I closed my eyes, shook my head. Of course it had been Ruby. Of course. “I didn’t say she was a good person,” I said. “But that doesn’t make her a killer.”
Her face turned hard. “My mom said they’re going to retry the case. It has to be Ruby.” Her voice cracked midsentence.
I felt for her then. Even after everything. The things you would do to protect your sibling. The ways you weren’t sure whether you were helping or hurting, but you tried anyway because doing nothing seemed worse.
The little lies we told our parents—No, he wasn’t out—that became like second nature. The way I’d lie awake at night, listening for the sound of him returning home.
A fear that fueled the bigger lies, deep at the heart of a family.
I left her there, in her empty house, all alone. Knowing, one day, she’d have to come face-to-face with who she was—and what she had done.
CHAPTER 24
A WHITE CAR.
According to Molly, there was a white car, off the road, down by the pit.
But it was dark, and the investigators from the state had been going door-to-door, and the arc of a flashlight swept across the sidewalk in the distance, coming closer. It passed Tate and Javier Cora’s house, then paused briefly in front of my own.
I remained perfectly still—a shadow in the dark, looking out. Feeling like Ruby must’ve felt, watching as each person walked by the Truett house, unaware that someone was inside, seeing everything.
His face turned briefly toward the front porch light—Preston—before continuing on, moving slowly down the sidewalk. Maybe he was patrolling again tonight. Maybe he was watching for something. Some threat that he knew was out there but couldn’t find.
I SEE YOU.
Did any of us ever see each other here for what we truly were?
* * *
AS SOON AS HE was out of sight, I left through my back gate, carefully locking up behind me. I kept to the fence line, hearing the nighttime routines of each house I passed, the homes winding down to silence, the drone of the air-conditioning units churning in the night.
When I rounded the corner, the sounds of the outside gained force, the cacophony of the lake growing louder as I darted across the street. The crickets, the call of the frogs—beckoning me closer, into the trees, thick with the promise of something.
Inside the tree line, I was fully disoriented at first. There was no clear path here, just trees and branches and things moving through the underbrush. It was easier on the way back, when you could see the lights from the neighborhood guiding your path.
I closed my eyes, listening to the sounds to orient myself. The water lapped at the shore in front of me, so I headed left, deeper into the trees. It was impossible to get lost—the woods were not that deep here. Eventually, I’d hit either a road or the water. I could feel the breeze coming in off the lake, from my right.
Every few steps, I turned on the light from my phone to guide the way, but I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself, in case other people were out here. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the woods. The moonlight was crisp and clear, and the shadows became more distinct—the shape of trees, of branches, of dense underbrush scratching at my legs.
And then, abruptly, I was out. The trees gave way to nothing. To openness.
I shone my light around the space: a flattened circle of dirt, the ash pit in the center. Little signs that others might’ve been here in the past: cigarette butts where the flame had once been; a bottle of beer at the border of the clearing; drag marks across the dirt, like someone had pulled a boat through the woods.
There was no car that I could see. From where I stood, to the right, was the water—where the kids must’ve been launching their boat. I headed to the left, where the clearing gave way to the dirt access road. The path was narrow and rocky, dipping and swerving with the terrain, not the place for any vehicles. You’d easily lose a tire or worse.
But at the bend of the next corner, I saw it. A flash of metal in the moonlight. Bright white, tucked off the side of the dirt road.
I moved faster until I was almost upon it. Until I knew it was the car I’d seen before. Tinted windows and mud-streaked tires. No plates.
There was no way to know whether this was Ruby’s car, though. To know why Whitney or Molly had assumed it was hers. Or whether Molly was just spinning another story, trying to keep Ruby at the center.
I circled it carefully, as Preston had done when it was parked in the lot at my office. Between the dark and the tinted windows, I couldn’t see inside. I shone my flashlight into the window but could make out only darker shadows.
I braced myself as I tried the handle, ready for a siren that blared through the night, but the passenger door was locked, and no alarm sounded. I tried the other handles, but every door was locked. There was a keypad under the handle of the driver’s door.
Keys couldn’t keep you safe—
I searched on my phone for the make and model of the car, to see if there was a way to reset it. All I discovered, per the car manufacturer, was that a five-digit code would grant me access, but it would also lock me out for good after three attempts, requiring a call to the dealer afterward.
I almost left. I had no proof this car was hers, and no way to get in. But I had three attempts, and I decided to take them.
The first code I tried was Ruby’s birthday. I knew the date by heart, subtracted backward to calculate her birth year, and hoped the locks clicked open.
They didn’t.
What other codes could there be? Knowing Ruby, she’d think she was being clever, subverting all expectations. Not even bothering to try to outwit someone.
I punched in 1-2-3-4-5, because what other options did I have?
Nothing happened.
I was down to the last attempt, but I could think of no other date. Pacing back and forth, I tried to remember her dad’s birthday or anything significant that had happened in her life—and then I froze.
The date she’d written inside the front cover of that journal. 6-28-19.
The date she’d been released from prison. Something meaningful. Not just arbitrarily dating her book but writing down her code.
I held my breath as I tried it now: 62819.
The locks clicked open, cutting through the silence. And I knew, without a doubt, that this car had belonged to her.
She’d parked it at my workplace, knowing we were all on vacation. Moved it after discovering I’d been there and must’ve seen her car.
Molly was right. Ruby had taken my car and gone absolutely nowhere. Taken it for my set of keys. Because she could. Acting like she hadn’t driven in over a year. Acting, always acting.
Like she’d been planning this for so long. Something stirring inside her for fourteen months. Not arriving in her car but by cab. Acting like she needed help, needed me.
She wasn’t back only for that cash or the set of keys she’d left behind. She was planning to dig to the bottom of things by watching us all. To get her revenge.
God, how she must have hated us. Fourteen months for that hatred to take root deep in her heart and grow.
I opened the driver’s door now, and the overhead light turned on, exposing me.
Ruby, the liar. Ruby, the criminal. Ruby, the victim.
I wanted to know which one I was dealing with. Which one was the true Ruby.
There was nothing but a bill of sale in the glove compartment. Candy wrappers and a soda can littered the cupholder, as if a child had been hiding out in here. I moved to the backseat, where a blanket lay over the space between the seat and the floor—like she might’ve slept here or been planning on it.
Or maybe she was just preparing. Always ready to leave. In case the district attorney decided they were ready to retry her. She couldn’t trust that the system would work in her favor, ever again.
I moved the blanket and found what she’d been hiding: a file box, lid on.
The box from my office of Brandon Truett’s personal
effects.
I opened the box and saw all the things I’d stored away: the photo of him and Fiona smiling up at me, on top of a stack of magazines routed to the wrong address. A Visa gift card, removed from the birthday card, wedged into the corner of the frame now.
Tipped on its side was the small box that had been delivered to the office after his death. I turned it over, but Ruby had already torn it open. The edges were mangled, the sides compressed, but the top was folded back on itself.
I pried the cardboard sides apart, looking at what lay within, as a wave of sickness washed over me, heat rising, goose bumps running down my neck.
It was a white box labeled in simple print: carbon monoxide detector.
The picture below the label showed the make and model that had been inside his house. The same model in all our homes.
As if Brandon Truett had placed this order and accidentally clicked his business address for the delivery. As if he’d used the gift card we’d given him, sitting at the desk where he worked, to place this order.
And by the time it arrived, he was dead.
I closed my eyes, trying to take a deep breath, as I finally understood what Ruby had uncovered.
No one had taken the carbon monoxide detector from their house. No one had hidden it or thrown it in the lake after planning their dark and heartless deaths.
More likely, the Truetts had removed it—an incessant beeping that wouldn’t stop, a broken model that needed to be replaced—and the new one had not arrived in time to stop it.
Who had known it was missing? Did that person take advantage of the situation, planning how to kill them, silently, at night, without needing to dispose of the carbon monoxide detector?
Or—
Or…
Had Ruby believed something else.
I heard a noise in the woods, and my head jerked to the side, my heart thundering.
A raccoon scurried across the dirt road in front of the car, disappearing into the brush on the other side.
Was it possible?
I had to see. Had to walk it through to believe, as I knew Ruby must have, that simple, horrible truth: that no one had killed them at all.
* * *
I STARTED RUNNING, THE box with the carbon monoxide detector tucked under my arm—the only thing that mattered anymore. Proof. Proof, if I could make sense of it.
Proof, but I had to see it. I had to be sure.
I raced through the woods, the twigs scratching at my bare legs, my breath catching. Seeing the flicker of lights through the trees in the distance—Hollow’s Edge, leading me back.
What had we done? What had we done?
Had we covered up a tragic accident? Blamed it on Ruby?
Because negatives were harder to prove. Absences, harder to find.
I burst out into the road, not worried about being seen anymore. Not even looking for Preston, or the investigators from the state, or the neighbors who might be watching out their front windows, who might hear my frantic breathing on the other side of the back patios.
There was only one thing that mattered anymore.
That house. What had happened in that house.
I didn’t stop at my backyard, continuing on to the Truetts’ house instead. Opening their back gate, sprinting across their patio, where the dog had been left. Where he might’ve been left all night—
Pushing open the back door and stepping into the living room, where I was hit by a wave of humidity again. Walking to the center of the hallway, looking up. At the discolored circle left behind. Not removed by the killer, but by the Truetts, days earlier: an incessant beeping that wouldn’t stop, a malfunction that needed to be replaced—
Stopping at the garage door at the base of the stairs that had been left ajar. Fiona’s car keys in the ignition, which had been hanging beside the garage door.
Fiona leaving in the car, Brandon trying to get her to stop, closing the garage door—
A fight. The bang of her car door, picked up on the Brocks’ footage, as she followed him back inside, just for a second—
Please, just let’s talk about this…
An argument that had trailed into the kitchen, up the stairs, not realizing what they had forgotten.
I followed them now—the ghosts of them—up the steps to the front master bedroom. Over the garage.
Imagining them succumbing to exhaustion, emotionally spent, not thinking. Or succumbing to something else. A slow but heavy fatigue setting in.
I stared into the empty room from the same spot I’d stood long ago, where they were both found—not in separate rooms, as Ruby had promised us—but together.
I took a slow, wavering breath in, my throat hitching from the memory—and heard it.
A creak at the base of the stairs, shattering the stillness.
My shoulders tensed, everything on high alert.
Another step, and then I was sure: I was not alone.
TUESDAY, JULY 9
HOLLOW’S EDGE COMMUNITY PAGE
Subject: Did anyone else hear that??
Posted: 12:13 a.m.
Margo Wellman: Was that a fucking GUNSHOT?!?
CHAPTER 25
I HAD THE BOX WITH the carbon monoxide detector tucked under one arm, and I fumbled for the phone in my back pocket.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice called from the bottom of the stairs. “Is someone in here?”
“Charlotte?” I called back, heading for the stairs.
She was all in shadow, standing on the second step from the bottom. “Oh my God,” she said, stepping back, laughing slightly to herself. “You scared me to death. What are you doing in here, Harper?”
I descended the steps, though she still had a grip on the railing, like she needed it to orient herself in the dark.
“I found something,” I said, arm tight around the box. Proof. Proof that Ruby was innocent.
“In here?” she asked. “Did you break in here? I heard something, and the back door…”
I looked down the hall, where the back door was fully ajar. “No,” I said. “Ruby did.”
Charlotte scoffed. “Of course she did.” Even in the dark, I could see her hair moving over her shoulders as she shook her head. “And what’s that, Harper?” She pointed to the box under my arm. But there were things I had to explain to her first. Things I had to know.
“Can we just… can we get out of here? Go back to my place?” It was so hot, and I couldn’t breathe inside this house, and I couldn’t read the expression on her face.
I reached around her, to unlock the front door, to get out—but her hand circled my wrist, stopping me. There was barely any force behind it, but the intent was clear.
“You’re trespassing, Harper,” she said in that calm, unwavering voice. “Tell me now what it is you found.”
Even in the heat, I felt entirely cold. This was my neighbor, and I’d known her forever. Had been in her house, taken her advice, accepted her help—
But right now she was a stranger to me.
“I found Ruby’s car,” I said. Something true, something innocuous, that would get us both out of this house. I wished for the cameras out front. For the perception of safety, the threat of being watched. “I can show you.”
But Charlotte didn’t move, and she didn’t release her grip on my wrist. Her fingers felt cold against my skin in the oppressive heat of this house.
“She had a car?” she said. “God, she really had us all fooled. She really was a terrible person, Harper.” Just like I’d said to her at the party. Charlotte’s grip loosened, and I pulled my arm back. But she still stood between me and the front door and made no indication to leave.
“She didn’t do it,” I said, taking a step back. There was another door, another way out—
“She did. And she’s dead now. It’s time for us all to move on, to heal.”
My neighbor who was the voice of reason, who was in complete control, calm and efficient, who said, I think it’s best to ignore Ruby.
<
br /> “Harper, stop,” she said. Only then did I notice I’d been backing slowly down the hall and that she’d been matching me, stride for stride.
“Listen,” I said, hand held up to keep her back, though I didn’t know what I feared her doing to me. We were the same size. We were not violent people here. We ignored confrontations, performed them in thinly veiled comments instead. “I know Whitney was out there the night the Truetts died. She was in my house that night, too. I thought it was Ruby, but it wasn’t. Whitney was in my house.”
I heard only her sharp intake of breath in the silence. “Do you have any proof?” she asked. But I was chilled, wondering why she wanted to know. What she was after. The threat of proof could keep me safe. Safe, until she found it for herself.
“You knew,” I said. “You thought it was Whitney, too.” Mr. Monahan had told her she was out that night—
Charlotte stepped closer, lowered her voice like there were people listening even now. “You would do the same,” she said. “One day, when you have children of your own, you’ll understand.”
“Did you ask her, Charlotte?” I said, my voice rising with the horror of it. “Did you even ask her?”
“Sometime, when they’re teenagers, you lose them,” she said, like she was back in her typical role, giving advice. “They go quiet, and you just have to pay attention, have to anticipate their needs.”
My God, everyone here, not talking to each other. Not asking each other directly. And look what we had become. Look what we had created.
“Whitney didn’t do anything,” I said. “She was out at a party on the lake. Ruby heard them down there.” Someone else was out there, she’d promised, to anyone who would hear. “Whitney came to our house after because Ruby told her she would always be welcome there. But Ruby wasn’t there.” That tight time line we’d traced of Ruby’s path. Like she’d gone down there only to dispose of evidence before heading right back.
I wasn’t sure whether Whitney needed help that night; whether she wanted to talk to someone; whether she just wanted to wash away the evidence of a night out before returning home. It was all forgotten the next morning when we discovered what had happened.
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