Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(26)
* * *
AFTER MAC LEFT, I flipped all the outside lights on, made sure the blinds and curtains were closed. And then I spent the next hour reconnecting that old camera over the front porch, the one Ruby had mentioned. It was basically an old webcam, something Aidan originally placed over the door when word first went around about packages going missing before the holiday. Once I got it working, I could access the feed and watch the livestream, but I didn’t have a service set up to record.
Ruby still wasn’t home—if not for the cash left behind in the bathroom, I would’ve thought she’d taken off with my car and this was my punishment.
Upstairs, I stuffed the image and the note in the bottom of my pajama drawer. Close by yet hidden.
As midnight approached, I left my laptop open in my bedroom, screen beside my bed, so I could see who might come by. Who might’ve left this photo. Who might still be watching. Listening to the noises of the night behind the safety of closed walls and locked doors. The sounds of the lake in the distance—a steady buzzing, a rising hum—drowned out anything softer, closer. I would hear no careful footsteps, no quiet struggle.
I watched until I fell asleep, my dreams fitful and dark. I kept jerking awake, wondering what had woken me. Pressing a button on the laptop until the screen came into focus again, watching the shadows of the grainy footage. Wondering whether it had been Mac walking by. Ruby coming home.
Or someone else.
TUESDAY, JULY 2
HOLLOW’S EDGE COMMUNITY PAGE
Subject: Neighborhood Watch Schedule Posted: 8:24 a.m.
Charlotte Brock: Just posting the final schedule for the upcoming week from the meeting last night. If you can’t make your shift, please find a replacement and update it here so we know who to expect. P.S. Thanks to Mac Seaver for taking the first shift last night.
JULY 2—Tate & Javier Cora JULY 3—Harper Nash
JULY 4—Margo & Paul Wellman JULY 5—Tina Monahan
JULY 6—Charlotte Brock JULY 7—Preston Seaver
CHAPTER 9
I WOKE CURLED UP ON my side, facing the laptop, with the faint tinge of a hangover, though I’d had only the single beer. My head could get like this sometimes, regardless of the liquor—the stress or adrenaline causing a dull ache, a persistent nausea. It was barely morning, the soft glow of dawn just starting to seep through the cracks in the blinds.
It took me a second to remember what I was doing, why I was so disoriented—waiting for Ruby; watching for whomever had been lurking.
I pushed myself out of bed, steadied myself in the open doorway. “Ruby?” I called, walking toward her room—dark and stale and empty—before heading down the stairs. Still in my pajamas, I opened the front door, even though I knew what I would see: an empty street, the vacant driveway. My car and Ruby still gone.
But the street wasn’t dead, despite the hour. Preston Seaver was heading in the opposite direction, head down, hands in the pockets of his gym shorts, striding toward home. He didn’t notice me on the front porch, didn’t change pace, just continued toward his house on the corner. Probably covering the last part of Mac’s shift from the night before.
Despite the adjusted summer schedule, Mac worked early mornings—earlier than the rest of us, getting a head start on the outdoor work. Last I’d heard, he was overseeing the brickwork being redone across the quad in center campus.
I eased the door shut, running through my options: report the car missing; find that lawyer’s information and contact her about Ruby’s whereabouts; wait.
Maybe Ruby just did not think of others as I thought of her. Maybe she got lost in the freedom of it—fourteen months with no one dictating her schedule, accounting for her every move. Or maybe she was telling me something.
I got rid of her things, and she took my car. Everything a push and pull.
Like she said, someone was going to pay.
* * *
I LOOKED AT THE clock; I was due at Charlotte’s for coffee in fifteen minutes. When I first moved in, I loved the standing coffee dates she would organize at her place. The promise of close friendships and secrets kept. There was something about Charlotte that made you want to open up—it was probably what made her so good at her job as a counselor at the college. Or maybe it was a trick she’d learned in her training. Either way, it was common to be welcomed into Charlotte’s home for coffee only to leave with half your issues addressed, feeling lighter.
All of us were different now. Held tighter to our secrets and our trust.
I left my hair to air-dry—Charlotte would probably be put together, but there was no point in me pretending. When I stepped outside, Javier was sitting on his front porch in a worn gray T-shirt and blue pajama pants. He had a coffee beside him and a cigarette in his hand. I knew he’d supposedly quit years ago and that Tate wouldn’t put up with smoking in the house. I also knew the scent carried through the slats of the back fence some nights, long after she must’ve gone to sleep.
“Morning,” I said, heading down my porch steps. He tipped his cigarette toward me in faint acknowledgment, not speaking. I wondered if Tate was still inside, sleeping.
Javier Cora leaned into summers with conviction, so different from the persona he adopted on school days, with his quirky bow tie and loafers and dark hair tucked behind his ear, as if shrugging on the costume of Favorite Teacher. He would probably be unrecognizable to them with his summer hair, longer and unstyled; a beard he shaved only once a week, if that; the cigarette, a scandal to middle school parents everywhere.