‘I probably should get going,’ Ruby says quickly, her discomfort refusing to leave her alone this time. ‘It’s getting late, and I have to be somewhere.’
‘You keep running away on me,’ Tom says, frowning as she stands up from the table. ‘Can I at least have your number and take you out for a proper meal next time?’
‘I …’ Ruby does not know how to respond. Feeling, suddenly, that she has been backed into a corner and has been the one, foolishly, to put herself there. She is trying to come up with a response that won’t embarrass either of them when Tom stands up too, comes to her side of the table. Before she has time to register what is happening, he reaches out, pulls her toward him. She thinks he is offering a farewell hug, but instead his hands go to her face, and his sour-wine lips push down hard against hers.
‘Sorry, I couldn’t resist,’ Tom says when he pulls away from the kiss. ‘I have been wanting to do that all afternoon.’
Ruby feels as if she is going to burst into tears.
‘I really have to go,’ she says, trying to hide the quiver in her voice. ‘Thank you for … for the wine, Tom.’
(We placate, we soothe. Anything to get ourselves out of there.)
If he senses defeat, Tom’s smile doesn’t falter.
‘I’ll give you some time to change your mind on that date, Ruby’—it is only now that his smile turns to a slight frown—‘and, until then, be careful around here. Like I said to you before, it’s not the safest place for a woman on her own. Shake your head at me all you like. But what on earth were you doing in the park that morning? When you found the dead girl? She was out here, taking her pictures. But you have no excuse, when there are a thousand other places to go for a run.’
‘I misjudged the weather,’ Ruby responds after a time, no other answer possible. ‘And I guess I thought you could never really be alone in New York City.’
‘Indeed,’ Tom’s eyes flick to the other diners at the cafe, and then back to her. ‘Just promise me you’ll be more careful from now on.’
‘Thank you, Tom. I appreciate your concern,’ she manages to reply, before they finally, mercifully, part ways.
Ruby retreats along the river, knowing, without looking back, that Tom’s eyes stay on her as she goes. She has a fleeting thought, not unlike the one she had the day of her police interview, when she passed the young man at the front desk of her apartment building and felt him watching her, that Tom might know where she lives, might follow her all the way up to her room if he could. This makes her so uneasy that she breaks into a run and does not stop until she is streets away from the park, streets away from him, those tears she has been holding back now spilling over.
What was it she had thought when she first sat down with him today?
This is what happens when you don’t trust anybody, least of all yourself.
Is it possible, she wonders, her chest heaving, and her legs shaking, that she has gone the wrong way, yet again?
It is a thought she decides to follow no further, as she turns and heads for home.
The night of Ruby’s accidental date with Tom, a message comes through from Lennie: Josh finally told me what happened. He’s a dumb ass, but it’s not entirely what you think. Text me back. I miss you xoxo
Another text comes in from Sue: I’ve left you a dozen messages, Ruby. Call me back, please.
And from Josh, not long after: I know you’re mad at me. I would really like the chance to explain things. In the meantime, I found something you might be interested in …
He sends her Noah’s address. Reduces the map of New York to one pulsing dot.
It’s as if I have been waiting for this all along.
When Ruby shows up at Noah’s door, he is not entirely surprised. He had been expecting something like this. That someone with a connection to me would eventually seek him out. Still, to meet the woman who found my body is its own shock; he assumed it would be someone from my past. As he shakes Ruby’s hand, invites her in, he resolves to never ask her anything but the barest details about that morning. It is the one thing he won’t ever want to know.
He offers Ruby tea, coffee, whiskey, and she is tempted to go for the latter, though it is only 9 a.m. Noah sees the gleam in her eye, and decides, immediately, that he likes this Australian woman; anyone unfazed by the idea of liquor at this hour is okay by him. Franklin also gives his seal of approval, nosing at Ruby’s hand when she sits down, asking for a scratch. He looks for me still, the old mutt, and he finds me sometimes, too. But this morning I remain at a careful distance, anxious for this meeting to go well. For Ruby, yes. But for Noah, too, who is just as lonely as she is. My New York bookends, the man who let me stay with him, and the woman who stayed with me.
They talk a little about themselves, and then Ruby takes a deep breath, asks the question she has carried around since that morning by the river.
‘What was Alice like, Noah?’
He stares at Ruby for the longest time, knowing how important his answer will be. When he finally speaks, his voice has an uncharacteristic tremble.
‘Alice was rough around the edges. Uneducated, yet the smartest young woman I’ve known. She absorbed information like a sponge, and then she dripped what she learned all over the floor. She was beautiful, yes, but far too quick for loveliness. There was nothing lovely about her. She was raw and unfinished, and though it turns out no one had ever really let her be a child, she still behaved like one at times. Being around her was amusing and exasperating and, occasionally, illuminating. She was very easy to love.’
(I was? I have never before considered this.)
He tells Ruby so many stories, all the things he paid attention to. He talks about my mother, and my birthdays. About my growing love of photography, and how I treasured an old Leica. He’s now certain I stole that camera from that ‘no-good teacher’, the man I had told him about, but only just (I should have known Noah would comprehend what really went on between Mr Jackson and me). He says I loved the Chrysler Building with a passion, that I often sounded like an unpolished Joan Didion when I described New York, and that when he first saw me, I looked for all the world like the homeless waif I was. He even cries a little when he talks about the last time he saw me, how I was annoying him before bed, clunking around on the piano, restless in a way he should have noticed. More than anything, he wishes he had kept me up late, pushed harder to uncover my secrets.
‘If I had known …’
Noah trails off and Ruby, thick with everything she has been told today, reaches for his hand. When he doesn’t pull back, she squeezes her fingers around his.
‘How could anyone know,’ she says softly, and when she asks him if it would be okay for her to visit again sometime soon, he says yes.
It isn’t until much later that afternoon, as Ruby sits on her bed channel-surfing, and thinking about everything Noah told her, that something Tom said yesterday comes back to her.
She was out here, taking her pictures.
Ruby sits up, pushes her fingertips together, brings her hands to her mouth. Noah said something about a Leica, didn’t he? Amongst all those other startling, beautiful stories. She concentrates hard, hears Noah saying Alice loved her old camera and had planned to enrol in a photography school, so she could keep taking pictures of her beloved New York. Was this common knowledge, something already out there? In all the articles and forums and news bulletins she has scoured since the murder, Ruby can’t recall coming across anything about a camera. Turning off the TV, she opens her laptop, googles my name for the thousandth time. She finds no mention of a camera or photography or pictures in any of the news stories. Next, Ruby returns to her favourite sleuthing websites, scans post after post for discussions around why Alice Lee was out there by herself that morning in Riverside Park. Perhaps Tom has been here on these forums, too. Indulging his fascination with the dead girl from his neighbourhood, and that’s where he picked up such a specific piece of information. Clicking through the scores of entries,
Ruby encounters the usual theories—prostitution, sleeping rough, online dating gone wrong—but once again, no mention of anything to do with Alice Lee taking pictures in the park.
A girl was murdered here.
Ruby’s heart begins to hammer.
She tries to pull other sentences to the surface. Thinks hard about Tom’s questioning of her, sees a flash of him snapping when that jogger came too close. It’s nothing, it has to be nothing. That kiss clearly unsettled her, and she’s been spending too much time on those damn forums, finding tenuous connections, potential matches—Snap!—where there are none. It’s just because she’s lonely again. Trying to fill up the absence of Death Club any way she can.
Still. A thought comes creeping in, persists. What if it’s no accident that she and Tom crossed paths again this week? If Ruby had gone back to that rocky beach a week ago, or a week before that, would she have found this man already there, looking out over the water, just as she herself had done that morning? What if Tom had been there well before she came along, and she was simply the one to discover the damage he’d left behind?
What if. What if. What if.
What if Tom was always there, in that nice spot by the river, waiting to see what happened next.
She won’t ever think of her foot cracking down on something round and black, the shattering of the plastic lens cap I lost when I was making my way down to the river, with the Leica tucked under my jacket to protect it from the rain. In my haste, I never even noticed when the cap dislodged and fell to the ground.
With so much that has happened since that morning, Ruby has long forgotten her prayer to the god of lost things. Which means she’ll never realise I accidentally told her about the camera, right from the beginning.
No matter.
She has a bigger realisation waiting for her. She really is almost there.
TWENTY-TWO
WHEN RUBY IS BUZZED UP TO SUE’S APARTMENT, LENNIE IS already seated in the kitchen chopping vegetables, sharp metal perilously close to her fingertips each time she brings down the blade.
‘Don’t disappear on us again,’ Sue had gently scolded when she opened the door, but Lennie is less subtle when Ruby walks into the room.
‘Where the fuck did you go, Ruby?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ruby says, feeling her eyes start to water. ‘I had some things to figure out on my own.’
The two women had responded to her SOS text within minutes; before she knew it, she was on her way to their Brooklyn apartment building for the first time, comfort and a home-cooked meal beckoning.
Something weird has happened. I need to talk to you both.
That was the message Ruby had sent, after going over Tom’s comments again and again. Feeling as if she might go crazy in her small room, she had reached out with her heart in her throat. To find Sue and Lennie still open to her was a relief, cool air rushing into a stifling room.
Taking a seat next to Lennie now, Ruby watches as Sue silently adjusts Lennie’s grip on the knife handle before returning to her own chopping and dicing. The casual intimacy of this gesture is maternal, beautiful, though neither of her friends seem to give it a second thought. Ruby stares into the wine glass Sue had ready and waiting for her when she walked into the room. Thinking that perhaps the best friendships are like this. Quiet and certain. She wonders at how long it’s taken for her to contemplate this notion. That being seen and known is better for you than being someone’s enduring mystery.
I don’t understand you sometimes! Ruby would need more fingers and toes to count the many times Ash has directed this sentiment at her.
She opens her mouth, wonders where to start with her story about Tom, when Lennie turns to face her.
‘So. Josh. You talked to him yet?’
It is almost a relief to push Tom to the back of her mind, even for a minute, and focus on something she might actually have the words for.
‘There is something I never told you about why I came to New York,’ Ruby says nervously, as Sue stops her chopping and dicing. Lennie is already demonstrably holding her breath.
‘I left because I was having an affair. With a guy—Ash—who’s getting married later this year. I’ve been the other woman for so long, and it’s horrible to wait for a person to choose you, and when Josh said he was still married, I saw all of that starting over again …’
The rest comes out in a rush, the heartache and embarrassment and loneliness that followed her from Melbourne to New York, and before she can stop herself, Ruby is crying, causing Lennie to jump up from her chair, wrap her in a fierce hug.
‘It all makes sense now,’ Lennie says, her own voice cracking. ‘I knew something was up with you! I just wish you’d told us sooner.’ ‘Agreed,’ Sue adds, massaging her fingers through her cropped hair, a gesture Ruby now recognises as an attempt to gather her thoughts before speaking.
‘I’m very glad you told us, Ruby. And you’ll get no judgement from me on how or who you choose to love.
‘As for Josh,’ she continues, ‘you should know it’s not the same situation. He’s been separated for a while now. I tell him all the time to hurry up with the divorce papers, but he’s such a procrastinator when it comes to his personal life. We had hoped’—Sue looks at Lennie, who nods emphatically—‘that you might be a catalyst for him to finally get moving in a new direction. You’re basically all he talks about.’
Ruby blinks at this information, tries to absorb it. There have been so many revelations coming at her these past two days, she can hardly keep up. It hasn’t even been that long since she found out my name and now—
Alice Lee pops into her head with a startling clarity and Ruby stops, remembers why she came here tonight. She takes a long swig of wine, shakes Josh off for the time being.
‘Thank you for that. I think. But … there was something else I wanted to talk to you both about, actually. Something happened yesterday.’
Taking it slow, Ruby tells Lennie and Sue about meeting Tom. About how he showed up at the exact place she found my body, and how charming he was at first, before he kept trying to turn the conversation back to the murder, even when she made it clear she didn’t want to talk about it.
As Ruby goes over their encounters, she thinks of Detective O’Byrne, and the last time she had tried to explain what happened down by the river. How he’d said it can take time to remember details ‘better’, especially the important ones. She is conscious of getting the details she does remember about Tom in the right order, wants to give her friends the clearest account she can. Still, she pauses over Tom’s comment about ‘pictures’. Struggles to describe that particular detail, and all that came after it. The unwanted kiss, and Josh’s message. Meeting Noah. The gift of his stories about Alice. She knows that each beat of the story is bursting with significance, but what if she’s reading the signs all wrong? When was the last time she knew something to be completely true?
Ruby suddenly sees Josh holding out his phone like a bunch of flowers, my smiling face filling the screen.
Taking a deep breath, she carries on, finally able to admit just how uncomfortable Tom made her feel, the way he kept pushing himself on her, and onto me, too.
‘There’s something this guy seems to know that he shouldn’t,’ she adds, arriving now at the place she started, coming up the stairs to Sue’s apartment tonight, her confusion held out in front of her, and her fear, too, that her friends might shut the door in her face. She feels exhausted to have come this far, and from the looks on Lennie and Sue’s faces as she finishes her story, they are right there with her.
‘Oh my God, Ruby. Do you really think …’
But for once, Lennie is lost for words and she trails off, looking to Sue for help. The older woman is silent, thoughtful, as she refills each of their wine glasses almost to the rim. If Ruby didn’t know better, she’d swear Sue’s hand is shaking.
‘That man, whoever he was, had no right to make you feel that way, Ruby.’
Sue is ind
eed trembling, though not from fear. From rage.
‘And Alice, that poor, poor girl. She was basically the same age as my Lisa. What happened to her makes me so mad. The entitlement of these fucking men who destroy lives, just because they can.’
‘I’ve never, ever heard you swear—’ Lennie starts, then stops. ‘You’re right. It makes me fucking mad, too. And scared.’
Wine slops over Lennie’s glass, she watches it spill onto the table, before she turns back to Ruby, her dark eyes wide.
‘Do you really think he could have done it? This Tom guy.’
Still, Ruby doesn’t know for sure. How could she. Reading true crime threads and wandering around the internet with her imaginary magnifying glass could never prepare her for this. Not even seeing the machinery of a murder investigation up close, those forensic investigators, Jennings, her clumsy interview with O’Byrne, could give her the tools she needs to determine Tom’s motives down at the river yesterday, or any of the days before. How do you crawl into the mind of a murderer, and would it look any different from that of any other man, when you got down to it?
‘For all I know,’ Ruby answers slowly, ‘Tom is a great guy. Just a little forward. And a bit weird about Alice. That’s not enough to make him a murderer.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Sue responds. ‘And so what I’d like to ask you is this. Something we don’t ask ourselves enough. Do you trust your instinct, Ruby?’
The question feels as large as the room, and all three women pause to consider it. Thinking about the nights they’ve crossed the road to avoid a parked car with its lights still on or pretended to make a phone call when someone walks too close behind them. Remembering the times they have shifted seats on public transport, or said no, thank you, to that offer of a drink. Self-preservation as a replacement for instinct, because being right would be the real danger here.
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