Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(9)

“No, of course not.” I’d gotten rid of her things, and now she sat beside me, still smelling faintly of chlorine, hair damp and tangled, in more of my summer clothes. She didn’t have a credit card, or employment, or a bank account.

She selected one-day rush delivery and passed the laptop my way so I could enter the payment information. “I’m good for it,” she said with a wink. I’d never seen her wink before. It was things like this—quirks I didn’t recognize—that I found most unnerving.

She scooted closer, the cushions sinking between us, so that I felt her brush against my shoulder as she watched me finish placing the order. “Hey,” she said. “Let’s see what they’re saying.”

I froze, my heart in my throat. “You want me to Google your name?” I could only imagine what things might come up—links I’d already clicked, articles I’d read, every one of them already consumed by me in private.

“No,” she said, “I mean here. The message board. What they’re saying here.”

My fingers tingled. That wasn’t any better. Ruby had never been a member of the Hollow’s Edge community page, since she wasn’t an owner herself. Charlotte was the president of the board and had established an arbitrary set of rules that dictated who could be permitted access to the message board—homeowner being the main criteria. She’d decided back then that Ruby was something between an unregistered tenant and a long-term guest.

But I couldn’t deny her now. Not when she was sitting so close, wearing my clothes because she owned nothing of her own. Not when I’d convinced her to stay in—some dark secret I might still be able to contain.

She watched as my fingers flew over the keyboard, typing the URL, my log-in already in place. The page loaded quickly, entries sorted by date. There were no new posts from today. Not a single one.

“It’s not the same anymore,” I told her. “People don’t use it as much.” Then I shut the laptop quickly, before she could scroll down, call me on my bluff.

She let out a sigh as she edged back to her side of the couch. “I’m not sure what I expected,” she said, reaching for another slice of cheese pizza. “Maybe my picture on every security camera on the street.” She smirked, then closed her eyes as she inhaled the scent of greasy pizza. I guessed this was another thing she’d missed. “Did you ever get yours fixed, Harper?”

Once upon a time, I’d had a security camera, too. Angled over the front porch—a deterrent more than anything. But it hadn’t recorded that night. Whatever service Aidan set up had long since expired.

“Never got around to it,” I said. Though the device still sat there, uselessly pointed at empty space. Those cameras, for our safety, they could just as easily be turned against you. The petty infractions they exposed; the relationships they ruined. I wasn’t sure a camera would ever keep me safe when the person convicted had a key.

After we finished eating, I took our plates to the kitchen and tossed the pizza box in the trash can inside the garage, thinking Ruby would be heading to bed soon. Thinking surely she’d be as tired as I was. The sun and the drinks, and who knew how long it had been since she’d last slept.

“Do you need anything before I go to bed?” I asked, turning off the television, hoping she would take the hint.

She shifted positions on the couch, letting Koda settle onto her lap. “I’m good. I’m just—God, it’s so quiet. I’m not used to so much silence.”

But it was only inside the walls that was quiet. Outside, the sounds of the night came alive, things encroaching from the woods and the lake. The crickets chirping and the tiny frogs bellowing, a sound I once mistook for something larger, until a frog had plastered itself to the front window—letting out a call so sharp and close, I’d thought it was a cry for help.

During the investigation, we had established an official neighborhood watch. A self-imposed curfew. The remnants of our fear carried over long after. We locked our doors and the patio gates, we pulled the curtains tight, we slept with a can of Mace beside our beds—or more. We listened to the silence. We whispered. We reimagined the noises we’d heard drifting from our neighbors’ homes. The music at three a.m. The fight. The bang. We stared at the ceilings, slept odd hours, searched through our old camera footage.

Ruby didn’t know, she had come back to someplace different.

“Good night, Harper,” she said when I hadn’t made a move to leave.

“Good night,” I said. I hated to leave her there, but I did. Didn’t want her to think that I didn’t trust her here, that I was afraid.

My room—the master—faced the front, and hers faced the back, a smaller room with a Jack-and-Jill bathroom connecting to the loft, which looked out over the stairway and entrance. Inside my bedroom, I checked my phone one last time. No one else had reached out. I’d expected more calls, more texts, more questions. But the silence said something, too. The nature of my friendships here, too fragile to withstand Ruby’s return.

The thing we learned last year, or maybe the thing we had always known, was that there were two versions of Hollow’s Edge. There was the one on the surface, where we waved to our neighbor, and passed along recommendations, and held the pool gate, smiling.

And then there was the other, simmering underneath.