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July 26, 2022

The Lost and Found Girl

Excerpt

The Lost and Found Girl Extended Excerpt

THE MIRACULOUS RUBY MCKEE

by Dale Wainwright

The Pear Blossom Gazette, December 5, 2005—

It was five years ago, on a cold December night, when three young girls made a miraculous discovery that changed the town of Pear Blossom forever. While walking home from choir practice on that night, Marianne, Lydia and Dahlia McKee discovered a small baby, bundled up and abandoned upon Sentinel Bridge. Sentinel Bridge is the largest covered bridge in the area, built in 1917 to join two halves of the town, restored in the early 1990s as part of an effort to reinvigorate the community of Pear Blossom. The bridge itself crosses Willow Creek, connecting the main thoroughfare of town with many of the community ranches and orchards.
On the night of December 23, 2000, however, the bridge served as something more than a simple connection of pieces of the community. It played host to a miracle. The infant that was found there could so easily have succumbed to the elements. The girls might not have noticed a tiny, quiet bundle in the darkness of the bridge. And yet, she was found.
Now a thriving, happy kindergartner, Ruby was adopted by the very family who found her that night. A McKee in name, but part of the entire town of Pear Blossom. It was Ruby’s Miracle that reinvigorated interest in Pear Blossom. That revived the festivals, tourism, the historical society. The international headlines about the Miracle Christmas Child shone a spotlight on the picturesque town and landed Pear Blossom in tourism magazines and lists of the most desirable communities to visit, to buy a home in, or to start a small business in. This reinvigorated Main Street and brought new vigor to the town.
It is easy to look at this night as a miracle, for a child’s life was saved. But it is said in the town of Pear Blossom that Ruby McKee herself is miraculous.

Chapter One

Ruby

Only two truly remarkable things had ever happened in the small town of Pear Blossom, Oregon. The first occurred in 1999, when Caitlin Groves disappeared one fall evening on her way home from her boyfriend’s family orchard.
The second was in 2000, when newborn Ruby McKee was discovered on Sentinel Bridge, the day before Christmas Eve.
It wasn’t as if Pear Blossom hadn’t had excitement before then. There was the introduction of pear orchards—an event which ultimately determined the town’s name—in the late 1800s. Outlaws who lay in wait to rob the mail coaches, and wolves and mountain lions who made meals of the farmers’ animals. The introduction of the railroad, electricity and a particularly active society of suffragettes, when women were lobbying for the right to vote.
But all of that blended into the broader context of history, not entirely dissimilar to the goings-on of every town in every part of the world, as men fought to tame a wild land and the land rose up and fought back.
Caitlin’s disappearance and Ruby’s appearance felt both specific and personal, and had scarred and healed—if Ruby took the proclamations of various citizens too literally, which she really tried not to do—the community.
Mostly, as Ruby got out of the car she’d hired at the airport and stood in front of Sentinel Bridge with a suitcase in one hand, she marveled at how idyllic and the same it all seemed.
The bridge itself was battered from the years. The wood dark and marred, but sturdy as ever. A white circle with a white 1917, denoting the year of its construction, was stenciled in the top center of the bridge, just above the tunnel that led to the other side, a pinhole of light visible in the darkness across the way.
It was only open to foot traffic now, with a road curving wide around it and carrying cars to the other side a different way. For years, Sentinel Bridge was closed, and it wasn’t until a community outreach and education effort in the mid nineties that it was reopened for people to walk on.
Ruby could have had the driver take her a different route.
But she wanted to cross the bridge.
“Are you sure you want me to leave you here?” her driver asked.
She’d told him when she’d gotten into his car that she was from here originally, and he’d still spent the drive explaining local landmarks to her, so she wasn’t all that surprised he didn’t trust her directive to leave her in the middle of nowhere.
He was the kind of man who just knew best.
They’d just driven through the town proper. All brick—red and white and yellow—the sidewalks lined with trees whose leaves matched as early fall took hold. It was early, and the town had still been sleepy, most of the shops closed. There had been a runner or two out, an older man—Tom Swenson—walking his dog. But otherwise it had been empty. Still, it bore more marks of civilization than where they stood now.
The bridge was nearly engulfed in trees, some of which were evergreen, others beginning to show rusted hints of autumn around the edges. A golden shaft of light cut over the treetops, bathing the front of the bridge in a warm glow, illuminating the long wooden walk—where the road ended—that led to the covered portion, but shrouding the entrance in darkness.
She could see what the man in the car saw. Something abandoned and eerie and disquieting.
But Ruby only saw the road home.
“It’s fine,” she said.
She did not explain that her parents’ farm was just up the road, and she walked this way all the time.
That it was only a quarter of a mile from where she’d been found as a baby.
She had to cross the bridge nearly every day when she was in town, so she didn’t always think of it. But some days, days like this after she’d been away awhile, she had a strange, hushed feeling in her heart, like she was about to pay homage at a grave.
“If you’re sure.” His tone clearly said she shouldn’t be, but he still took her easy wave as his invitation to go.
Ruby turned away from the retreating car and smiled, wrapping both hands around the handle of her battered brown suitcase. It wasn’t weathered from her own use. She’d picked it up at a charity shop in York, England, because she’d thought it had a good aesthetic and it was just small enough to be a carry-on, but wasn’t like one of those black wheeled things that everyone else had.
She’d cursed while she’d lugged it through Heathrow and Newark and Denver, then finally Medford. Those wheely bags that were not unique at all had seemed more attractive each time her shoulders and arms throbbed from carrying the very lovely suitcase.
Ruby’s love of history was oftentimes not practical.
But it didn’t matter now. The ache in her arms had faded and she was nearly home.
Her parents would have come to pick her up from the airport but Ruby had swapped her flight in Denver to an earlier one so she didn’t have to hang around for half the day. It had just meant getting up and rushing out of the airport adjacent hotel she’d stayed in for only a couple of hours. Her Newark flight had gotten in at eleven thirty the night before and by the time she’d collected her bags, gotten to the hotel and stumbled into bed, it had been nearly one in the morning.
Then she’d been up again at three for the five o’clock flight into Medford, which had set her back on the ground around the time she’d taken off. Which had made her feel gritty and exhausted and wholly uncertain of the time. She’d passed through so many time zones nothing felt real.
She waved the driver off and took the first step forward. She paused at the entry to the bridge. She looked back over her shoulder at the bright sunshine around her and then took a step forward into the darkness. Light came up through the cracks between the wood on the ground and the walls. At the center of the bridge, there were two windows with no glass that looked out over the river below. It was by those windows that she’d been found.
She walked briskly through the bridge and then stopped. In spite of herself. She often walked on this bridge and never felt a thing. She rarely felt inclined to ponder the night that she was found. If she got ridiculous about that too often, then she would never get anything done. After all, she had to cross this bridge to get home.
But she was moving back to town, not just returning for a visit, and it felt right to mark the occasion with a stop at the place of her salvation. She paused for a moment, right at the spot between the two openings that looked out on the water.
She had been placed just there. Down on the ground. Wrapped in a blanket, but still so desperately tiny and alone.
She had always thought about the moment when her sisters had picked her up and brought her back to their parents. It was the moment that came before that she had a hard time with. The one where someone—it had to have been her birth mother—had set her down there, leaving her to fate. To die if she died, or live if she was found. And thankfully she’d been found, but there had been no way for the person who had set her there to know that would happen.
It had gotten below freezing that night.
If Marianne, Lydia and Dahlia hadn’t come walking through from the Christmas play rehearsal, then…
She didn’t cry. But a strange sort of hollowness spread out in her chest.
But she ignored it and decided to press on toward home. She walked through the darkness of the bridge, watching as the light, the exit loomed larger.
And once she was outside, she could breathe. Because it didn’t matter what had happened there. What mattered was every step she had taken thereafter. What mattered was this road back home.
She walked up the gravel-covered road, kicking rocks out of her way as she went. It was delightfully cold, the crisp morning a reminder of exactly why she loved Pear Blossom. It was completely silent out here except for the odd braying of a donkey and chirping birds. She looked down at the view below, at the way the mist hung over the pear trees in the orchard. The way it created a ring around the mountain, the proud peak standing out above it. A blanket of green and gold, rimmed with misty rose.
She breathed in deep and kept on walking, relishing the silence, relishing the sense of home.
She had spent the last four years studying history. Mostly abroad. She had engaged in every exchange program she could, because what was the point of studying history if you limited yourself to a country that was as young as the United States and to a coast as new as the West Coast.
She could remember the awe that she’d experienced walking on streets that were more than just a couple of hundred years old. The immense breadth of time that she had felt. And she had… Well, she had hoped that she would find answers somewhere. Because she had always believed that the answers to what ails you in the present could be found somewhere in the past.
And she’d explored the past. Thoroughly. Many different facets of it. And along the way, she done a bit of exploring of herself.
After all, that was half the reason she’d left. To try and figure out who she was outside of this place where everyone knew her, and her story.
Though, when she got close to people, it didn’t take long for them to discover her story. It was, after all, in the news.
Of course, she always found it interesting who discovered it on their own. Because that was revealing.
Who googled their friends.
Ruby obviously googled her friends, but that was because of her own background and experience. If those same friends had an equally salacious background, then it was forgivable. But if they were boring, then she found it deeply suspicious that they engaged in such activities.
She came over a slight rise in the road and before her was the McKee family farm. It had been in the McKee family for generations. And Ruby felt a profound sense of connection to it. It might not be her legacy by blood, but that had never mattered to the McKees, and it didn’t matter to her either. This town was part of who she was.
And maybe that was why no matter how she had searched elsewhere, she was drawn back here.
Dana Groves, her old mentor, had called her six months ago to tell her an archivist position was being created in the historical society with some newly allocated funds, and had offered the job to Ruby.
Ruby loved Pear Blossom, but she’d also felt like it was really important for her to go out in the world and see what else existed.
It was easy for her to be in Pear Blossom. People here loved her.
It had been a fascinating experience to go to a place where that wasn’t automatically the case. Of course, she hadn’t stayed in one place very long. After going to the University of Washington, she had gotten involved in different study abroad programs, and she had moved between them as often as she could. Studying in Italy, France, Spain, coming to the States briefly for her graduation ceremony in May, and then going back overseas to spend a few months in England, finishing up some elective study programs.
But then, she’d found that instructive too. Being in a constant state of meeting new people. And for a while, the sheer differentness of it all had fed her in a way that had quieted that restlessness. She had been learning. Learning and experiencing and…
Well, part of her had wondered if her first job needed to be away from home. To continue her education.
But then six months ago her sister’s husband had died.
And Dana’s offer to come back after she finished her degree had suddenly seemed like fate. Because Ruby had to come and try to make things better for Lydia.
Marianne and Dahlia were worried about Lydia, who had retreated into herself and had barely shed a single tear.
She’s acting just like our parents. No fuss, no muss. No crying over spilled milk or dead husbands.
Clearly miserable, in other words.
And Ruby knew she was needed.
One thing about being saved, about being spared from death, was the certainty you were spared for a reason.
Ruby had been saved by her sisters. And if they ever needed her…
Well, she would be here.
Fixing Lydia, fixing all of this, maybe it was what she was meant to do.
And all of the melancholy that she had felt a moment before faded. Lifted like a weight taken off of her shoulders. And she started to walk a little bit faster, letting the momentum carry her down the hill toward the farm.
She branched off of the main road, moving down the narrow, bumpy drive that led up to the white farmhouse her father continually repainted to keep it in the best shape possible. One of the many things she had learned from her father.
That taking care of the things that took care of you, that held your family, that held history, was important, and a point of pride.
The McKees had never been a rich family, but her childhood had been stable. Wonderful. Her parents had helped her do the work to get scholarships to go to college. Because they wouldn’t have been able to pay for the entirety of it on their own.
And so Ruby had gotten good grades. She’d volunteered at the historical society exhaustively, from the time she was thirteen years old all the way up until she graduated. Her relevant community service and the essays that she’d written about it were exemplary. And she could only credit the influence of her mother for that.
Andie McKee was meticulous, loving and strict all at once.
Ruby picked up the pace then, letting her suitcase sway as she ran, holding on to her dress and keeping it from getting her boots tangled up in the long hem as she ran up the pitted driveway to the front porch.
She stopped at the bottom step, breathing hard. Then she walked up and knocked on the door. It was early, but she knew her parents were awake. Likely had been for a while. They might be in their sixties, but you didn’t retire from farm life.
The front door opened, and her mom stopped, still wiping her hands on her apron. “Ruby,” she said, throwing her arms out and pulling her in for a hug.
She pushed Ruby back, examining her, and Ruby did some examining of her own. The last time she’d been home had been six months ago, for Mac’s funeral, and then she’d seen her parents, Dahlia and Marianne at her graduation five months ago. And of course, her mother looked much the same. But there was something about all the spaces between visits that made her start to picture her mom as she’d been when Ruby had been a kid.
She never pictured her with all these lines on her face, with her hair more gray than light brown. She seemed smaller somehow, as if each passing year had taken something from her.
But when she looked at her mother’s eyes, she didn’t get that sense. Because the joy in her eyes shone as brightly as it ever had.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were coming so early?”
“I changed my flight last night,” Ruby said, wandering into the small, well-worn kitchen. It was clean, meticulously so, and it was in almost unbelievably good working order. The appliances were not new, neither were the cabinets, neither was the floor or the counter. But her father kept everything in such a well-maintained state, that it was as if she had walked back in time, into the kitchen as it had been in the 1950s.
Her father had never liked modern appliances, preferring the original wood-burning stove and an old-fashioned furnace. Air-conditioning had been a foreign concept in Ruby’s life until she had started going and visiting friends’ houses. The one concession he’d made was getting a more modernized refrigerator.
Even he had to admit that there was a better way than an icebox.
“Well, we would’ve come to get you.” Her mother opened the fridge and took out a bottle of orange juice, then retrieved a loaf from the bread box. Each movement decisive and economical as she put a slice of bread in the toaster.
“I know, Mom,” Ruby said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Because I didn’t want you getting up and driving to Medford. Anyway, it was easy to get a car.”
Pear Blossom was almost an hour away from the larger town of Medford, the hub that many people used for hospitals and big box shopping. And for the airport. Ruby had never spent much time there.
Going mostly for special trips when some of her friends had convinced her mom that going shopping at the mall was an important rite of passage.
Andie preferred to get everything she could from Pear Blossom. It wasn’t part of that local movement or anything like that. Her parents had a deep sense of community, and they always had. Along with a lot of practicality. Even if small, local businesses couldn’t sell things for as cheap as a big box store, by the time they drove to go pick up an item, by the time they expended the time and the gas, and put money in the pockets of a stranger rather than a neighbor, it all truly didn’t seem worth it. Ruby’s meals had been farm-to-table far before it was cool.
“Did you just get in from England?”
“Yesterday.”
“You must be dead on your feet. Put down your suitcase and go get some sleep.” Then the toast popped up and her mom put it on a plate, slathered it in butter and set it on the table. In direct opposition to her words, she clearly thought Ruby needed food before sleep.
She took a juice cup down from the cabinet, and Ruby interrupted that. “I’ll take some coffee. I can’t go to sleep. I need to stay up. Otherwise I’m never going to get back on the right time zone.”
“What’s the rush?”
“I start at the historical society in a few days,” Ruby said.
“In a few days.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to let the grass grow under my feet. To sleep when I could just as easily power through and acclimate.”
“You sound like your father.”
“Who sounds like me?” JedMcKee walked into the room then, putting a hat over his bald head. His face had the set look of a man who smiled sparingly, but when he saw Ruby, the change was immediate. “Well, as I live and breathe.”
“Good to see you, Dad,” she said.
She found herself swept nearly off her feet as she was pulled in for a big hug, a decisive kiss dropped on her cheek. “Good to see you, kiddo. And you’re back with us. For keeps now.”
“Yeah,” she said. She waited for a sense of claustrophobia or failure or something to settle over her. But it didn’t.
“So, are we moving you into your old bedroom?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t have a place yet, but I’m going to find one.”
“I’m sure that there will be a lot of people who can find space for you,” her mom said.
“I don’t want the Ruby discount.”
It was a joke in her family. Free coffee, free candy and free ice cream had been a hallmark of Ruby’s growing up years. Another thing that she’d had to get used to when she’d gone away to the real world. People did not shower her with free items or treat her like she was a special, magical creature in any way.
And no, that wasn’t the reason she’d come back home.
“Does that mean I can have it?” her dad asked.
“By all means,” Ruby said.
“You know, we finished renovating the shed for Dahlia. There are two bedrooms in there now. Not sure it’s hugely different than living in the house here, but you don’t have your parents breathing down your neck.”
The shed was misnamed, because of course nothing under her father’s watch was anything half so shabby as a shed. Ruby preferred to call it a cottage, which was infinitely more charming and romantic. Especially not something he’d have one of his daughters living in. It had started its life as a shed and become a very cute garden cottage.
“Dee is living in the cottage?” Ruby asked.
She hadn’t seen her sister in the five months since graduation, but she would have thought she’d have mentioned that.
“She’s working her way up to a full-time position at the Gazette, plus doing freelance writing, so she quit the job at the coffee shop.”
She’d have thought she’d mention that too.
“Oh,” Ruby said. “Well, good for her.”
One point for the cottage was that it was on the opposite end of the property to the farmhouse, which would have her in proximity to her parents, but distant proximity. And she and Dahlia had shared a room as kids, so a two-room cottage would be spacious compared to that. It butted up against the neighboring pear orchard, and John Brewer was an utter recluse that she would never have to worry about encountering.
“If you’d like the other bedroom in there, Rubes, it’s all yours.”
“I should…probably talk to Dahlia about it?”
“She doesn’t pay rent on it,” her dad said. “My money renovated it.”
It was a pragmatic take, for certain, but Ruby would be the one who had to live with a sister filled with resentment if she didn’t want her there, not her dad.
“I’ll talk to Dee,” she said.
“You can stay in the house, for now, though, right?” her mom asked hopefully.
“Yes, of course,” Ruby said.
In fact, she really wanted to do that. Because honestly, she was too exhausted to do any sort of taking care of herself. And that was the greatest and best thing about being back home. Her mother’s cooking. And hopefully soon some of her mother’s coffee.
She had coffee with both of her parents before her father went out to start work, and then her mother ushered her upstairs to her bedroom. Initially, she’d shared a room with Dahlia, but once Marianne and Lydia had moved out, she and Dahlia’d had their own rooms, and they were still much the same as they’d been when she and her sister had moved out.
Ruby’s room was sweet and girly with a floral, yellow bedspread and a gold daybed. She had a tatted rug that covered the newly refinished wood floor. Her father, of course, refinished the floors every time they started to look worn.
Her mother took her suitcase out of her hand and swept it over to the bed, popping it open.
Ruby blinked, giving belated thanks that she had not packed too many intimate things in that suitcase. She had been traveling with a carry-on, and she hadn’t wanted airport security going through her personal items right in front of her.
The condoms she’d bought in Europe had stayed in Europe. And good thing too, since her mother was now pulling things out of the suitcase and beginning to put them away.
“Mom,” Ruby said, “you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.” She frowned. “I don’t know how you’ve been living with so few things for so long.”
“I have perfected the art of not having much. And there wasn’t a whole lot I couldn’t leave behind, anyway. But moving between programs as often as I did, it’s better to travel light. Though, I did send a few things home. So, don’t be deceived. There is follow-up.”
“Good,” her mom said. “I would be a bit concerned if you came away from all of that with no souvenirs.”
“The souvenir was the education,” Ruby said. “Honestly. The museums. The historical sites. It wasn’t like anything… I can’t believe it’s over.”
“I’m a little surprised you didn’t end up settling there. In Italy or England. They were your favorites, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “And I thought about it. But… I don’t know, there’s this opportunity here, and I got to know this town doing the work I did with the historical society. Doing the living history I did with the historical society…”
“Yes, I remember it well, since I sewed your dresses.”
“It just seemed like maybe it would be a waste to not try this. Plus, I miss you guys. I can’t imagine being away permanently.” She almost mentioned Mac. Almost mentioned Lydia’s loss. But the air of determined all rightness in the air was too firm and she didn’t want to disturb it.
“I can’t imagine it either,” her mom said, wrapping her arm around her and giving her a kiss on the head. “But I always knew that you were destined for big things, Ruby McKee.”
She didn’t say why, but Ruby knew it all the same. She’d been spared for some reason, after all. Everyone thought that. And so, she must be destined for some sort of greatness.
Ruby had never really felt all that great. Because as much as she valued the miracle that was her life, it was the other side of it that lingered. She’d been saved, it was true.
But first she’d been left to die.
She stood and went to the window, looked out over the familiar landscape, then squared her shoulders, as if to shake off the thought.
It didn’t do to dwell on the dark sides of the past, not when there was so much brightness all around.
Ruby wanted to bring brightness.
It was why she was here

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