Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(4)

Ruby closed her eyes briefly, took a slow breath in. I wondered if she had learned this during her time behind bars. It was not at all how Ruby Fletcher used to handle disappointment.

“Did Mac come by for anything?”

God, I didn’t know what she was asking. Everything she said was laced with something else.

“I can take you to the store. For anything you need,” I said. I could buy her new clothes, new toiletries. I could offer to put her up in a hotel, hand her some cash, wish her well. Wish I’d never see her again.

But she flicked her fingers at the air between us. “Later.” She bent and picked up her bag—her empty bag—and returned up the steps.

It occurred to me that I might be witnessing a crime against my property. That she was going to rob me, and I was going to be complicit in it, as it was so easy to grow complicit to the desires of Ruby Fletcher.



* * *



WE DIDN’T ALWAYS LIVE together. The situation was unspoken but understood, I thought, to be both brief and temporary. After Aidan moved out of my place, after Ruby’s dad retired and sold their house, it was a momentary necessity—a period of time when we both needed a pause, needed to grasp our bearings, figure things out. Decide what we wanted next.

But she didn’t leave, and I didn’t ask her to. It seemed that what we both wanted was for her to stay. We had developed an allegiance of convenience, if only for someone to feed the cat.

I’d grown accustomed to the solitude since she’d been gone. I’d grown to value my independence and my privacy, on my own for the first time since college. Knowing that everything here belonged to me.

When she came downstairs wearing my clothes—the maroon tie of a bathing suit top visible under my black tank dress—I didn’t have much of a position to argue from, after getting rid of her things. She was taller, and now slimmer, than I, but our clothes were the same general size.

Koda followed her down, weaving between her feet, the traitor. She had been Aidan’s cat first, was firmly antisocial, and seemed to spurn attention from all humans except Ruby.

Ruby gathered her hair into a short ponytail, one of my elastics on her wrist. “Do you have an extra pair of sunglasses?” she asked.

I blinked at her. This was like watching a car crash in slow motion. “What are you doing?” I asked.

In answer, she opened the drawer of the entryway table—the same place we’d always kept the keys—the same place Ruby had also kept the Truetts’ key, when she walked their dog. For a brief second’s pause, I thought she was looking for it, but then she grabbed the electronic pool badge that granted us entrance through the black iron gates. “Going to the pool. Aren’t you?”

“Ruby,” I said in warning.

Lips pressed together, she waited for me to continue.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea right now,” I said. She had to know it. Of course she knew it.

She turned her face away, but not before I caught what I thought was the glimmer of a smile. “I’m ripping off the Band-Aid,” she explained as she opened the front door. But that wasn’t quite right. Prison had softened her metaphors. She was flirting with an inferno. She was dousing a gaping wound in vinegar.

She walked out barefoot, front door left ajar—an offering that I had no intention of taking. Not in broad daylight. Not on this street. Not in this neighborhood.

It was bad enough she was here, in my house.

But I stepped out onto the front porch, watching her walk past the front of the Truett house without a glance toward the empty porch, the darkened windows. No hesitation or change in her stride as she passed the house she’d once allegedly let herself inside in the middle of the night, let the dog out, started the old Honda in the garage, and left the interior door to the house ajar, so that Brandon and Fiona Truett died silently of carbon monoxide poisoning in the night.

My house was situated at the center of the court, six homes around the half-moon edge, a wide-open circle of pavement with a grassy knoll in the middle, with a scattering of trees that blocked the view of the lake in the summer but not the winter.

The pool was on the main neighborhood road, bordered by the woods and overlooking the lake, and from a certain vantage point, with a generous frame of mind, it could pass for an infinity pool.

As Ruby strode by each house, I imagined the security cameras catching her. Watching her. Recording her in jolts of time that could be pieced together later to track her every movement. The Brock house, whose video feed had picked up a noise that night. The house on the corner, belonging to the Seaver brothers, whose doorbell camera had caught the hooded figure striding past, and who had plenty to share about Ruby Fletcher besides.

Ruby was out of sight now, probably passing the Wellman house, whose camera had identified Ruby sprinting into the woods, toward the lake.

I was listening hard to the silence when I sensed movement from the corner of my eye.

Tate was standing at the entrance of her garage next door, half in, half out, arms crossed over her abdomen. Our separate houses were only a few yards from being townhomes with shared walls. We were practically side by side. I felt her staring at the side of my face.

“I didn’t know she was coming,” I said.

“How long is she staying?” Tate asked.

I thought of the empty bag in my house. “Not sure yet.”