Not My Ruby

Catching up with my best friend over dinner, I slid into the curved leather booth right beside her, just like I always did.

Halfway through our appetizers, her silver fork slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the hardwood floor. She immediately turned to me, clearly annoyed.

Jenna, you know I'm a southpaw. Why did you slide in on my left side? Our elbows are going to bump all night.

My hand froze halfway to the floor.

Ruby was indeed left-handed.

But we had a secret pact. She had sworn to me in private that whenever we shared a meal, she would strictly use her right hand.

She once told me that if she ever ate with her left hand, it wouldn't be the real her.

It started a couple of years ago.

Ruby saw a post online claiming that true best friends always sit on the same side of a restaurant booth.

She immediately declared that we would only sit side-by-side from then on.

I laughed and called her an idiot. "You're left-handed. If you sit next to me, we'll be playing bumper cars with our elbows."

She thought about it for a second, her eyes lighting up. "Simple. Whenever I eat with you, I'll just use my right hand!"

At the time, I figured she wouldn't last three days.

But she actually pulled it off.

For two whole years, every single time we ate together, she stubbornly gripped her silverware with her right hand.

Whenever she absentmindedly reached for a glass or a piece of bread with her left, she would instantly snatch her hand back, sticking her tongue out at me like a kid caught stealing cookies.

She even made a solemn declaration.

"If there ever comes a day where I eat with my left hand around you, then that person definitely isn't me!"

Her expression had been so intensely serious when she said it. That was why the memory stuck with me.

Yet right now, she was holding a fresh fork in her left hand, flawlessly twirling her pasta.

I stared at that hand for a few heavy seconds before bending down to pick up the dropped fork.

My fingers were trembling uncontrollably.

Was the person sitting next to me not Ruby?

Or was this just some twisted little prank she was playing on me?

I sat back up, forcing a stiff smile. "Alright, alright, I'll move to the other side. Don't be mad."

I picked up my plate and slid into the opposite side of the booth.

Ruby's expression had already returned to normal. She continued eating, casually complaining about the toxic drama at her corporate office.

Her tone, her facial expressions, the unique rhythm of her speech. Everything was exactly the way I knew it.

I tried to convince myself I was just overworked. My paranoia was playing tricks on me.

But the icy chill settling in my stomach refused to melt.

A moment later, her boyfriend, Connor, returned from the restroom and naturally slid into the booth beside her.

For the rest of the dinner, they chatted about entirely normal, domestic things.

Ruby complained that his mother was pressuring them to get married. Connor just smiled, fed her a bite of his dessert, and promised they would tie the knot by the end of the year.

Everything looked perfectly, painfully normal.

Until Ruby absentmindedly took a massive bite of a stuffed mushroom from the appetizer platter.

My heart violently seized.

"Why are you eating the mushrooms?"

Connor paused, looking at Ruby in genuine confusion.

"Yeah babe, don't you hate mushrooms?"

Ruby blinked, looking slightly flustered before waving it off with a complaining tone.

"Well, your mom puts mushroom broth in every roast she makes. I guess I just got used to it."

Connor smiled sheepishly, leaning in to kiss her cheek, completely oblivious to the world around them.

But a cold sweat broke out across my skin.

Connor always thought Ruby avoided mushrooms because she was a picky eater.

But I was the only one who knew she was deathly allergic.

Freshman year of college, a dining hall worker had accidentally ladled mushroom gravy onto her mashed potatoes.

She didn't notice and took two bites. I had to ride with her in the back of an ambulance while she went into anaphylactic shock.

Since that night, she wouldn't even touch a plate if a mushroom had been near it.

You can mimic someone's mannerisms. You can memorize their habits.

But a biological physical reaction does not lie.

I sat there for the rest of the dinner watching her closely. Ruby didn't show a single sign of an allergic reaction.

Her skin remained flawless. Her breathing was perfectly even. She even stole another mushroom off Connor's plate.

The last shred of warmth drained from my body.

The woman sitting across from me was absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, not Ruby.

Which meant... where was the real Ruby?

I practically threw myself onto my bed as soon as I got home, staring blankly at the ceiling while my mind spun out of control.

I desperately tried to map out the timeline.

When did Ruby change?

A week ago, she had been perfectly fine before leaving for a VIP music festival in London.

The morning of her flight, she sent me a voice memo.

"Jenna, I'm heading to the airport! Let me know if you want anything from the duty-free shops."

Once she landed, she texted me every single day.

Videos from the concert floor, pictures of fish and chips, the glittering night view from her hotel window.

I rolled over, opened our chat history, and scrolled up to the day of the concert.

She had sent a video from the VIP pit. The camera was shaking wildly, drowned out by the screaming crowd.

I could hear her screaming over the noise. "Jenna, this is incredible! I'm totally coming back next year!"

I watched it over and over again.

It was definitely her face in the video. The voice belonged to her. There was absolutely nothing suspicious about it.

But the more flawless it looked, the heavier my dread became.

It didn't feel like she was sharing a fun moment with her best friend.

It felt like someone was deliberately trying to prove she was still alive.

If the Ruby sitting in the restaurant tonight was a fake.

Then who was sending me these messages?

And what about Connor? Did he know the woman sharing his bed was an imposter?

I didn't sleep a single wink that night.

First thing the next morning, I drove straight to the local police precinct.

"I need to report a missing person. My best friend is gone."

The officer at the front desk was a man in his thirties named Officer Collins. He told me to sit down and walk him through it slowly.

I spilled everything.

I told him how Ruby had come back from London acting like a completely different person. How she didn't know the secret habits only the two of us shared.

And how she had eaten an allergen that should have put her in a hospital, yet suffered zero reaction.

Officer Collins listened, his expression growing increasingly skeptical.

He typed a few things into his computer and sighed.

"Ma'am, we just ran a check on Ruby Hensley. She is currently at her registered home address."

"Her phone is active. Her social media is updating normally. She posted a photo of her dinner just last night, correct?"

I nodded frantically.

"Under these circumstances, we cannot open a missing persons case."

Panic clawed at my throat. "But she isn't Ruby! The woman in her apartment is a fake!"

Officer Collins looked at me like I belonged in a psychiatric ward.

"Ms. Sutton, you are claiming this woman is an imposter, yet all her social ties, her legal identification, and her digital footprint match perfectly."

"Do you have a single piece of hard evidence to prove she is fake?"

I opened my mouth, but the words died in my throat.

I only had my intuition.

And a secret dining pact between two best friends.

None of that held up in a court of law.

Officer Collins stood up, his tone shifting into a stern warning.

"Ms. Sutton, if you continue to press this, I will have to escort you out for obstructing police business."

I was practically thrown out of the precinct.

Standing on the concrete steps, the bright morning sun made my eyes burn with unshed tears.

Three years ago, Ruby's parents were killed in a horrific highway pileup.

I was the only family she had left in this world.

If she was still alive, she was waiting somewhere in the dark for me to save her.

And if she was already... gone, then I was going to find her and bring her home.

My phone buzzed with a new text.

It was from Ruby's account. A picture of a sad-looking sandwich with a caption.

"The deli downstairs is getting worse every day!"

Just her usual, casual complaining about her lunch break.

I stared at the screen, my fingers turning numb.

The fake Ruby had her phone.

If the real Ruby had wanted to contact me, or warn me...

A sudden memory hit me like a freight train. I sprinted to my car and sped all the way back to my apartment.

Buried in the back of my closet was a clunky, outdated smartphone from our college days.

Ruby was a brilliant coder. Back then, she had built a private, encrypted messaging app just for the two of us to gossip on.

When we upgraded our phones after graduation, we slowly forgot the app existed.

I tore through a shoebox, found the old phone, and frantically plugged it into a charger.

The screen flickered to life. I found the greyed-out icon for her custom app.

I tapped it.

There was one unread message waiting on the screen.

Received: Seven days ago, 2:37 PM.

It was only three words.

"Hide and seek."

I stared at those three words, my pulse pounding violently against my ribs.

Seven days ago. 2:37 PM.

According to her itinerary, Ruby was supposed to be in the air, halfway to London at that exact time.

Her phone should have been in airplane mode. Sending a message over cellular data would have been impossible.

Unless... she never got on that plane.

I grabbed my current phone and dialed the airline's customer service hotline.

"Hi, could you please check the passenger manifest for a flight to London last week? I need to know if a 'Ruby Hensley' actually boarded the plane."

The representative ran the search and delivered the crushing truth.

"I can confirm that a passenger named Ruby Hensley checked in her luggage at the kiosk, but she never scanned her boarding pass at the gate."

A freezing shudder violently wracked my body.

Ruby never went to London.

Yet she had sent me a video from the VIP pit of the concert later that night.

Which meant the real Ruby had already been taken before the flight even departed.

And "Hide and seek" was the final breadcrumb she managed to drop for me.

I stared at the screen, desperately trying to decode the hidden meaning.

Hide and seek.

It was a game we had played constantly since we were little kids.

Back in her childhood backyard, she would always hide behind the giant ceramic water barrel near the flowerbeds, and I would always find her in seconds.

But that was too obvious.

If she was just referring to an address, she wouldn't have used a riddle.

So what did it mean?

I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing myself to mentally catalog every place we had ever been together.

The old neighborhood from our childhood had been bulldozed for condos.

The diner near our high school was shut down.

The arcade we used to skip college classes for was now a strip mall.

Eliminating those, I started thinking of places on the outskirts of the city that fit the theme of hiding.

Abandoned factories, half-built construction sites, overgrown state parks...

Everything felt plausible, yet entirely wrong.

I opened the map on my phone, aimlessly zooming in and out of the county borders.

And then my eyes snagged on the name of a deeply remote township.

High Ash Springs.

H, A, S.

The exact same initials as "Hide And Seek."

In that split second, every instinct in my body screamed that Ruby was out there.

I quickly zoomed in on the map.

High Ash Springs was located in the eastern foothills. It was a completely isolated, impoverished mountain community wedged between two jagged peaks, lacking even a properly paved access road.

It was eerily familiar.

And its isolated geography made it the perfect place to hide a body.

I looked up from the glowing screen.

I couldn't be one hundred percent certain this was what her message meant.

But even if there was a one-in-a-million chance, I had to take it.

Terrified of alerting the imposter, I opened our regular chat and sent a casual text to "Ruby."

"Work just dumped a massive out-of-town project on my lap. Gotta leave for a few days. Let's grab drinks when I get back!"

She replied instantly. "Ugh, the worst! Have a safe trip!"

The bubbly, sweet tone was sickeningly accurate.

I packed a heavy duffel bag, threw in two portable power banks and a heavy-duty flashlight, and drove my car onto the interstate.

High Ash Springs was even more desolate than I had imagined.

After leaving the highway, the road degraded from asphalt, to cracked concrete, to nothing but loose gravel and packed yellow dirt.

After driving for almost four brutal hours, my headlights finally illuminated the weathered stone sign marking the town limits.

The moment I saw it, a cold sweat drenched the back of my shirt.

Because I had been here before.

Two years ago, Ruby, Connor, and I took a weekend road trip. Our GPS supposedly glitched, and we ended up hopelessly lost in this exact town.

Ruby had been sitting in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the decaying cabins. "This place would be perfect for a horror movie," she had joked.

If Ruby was truly trapped out here against her will.

Then Connor was absolutely involved.

Because on that road trip two years ago, Connor was the one behind the wheel.

He was the one who set the GPS. And he was the one who "accidentally" took the wrong exit into this forgotten valley.

From the very beginning, he was the only one who knew this place existed.

I slumped back against the driver's seat, completely paralyzed by the realization.

Connor and Ruby had been dating for three years. He treated her like royalty.

If she worked a late shift, he would sit in his car outside her office until midnight just to walk her out.

If it rained, he was standing at the subway exit with an umbrella.

When she had horrible cramps, a mug of hot ginger tea was always waiting on her nightstand.

They had already booked their wedding venue for December. Their engagement photoshoot was scheduled for next month.

Why would he do this?

And who was the fake Ruby living in her apartment?

I didn't have time to fall down that rabbit hole. Finding Ruby was the only thing that mattered.

I forced myself out of the car, locking the doors behind me.

A few elderly locals were sitting on their porches in the fading afternoon light. They watched me approach with openly hostile, guarded eyes.

I walked up to each of them, asking if they had seen a strange man and woman pass through town a week ago.

But their thick, isolated accents were nearly impossible to decipher. Even with wild hand gestures, I got absolutely nowhere.

Just as the sun began to dip behind the tree line, a rugged, middle-aged man finally approached me.

"You lookin' for a guy traveling with a really pretty girl?"

My head snapped up. "Yes! You saw them?"

I frantically pulled out my phone, showing him a photo of Ruby and Connor.

The man squinted at the screen. He didn't say a word, just casually rubbed his thumb and index finger together.

I understood immediately.

I dumped out my wallet, shoving all the emergency cash I had on me into his calloused palm. About four hundred dollars.

He weighed the cash in his hand, but his greedy eyes dropped to my wrist.

I was wearing a solid gold Cartier bracelet. It was a birthday gift from my mother, and I had never taken it off.

Without a second of hesitation, I unclasped the gold and pressed it into his hand.

The man finally smiled, satisfied.

He pointed a dirty finger toward the towering peaks. "They went up the mountain."

According to the local, a torrential downpour had just passed through seven days ago when an expensive sedan rolled into town.

"Car was too low to the ground for these dirt roads. Got stuck in the mud on a steep incline."

"I helped the guy push his car out. He threw me a hundred bucks for the trouble."

"There was a woman sitting in the passenger seat..."

He paused, scratching his jaw.

"Didn't get a good look at her face. But the hair color and the fancy clothes matched your picture."

My heart plummeted into my stomach.

"Which way did they go?"

"Up that one."

The man jutted his chin toward the eastern ridge.

"Cross over that peak and you hit the neighboring county line. Nothin' up there but an abandoned logging camp. Trail's washed out, nobody ever goes up there."

"Did you see them come back down?"

The man shook his head.

"Nope. Ain't no cell service up there either. Don't know why any city folks would wander up there."

I stood completely still, staring at the pitch-black silhouette of the eastern mountain. My heart hammered wildly against my ribs.

The sky had gone completely dark. Trying to navigate an unfamiliar mountain trail at night was a death sentence.

I retreated to my car, reclined the driver's seat, and forced myself to wait out the night.

I didn't sleep. I couldn't.

Ruby's face played on an endless loop behind my eyelids.

When we were kids, she used to wear her hair in two messy pigtails, her crooked canine teeth showing whenever she laughed.

In middle school, she chopped her hair into a pixie cut and cried for three days when a substitute teacher mistook her for a boy.

In college, she got her heart broken by a frat boy. I walked thirty laps around the track with her while she sobbed, swearing she would never trust a man again.

Then she met Connor, and she believed in love again.

She told me Connor was different. Connor genuinely cared for her soul.

I buried my face in my arms, my tears soaking silently into my jacket sleeves.

Connor, what the hell did you do to her?

The second the sky began to turn a bruised purple, I was awake.

I didn't go back into the village. I drove straight to the nearest county sheriff's station.

"I need to report an emergency."

"My best friend and I were hiking the eastern ridge yesterday and we got separated. She never came down the mountain."

I lied. It was the only way to guarantee they would send a search party into the woods.

Just as I hoped, the mention of a missing hiker in a dangerous, unmapped forest triggered an immediate response.

Within thirty minutes, they had assembled six deputies and two search-and-rescue dogs.

The search team was led by a grizzled veteran named Officer Collins, his skin deeply tanned from decades in the sun.

The dogs were pure professionals. The second we hit the tree line, they started barking wildly, dragging their handlers deep into the dense underbrush.

The deeper we ventured into the suffocating woods, the heavier my dread became.

If Ruby was actually out here, was she even still alive?

Suddenly, both dogs stopped dead in their tracks, letting out a synchronized, ferocious howl before sprinting forward.

I was stumbling over exposed roots, struggling to keep up.

By the time I ripped through the final wall of thorny bushes and spilled into a small clearing, I heard one of the deputies yell.

"We've got a body!"

...

Lying in the center of the muddy clearing was a corpse that had been partially unearthed by wild scavengers.

It barely looked human anymore.

The decomposition was brutal. The skin was mottled black and purple, bloated and grotesquely swollen from the humidity.

Her facial features were entirely erased. Maggots writhed inside the empty eye sockets and along the jawline. The air was thick with the suffocating, putrid stench of rotting meat.

But I knew it was my Ruby.

She was wearing the custom, rhinestone-studded t-shirt I had designed for us to wear to the London concert.

And wrapped around her decaying wrist was a braided silk bracelet I had brought back for her from a temple in Kyoto.

Three years ago, when I tied it around her wrist, I had told her:

"This is for protection. You're going to live a long, beautiful life."

But my Ruby was only twenty-eight.

She loved feeling beautiful.

She spent an hour and a half on her makeup every single morning. She would twirl in front of her full-length mirror three times before stepping out the door.

And now she was lying in the filthy dirt, being consumed by insects.

I collapsed to my knees in the mud, my body violently convulsing with sobs.

Officer Collins walked over, placing a heavy, sympathetic hand on my shoulder.

"Let's get you back to the precinct."

I followed him down the mountain in a completely dissociative haze.

Ruby's remains were bagged and transported to the county morgue.

He told me they needed to perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death.

I don't remember how I survived the rest of that day.

I only remember Officer Collins eventually leading me into a private interrogation room.

"We found something inside the victim's body. Something she left behind for you."

I stared at him blankly.

Inside her body?

Officer Collins plugged a tiny, blood-stained microchip into a forensic laptop on the table.

A sharp burst of static filled the sterile room.

First came the frantic rustling of leaves, like someone crawling desperately through thick brush to hide.

Then came the sound of ragged, terrified breathing.

And then, I heard Ruby's voice.

"Jenna... if you're hearing this recording, it means I've already been murdered."

"I have a terrifying secret to tell you."

The recording continued.

Ruby's voice was broken and breathless, shaking with pure adrenaline. She was running.

"Jenna... if there ever comes a day... where you realize someone else has taken my place... you have to be careful..."

A burst of heavy static.

"Connor. He..."

A sudden, sickening thud echoed through the speakers, like someone tripping and smashing into the dirt.

Immediately following it was the terrifying crunch of heavy boots closing in fast. Someone was hunting her.

"Ruby!"

I screamed her name out loud in the sterile room, as if she could somehow hear me across time.

In the recording, Ruby didn't speak another word.

There was only the sound of her gasping for air, thorns tearing at her clothes, and the heavy boots getting closer and closer.

Then came a violent, scraping noise, like a piece of plastic being crushed and discarded into the grass.

Her final words were a barely audible whisper, fragile as glass.

"Jenna, you know my most precious thing... you know what it is!"

The recording abruptly cut out.

The silence in the room was deafening.

Officer Collins hit the spacebar on his keyboard, turning to look at me.

"We extracted this microchip from the victim's stomach contents. It appears to be the core memory board of a digital voice recorder."

"Right before she died... she smashed the plastic casing of the recorder and swallowed the chip raw."

I bit down on my lower lip so hard my mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood.

She swallowed it.

She knew she was going to die. She knew there was no escape.

So she swallowed the evidence.

Because she knew that as long as her body wasn't entirely destroyed, as long as someone eventually found her, her final words wouldn't be erased.

She traded her life to deliver this message to me.

"Ms. Sutton," Officer Collins said softly, sliding a paper cup of water across the table. "Are you alright?"

I reached for the cup. My hands were shaking so violently I spilled half the water onto the metal table.

"Do you know what she meant by her 'most precious thing'?" he asked.

I didn't answer.

I was desperately trying to figure it out.

This was her second clue.

"Hide and seek" was the first.

"My most precious thing" was the second.

I closed my eyes, digging through decades of memories.

What did Ruby value above everything else?

She used to joke about it all the time.

She always said her most precious possession was methe best friend who had stood by her side for twenty-eight years.

But if the answer was that simple, she wouldn't have used her dying breath to encrypt it.

It had to be something tangible. Something hidden.

My eyes snapped open. I pushed my chair back violently.

"Officer Collins, I need to go somewhere right now."

"Where?"

"The cemetery. Where her parents are buried."