“Where is she going?” I asked.
“Down to the lake. Cuts through the trees. There.” His finger jabbed at the windowpane, and my gaze followed. The trees across the way. The other side of the inlet, with the dirt access road, the abandoned campfire.
“Ha,” Mrs. Monahan called from the kitchen. “Like you would know. What, you following her now?”
“No, but people talk around me like I’m not here. Like if I’m not on your eye level, I can’t tell what you’re saying. I can hear just fine,” he called back, raising his voice. “She and that young man were making plans at the pool party, standing right over me. Before…” His words trailed off. Before the fireworks. Before Ruby was found dead. Before she was poisoned.
Before someone poisoned her.
But I was stuck on his earlier comment. “What young man?” I asked.
“You know,” he said, waving his arm, seeming to search for something. Mrs. Monahan entered the dining room and gave me a knowing look. Like his mind wasn’t all that it should be anymore. Like I should take whatever he said with a hefty dose of salt. “She told him there was a party out there. That they were meeting at the pit the next night. Asked if he’d be showing up this time.”
The pit. That must’ve been what they called it—the small clearing on the other side of the inlet. Where Javier thought the kids were launching a boat. Where I’d seen the shadowed figure watching the kids on the lake last night.
“They’re just kids, George,” Mrs. Monahan said. “You weren’t even sure which girl it was.” She turned to me. “They look so similar, don’t they? For a long time, George called them both Whitney.”
“No,” he said with a grin. “I called them both Molly.”
I saw Ruby’s journal again. The initials she put in the page at night with a question mark.
Not Margo Wellman.
She couldn’t be sure whether it was Molly or Whitney. Ruby had seen one of them sneaking by in the evenings—and so did Mr. Monahan.
“Anyway,” he continued, “it’s the older one. The one we had the graduation party for. She’s the one who was making plans to meet up at night. She’s the one who sneaks out there.”
“Whitney,” I answered.
“You sure you don’t want something?” Mrs. Monahan asked, a polite way of telling me it was time to go.
“No, thank you,” I said. I opened the front door, and Mrs. Monahan retreated to the kitchen.
“I told Charlotte,” Mr. Monahan said in the entrance, one hand on the door. He lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t want my daughter out there with everything going on. Scary enough she was out there that night.”
I blinked twice, trying to process. “What night?”
“The night the Truetts…” He trailed off, hand to his hair again, as if trying to keep track of something.
“You saw Whitney out that night?” I asked, keeping my voice low in response. Ruby had claimed she heard someone else out there, and maybe this was it. Maybe she had been telling the truth about that all along.
“Yeah, I told Chase that. Saw one of Charlotte’s daughters heading down there earlier in the evening.” He shook his head again. “I saw her and Ruby both. But we don’t have cameras, and apparently, an eighty-five-year-old in a wheelchair is not the most reliable witness in the middle of the night. Like I said, I’m not blind. I could’ve helped. But I guess they didn’t need it.”
“Wait,” I said, eyes closed. I knew it by heart: the path she had taken that night. The direction she’d gone. The direction she’d returned. The tight time line of it all. “You saw Ruby?”
She’d gone down to the lake to the right, past the Brocks, the Seavers, the Wellmans. She’d come back home from the other direction, behind our homes. Sneaking in the back gate.
“Yeah,” Mr. Monahan said. “Clear as day. She tripped the motion light in our driveway. Guess she didn’t know the trick. Shielded her eyes at the house and scowled.” His eyes widened. “You know how she could scowl.” He seemed so sure, but he must’ve had it wrong.
“You saw Ruby heading that way, down to the lake?” I pointed to the left, toward the trees across the street, in the direction he’d just seen Whitney going.
“No,” he said. “No. Heading home.” Thumb jutting to the right.
I started walking down the porch steps as he closed the door behind me. Trying to make sense of it, I stood in their yard, staring down the street. Past Tate and Javier Cora’s house. Straight to mine.