I’d noticed the unlatched gate here a few nights ago. My own gate had also come unlatched, swaying loose in the wind, though I was always careful to keep it locked. It seemed likely that both had been opened by the same person. Like someone was spying on each place. Or like someone was moving back and forth between our patios.
Ruby had gone out back the first night she was here—I’d heard that creak of the back door. And the next morning, she’d been sitting in the Adirondack chair, her feet up on the wooden ottoman, while Tate and Javier were arguing next door.
She’d moved the chair, I thought, for the single square of sunlight on the patio. But maybe she’d moved it sometime in the night. The base of the chair was solid wood, and the arms were sturdy, and it was now positioned just beside the Truett fence.
Maybe, after looking for the keys and finding them missing, she’d decided to find a way in by any means necessary.
I shook the fence between our properties to check for stability. It didn’t budge. These fences were meant to withstand storms and wind and wear and accidents, connecting from yard to yard, reinforcing the strength.
I felt a chill running down the length of my arms, up my back. Like she was here with me now. Of course it was her. It was always her.
I could picture her clearly, her determination: Unlocking my back gate, to be able to return after. Dragging the chair to the other side of my patio, perching on the base, climbing on the armrest, slinging a leg over the sturdy flat-top posts of the fence, falling to the bricks on the other side, where I now stood.
The marks around the deadbolt—my knife in her hand to wedge her way inside.
Ruby had been here, I was sure. Ruby had gotten inside.
I walked up the brick steps again, twisting the handle, following her trail. Desperate to know what she had found, what she had discovered.
The door pushed open on the first try.
Inside, I was hit by a wave of thick humidity and uncirculated air. I flipped the switch on the wall, but nothing happened. The electricity had long since been cut. And with that, the air-conditioning and any hope of circulating air. I breathed shallowly into my sleeve, like I’d done that day when we’d found them.
Shadows emerged from the darkness as my eyes slowly adjusted. Random pieces of furniture that had been left behind after Brandon’s brother had either sold or donated what he could—a hard-backed chair against the wall, a coffee table in the middle of the room, a stool at the kitchen counter—creating the skeleton of a house.
Even breathing into my arm, there was something off about the smell. Everything in this house reeked of wrong.
I used the light on my phone to guide the way, looking for any signs of an intruder here. But the silence and the stillness had their own presence.
I passed the kitchen window that I’d once thrown open in a panic. I kept the light pointed down so no one would see me in here.
Next, the garage door, where Chase had yelled for me to hit the automated opener—the responding mechanical hum painfully slow in the chaos—while Charlotte had run for the living room windows, throwing open the back door, too.
I followed the hallway, swooping my light up to the ceiling, to that small, discolored circle where the carbon monoxide detector had once been. The stairs to the right, where I’d followed Chase.
I’d found him at the foot of their bed. I’d never forget the look on his face. Sometimes I couldn’t look at Chase without picturing them, too. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to break in here now. Especially Ruby.
At the end of the hall, the scent suddenly changed. It became something beachy, more fragrant. A scent to mask another smell. The closer I moved to the front of the house, the more the scent grew.
The Truetts had converted the formal dining room at the front of the house into Fiona’s office, with French doors. One of those doors was ajar, and the source of the smell revealed itself: a blue candle in the middle of the wood floor, currently extinguished but burned all the way down to the melted wax. The label declared it Ocean Breeze.
I approached it slowly, this single sign of life in an otherwise barren house. The office was empty except for a stand-alone desk shoved against the far wall, and I didn’t want to use my flashlight in here—too visible, with the uncovered windows, from the front sidewalk.
I almost didn’t see it in the shadows: the heap of fabric in the back corner under the desk, stuffed against the wall.
Keeping my light off, I got down on my knees, inching closer, hand extended toward the fabric. A rustle of material, the shape of something rolled up—