“Hi,” she said in a faux-quiet voice. Then she gestured to the staircase behind her. “The girls are still sleeping.” A quick roll of her eyes. “Teenagers in the summer. Come on in. They won’t hear us in the kitchen.”
I followed her past the stairway, down the hall, into the kitchen, where three barstools were tucked under the counter dividing the kitchen from the living room, the lack of a table opening up the space.
Charlotte still had a faint limp, if you knew what you were looking for. An accident in the midst of her divorce that had landed her in a ditch with her leg pinned the wrong way. A resulting knee surgery. It was more pronounced when she was barefoot, like she was still being careful. A residual fear of the damage. I rarely saw her in shorts, so the limp sometimes caught me by surprise. But I found it reassuring that there were things outside all of our control. That even she couldn’t anticipate a deer darting out from the woods. That even her instincts—cutting the wheel in the wrong direction, toward the lake, where the road sloped into a ditch—could be wrong.
“Are the girls going to Bob’s?” I asked her.
She faltered, looked over her shoulder at me, and said, “No, they’re spending the holiday here.”
“Oh, yesterday Molly mentioned—”
“Yes,” she said, waving away the comment, “there was a mix-up on his end over who had them for the long weekend.” She poured us two mugs of coffee and sat on one of the counter stools, leaned her chin in one hand, and waited for me—for what I’d come to say.
I always felt insecure when I was alone with Charlotte. As if our contrast was too great not to acknowledge. Ever since Bob left, it seemed like she’d doubled down on herself. Calm and unflappable before and after. The fact that her marriage had fallen apart in such a public way, that she was aware we all knew—it must’ve killed her. I knew what it was like to have the whole neighborhood watching as the life you’d built abruptly fell apart. But instead of humanizing her, it had done the opposite. She’d fortified herself, daring you to find a weakness.
“First,” I said, hands held out in the universal proclamation of innocence, “I had no idea she would turn up at my house. Scared me to death, to be honest.”
“Mm.” A noise that could’ve meant any number of things. Her face remained porcelain. “I can imagine.” She spooned some sugar into her mug, the metal clanging against the side.
“She just…” I leaned forward conspiratorially. “She just walked right in like nothing had changed.”
“And?” she asked, raising the mug to her lips, steam rising.
“I think she came back for her things.” I didn’t specify the money she’d left behind, hidden in her old kayak. I cleared my throat. “And… did you see her lawyer on TV the other night?”
Charlotte shook her head, mug frozen. But the lack of movement gave her away—she was holding her breath. Intrigued despite herself. I wanted to shake her, break through the surface, share a secret. But it was like she thought any show of emotion lost her the upper hand. Like she had to be the person you wanted something from, needing nothing in return.
“Ruby said they’re going to sue,” I finally said.
Charlotte lowered the mug back to the counter. “Sue who, exactly?”
I tipped one shoulder, then added cream and sugar to my mug. I really did need the caffeine, my head fuzzy from the sporadic night’s sleep. “She didn’t say. But she went to meet with the lawyer yesterday.”
She raised her eyebrows again. “And?”
“And she hasn’t come back yet.”
Charlotte let out a deep breath. “Maybe she’s not coming back. Maybe this has nothing to do with”—she waved one manicured hand over her head—“any of us.” The same thing I had hoped.
“Well,” I said, after taking my first sip of perfectly brewed coffee, “she has my car. So I do, in fact, hope she returns in this case.”
Charlotte closed her eyes and laughed softly despite herself. “Oh, Harper,” she said, and I knew I was forgiven. That I was back in the role she expected me to inhabit. Too trusting, too naive. Too blinded by my desire to see the good in everyone. The last to know when Aidan was going to leave. The last to accept the truth about Ruby but forgivable for the pattern of my own nature.
“I know, I was caught off guard. I didn’t exactly tell her she could use my car,” I said. “But in her defense, I didn’t tell her she couldn’t.”
Charlotte gave the tiniest shake of her head and a look that bordered on patronizing. Like she was getting ready to impart some sage advice; she’d gazed deep into my soul and found the flaw, and now she would expose it, to fix it. “Well, I think you’re going to need to tell her to leave. Once you get your car back,” she said.
“How, exactly, can I do that?” I asked. Half sarcastic, but also, I wanted to know. She was the mother of two teen girls, elbow-deep in the issues of an entire school community, and you knew she could put things into context. I wanted to imagine what Charlotte would’ve done had Ruby walked in her front door unannounced.
“It’s not her house, Harper. It never was.”
“She paid rent,” I countered. She was up front with the checks, paying me in installments of three months at a time, the ideal tenant. Said money always made things awkward, and she didn’t want me to have to ask her for it. She made sure she was always ahead of the curve.
Charlotte put a hand over mine. “You’re a good person, but you don’t owe her, Harper. She is a criminal.” I pulled my hand back abruptly, and her eyebrows pushed together, the single line between them deepening. The only sign of her age. “You don’t think she’s innocent, do you?” she asked. Leaning forward finally, like we would share that secret after all. Her face scrunched up in disgust for a fleeting moment. “It was a technicality, Harper. An injustice.”
Except it wasn’t a single technicality. The entire investigation and trial had been tainted from the start. Chase wasn’t a misfiled piece of paperwork. He was a very real person involved in a very real investigation, with a hand in every corner of it. The message board had been the proof. According to Ruby’s lawyer, there was more that we didn’t even know. Evidence that had been withheld. People who should’ve known better.
“We don’t know that,” I said. “The whole thing, the investigation, it was so fast, don’t you remember?”
Once the focus settled on Ruby, the dominoes fell quickly and succinctly, improbably sinking her. Her half-smile on all of the news pieces. The time line, forced between camera still shots.
Charlotte folded her hands on the counter, the very vision of a mother advising her children. “Look, let’s pretend. Let’s go ahead and pretend. Ruby was out there that night. She was seen by various cameras. At the very least, she knew something, and she said nothing. She was seen running down to the lake. She lied. You heard her sneaking in the back door at two in the morning. Does that strike you as an innocent person?”
It didn’t. But Ruby didn’t strike me as guilty before her arrest, either. “There was no motive,” I said, looking out the kitchen window, where you could see straight into the Truett house next door—the curtains gone, the entire house stripped and empty. That was what had irked me the most. Apparently, you didn’t need a motive to convict, but it kept me up at night. Kept me on her side longer than most. There was no reason for Ruby to do it, so I could therefore believe she hadn’t done it.
“She stole from them, you know. From Brandon and Fiona.”
My gaze jerked back to Charlotte. “What? Did you tell the police this?” After Ruby was arrested, there were so many rumors. I’d just never heard any related to this.
She sat back on the stool, mug in hand again. “Of course. But they couldn’t bring it up in trial. There was no one to vouch for it. But Chase knew. They all knew. Fiona said money had gone missing.”
“She thought it was Ruby?” Fiona still let Ruby walk their dog, still let her have a key. It didn’t track.
Charlotte shrugged. “Never said.
You know how Fiona was, though, a little…” She let the thought trail as if we could not discuss the limitations of the dead. But I knew what she meant. Removed. Condescending. Uninterested in the rest of us. Charlotte continued, “I only remember because she opened her wallet once to pay me for when we all got the group rate to aerate the yards, remember? She opened her wallet and frowned, and I could tell something was wrong. She was clearly flustered, called Brandon asking if he’d taken the money in her wallet. And when he said he hadn’t, she was shaken, I could tell. She looked straight at Ruby, who was out washing her car.” Charlotte pressed her lips together, and I knew what she was remembering: Ruby in a bikini top, cutoff shorts, everyone looking despite themselves.
“It could’ve been anyone,” I said. “Or maybe Fiona was wrong. Ruby didn’t need the money.” They called her a grifter, but that wasn’t true—she’d paid me to stay after Aidan left me with the mortgage; she’d helped me out of a bad situation. They called her a charmer, a fake. A person who got what she wanted. But she was locked up for the last fourteen months, and no one believed her, so that wasn’t true, either.
Even as I said it, I pictured that money again, stashed in the bathroom, damp in my hand—
Charlotte shrugged. “Who said she needed it? Like some spoiled, bored child. It’s not the first rumor I heard about Ruby, though I assumed she’d grown up since then. Always seeing what she could get away with.” As if everything could be traced back to boredom. “My guess, the Truetts knew it was her. Maybe they confronted her. Maybe they asked her for the key back, and she knew she had to do something.”
“You can’t think she would kill over that? Come on.”
“Is there a good reason to kill them, Harper?” She took a slow breath, started again. “Look, something like that gets out… we’re all so connected here. The college. The school. Our jobs. Even small things have big repercussions here.”
I couldn’t stop my mind from drifting, then, to every time I thought I’d misplaced something. Of the times I’d been surprised to be short on cash or I’d found a piece of jewelry in a different place than I thought I’d left it. Things I’d attributed to being busy, not fully focused on the simple actions of the day. Now I was seeing something else: Ruby, hand in my jewelry box, thumbing through my wallet, seeing what she could get away with. Watching my reaction for her own entertainment.
“Ruby never liked Fiona,” Charlotte said, voice lowered.
Like she was any different, any better. I didn’t say what I was thinking: that none of us did. On a good day, we rolled our eyes at them, emboldened by our shared sentiments, bonding the rest of us together. It made us feel more righteous, more right. On a bad day, Brandon and Fiona represented something bigger, something that preyed on our insecurity—that there was something unworthy about the life we were living.
A creak in the ceiling directly overhead cut through the silence: someone walking in the loft, if their upstairs layout was the same as mine. We both looked up.
Charlotte checked her watch. “About time,” she said. Then, to me, “I think you should go before the girls come down. I don’t want them to hear us. I don’t want to upset them.”
Though, judging from my conversation with Molly the other day, Charlotte had already managed to do that herself.
I nodded, heading down the hall. “Thanks for the coffee, Charlotte.”
“Of course,” she said. “And, Harper?” I looked back, hand on the doorknob. “Tell her to go.”
“I will,” I said.
* * *
IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT, midmorning, but no one was outside. There was something off about the entire street, like an abandoned set.
The Truett house, blending in with the still surroundings. Nothing, except for the lack of curtains, to set it apart. Nothing to declare: This is the murder house. In the months after the trial, people would drive by, slow down, watch. Try to see something inside now that the danger had passed.
I’d never peered inside those open windows myself—I’d already seen inside once, and that was enough. The reality burned on the inside of my eyelids. The bedroom upstairs; Chase’s expression. The scream rising in the back of my throat.
Something caught my eye now as I passed. A flash of movement in the dark windows. A trick of the light. My memory and imagination overlapping.
But I found myself walking up those porch steps again, listening closely.
I pressed my ear to the door—the rumble of the car engine, a dog barking from the backyard—but there was nothing. This time, when I reached out to check the handle, it didn’t move. It was locked. My imagination, then.
I released the handle, backed away, could see the gleam of my thumbprint left behind on the brass knob. During the investigation, Ruby’s fingerprints had been found on this handle, along with mine, Brandon’s, Fiona’s, and more. I thought about that now—about how much of ourselves we leave behind in every interaction. How every place we’ve been, everything we say, can be used to craft a story.
But Ruby’s fingerprints had also been found on the back door, where the dog was left. On the bedroom handle upstairs, like she had peered in on Brandon and Fiona sleeping before steeling her nerve. Her cold gaze, her cold heart. And on the car door in the garage, the most damning place of all.
Ruby’s defense was just that—of course she’d been in their house. She had walked their dog when needed. She couldn’t tell what she might’ve touched or when. If she might’ve brushed against the car when it was out in the driveway.
She was just out that night. For a walk, she said. And why not? Was that such a crime? She’d left her phone behind because who was she planning to call in the middle of the night? What did she have to fear here? This was a safe place. Lake Hollow Prep was on spring break. She was twenty-five years old. There had been other people out there, she told anyone who would listen, she’d heard people down at the lake and gone to check it out.
This was the point she kept maintaining: There were other people out. She wasn’t alone that night. But the cameras did not back up her claim.
And neither did anyone else.
The neighbors testified with their videos that had been posted on the message board. They testified to the time stamps, the locations of the cameras, and described what they saw: A woman walking from the Truett house; a woman racing toward the woods. A woman who did not reappear on any cameras on her way home—who must’ve cut through the woods to the other side of the inlet, ignoring the sign marked PRIVATE PROPERTY. Sneaking back by an unseen route—the dirt access road, the dense woods—creeping around behind our street, hoping no one saw her. Maybe she’d left her phone at home, they decided, because she didn’t want any evidence of where she had been.
Most of the devices recorded only when motion triggered. There was no more activity on our street.
The jury was satisfied: Nothing else had happened that night.
But. The image of that key chain left inside my house.
There were things people here knew. Things people had seen.
I wondered, not for the first time, what else they might’ve seen—and what they’d decided to keep hidden.
CHAPTER 10
I WAS STANDING IN THE hallway outside the kitchen with my cell phone in my hand, debating, when I heard the mechanical hum of my garage door. Nearly thirty hours after Ruby had left to go meet with her lawyer. Enough time for me to research local business parks and pull up Blair Bowman’s information, debating whether to make that call—or whether to call the police, report my car missing.
I opened the front door and stood in the entryway, staring at Ruby in my driveway, watching as she rifled through the trunk. She didn’t even look my way until she was halfway up the steps, in a different outfit than when she left. She pushed through the doorway, two tote bags full of groceries on one arm.
“Hi!” she said, bags extended in my direction. “Hold on, there are more.” Nothing about being gone, being missing. The new clothes, the lack
of contact.
She turned down the steps, gathering the last of the bags, closing the trunk with a resounding thud. Half the street probably heard, heading for their front windows.
Ruby strode past me in the entrance with the three remaining bags. She waltzed into the kitchen, humming as she emptied the groceries. The tote bags were my own, stored in my trunk, now brimming with the staples of my kitchen.
“Ruby,” I said, unmoving at the entrance.
She paused, turned around, lips pressed together when she took in my face. “You’re mad,” she said, her posture deflating.
“Of course I’m mad,” I said, not bothering to worry about the level of my voice, whether anyone could hear. “You were gone for two days with my car! I was”—furious, worried— “I was this close to calling the police.”
I heard the echo of my mother in my head, following Kellen into the house after one of the many times he’d disappeared for a night, a weekend, or more. The nights my parents had spent arguing over whether to call the police or his friends. Whether to lock him out or lock him in. Over who had abandoned him and who had enabled him. The relief evident on her face at his return, even as her voice rose in anger—
Ruby blinked rapidly. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I know, I wasn’t thinking. I just…” She lifted her arms, closed her eyes, feigning contrite. “I got carried away. I wanted to call, but I didn’t know your number. Not by heart. It used to be in my phone, you know.” She fished around in her messenger bag, pulled out her cell. “Here,” she said. “Tell me your number.”
I recited the numbers by rote, and my phone began ringing in my back pocket. She pressed “end.” “Now we’re connected,” she said. “It won’t happen again.” As if the fault had been out of her hands until now.
“Where have you been?” I asked, because it was my car, my house, and Charlotte was right. I didn’t owe Ruby unfettered access to my life.
She let out a sigh. “It was late by the time we finished up, and we’d been drinking over dinner, and I just thought… I should stay. Last thing I need is to get pulled over now, right?” Eyes wide, like she was sharing a secret. “I would’ve called you if I had your number, I swear! And then I wanted to make it up to you by getting the groceries, since you mentioned needing to go shopping. I found these bags in the trunk. Very resourceful. Very conscientious.” A grin. “And I’m making you dinner,” she said, a tentative smile. “To make it up to you. And to thank you. For everything.” She blinked once, slowly. “Forgive me?”
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