Mac had saved me a spot beside him on the couch. Tate and Javier were on the sofa beside ours, Tate looking slightly more nauseated than normal. Tina squeezed in beside Tate, and Tate winced as she shifted to make room.
“When are you due again?” Tina asked, like we were here for a friendly catch-up.
“Three more months,” Tate answered.
Charlotte seemed to be waiting for something. “Is this everyone who was at the party?” she finally asked, eyes skimming over all of us.
We looked at one another, each performing a silent tally.
“Not Pete,” Javier said. “Or the Wilsons.” Those must’ve been the people who’d left as soon as Ruby arrived.
“I meant the people who were there… during the fireworks,” Charlotte amended.
“Preston’s not back yet,” Mac said.
“Well,” Charlotte said. “You can fill him in later. Go ahead, Chase.”
Tina’s parents weren’t here, either, but no one mentioned that, not even Tina.
Chase stepped to the front of the living room, and Charlotte took his place, perching on the armrest. Apparently, Chase had worked his way back into our good graces, too. How we needed him. How we welcomed him.
“Some of you may have noticed the agents from the state police,” he said.
At that moment, the front door opened, and Preston walked in, then stopped abruptly in his tracks at the sight of us.
“Where’ve you been?” Mac called.
“With Madalyn. Sorry I’m late.” The second statement was directed Charlotte’s way.
Chase gestured for Preston to join us in his own living room. “As I was saying, there are agents from the state police who’ve been going door-to-door, asking questions. Preston, what’s going on with Madalyn?”
“Well, she’s totally freaked. I told her to go home for a little while. There’s nothing for her to say anyway. She didn’t see anything.”
“She’s a student?” Tate asked, cutting her eyes at him.
His jaw tensed. “Grad student. But yeah, she’s going back home to Ohio for a little while, I think.”
“She okay with it?” Chase asked. I couldn’t keep up with the conversation. I felt like I had just walked in instead of the other way around.
Preston nodded, then addressed the rest of us. “Madalyn wasn’t feeling well, so we left early,” he said, and it took me a minute to understand what he was saying. That she didn’t see anything. That none of us did. That she wouldn’t discuss any fight with the police or the things Ruby had said—the way she had turned on us all.
Chase nodded. Keep it simple. Keep it contained. For once, I was on the inside.
“The agent came to our house yesterday,” Tate piped in. “We didn’t answer the door.”
Tina nodded in agreement. “My mom answered the door, so we had to talk to him. Just gave him the general rundown.” She flicked her hand like we’d all been through it. Knew what she had seen, what she had said.
Margo raised her hand and started speaking. “I’m sorry, is no one going to mention the foul-play suspicion? We were all there. We were all witnesses.”
“What are we supposed to say?” Mac responded. “I sure didn’t notice anything.”
“Well, it looks pretty fucking suspicious that we were all there, and no one saw a damn thing,” Tate said. Her eyes flicked from person to person, challenging us.
This was how it began. When we started to winnow down the group, deciding whom it would be. Whose image would first raise suspicion when it appeared on one of our security cameras. Whom we were willing to feed to the masses. Did they even see what they were doing?
“Listen,” Mac said, the first time I’d heard him take control of anything, “it was a public event. It’s not like we live in some gated community. We’ve all noticed things happening on watch.”
“Javier, you said you heard people down at the lake on your shift, right?” Margo asked.
Javier nodded. “There were definitely people out during my shift at night. And Tate heard something the night you were on watch, too, Harper. Right, Tate?”
“Yep,” Tate said. “At like two-forty-five, a loud noise somewhere out front. I’m getting to the point where I can’t sleep, anyway.”
Was this how it really was? Were these truly the people I lived beside? I could feel it, this idea gaining momentum, that the danger was out there and not in this very room. Just like Ruby had claimed in her own denial. Someone else was out there. Someone else did it. It didn’t have to be one of us. We didn’t have to look at one another and wonder.
“We were ignoring her, mostly,” Charlotte said, and everyone nodded, though that wasn’t true. Maybe we’d tried to, but we hadn’t ignored her—we couldn’t, when she’d turned so clearly on all of us.
But there was something so alluring to it, a momentum I couldn’t stop. Something I wanted to be part of. An idea we could develop together, a puzzle we could solve, each of us with our own small piece. An image we could bring to light only collectively. Something that seemed suddenly possible.
Because we were friends and colleagues. Had known each other for years. Mowed each other’s yards when we were injured; thrown baby showers and graduation parties; pulled in the garbage cans when people were working late. We knew each other—we knew more about each other than any of us cared to admit.
“There were footprints at the pool,” I said, “the night I was on watch.” The gate swinging open. Footprints disappearing at the black pavement. “And a car driving off behind our homes.” I thought about that white car again—the one at the office. Who might’ve had cause to go there. “What about Brandon’s brother?” I was grasping, but it was another possibility. Someone who might’ve been keeping an eye on Ruby. Who might’ve been angry about her release.
Tate nodded. Finally, I was on the inside as we cast our suspicions outward.
“Listen,” Javier said, “I say we make a pact. No one tells them anything. No rumors or gossip. You know how it goes, right? We were all together. We can all vouch for each other. Let’s not complicate things.”
And I now understood what Chase had meant when he said not to dilute the evidence with rumors we couldn’t prove. The answers were simple. There was no great conspiracy. The simplest answers were most often the right ones.
Everyone seemed to be in agreement as I looked around the room. Even though the simplest answer, we all knew, was that someone here had done it.
Maybe it was because we each understood. There was a collective motive, and the focus could turn to any one of us. We had each testified. We were each afraid. We were protecting each other as much as ourselves.
We were just ignoring her, going on with our lives. We don’t know what happened. We didn’t see.
We were all good people here.
* * *
MARGO WAS THE FIRST to leave, heading for Charlotte’s to pick up Nicholas. I had started paying attention to things like this—who was leaving and who was staying. The order in which we arrived and left.
Several others stuck around to talk to Chase one-on-one. The bathroom by the stairs was occupied, but there were two upstairs, and I headed that way so I could catch Chase after, ask if he’d heard anything more from his friends—whether they were sure it was poison. Whether I had cause to be afraid.
Mac had the master bedroom with its own bathroom, the mirror image of my own. But when I went to let myself in his room, the door was locked. I guessed he had done this knowing there would potentially be a large meeting downstairs. But I found it odd.
The door to their converted office was ajar, connecting to Preston’s room through the Jack-and-Jill bathroom. I peered inside the office space, but his bathroom door was closed on the other side. It felt like an invasion to use his private bathroom. Especially since we weren’t particularly friendly.
I heard the front door close and was about to return downstairs when a balled-up piece of paper caught my eye. It lay beside a metal trash
can under the long table used as a shared desk. As if the paper had just missed.
But it was what I could see through the page that caught my eye. The bold black print. Something so familiar about it. I dropped to my hands and knees under the desk and gently unfurled the sheet of paper, flattening it against the beige carpet.
My hands began to shake as the three words stared back at me, a quick chill in the silence: I SEE YOU.
The same format as the warning I’d received with the photos tucked inside. As if other versions had been printed out here and decided against.
I balled it back up, dropped it in the trash can, stumbled down the staircase. I didn’t know if anyone saw me barreling through the front door. If any of the cameras caught me stumbling toward home. My flip-flops catching on a sidewalk square before I regained my footing.
I had to slow my breath, slow my heart rate. Get inside my house and regroup.
But my stomach churned over the thought of Mac. Of Mac, who had been in my house, whom I had let inside my life—
I threw open the front door, barely enough time to notice the square of paper wedged into the door. It flopped to the floor, the photo facedown.
Not again. Not this. I was still thinking of Mac, but I had just been with him the entire time.
Preston, though. Coming into the meeting late. Preston, who had ample time to leave this here.
Not Mac, then. But his brother.
The sheet of paper with that same bold print I’d seen beside the garbage can: HELLO THERE! Friendly and ominous at the same time. Like the mug behind my desk at work.
I picked up the photo, feeling nauseated. My hands shook. It was so clear. The trees and the lake and the dog-bone key chain. The Nike swoosh on the side of the sneaker, the ponytail, the face caught in profile. Looking to the side to make sure there was no one watching.
That first message: YOU MADE A MISTAKE.
The second: WE KNOW.
They were right, of course. I had made a mistake.
Anyone who saw this picture would know.
Anyone could see it was me.
CHAPTER 19
THEY WEREN’T MINE.
That was the defense I had worked through, sitting in my backyard patio, key ring in hand. What I’d tell the police. What I’d tell the neighbors.
They weren’t mine.
But they’d been in my house, and my fingerprints were all over them, and this wasn’t just the Truett key. Oh, no. If only it had been, maybe I would’ve called someone, turned them in.
But this was something more, and I heard the echo of Chase’s advice, his low words through the fence: Keep it simple.
Get them out of the house.
Away from you.
Now.
* * *
I’D FOUND THEM THREE months ago, in the spring, planting flowers in the mulch bed of my patio. Spade in the soil, digging beneath the mulch into the cool earth.
My shovel struck something hard six inches down—something I thought at first was an accumulation of small stones. But I reached my gloved hand into the soil, and my fingers hooked into a ring. A glint of metal in the sun as I pulled it out.
A large ring of keys, deliberately hidden in the corner of the garden.
That dog-bone key chain was the first thing I recognized, attached to a larger ring by a small loop. But the large ring was full of keys. Each labeled with a small black letter written in Sharpie.
I pieced through them one by one, wiping the dirt and grit from the surface of each key to reveal what was written below.
The T, the B, the S, the C… I was halfway through the key ring before the realization settled in: that these were the keys to other houses on the street. The T for Truett; the B for Brock; the S for Seaver; the C for Cora. On and on they went.
I didn’t know what this meant. Why Ruby had all of these keys. I assumed she’d hidden them during the investigation after denying she’d had the Truett key. Asking me to back her up, to tell the police: I don’t have their key anymore.
A bold-faced lie, while she buried the truth.
Not only did she have the Truetts’ key, she also had the keys of nearly everyone on the street. And they probably had no idea.
I could only imagine that this was an accumulation of keys she had amassed over the years, living here. From all her time walking dogs, or bringing in mail, or house-sitting. The keys that were left for her under doormats, or spares that were temporarily lent her way. Either she hadn’t returned the keys, or she’d copied them. My guess: copied them. So that no one knew she had them anymore.
But these were also more keys than I thought she’d had access to. There were plenty of people who had never trusted Ruby, wouldn’t have left her in possession of a key. But we were all connected here. Access to one house could grant her access to another—a neighbor’s spare key, for emergency, labeled and hung on a key hook on the wall or in a kitchen drawer.
Years ago, Tate and I had swapped keys in case one of us was ever locked out. Though our friendship had cooled, we’d never asked for them back. Such an admission would be too direct. Too confrontational. And so Tate and Javier Cora’s key was still buried at the back of the top drawer of the entryway table, should they ever need it.
Ruby had plenty of chances to find it, copy it, use it. From the look of it, she had gotten us all. Every one. And now this set of keys was in my hand.
I’d debated what to do with the ring of keys that day, sitting on the brick patio, as the late afternoon turned to evening. And then I thought of the lake, of fingerprints disappearing—a hand of fate that might or might not drag them to the surface someday in the future, freeing me of any role or suspicion.
So I’d headed that way in the dark, passing the closed front doors, the glow of porch lights. The jangle of keys in my pocket was too jarring in the quiet night. I’d clenched them tightly in my palm, cut down the path in the woods by the pool, heading toward the water. Believing I was alone.
But someone had seen me. Someone had stood at the back corner of the concrete pool deck, watched as I ran by—and caught me.
* * *
NOW I KNELT ON the cold wooden floor of the front foyer, this photo in hand, with all the things I knew it could imply—all the ways it could be twisted against me. Wondering why someone was taunting me with this and what they were planning to do with it now.
Though Preston and Mac shared that upstairs office space, Mac had been with me at the meeting. He’d already been there when I arrived. It was Preston who came in late. Who had time to leave this threat in my door.
Preston had been so quick to turn on Ruby after the Truetts were found dead. And when Ruby was gone, his distrust seemed to transfer to me, by rule of proximity alone.
Preston, who had been at my place of work, watching me. Preston, who had a master set of keys at work. Who had printed other warnings in his office, the I SEE YOU crumpled under his desk. Preston, who lived three doors down, who had walked straight through my front door when I’d been out on watch.
I’d thought these warnings had been to try to push me to get Ruby to leave. A threat that, if I did not, this could be revealed—to others, to Ruby herself.
But Ruby was gone now, and this newest picture had still arrived. And I no longer knew whom I could trust.
I didn’t know whether Mac was a part of this somehow. I didn’t know how much the brothers shared with each other, whether family mattered above all else. I felt entirely afraid and alone.
I was remembering the way Mac came over at the start of summer break, beer in hand, crooked smile on his face—the coincidence of his timing. Whether the rumors of Ruby’s case had brought him to my front door once more. And if so, what he was truly after.
I called my brother again, sitting on the cold floor of the foyer, the photo in my hand.
This time he answered on the first ring. “Harper? Is it Dad?”
“Sorry, no, everyone’s okay,” I said.
“Oh,” he said.
“Good.” He paused for a beat. “It’s just, you’ve called twice on a Saturday. I have a missed call from you from earlier.” Our calls were infrequent, our relationship existing primarily on holidays and via parent updates.
“What kind of person would you say I am?” I asked abruptly. I was staring at a photo of evidence I’d hidden. Had listened as Ruby called me an opportunist, unable to be happy as myself.
“Are you drunk?” he asked as answer.
“No. Just if you had to describe me to a friend. Like My sister is…”
“The good one,” he said without pause.
“Ha,” I said.
I heard his sigh through the phone. “I guess I would say: I wish I knew her better growing up, but I fucked up our family pretty good. I would say: She gave me more chances than I deserved, and she’s a better person than me.”
I’d forgotten this about my brother: that he was direct and honest, always trying to atone for himself but unable to stop the cycle. I was wrong—nothing existed in him that reminded me of the true Ruby.
In the silence that followed, he said, “Is everything okay? You’re not having some sort of breakdown, are you?”
“Well,” I said, thinking of how to even begin. How to present this without inviting judgment. And then I stopped worrying. It was my brother, and I’d seen him at his worst, and maybe it was only fair that he saw me at mine. “The verdict in my neighbors’ murder was thrown out.”
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Ruby came back here. To my house. It was a mess, and she’s dead.” Silence on the other end. “The police think she was poisoned.”
More silence.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Are you in trouble?” he asked, quick and low.
“No.” A pause. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Kellen, my God, it’s all horrible.” A horrific mess, with three people dead and an investigation just beginning.
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