“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.
“You should come visit me.”
I laughed. “I don’t need Mom breathing down my neck right now, too.”
“No, I’ve got a new place. God, it’s been a while, Harp.” Our last real conversation was the one on New Year’s Eve, I thought now. Over seven months with neither of us reaching out. “I’m in Philadelphia,” he said. “Well, close to Philadelphia.”
“What?” That was six hours away.
“Long story. But I have a job here, and other than dealing with Mom’s constant calls, it’s a pretty quiet time.” Quiet times was the term Mom used for his good times. As if quiet were a positive thing and not an immense blanket of deception covering what was potentially brewing below.
But I was stuck on his prior statement. “You moved to a new city, you’re only six hours away, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“You wouldn’t be,” I said.
“You weren’t always thrilled to see me when I came to visit Dad…”
Because my dad expected too much of Kellen, was never able to let the past go. He’d bring it up somehow—on day two or day three—and I’d have to watch my brother harden, never able to exist in the present. “Not because of you,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I also don’t have a car right now, either.”
I laughed then, remembering how his excuses always existed in layers. But knowing I could reach him in a day’s drive if needed. “I’ll call you later,” I said. “It’s good to hear your voice. Just don’t tell Mom and Dad, okay?”
He laughed then, too. “Harper, it is my absolute pleasure to begin repaying that debt to you.”
And then I pushed myself off the floor with that photo in hand. I wondered what Ruby felt the first day when she was home, reaching her hand deep into the soil—coming up empty.
The first day Ruby was back, even before she’d gone to the kayak for the money, she’d gone into the backyard in the middle of the night and reached her hand down into the dirt, looking for this.
I was seeing her more clearly now: She wanted access to all of us here—our secrets, our lives.
When I’d found the keys this spring, Ruby had already been gone for so long. She had been convicted.
Back then I’d wondered what she had been doing with those keys. Whether she used them to piece through our lives, stirring up gossip with a throwaway line—if our discomfort had been all for her entertainment.
Chase told me the guys had wanted to bring up the rumors they knew but couldn’t prove during the investigation. And now I was thinking again about the way Aidan had left, so fast, desperate to escape something.
Chase was right: She had always been dangerous, just not in the way I had assumed.
I remembered Preston telling the police that Ruby had once been inside, broken dishes, while Mac and she were fighting. And Fiona looking in her wallet, confused. How everyone was quick to throw suspicion on Ruby after her arrest, in a myriad of ways. The access she had, not just to our things but to our secrets.
They sleep in separate rooms, you know, she had said about the Truetts. And none of us asked how she knew. None of us doubted the veracity of her claim, either.
Because we all believed that Ruby knew things. We just didn’t always know how.
* * *
IF PRESTON TOOK MY photo as I ran down to the lake, I wondered if he knew what I’d done with the keys. If he’d seen me after, as I stood at the edge of the lake, surrounded by the noises of the night, moonlight glinting off the metal.
If he’d seen that I had not tossed them into the water at all, afraid of the sudden openness, the currents, the cameras that might place me down here. The way beer cans washed up the morning after kids had tossed them from their boats at the mouth of the inlet.
How I’d gone deeper into the woods instead, letting the darkness protect me, the noises insulate me. Farther around the inlet, where I believed that no one could see or hear me. To the boundary of our woods, with the sign on the tree warning us: PRIVATE PROPERTY.