only partitioned curtains. Under my mother’s watchful eye—she’d announced she was a certified RN the moment she arrived—the nurses checked my blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, and reflexes. In the end, I was treated for a mild case of dehydration and given an antibacterial cream for my scraped cheek.
Throughout the examination, Mom ran her palm over the top of my head, smoothing the curls on my forehead like she did when I was a kid. She asked, over and over again, if I was okay, never broaching the subject of Mark or my relationship with him, or how little I’d told her about what had happened at Tarble, the events that led me to be abducted by Professor Barnard. It was simply understood we would tackle these subjects when the time was right.
It was a quarter to midnight by the time Detective Pickens pushed open the curtain. His expression was stiff, but his eyes were soft. He brought my purse. They’d found it hidden in the cabin.
“How’s Beth?” I asked.
“Stable.”
“And the baby?”
“There’s a heartbeat, though considering the bleeding, it’s a threatened miscarriage.” He paused. “Suter will undergo skin grafting soon. Most of his burns are second-degree, but some areas are third.”
“What about Barnard?” I asked. “Is she in custody?”
He grimaced. “Not yet. We found on the cabin floor the rope you used to tie her up. She must have taken off in Mark’s car. We searched the cabin, though, and took evidence. A team is out looking for her. She’ll turn up. The most important thing is that you and Beth are safe.”
“How did you find us?”
The detective took a seat then in the small chair by the bed, the one my mother had refused to sit in, preferring to stand by my side. “First of all,” he said, “I want to apologize for not responding to your concerns immediately.” His fat fingers danced in front of him, acting out his feelings, what was missing in the emotionless void of his brusque voice. “We wasted our time on Grenshaw when we should have been focusing on Barnard.”
“But how could you have known it was her? I certainly didn’t, not until it was too late.”
“We could have, had I followed through.”
“What do you mean?”
He repositioned his large body in the small chair and threw a glance at my mom. “The book belonged to Barnard, not Beth.”
I stared back at him in confusion. “A Room of One’s Own?”
“It wasn’t Beth’s handwriting,” he explained. “The name and phone number inside the front cover and those notes in the margin? About Cassie’s Cabin? Beth didn’t write any of that. I didn’t find that out until I showed it to Janice earlier today.”
I tried to make sense of the detective’s news. “So Barnard put the book inside Beth’s suitcase? Before she checked it?”
“Before, or it could have been after, when she brought it to you.”
“Brought it?” I choked on the words. “To me?”
“Barnard was the delivery woman, the one who dropped the suitcase off at your house. It wasn’t a legitimate service, Ruby. And I would have found that out sooner had I followed through with a phone call to the airline. Beth’s luggage was never lost. Barnard simply retrieved it after her travels, then brought it to you.”
My mind traveled back to that evening over a week ago, to the woman in the brown shirt and culottes, her ponytail pulled through the back of her hat, the East Coast accent. A chill cascaded over me then like a cold rain.
“She planted the book inside the suitcase,” I said. “And the postcard about Reunion. She wanted me to come back to Tarble.”
I wondered what else Virginia Barnard had orchestrated over the weekend. Had she designed the lesson and essay about Sara Teasdale’s poem specifically for me? Had it all been part of her plan? She wanted me to bring Mark to justice, to take over where Beth had left off. And I’d fallen into her trap.
“But how did you figure out she was the delivery woman?” I asked.
“Let me backtrack a bit. When we realized Beth might not have flown to Pittsburgh, I ordered a team to start looking through the Genereal Mitchell Airport security tapes from the day Beth disappeared. The Pittsburgh PD had already looked at the PIT tapes, but we had no reason to watch the ones from the Milwaukee airport, not until the Grenshaw case fell apart.”
“Did they see Barnard on the tapes?”
“Yes, though initially, we didn’t know who she was. She was wearing another disguise.”
“She was pretending to be Meryl,” I explained. “That’s who Beth thought she was.”
He nodded. “And then she doctored up her appearance to look younger, more like Beth so she could fly to Pittsburgh in her place. We’re not entirely sure where she kept Beth during that time.”
“Her car,” I offered. “Beth told me she felt really drowsy all of a sudden and fell asleep in Meryl’s—Virginia’s—car. When Beth woke up again, she was in the cabin.”
The detective pulled a pen from his breast pocket and made a note. “Barnard must have drugged Beth pretty heavily then, considering she flew to Pennsylvania and back again. At any rate, watching the tapes verified Beth willingly walked away with this unidentified woman. Meanwhile, I was with the tech team, trying to pinpoint an origin for the suicide note Janice received in her e-mail. It was a new account, created just that day. It took some time, but we tracked it to a computer on the Tarble campus.”
“But you said the e-mail, the suicide note, was dated the day Beth disappeared,” I said. “How did Barnard manipulate the time?”
“Simple. She reset the time and date on the computer she was using. The e-mail she sent entered Janice’s in-box under the time and date of the source computer, and not the receiving one. Janice just assumed it had been stuck in cyber space. Truth is, Barnard sent it just minutes before Janice received it.”
“She knew about the woman on the plane,” I explained. “She was trying to throw your investigation off track.”
“And soon after that, your mother called, saying she hadn’t heard from you. She’d tried calling but couldn’t get ahold of you.”
“I just knew something was wrong,” Mom added, breaking her silence.
“Then I went over everything you’d told me about Mark Suter and that book,” the detective continued. “And once Janice insisted it wasn’t Beth’s handwriting in the book, I checked the number on the business card from the delivery service, which I eventually traced to Barnard. By the time I got to Tarble, it was too late. She was nowhere to be found, and neither were you. Neither was Mark Suter. But I did speak to your friend Heidi. She filled me in about a few things.”
“I didn’t tell her everything,” I said with remorse. “There was a lot she didn’t know.”
“She knew enough. We found you, didn’t we?”
“But how did you know to come to the cabin?”
“The notation in the book, Cassie’s Cabin. Meryl Suter told me where it was,” he said. “Look, for the record, I rarely admit I’m wrong. And I was wrong. If I had listened to you, I could have saved you, your mother, Beth, and her family a lot of pain and suffering. If I could go back and do things differently, I would. But I can’t.” He stood then and took my hand in his, covering it with his other. “I’m sorry, Ruby.”
It was the first time he’d ever called me by my first name.
“What if you don’t find Barnard?” I asked.
“We will.”
“I don’t know. She’s . . .” I paused. After learning she’d not only tricked Beth into thinking she was Meryl, but also me into thinking she was a delivery woman, I couldn’t find the right word to describe her. No wonder she’d looked familiar. After all, I’d unknowingly seen her twice before that, the first time at Café Du Monde.
“Cunning?” the detective offered.
“Resourceful,” I said.
The detective nodded. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Check your purse. Make sure everything’s there. Barnard may have stolen a credit card.”
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been in here,” I said, after unzipping it. My wallet was there. Driver’s license, credit card, library card, cell phone. Twenty bucks cash.
“Anything missing?” he asked.
I shook my head as I checked the side pockets. One was empty but the other still held the photo of Beth and Mark. “I have a confession to make,” I told the detective. “I took this from Beth’s bedroom.”
“You can return it to her,” he said.
I studied the picture like I had the day I found it; but this time, my eyes zeroed in on the woman in the background, the one wearing the wide-brimmed hat and draped scarf, the one I’d initially taken to be a stage performer.
“It’s her.” I tapped the picture. “Barnard. In the background.”
The detective snatched the photo to inspect it. “That’s her?”
I remembered the photo of Sara Teasdale tacked to the corkboard in Professor’s Barnard’s office, the wide brim hat and scarf.
“I better take this with me,” the detective said.
Too dumbfounded to speak, I closed my eyes as an epiphany bubbled up inside me and prepared to explode. And I willed the police to find Professor Barnard, wherever she was hiding.
She had some explaining to do.
An hour later, Mom stepped out to see if I could be released, and I fell asleep. I had the miniature television on, but the volume was so low, it might as well have been off. And I shut my eyes for a moment, lulled by the inaudible television noise, the sound of a cart rolling, the beeping of a machine.
When I heard the curtain slide, I opened my eyes to a new shift nurse in off-pink scrubs—more salmon colored than those of the other staff—and large tortoiseshell glasses. Her blond hair, flat and dull, was pulled back into a tight bun, which minimized her forehead wrinkles and made her look ten years younger. Despite her disguise—apparently one clever enough to fool the police officers in the waiting room—I recognized Virginia Barnard by the browns of her eyes. And I immediately pawed at my white blanket, searching for the power cord with the important buttons, especially the one that alerts the nurses’ station in an emergency. But it was buried in the folds.
“Please. Don’t. I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.
I finally found the button under another blanket crease and rested my finger on the switch like the trigger of a gun. “Then why are you here?”
“To check on you. Both of you.” She sighed. “I hope Beth doesn’t lose the baby.”
I was surprised she knew about Beth’s threatened miscarriage. “Did you go see her?”
“No, but the nurses talk. They also said Mark lost a lot of skin. He may be permanently disfigured. That’s so unfortunate.” She smirked. “He was so handsome.”
“There’s no way you’re getting out of here a free woman,” I said.
“I’ll take my chances.”
“All I have to do is press this button.”
“But you won’t,” she said, removing the phony glasses as she neared me.
I held the power cord tighter, took a deep breath, and said, “It was you.”
“Yes,” she said. “I brought you the suitcase. Just like seeing Mark at the café, it was all a matter of fate. I looked down at Beth’s suitcase and there you were—your name and address on the tag—begging me to find you, to inspire you to come back. And so I put the postcard and book in there for you. It was my sister’s copy.”
It made sense to me then. Jenny Barnard had written Like Cassie’s Cabin in the margin. It was her affection for Mark I had sensed from the notation, not Beth’s. I remembered my discussion with Mark that afternoon in the coffee shop. He’d drawn a comparison between his mother’s cabin and Woolf’s book. Had he stolen the idea from Jenny, or had she gotten it from him?
“I’m not talking about the suitcase,” I said. “I’m talking about Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in New Orleans, and Sylvia Plath here on the beach.”
She shook her head. “I never pretended to be Plath.”
“Don’t lie to me. You were on campus for the English Department interviews then. You said my name. It was you.”
“Yes, it was me on the beach. But I wasn’t pretending to be Plath, Ruby. I was just dressed as myself that night. I said your name because I wanted to talk to you.”
“But I thought . . .” I recalled the 1950s-style clothing the professor had worn all weekend and considered the woman on the beach, her camel-colored peacoat and blond hair. Could it have been Professor Barnard I saw? Had I morphed her into being Plath because I’d been predisposed to do so?
“But Woolf and Gilman?” I argued. “That was you, right?”
She nodded. “You have to understand, when I saw you in the café, so young and innocent, I saw my sister twenty-some years ago. And I vowed to remove Mark from your life as soon as possible. I knew his mother had been schizophrenic. He’d told my sister. It was in her diary. And when I read your thesis notes, it all became clear to me how to save you.”
My mouth hung open. “You stole my notes?”
“Yes. I knew you would end up telling Mark about your visions—you’d been so open and honest with him in the café when you talked about your father—and I knew he would be reminded of his mother. He would either lose interest in you or love you more, but I gambled on it being the former. He was going to break your heart eventually, I just expedited the process.”
“But you made me think I was going crazy,” I said. “You were more concerned with removing Mark from my life than you were about my sanity. You thought you were saving me from your sister’s fate, but you helped drive me to it.”
“I’m sorry, Ruby. I never meant to hurt you. In my mind, I was also haunting Mark, trying to remind him of what he’d done to my sister.”
I stared back at the professor. Anger throbbed through my veins. But another feeling soon overtook it. Relief. Everything that had happened —Woolf, Gilman, and Plath, those haunting visions of dead women writers—were nothing but this insane woman’s plot to toy with my life.
I wasn’t crazy after all.
The professor’s hand went to her heart. “I made up for it, didn’t I? I brought you back to Tarble. I forced you to face your past, to confront Mark. I resurrected you from the dead.” She reached behind her back. “Look, I don’t have much time. Either you’re going to press that button or a real nurse is going to push back this curtain.”
I stiffened, wondering if she was armed. But she didn’t pull out a weapon.
“This is for you,” she said, handing me a leather-bound notebook, similar to the one Mark had given me in New Orleans.
I held the book in my hands but didn’t open it. Instead I ran a finger along the paper edge. “What is it?”
“Jenny’s diary. I want you and Beth to read it, so you understand.”
I glared at her.
“You can pretend to be angry, Ruby,” she said. “But I know how you really feel about me. When it comes to showing our feelings, it is what we do, not what we say, that matters. And you proved everything to me tonight when you tied me to the bed. You left the knot loose.”
“I didn’t,” I argued. “It was tight.”
“Was it?”
I thought back to earlier that night, when I bound Professor Barnard’s wrists to the bed. By the time the police arrived at the cabin, she had gotten herself free. It was impossible, I thought, that I had wanted Virginia Barnard to get away, that I had helped her escape. But then again, maybe I had.
Because after she left, I waited a good long minute before pushing the call button.