Auckland Writers Festival special: Jacqueline Bublitz's Leave the Girls Behind extract

NZ Herald

13-05-2025

RUTH-ANN BAKER IS HAVING AN UNREMARKABLE DAY.
For the twenty-six-year-old New Yorker, unremarkable looks something like this . . .
She gets out of bed before 10 am. She does not worry excessively about her dog, Ressler, dying (she just worries a small, helpful amount). She does a quick tidy-up of her apartment and eats the right food at the right times. A bagel for breakfast, a salad sandwich for lunch. She drinks three coffees, none of which make her overly jittery, and she does not grab at her stomach when looking in the mirror, nor hate any part of her body excessively. She completes the requisite amount of steps for herself and for Ressler, and she does her breathing exercises. Talks briefly to her Uncle Joe on the phone. Ignores a call from her mother, and communicates with her father exclusively through emojis. She watches a half-hour documentary on climate change at 5 pm, and times her wallowing after. Ten minutes to worry about the state of the world, and then she puts her hair up in a messy bun and gets ready for work. The walk to Sweeney's Bar will take her ten minutes, the way it always does. Meaning she'll be right on time for her shift, the way she always is.
There is nothing remarkable about her day at all, no cause for concern.
Until.
Her cell phone begins to beep loudly, just as she drops it into her bag. Living in Manhattan, Ruth is used to wailing sirens, to honking horns and sudden booms that make you jump, but the noise emanating from the bottom of her satchel has a different tone; there's an insistent, high-pitched urgency to it. She scrambles to retrieve the phone, her fingers brushing over the tiny stun gun disguised as lipstick and the can of deodorant that's really mace, until she finds it, just as the beeping stops. And now she understands why that sound seemed to reverberate all around her. She has been sent an automated emergency alert, one that would have echoed throughout the city and beyond. Leave The Girls Behind by Jacqueline Bublitz.
Ruth feels her stomach drop. It's a notification about a child abduction. She knows that AMBER Alerts can be sent directly to cell phones these days, but it's still a shock to receive one right here in her apartment.
Taking a deep breath, she reads over the truncated details, each line causing a little earthquake that makes her hand — and the phone — shake.
AMBER ALERT Hoben, CT
VEH DrkBlu Van
CHILD 7F 4ft 45lb
SUSPECT White M 30–40 yrs
CHECK MEDIA
Less than ninety characters of information, but Ruth can see through the gaps. A little girl has been taken from the town of Hoben, Connecticut, by a man with few identifiers, outside of the blue van he was driving— possibly across state lines, given the alert has been sent as far as New York City.
A child has gone missing. An adult male has driven her away.
Ruth tries not to think about what that man did next.
Or the town he took the little girl from. Where so much has already been lost.
'It's a real one tonight, Nancy Drew!'
Owen Alvin greets Ruth with his favourite nickname for her, and the feverish glee that comes from finding his little bar improbably busy for a Monday. Most nights, Sweeney's— full name Sweeney Todd's Sports Bar— attracts a small, dedicated crowd, who come for the endless loop of Stephen Sondheim soundtracks and/or the latest playoffs screened on the three muted television sets mounted on the back wall. But tonight, Ruth's workplace is packed with patrons, most of their faces unfamiliar to her. Sweeney's must have featured in another one of those 'Secret places only New Yorkers know about' articles, she thinks with a grimace, as she joins her boss behind the bar.
Owen appears to mistake her expression for a smile, as he beams at her.
'Let's do this!' he half-shouts over a cranked-up version of 'Losing My Mind' from the last Broadway revival of Follies.
Accurate, Ruth thinks dourly. Her mind is somewhere else entirely.
CHECK MEDIA, the AMBER Alert had said.
Even as she read this, back at her apartment, Ruth knew she had to resist. When it comes to missing girls, she's made a promise not to check media, and she has every intention of keeping her word. But that doesn't stop her thoughts from returning, over and over, to the little girl. To that town. Old, familiar fault lines have started to quiver under Ruth's skin, and it's only loyalty to Owen that keeps her from faking a migraine, and asking to go home. She wouldn't do that to him on a busy night like this. Jacqueline Bublitz is appearing at the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival. Her latest book is Leave The Girls Behind.
This tiny neighbourhood bar has been her sanctuary for five years now, ever since Owen hired her as a favour to her Uncle Joe. Back in 2010, Ruth was a twenty-one-year-old college dropout with a chasm where her future used to be. She'd been studying forensics; the plan, for as long as Ruth-Ann Baker could remember, was to become a criminal profiler. But all that changed, thanks to the episode. She went abruptly from being top of her classes at her city college to living with her uncle and Gideon, Joe's then-new husband, on their then-newly purchased hobby farm in the Hudson Valley. It wasn't an official term by any means: 'the episode'. But that's what they called it, Ruth, Joe and Gideon. And Officer Canton, back in Hoben, although he likely had many names for what she put him through that winter. When she came out the other side in the spring, Joe suggested she move into his recently vacated apartment on the Upper West Side. It would save him having to find a new tenant, he told her.
Before the episode, Ruth had lived in a small Morningside Heights apartment with her parents, or rather her mom, because her dad had already moved out. Living by herself felt like a much needed reset button, and it helped that Ruth knew Joe's building and the neighbourhood well; she and her parents had stayed here for a full year when they first moved to New York, in the fall of 1996. Any concerns Ruth's family had about her living alone were eased when Officer Canton, who they'd known for years, showed up at the farm with Ressler. This, too, was framed as a mutually beneficial proposition. Despite his pedigree, the loving but recalcitrant bloodhound was failing spectacularly in his designated career as a K-9 with the Hoben Police Department, where Canton had his hands full with new canine recruits. If Ruth could just look after him for a while . . .
(Of course, Ressler, all droopy, one hundred pounds of him, ending up looking after her.)
Owen knows very little about that time in Ruth's life. When Joe introduced the two of them, Ruth had met Owen's requirements for bar staff: thanks to her uncle, she had a solid appreciation for the world of musical theatre and an unwavering respect for the pride flag that hung out the front of Sweeney's. Whether or not Ruth could pour beers was irrelevant, as was her history before she walked in the door— although her new boss did have a particular fascination with Ruth's former field of studies, which she'd shared in her (very informal) interview, because Joe said she didn't need to lie about her past.
Just tell small truths, Ruthie, her uncle had advised her. Then no one thinks to go looking for the big ones.
'You know Ruth-Ann,' Owen said at the start of her first shift, 'they say a bartender has as much chance of predicting a person's behaviour as a fully trained criminal profiler. So consider this job a continuation of your studies!'
'I'll be on the lookout for any dubious pie makers,' she'd replied, the reference to Sweeney Todd cementing their friendship just like that.
On her second night at Sweeney's, Ruth had walked in to find a large glass jar behind the bar. Inside was a glossy photograph of Len Cariou from the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, along with a pink disposable razor.
'I got you a Kill Jar,' Owen explained proudly. 'Anyone gives you demon barber vibes, you can take their credit card from that little tab folder I showed you yesterday and drop it in this jar instead, and I'll know to keep an eye on them for the rest of the night. How does that sound, Nancy Drew?'
She'd nodded, feeling alarmingly close to tears.
Since then, Owen has seldom called Ruth by her own name. It's either Nancy, or whatever other fictional female detective he's encountered while flipping through old television shows at 3 am. And they've rarely needed to use the Kill Jar. But she's remained quietly committed to its purpose, because she's always on the lookout for demons.
That said, she's too distracted to profile anyone tonight, suspicious or otherwise. In fact, she probably couldn't pick any of Sweeney's current patrons out of a line-up; they could all be the same person, so blurred is her normally keen vision. Her attention has been fixed on those three silent televisions mounted on the wall. She's been hoping to catch a news ticker running along the bottom of the screens, some kind of update on the missing girl. Because it wouldn't be breaking her promise if information about the little girl's disappearance came directly to her, would it?
It's not like she asked for that AMBER Alert, either.
But there are no breaking headlines from Hoben, Connecticut, scrolling beneath the Monday Night Baseball broadcast that Jan, Sweeney's barback and most committed Major League fan, has playing across every screen. If it wasn't for the memory of that shrill alert she'd received at her apartment, Ruth might think she'd imagined the whole thing. Conjured up a missing child after she'd realised the date. Because this unremarkable Monday in late May has long been designated Missing Children's Day, here in the States and around the globe.
Was that alarm simply another one of Ruth-Ann Baker's infamous delusions, brought on by her aversion to this date? She could ask Owen if he, too, received the AMBER Alert. Or maybe check with Jan, whose phone is always buzzing with sports scores and sure bets she'd placed the night before. But Ruth can't think how to frame the question casually enough that they won't see the glitter of her panic.
Hey, guys, did you see a kid just went missing from my old home town?
What if they say no?
What if they say yes?
Ruth is not prepared to have either of those conversations. She busies herself with work instead, losing herself in the mundanity of pouring beers, refilling popcorn bowls and forcing smiles.
Finally, right on 11pm, the bar clears out. Soon, there are only two customers left. A couple of old regulars, sitting on one of the ratty couches down the back, drinking bourbon and arguing about who should be allowed to run for president.
'Time to go,' Owen shouts down the bar, before asking Ruth if she'd like to join him and Jan for a post-closing nightcap, which she knows is code for heading to a club in Chelsea, where she'll sit in a booth minding their bags and the drinks, while they dance until sunrise.
'Gotta get home to Ressler,' she answers, faux apologetic, and Owen seems to buy this excuse, because he tells her she might as well finish for the night then. The two quarrelling regulars haven't even left yet as Ruth races out the door, before her boss can change his mind.
Walking home, Manhattan's calm, spring air is at odds with her mood. Without Sweeney's to tether her, Ruth is beginning to feel those tremors again. And now she has her own safety to worry about, too. It's something she has to consider after every late shift. How to navigate streets that change shape in the dark. Ruth knows that if you regularly walk alone at night, you should probably mix up your route a little. Tonight, after leaving the bar earlier than usual, she makes a quick calculation. If she heads south on Amsterdam, she's guaranteed to see other nocturnals exiting the twenty-four-hour CVSs and Duane Reades dotted along the way, all those harried people with their plastic bags full of painkillers and diapers and hopeful, last-minute contraception. At this hour, in this neighbourhood, there's always someone needing something, and she'd like to be noticed by them. So that if someone is ever asked, Have you seen this girl? they just might remember her.
As a young woman living alone in a big city, she has to think about these things. A year ago, a teenage girl was murdered down in Riverside Park, and for weeks no one could figure out who she was. Most people were shocked by the whole thing, but not Ruth-Ann Baker.
'You act like this is Times Square before the Marriott moved in,' Owen teased her once, when he saw the self-defence kit she carries in her bag. The lipstick stun gun in particular had amused him.
On the walk home tonight, she slips that little stun gun into her pocket, next to her keys.
When she reaches her uncle Joe's co-op on West 86th, Ruth looks left, right, left again before heading through the first of the building's two security doors. Despite her eagerness to get upstairs, she waits until the second door has clicked shut behind her before she races across the gleaming lobby to the elevator.
She keeps her right hand in her pocket, fingers smoothing over the stun gun, as she takes the slow ride up to her floor. Before exiting into the shared hallway, she closes her eyes briefly, listens for the sound of footsteps or breathing, and then she walks purposefully to her apartment's front door. Stepping inside, she barely has time to fix the three internal chain locks before Ressler gambols towards her, perpetual drool dripping from his jowls.
'Hey, big guy,' she croons, bending down to scratch the folds of his ears.
Ressler responds with his own scratch against her leg, a sign that he needs to be let out, asap. Ruth reaches for his harness, hanging from its hook in the entrance way. She might have been desperate to get home, but now she's here, taking Ressler for a walk suddenly feels like a welcome postponement. Because what comes next seems alarmingly inevitable...
Extracted from Leave the Girls Behind by Jacqueline Bublitz. Published by Allen & Unwin. Out now. Jacqueline Bublitz will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival May 13-18. For more information and tickets, visit writersfestival.co.nz