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.
“No,” I said. “There was nothing to write down. It was quiet.”
She raised an eyebrow, reached a hand for my wrist, and flipped it over, exposing the fragile skin there. I could feel the blood pulsing. “What’s the matter?” she asked, leaning closer.
I felt boneless, my arm limp in her grip, not sure what I could trust—my memories, even; my perception of events. The words she might’ve spoken in the courtroom. The knife she kept under her mattress and the threatening pictures left inside. Whether she was afraid or someone to fear.
The way she’d sneaked in here the first day, barefoot, with no warning. The fact that Chase believed she’d tried to break into his house, the missed calls from her lawyer, and this sudden thought that maybe she had taken my car and gone absolutely nowhere. That she’d been here all along, watching. That she’d had fourteen months to let things fester, and now she was back for a reason.
“Ruby,” I said quietly. “Ruby, you can’t go to that party today.”
You can’t be here at all.
Her eyes narrowed, and her face became impenetrable, nothing but hard angles and flat expression. “You know what no one does around here? Talk to each other face-to-face. Ask questions or demand answers. It’s contagious, the way people act to save face.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Smile on the surface, and whisper something else to the police. Cut someone out of their lives and pretend she never existed.”