Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(43)

It illuminated my path until I approached my front steps, where I’d left the porch light on for my return. I tried to unlock the front door, but the key didn’t turn—it was already unlocked. Had I forgotten to lock up after myself when I’d left? With the late hour and all that had happened, I couldn’t be sure.

Stepping through the front door, I almost slipped. Under my sneaker, a paper had been left in the center of the entryway, folded on the hardwood floor of the foyer.

The room buzzed, and I remained perfectly still, listening to the silence of the house. Someone had been inside.

Maybe someone still was.

My shoulders tensed and I held my breath, trying to hear the sound of an intruder, but all I could hear was my own heartbeat, the pounding inside my own skull steadily increasing. I felt the adrenaline coursing through me—fight or flight; stay or run.

I flipped the lights on, thinking this would set someone fleeing, but nothing happened. A clatter as the ice maker dropped newly formed ice in the freezer, and I jumped, hand to heart.

I stepped silently around the paper on the floor and continued deeper into the house, flicking on each downstairs light as I passed. A rustling upstairs, and I paused at the base of the steps. I could feel my pulse in my fingers, gripped to the banister, as I listened. Ruby, probably, turning over in bed.

I took the steps slowly, cautiously, my senses on high alert, until I stood in the entrance of Ruby’s darkened room. The light from the hall stretched across the carpeting, and I saw her facedown on the bed, her legs moving in some restless dream.

Feeling more secure, I checked every corner of this house, assuring myself that we were alone. Checking each lock, closing the curtains.

All the while, thinking of Ruby sleeping upstairs with the knife under her bed. The blasé way I’d walked outside, unsure whether I’d left this house unsafe, unguarded, when everyone knew I was on watch tonight.

How sure I had been when I’d told Ruby that no one would be out there tonight.

How wrong I had been. How unquiet our street truly was.

Heart still racing, I picked up the paper left behind in the foyer, and a photo slipped out once more.

It was a printout of the same image, of that dog-bone key chain. But the frame had been pulled farther out, everything else gaining context: a person running down the sloped wooded path toward the lake—the water nothing more than a darkness stretching into the distance.

A black line obstructed the left side of the frame, and it took me a moment to make it out.

A black iron bar, surrounding the pool.

The photo had been taken from a distance. But not from the security camera of someone’s house. It had been snapped from the corner of the pool, from inside the fence. Where Mac had stood the other day, beckoning me closer.

The image was black and white, taken in the dark, but I could make out different details this time. Jean shorts and pale legs and sneakers, the Nike swoosh reflecting in the moonlight.

Details that could be identifiable.

A scene that someone had silently watched, standing at the edge of the pool deck.

I unfolded the paper it had arrived inside. Two words typed in black ink. A simple, stark message: WE KNOW.





THURSDAY, JULY 4





HOLLOW’S EDGE COMMUNITY PAGE

Subject: Are we really doing this??

Posted: 9:20 a.m.

Margo Wellman: I’m sorry, but this party just seems like a really bad idea right now.

Javier Cora: We’re all going to be together. What’s the problem?

Margo Wellman: Yeah, drinking.

Preston Seaver: I will not let my life be ruled be fear.

Charlotte Brock: Look, come or don’t. No one’s telling you what to do. But you can’t stop people from going to the pool they all pay for with their dues just because you don’t think it’s a good idea.



* * *



Subject: Heard something…

Posted: 10:13 a.m.

Tate Cora:… outside last night. Woke me up around 2:45. Just went through my security footage, but there’s nothing on the camera. Harper, did you see anything??

Harper Nash: Nothing out of the ordinary last night.





CHAPTER 14


I HADN’T GONE OUT AGAIN. Not since arriving home to realize someone had been inside. I’d remained in my room, behind a secondary locked door, knowing that neither could truly keep me safe.

I stared at Tate’s note on the message board again, then slammed the laptop shut as Ruby appeared, coming down the staircase. Her steps slowed when she saw me, sitting at the kitchen table. “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Just tired,” I said, the image from the photo that had been left in the foyer last night seared into the back of my mind. Someone had gotten into my house while I was out, and I hadn’t slept, and now there was this: a collision between a party that no one would cancel and the sudden return of Ruby Fletcher, fear and paranoia commingling at critical levels.

“Well?” she asked, pouring herself a coffee from the pot on the counter. “Was I right?”

I shook my head, not processing.

“About last night,” she continued, taking the seat across from me. “Run into anyone else out there? We can compare your notes to my guesses.”

She felt so close. My eyes drifted to her lips on the edge of the coffee mug as she took her first sip. Trying to remember that day in the courtroom. Thank you. Fuck you.