I’d thought she had come here for revenge, and maybe that was true. But twisted inside that motive was something else at the heart, fueling it.
She’d come here to prove her innocence.
That’s what she was implying as her eyes skated over all of us last night.
She’d come back to prove that someone else was guilty.
CHAPTER 17
RUBY HAD BEEN ON campus. With my car. With my keys.
Chase thought she’d been trying to get inside his house, too, in the days when we thought she’d been gone.
Which meant she was looking for something. And there was one place I could go to start tracing her path.
Campus remained eerily empty, the July Fourth holiday bleeding into the long weekend. At the staff entrance, I passed the security center building, the electric vehicles all lined up in a row, unused. Every lot I passed was empty, the wind whipping up the brittle leaves, scattered across the narrow road.
When I pulled into the lot behind my building, I half expected to see the white car again under the oak tree, but mine was the only car here. Maybe even on the entire campus, judging from the drive in.
Before entering the building, I peered through the glass panel beside the back door, but the motion lights remained off. I paused at the entrance when I stepped inside, taking it all in—trying to see things as Ruby might. This place where she once gave student tours, and joined me for lunch, and asked for advice, and smiled when Aidan stopped by to say hi.
Everything about her, a deception.
The lights flicked on one by one as I moved deeper inside. I moved fast, using my key for my office, imagining Ruby doing the same days earlier. How compliant I must’ve seemed to her. How easily manipulated. Ruby in my house; Ruby in my car; Ruby in my place of work—
Was there any part of my life she hadn’t tainted?
Standing in the glass doorway to my private office, I tried to look for signs of her. But everything looked exactly as I thought I’d left it the week before. Only my mug on the blue bookshelf was off-center—HELLO THERE! now barely visible—but that had been my doing, when I’d watered the plant.
My desk was covered with files on prospective students and meeting notes and interdepartment communications. I kept nothing personal or private here. Nothing that would be of interest to Ruby. What would she have been here for if not for me? What did she think she would possibly find here? Evidence that I was not equipped to do my job? Proof that I did not measure up to Brandon Truett?
There was nothing else here except for a plant on the verge of dehydration and a closet full of junk: the detritus left behind from when Brandon Truett worked here. I couldn’t think of a reason that would interest her, but I crossed the room, throwing open that closet door for the first time in months.
It was empty.
My breath left me in a quick gust. The closet was completely, totally, empty—except for a faintly stale scent, from disuse and uncirculated air. The file box where I’d stored the remnants from Brandon’s desk, the photo of him and Fiona—all gone.
It had been so long since I’d looked in here that I couldn’t say for sure. Couldn’t tell whether the contents had disappeared sometime in the previous year, with Anna at reception, or the janitor, or someone with an attachment to Brandon Truett—or Ruby.
Absences were harder to find. Negatives harder to prove. To know for sure that it wasn’t someone else, over the last year, who had gone through here and cleaned things out. To take the leap that it must’ve been Ruby.
But she’d definitely been here.
I remembered her expression when I had caught her outside on my way home with Mac—when I told her I’d been to work. The quick frown. The worry. Had she been concerned that I’d noticed what she’d done?
If that was true, then Ruby Fletcher believed there was something worth finding in Brandon’s things. More important: She knew that the Truetts’ deaths had not been solved with her conviction. Her words at the party were not empty threats. And she believed that, here, she might find some proof.
I pictured her again, the moment she arrived at the party last night—the knowing looks she gave everyone; the way she flaunted her presence; the things she said: that we had somehow conspired against her. That she knew what each of us had done.
It seemed like maybe she had found that proof after all. A note he’d scribbled in a margin, maybe. A photo slipped behind another in the photo frame. Something that had eluded meaning when we were all so focused on Ruby. Something out of my grasp still.
But whatever she’d taken from this closet must exist.