Look where it had gotten us.
We had been raised on true crime and the promise of viral fame. We’d consumed unsolved mysteries and developed our deeply held theories. Believed that neither law experience nor a criminal justice background was necessary to see into people’s true hearts, to root out the truth. That all you needed was a clear perspective and a sharp mind.
Other than Chase, I was the only one here who had any real experience with the law. My brother, Kellen, was first arrested at sixteen; my dad had called it in himself. Thought it would shake him up, wake him up. But that was before we understood that once you were in the system, it was nearly impossible to get out. That you had to be careful, had to be sure. Neither Kellen nor my mother ever forgave him.
I started driving again and turned on the radio, but the sound made me jump, jab my finger at the power button—the noise was too loud, harsh and instrumental, tuned to a different station from my usual.
Suddenly, I felt that I was the intruder instead.
* * *
MY DRIVE TO AND from work was so different from the typical highway work commute. Here, the road meandered around the lake, trees stretching outward in either direction, toward the water or deeper into the woods. The only traffic I ever encountered was in the drive-through of Bakery by the Lake, a small but busy local shop that had carved a spot out of the woods, halfway between my home and the college.
I stopped there now for a bagel and a coffee. Then I sat in the parking lot, eating in my car, head tilted back, windows down, headache slowly dissipating. The irony of finally feeling free while being contained in my own vehicle. When I was done, I continued along the curving, tree-lined road, tracing the border of Lake Hollow.
I wasn’t sure how long Ruby intended to stay and when I’d feel comfortable leaving her for the full day, so I wanted to grab the week’s work, should I need it.
The College of Lake Hollow was located on the opposite side of the lake from our community. Whenever I used to borrow Ruby’s kayak, paddling out to the main channel, I’d just be able to make out the college’s boathouse on the other shore, the students practicing for crew, sleekly moving across the surface of the water. And then the lush green of the trees and the brick buildings and the glass windows reflecting the sun, depending on the angle. Some of the young professors who lived in communities with docks and lake access would take a Jet Ski across in good weather, their materials kept safe in a waterproof backpack.
Of course, the flip side to this idyllic scene were the tragedies. The accidents that we anticipated and accepted over the years, something we chalked up to part of life on the water. The Jet Ski that collided with the kayak a few years ago, killing the kayaker, a man in his sixties who hadn’t worn a life vest; the visitors in the summer who couldn’t swim but thought that a lake meant placid and calm, not that it could have a current, an endless depth—things that could snag you under the water when you jumped from a rented boat, trap you and disorient you. The high school kids who anchored and tied up boats together at night, at the edge of an inlet, not realizing until too late that someone had gone missing.
There were also the stories told on campus—stories that were based loosely on fact. The kids who dared to swim across the lake one night, thinking the shore was far closer than it was—four going out, only two returning. (The other two were found by lake patrol, clinging to a buoy, after their friends had called it in.) The yearly middle-of-the-night plunge taken by the incoming freshmen during orientation in August, in the dark, half-dressed and semi-sober. Supposedly as an offering to the lake so it would not come for you later.
All tradition was steeped in legend. All risk was heightened by stories.
In truth, it was a safe campus, a safe college, a relatively safe location. Up until the crime, the most dangerous aspect of living in Lake Hollow was the deer. The road was sinuous, snaking around the coastline, and if you weren’t careful, you’d turn a corner to see the glow of eyes staring back. If you were unlucky, you wouldn’t have time to see it darting from the woods, straight in front of your car—like Charlotte.
The lake accidents mostly happened in the summer, with no college students to witness the tragedy. But the biggest tragedy to date was the truest: the murder of Brandon Truett, head of admissions, and Fiona Truett, who managed a string of tutoring centers. Locked away for the crime was a former student of the college and neighbor of the victims.
Ruby Fletcher was a legend in the flesh, and now she had returned.
When the students moved back in the fall, if Ruby was still here, I imagined they would start coming by our neighborhood to get a closer look. A new dare. I wondered if the local kids had already started.
The campus on Fourth of July week was mostly empty, especially given the early hour. Even if people were working, they probably wouldn’t come in until closer to ten, other than the grounds department.
I pulled into the lot behind the admissions building, a low brick building with glass inset into the triangular top of the roof, making it look like there might be a second story. Each administrative building in this section was small and quaint and separate.
There was another car back here in the small lot. Most visitors ended up parking in the main visitor lot and walking across the picturesque green at the center of campus, following the snaking brick paths to other brick buildings. This lot was unlabeled and set back, accessible via the narrow faculty roads, requiring a permit on the windshield.
I didn’t recognize the white SUV in the back-left spot, under the shade of an oak tree. The rest of the staff was supposed to be on vacation. I parked on the other side of the lot, closest to the building’s back door.
We didn’t schedule any prospective campus tours or meetings from our office for the holiday week. But sometimes people came on their own during family road trips, taking in the colleges along the way, giving themselves self-guided tours. Others parked in our lots on the weekend to ride bikes through campus or have an afternoon picnic on the green.
I used my key to let myself in. The lights turned on automatically as I stepped inside. “Hello?” I called, just in case it was someone from tech, updating our systems. But the lights were motion-operated, and since it had been dark until my arrival, I couldn’t imagine someone else in here. The three offices beyond the front lobby stretched into darkness, though each was glass-walled—a modern renovation inside a classic, traditional structure.
I locked the entrance door behind me, which I always did when I was alone in here. It was a policy first implemented by Brandon Truett. He’d told us about a student who showed up after being rejected, demanding to know why. There’d been implications of a weapon. Campus security was called by the receptionist when she heard what was happening. Brandon said that was why we were to keep doors locked after hours, when campus security wasn’t the press of a button away. Especially if we were alone.
Back then, I’d thought he was overreacting, as I always did. Suspected his story, even, chalking it up to another legend that grew out of the old brick buildings. His story seemed less unlikely after his death. And any time I wanted to believe in Ruby’s innocence, I was reminded of this: someone who could’ve been angry enough to harm him. I told the police that there were thousands of people with motives. That his job made him the figurehead of rejection. Which, one way or the other, was a common motive for killing. Something that struck you to your core, sharp and fast.
“Anyone here?” I called, just so I wouldn’t spook someone. No one responded.
I had a different key for my personal office—a lock I’d had changed after taking over Brandon’s space, in the days when paranoia crept in. Those first few months, I couldn’t look at my office without seeing the version that had existed before: the large desk in the center of the room, the worn chair, the single frame on the clean surface. College of Lake Hollow paraphernalia decorating the walls, a framed portrait of the lake and surrounding campus taken from above.
This office had never truly se
emed like my own. Maybe it was the memory of a moving truck, of the empty places in my house—the fear that everything was temporary; that anything could be taken from me.
I’d replaced the chair first, the imprint of his body something that had sent a chill through me the first time I’d sat there, and I’d added my own decorations to the office, including a quirky blue bookshelf I’d put together myself, and a potted plant in the corner that was currently in need of water. But I’d left the College of Lake Hollow decor and the framed photo of campus. Put anything else left behind in the storage closet.
I used my black mug from the bookshelf—HELLO THERE! it declared in cutesy white text to whomever might be sitting across from me—to bring water from our shared bathroom in the hall back to my office, taking three trips in my continual attempt to keep the plant alive.
Then I grabbed the stack of blue files off my desk, where they’d been waiting. Brandon had kept most of his work organized in a system hidden from sight: in his desk drawers or in file boxes in the corner closet of the room. But I preferred everything where I could see it so I wouldn’t forget—a visual to-do list.
I used that same closet now to store all the things Brandon had left behind—the things not taken by the police during the investigation. I knew it was odd, all this time later, that his things still sat in a closet, gathering dust. But I was not the person who should’ve been responsible for deciding what to do with it all. And so these items remained, waiting for someone else to make that call.
His laptop had been at home, so I imagined the police had kept that; and his appointment calendar was kept electronically, with secondary access by Anna, at reception. There was nothing unusual on either.
What remained: a personal framed photo of him and Fiona, both of them dressed in khaki and white, standing on a beach, sunburned and carefree—so unlike the version of them I remembered; memos that had been sent his way but not received before his death; his most recent birthday card signed by the staff, along with a Visa gift card because we didn’t know what else to get him, stored in the bottom drawer; a fishing magazine that he’d accidentally routed to the school instead of home, which had kept coming month after month until it hadn’t been renewed; and a small package that had been sent to the school instead of his home. It had arrived when I was already working here, and Anna had left it on my desk, washing her hands of it. Staring at his name, I’d felt a chill and stored it in the closet with the rest of his things.
I had never gathered the nerve to throw it all out. The only next of kin was Brandon’s brother, and he’d had no use for anything but the dog. He’d never even set foot in this office, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him: Do you want the vacation photo that was on his desk? A half-used Visa gift card? I’d grown accustomed to the contents of the closet, the same way I could walk by the Truetts’ front door without flinching. But now I stared at the closed door, a chill rising. Ruby’s return had shaken up everything, every memory. Nothing was spared.
As I stood there with the files tucked under my arm, I heard something from the other side of my office door, but I couldn’t tell whether it was coming from inside or outside the building. Whether it was the pipes resettling after my trip to the bathroom, an older system tucked behind the remodeled walls. Or whether it was someone trying the front door.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I turned to face the glass walls, the empty space. Here, with the historic brick buildings, we didn’t have cameras. We believed in the honor code—for our students and for ourselves. We believed we were an isolated community and that the community was ours—the town an extension of the college or the college an extension of our town. Either way, we had been conditioned to believe in our shared safety.
I stood listening to the silence. I counted to ten, then to twenty. Hearing nothing else, I decided it must’ve been the old building, the hidden pipes and air-conditioning that had not been updated during the renovations.
I locked my office behind me and walked faster than necessary for the exit. Outside, that white car still sat at the other end of the lot.
And that was when I heard it clearly: a heavy step at the side of the building, boot on gravel. I spun in time to see Preston Seaver walking into the lot.
“Hey there, Harper,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he’d been waiting or had just arrived. Whether he’d been here all along.
He was in his security uniform but on foot, not in his car or on one of the electric golf carts the security team often used to get around.
I stepped back, on instinct. “You gave me a heart attack,” I said, looking around the lot. “You’re working this week?” I’d seen him early yesterday morning, finishing Mac’s watch, and assumed he had off this week.
“Just the morning shift, making sure all the buildings are secure for the holiday. Anyone in there with you?” His green eyes skimmed over me quickly.
“No,” I said, holding up the files that had been wedged between my purse and my body. “Just bringing some work home. It’s empty in there otherwise.”
He nodded, then tipped his head to the white SUV in the lot. “You know whose car this is?”
“No, haven’t seen it before. I assumed it was someone giving themselves a tour.”
“It was here yesterday, too. There aren’t any plates.”
I looked again—the tinted windows, a contrast to the mud-caked tires. “Was it in the same spot?”
He chewed the side of his cheek. “Don’t remember.”
It reminded me then of what had happened after Brandon’s death. How the media had come to his home, our neighborhood, and then to his place of work, reporting from our lot, while we watched from behind the windows, our doors locked. How Anna had to call security to get them to leave. Murder wasn’t good press for the college, either.
“You could get it towed,” I said. “If there’s no permit.”
“You don’t want to tow the wrong person’s car, here, by accident.” He walked closer, peering in the windows, completing a slow circle.
I unlocked my car and dropped my purse and the files on the passenger seat, preparing to leave before he could question me about something else.
“Guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah, see you at the party,” I said, easing myself inside.
When I drove out of the lot, I checked the rearview mirror. Preston was standing beside the white SUV, hands in his pockets, watching me go.
CHAPTER 12
AS I TURNED IN to Hollow’s Edge, past the stone sign and the fresh flowers and the mock lanterns at the entrance, I caught a glimmer of the lake before the road curved, and my breathing stilled, like always. On the drive in, it sometimes felt like you were sliding toward the water, especially in the dark, with only the porch lights to guide you down. I knew the graded roads and elevated plots were to give the impression that each house could have a view, but sometimes it created the illusion of the entire neighborhood sloping toward the lake, like we were all fighting some gravity.
But for all our differences, this was it—what we were here for, what drew us in. We were a group who appreciated a certain aesthetic, a certain lifestyle. We gravitated here, and to one another, from this commonality alone. We assumed things about one another because of it. We assumed we were alike.
We had kayaks and paddleboards and fishing lines. We spent summer weekends in our bathing suits underneath cover-ups, coolers ready to go, an assortment of insulated mugs to keep our drinks cold. We had midday happy hours and late-night barbecues, hair tangled from the wind or the water.
Maybe Brandon and Fiona hadn’t known what they were getting into when they moved here. To be fair, neither did I. I’d toured the area with Aidan before we moved, thought it looked calm and peaceful and quiet, that it was the type of place that would settle into me—that it would settle me. Turn me into someone still driven but more carefree, like Aidan. But that was before we were both ultimately surprised by the people we t
urned out to be. Seeing each other for the first time out of context when we moved here. Maybe Aidan seemed so academically driven only because he preferred it to the finality of what came next. Something he was actively avoiding.
And maybe I seemed outdoorsy and adventurous only because I’d been pushed outside all my life, sent to camps, enrolled in activities—anything to avoid the pitfalls my brother had fallen prey to. Maybe I became this way only because my parents were terrified of what could happen to me when I remained stationary. Like there was something sinuous that targeted stillness, always waiting to sneak up on me, sneak into me. This fear that I was at the whim of something greater, outside my control.
It was easy to forget now that the Truetts were one of the first families in. And maybe that tainted their perspective, too—that someone was always moving in, changing the rules, changing things on them.
A large subset of us at Hollow’s Edge overlapped at work. It wasn’t just Brandon and me, in the admissions department, and Ruby, who had been a student. It was Tina in the health center and the Seaver brothers in grounds and security. Paul Wellman in alumni giving; Charlotte, as a counselor; and Tate, who helped coach lacrosse as a second job.
It was the reason, I believed, that our neighborhood sometimes took on the approximation of dormitory living. Like we were an extension of the college in both location and age. Conforming ourselves to the unique structure of a private post-secondary education.
Except for the Truetts.
Every time they lodged a complaint (the backyard parties on summer weeknights; the fireworks on New Year’s Eve; the garbage can left out too long), the animosity grew around them. No one knew why they wanted to live here. They were never seen down at the pool on weekends. They had never shown up at a neighborhood party. Had never walked barefoot from the edge of the road, through the woods, straight into the water.
The shore wasn’t technically for swimming, though we all did it. The finger of water kept us sheltered from the current in the main channel. It was private and belonged to us alone, just one more secret of the community.
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