The Butterfly Sister Read Free Page B

you see? They were wrong. Because this is a lead. This could be how we end up finding her.”
    I recalled the mundane items Mom and I sorted in Beth’s suitcase. There was nothing there to suggest Beth’s whereabouts or foul play. But I wasn’t about to trounce on a distraught mother’s hopes.
    â€œTell me where you live,” Mrs. Richards asserted. “I’ll come right now to get it.”
    I asked Mrs. Richards exactly where she lived, then told her it was a two-hour drive to Oak Park from Milwaukee, but she said she didn’t care. She’d drive to Canada if she had to. I fumbled in my pocket then for the business card the delivery woman had given me.
    â€œIt’s better, don’t you think, if you just stayed home?” My words came out like hers had, in bits and pieces, interrupted by thoughts and breaths. I felt guilty for not offering to bring the suitcase myself, for allowing Beth’s mother to drive at night in her condition. “Let the delivery service bring it to you. That’s their job.”
    â€œBut I have to do something, Ruby . I can’t just sit around waiting for a phone call, waiting for the police. Waiting for Beth to walk through the door. I have to get my daughter back.”
    â€œI know. I know,” I said, though I didn’t know at all. I could only imagine, and the guilt tripled. “But what if the police call while you’re gone? What if Beth does come walking through the door? You need to be there.”
    â€œBut the suitcase . . .”
    â€œâ€”I’ll bring it to you.” The promise slipped from my mouth. I couldn’t take it back. “Tomorrow. After work.”
    This appeased Mrs. Richards enough to give me her address, and I went inside for scratch paper on which to jot it down before we said our good-byes.
    When I returned to the porch, I noticed that A Room of One’s Own still lay open on the swing, and despite the promise I’d made Gwen back in December, I started reading it. I read only a sentence before I felt the stitches in my heart—the ones I’d sewn up daily since I left Tarble—unravel.
    I came undone at a handful of words.

Chapter 2
    One year earlier
    B efore knocking, I studied the nameplate on the half open door, the words MARK SUTER, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH . Then, with fingers curled around the frame, I peeked inside.
    From the first day of senior seminar, I had thought my teacher attractive, counting it a blessing that Professor Margaret Preston, who usually taught the course, had taken a sabbatical that semester to research Victorian literature in London. Mark Suter, though untenured, having taught at the college only three years, was a welcome replacement. All of my classmates thought the same. Perhaps it was his hair, the color of wet sand, just long enough to curl behind his ears. Or maybe his eyes, a true baby blue, playful but sedative. Or was it his smile, a grin exposing not only flawless, pearl white teeth but less perfect—and thus, irresistibly endearing—creases around his eyes? Whatever it was—I don’t think there was a single way to quantify it—Mark Suter was that disarming, paradoxical blend of rugged and refined. A cowboy in a blazer. A bad boy with a Ph.D. During class, I often had to glance out the window to allow my eyes a rest, to drain the red from my cheeks, to settle the flutter in my stomach.
    Though I’d long been a straight-A student, no other teacher had treated me with as much esteemed regard as Professor Suter. In fact, on the second day of class, he’d referred to my analysis of a John Donne poem as a “sheer stroke of brilliance,” much to my classmates’ chagrin. And ever since, I’d found myself milking opportunities to be in his presence. I was the first student to enter his classroom and the last to leave. And he always seemed to notice.
    â€œProfessor, do you have a