Where is Ruby Redfort - every smart kid's smart kid?
One thing's for sure - she's definitely not where she should be.
If Ruby was here right now, Hitch's job would be a whole lot easier, her best friend might not be panicking, and the Count mi...
Hitch headed down to his apartment, Bug trailing a few paces back the whole way and eventually settling himself just outside the door to wait for his return. Once inside, he swept the room for monitoring devices, out of habit than anything else, really , and took a very brief shower.
Afterwards, feeling moderately better, he left the apartment, and went to search the kitchen for wherever Ruby kept the dog food, so her husky would stop following him around everywhere. Bug nudged him in the right direction, and after a quick hunt for a pair of scissors to open the package, Bug was happily munching on his belated breakfast, and Hitch was free to consider his options.
It looked as if it would take a while for the storm to fully clear up, or at least for it to be safe to drive outside. Maybe an hour or two. Sure, it would be easy for him to contact Spectrum and arrange a search party – a lot of people at Spectrum were very fond of Ruby, and some of them were in fairly high positions in their respective chains of command. They would be more than willing to help. But...
Hitch couldn't help but feel there was something vital he was missing. It just didn't make sense. The Count, as unpredictable and terrifying as he was, still usually had a reason for doing most of what he did. Kidnapping Ruby with no trace of warning whatsoever just didn't fit his style, and nobody else on Spectrum's wanted list had been confirmed to be in the vicinity recently. And then there was the matter of Ruby's cryptic note- gone to the source of the problem, I can fix everything. It didn't explain anything at all, and wasn't even vaguely reassuring. Why would Ruby leave a note like that?
His mind flashed back to the pile of relevant thingsthat he had made after shutting the window in Ruby's room, and he considered something for a moment. Clancy had said that Ruby had been working on something in her room prior to her disappearance. It was a bit of a long shot, but – what if–?
He took the stairs, two at a time, up to Ruby's room. Bug watched curiously from his breakfast, but didn't follow along.
The pile of books and notepaper that he had previously deemed relevant were on Ruby's bed, right where he had left them. He seated himself on the mattress, next to the headboard, and began to go through them.
On the top of the pile were an assortment of photos that hadn't been swallowed up by the storm and/or the vortex of mess that seemed to be the room's constant state of being. Hitch spread them out on the floor, and allowed himself a quick, fond glance at them, before returning to the information that would prove more helpful. He had only put them in this pile because of how much Ruby seemed to like, and because the others that she usually kept tacked with these to her pinboard seemed to have been ruined beyond repair in the storm.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
There were several books on experimental computer coding, by a variety of authors. Scraps of newspaper served as makeshift bookmarks in all of them – random pieces that seemed to be all inserted at chapters about something called 'parity bit coding'. Hitch opened one of them to the first instance of a newspaper bookmark, and skimmed through it.
