From the angle, only one thing was clearly visible—something small and shiny, protruding from the bottom of the closed fist. A key chain in the shape of a dog bone. Metallic, I knew. Something that got hot in the sun, cold in the winter.
A gift from the Truetts when Ruby was a teenager starting a dog-walking business. It had once been kept in our entryway drawer but had long since disappeared.
The police had been looking for this. The front door of the Truett home had been unlocked that morning. As if someone had snuck inside with a key. They never found it.
But someone else had seen this. Had captured it on camera and kept the proof for themselves.
Until now.
CHAPTER 8
FOOTSTEPS TRAIPSED UP THE front porch stairs—too heavy to be Ruby’s—and the image of the key chain trembled in my hand. I scrambled from my spot on the floor and flipped on the porch light in a rush before throwing the front door open. Mac stood there, mouth agape, hands held up in surprise.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, even as I was sliding the photo and note into the back pocket of my shorts.
“You said she was gone,” he said with half a smile. “We haven’t gotten a chance to talk.” He slipped inside, stepping around me and scanning the open front area.
I closed the door behind him, realizing he was planning to stay. “Well, she’s not here right this second. But she’ll be back. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be on watch?”
He paused to look at me from the corner of his eye. “She’s not here, Harper. What the hell do you think I’m watching for? Nothing’s gonna happen right now, you know that.”
It wasn’t Ruby I was worried about now. It was the knife she kept under her mattress for protection. And the note and photo of missing evidence that had been wedged into my door while I was at the pool meeting with everyone else.
My mind went straight to Chase. I tried to remember who had left before I had. Who had arrived after. Who would’ve had the chance to leave this here without me noticing.
But then Mac’s arm was at my waist, and he was guiding me toward my own kitchen. “Come on, you look like you could use a drink,” he said. All of us in Hollow’s Edge moved around each other’s homes with ease, each model so familiar that you felt at home even when you weren’t.
I felt my shoulders relaxing. I’d been running on high alert since Ruby’s return, feeling like I was two steps behind, trying to keep everything under control. I needed to relax. Make sound decisions. Think things through.
There was something contagious in Mac’s demeanor—something I lacked on my own—an ability to live in the moment, never looking too far ahead or too far back.
Once we were in the kitchen, Mac stepped to the side of the fridge, deferring to me, which I had come to appreciate as part of his allure. I opened the fridge and pulled out two beers, held one to the back of my neck for a moment while handing him the other.
“You all right there, kid?” he asked, twisting the top off his beer, tossing the cap on the kitchen table.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. “You scared me.”
“Everyone’s so jumpy right now. She’s just a person. One person. I asked Charlotte, you really think she’d do anything now that she’s out?” He shook his head, leaned against the counter beside me, waiting for me to take a drink. He held his bottle out until I clanked mine against his.
I knew exactly how this would go, and there was a comfort in the simplicity, in seeing the steps laid out before me, predictable and dependable. It had been much the same the first time.
He’d come over after Ruby’s trial, looking lost, like he couldn’t believe what had happened and didn’t know what had brought him to my door, except that maybe I was someone who might understand. I was someone who had seen the other side of Ruby, who was willing to speak in her defense. That day, like now, Mac kept staring deep into the heart of the house, like it was all some trick and Ruby would arrive from around the corner of the living room at any moment. I’d offered him a beer then. She called me, he’d said, his voice cracking with emotion. It was an automated message, a call from… He’d let the thought trail.
Did you take it? I’d asked, picturing Ruby standing against a cinder-block wall, one hand over her other ear.
He shook his head and looked up at me. Did I do the right thing? he’d asked. And I got it suddenly. Him. The way Ruby had chased after this feeling, on and off, for years. The way he looked up from the seat at my kitchen table, the puppy-dog gleam in his eye. The way his words felt raw and honest, like he was confessing something deeper. The gently lilting drawl that pulled you in. The way he deferred to my judgment, to my opinion—it was its own brand of power.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. You did the right thing, I had told him.
Well, I feel like an asshole. Head in his hand, twisting the bottle of beer back and forth on the tabletop.
Twenty years is a long time, I told him, as if absolving us both of what was still to come.
There’s also the double homicide to consider, he’d said, one side of his mouth raised in that private smile I’d come to know better. It was the first time anyone could, or would, make a joke. I had laughed, loud and unrestrained, more than was warranted. An emotion that had been bottled up. I hadn’t laughed since before we’d found the Truetts’ bodies. As if everything since then had been tamped down with a heavy weight. And now that it had been released, I assigned it disproportionate significance.
But everything back then was raw emotion. The fear, the loyalty, the shame. Everything felt so raw and exposed that it was easy to think: So what? What’s a little more?
So when he said, We weren’t that serious. I mean, you know that. We never were, I could answer: I know.
I knew roughly how it would go after that, had watched the same routine with Ruby. The way he called her kiddo, the way he skirted around her, stayed in her orbit, always making sure she was turned to him, following.
He’d stood and placed the empty beer behind me on the sink, leaning close. I needed that, he said. I was no longer sure what he was referring to, and I no longer cared.
* * *
BEFORE MAC, BEFORE THE trial, before the sound of the engine humming too long in the garage next door, I had often felt like I was standing on the edge of something, looking down, always careful not to get too close. Growing up with my brother, I had always felt the pull toward the other extreme. Like I was fighting to maintain a delicate balance; like any slip would send the rest of our family into a spiral. I’d believed strongly in the necessity of control—for myself and for others. I’d spent my entire life staying within the confines I’d established for myself or the boundaries others had set for me.
What would happen, I’d suddenly thought, if I breached those confines? If I did not pull back but leaned forward instead, giving in to the impulse and recklessness of the moment?
The answer, it turned out, was both relieving and terrifying: nothing. There was no repercussion, no slide I’d set in motion, and there was something alluring about that realization.
But now, as Mac stood beside me, it felt more dangerous, more deliberate. Back then, what was the harm? There was no fear in being found out, no consequence we would have to face—other than the side-eye from Tate, the knowing look from Preston. It had felt justified, even. Two people who could understand each other. Whose lives had been shaken by proximity to Ruby Fletcher.
Things had been easy and simple with Mac. We weren’t serious, either. We were a convenience. I couldn’t imagine Mac ever being serious about anything. Whatever we had then had dissipated by winter vacation, only to start up again early last month—some Pavlovian response to the changing seasons.
Mac placed the beer bottle on the counter, standing closer. The room felt charged, like he was testing me, but in some game—something elicit, something exciting. A rush. Like he was waiting for Ruby to catch us.
“Wait,” I said. Because the decisions weren’t as easy t
o make when there wasn’t a twenty-year buffer and cinder-block walls between us. Then I thought, So what if she found me? What would she do? Leave? Would that really be the worst thing?
I didn’t put up much of a fight when Mac leaned in, his mouth on my neck. But he must’ve felt my resistance. “Don’t let her get to you, Harper,” he said, breath next to my ear, body pressing mine into the counter. “Are you afraid?”
“No,” I said, even though I was listening for a car, watching the front entrance. But the thing I’d learned about fear was that it heightened everything, even this. It solidified whom you trusted and whom you didn’t. It clarified things—about others, about ourselves.
A noise coming from the patio made me jump. Even Mac jerked back, knocking the beer bottle over in the process, so that it rolled against the countertop, too loud in the silence.
“What was that?” he asked, peering at the darkness through the living room windows. It had sounded like something had fallen on the patio.
Mac stayed put while I crossed the living room toward the back entrance. I pulled open the door, heard nothing but the sound of crickets and a creaking hinge. The back patio was empty, but the high back gate of the fence had come unlatched and kept swaying back and forth.
That gate should’ve been locked from within. There was a bolt to turn from the patio, and it was unreachable from the outside. I’d started locking it after the Truetts. I never forgot. Without the lock, the gate could be unlatched by someone from the outside, occasionally from the wind or neighbors jostling the fence line.
I walked down the back steps, crossed the patio, and peered outside the fence into the row of trees. The sound of the crickets grew louder, but there was nothing visible between the shadows of the evergreens, overlapping. I couldn’t even see the streetlight on the other side of the road beyond, where the next half-moon court sat, a little more elevated than ours.
I pulled the gate until the latch clicked, then turned the lock. Maybe Ruby had left the gate unlocked when she was out here earlier today. When we were listening to Javier and Tate. Maybe she’d gone out for a walk and had forgotten to secure the fence after. But she’d been barefoot this morning; I didn’t think she’d been outside the fence.
“I think someone’s been watching the house,” I said, retreating to the safety of inside, locking the back door behind me. I turned to face Mac and felt once more the image of the key chain hidden in my back pocket. I wondered if whoever had placed it there had been trying to sneak closer to watch my reaction.
Mac was still staring out the window, and I didn’t know whether he believed me.
“Maybe you should get back out there,” I said, irrationally angry. Like he was the one at fault.
“Harper,” he said, “it was probably just the wind. Don’t let her get to you.”
My irritation only grew. As if Ruby’s presence was shifting the fabric of my reality. As if I was seeing danger in the places it didn’t exist.
As if Mac had come for any other reason than because he was drawn to the danger of the moment himself.
* * *
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 h
ouse. 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.
Here, to our neighbors, we revealed a side of ourselves that we kept hidden from our colleagues and acquaintances. The person we were at five a.m. on garbage day; the hours we kept; the lives we led. We were closer to being a family than not, knowing each other’s schedules, and visitors, and insecurities.
We knew who didn’t make it in to work (and whether they lied about the cause); we noticed whose cars didn’t make it home at night; we saw whose recycling bins were overflowing at the edge of the driveways (though we were rarely surprised); we listened to the arguments carrying from open windows and backyards, feeling more like confidants than voyeurs.
I rang Charlotte’s doorbell precisely at nine. She answered the door barefoot, in leggings and a flowing tank over a sports bra, like she had been working out. Though there wasn’t any evidence other than the clothing. Her hair was shiny and blow-dried straight, and her house smelled of coffee and freshly cut flowers. There was no evidence of the luggage from yesterday in the hall, or her daughters.
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