Last, I flipped the wooden stool over, and my stomach dropped. A silver piece of duct tape ran across the bottom slat, the corners of the tape grimy and pulled away from the wood from repeated use.
Peeling back the tape, I felt like I was following a ghost across time.
Flecks of paint dislodged as I pulled, and there, adhered to the sticky side of the silver tape, was a single spare key.
I shivered, imagining how secure I’d felt behind my locked doors and my latched windows. How utterly unsafe I had been all along. There had always been a way in.
Ruby knew better than to trust such a thing as a lock or a door. Had slept with a knife under her bed to be sure.
That horrific night last spring, someone else knew this key was here. Someone who’d been told they were always welcome here.
Someone who’d let themselves in the night the Truetts were killed. Someone who’d crept up the steps and used the shower to rid themselves of any evidence.
To wash away everything she had done.
* * *
I HAD TO TALK to Charlotte. But how did one say to your neighbor: Is your daughter leaving me threatening messages? Is your daughter a criminal? Do you know where she was on the night Brandon and Fiona Truett were killed?
I didn’t understand what had happened that night. Why anyone would want the Truetts dead.
Ruby must’ve suspected something—must’ve uncovered something as she’d watched us. Something that had ultimately gotten her killed. And now I was following in her footsteps.
I didn’t know whom to trust. Not Chase, who had lied, pushed the facts onto Ruby, kept the investigation focused there. Not the police, who were the subject of an internal investigation relating to Ruby. Not this state agent, whom I barely knew. Because, just as my brother had warned, you had to be sure. Before a system churned you up.
Even innocent, you wouldn’t emerge the same. He didn’t. The past always following him, refusing to let him go.
The system wasn’t infallible. It was made of people and the rules we had established with moves we deemed fair—or not.
Once it turned on you, it was hard to find your way out of it. It followed you, became part of you, just as you became a part of it.
* * *
I COULDN’T TELL IF Charlotte was home. I’d been waiting all afternoon for some sign of life from her house. I’d texted her, even, something innocuous—Can we chat?—but there had been no response.
While I waited, I kept going through Ruby’s journal pages, her notes of Whitney passing by the house each night. I was assuming it had been her. Then and now.
Someone who had been told that they could always come to Ruby should they need her.
Someone who knew where the cameras were and how to avoid them.
A girl who had been to my workplace in the spring for a college interview—that mug staring back at her from across the room: HELLO THERE! Something she’d used to taunt me with instead.
But the timing of the notes—I couldn’t figure out what had set them off. The first one—YOU MADE A MISTAKE—had arrived the evening when we’d been at the clubhouse meeting, all of us signing up for the neighborhood watch. The second—WE KNOW—had arrived the night I’d been on watch myself, boldly placed inside my house.
As the day was drifting to evening with no response, I grabbed that photo and stalked two doors down to Charlotte’s house.
The Brocks’ security camera was pointed at the walkway over the sidewalk. I strode up that way so they would see me coming. I rang the bell and saw a flicker of movement behind the window. Someone looking out. But no one came to the door.
I pounded on the door with the side of my fist until it abruptly flew open, Molly’s long hair swaying into view. “What?” she said, somehow managing to walk the line between whispering and yelling. The same expression she’d given me last week when I’d come looking for her mother before the clubhouse meeting. Full of suspicion and fear.
“Where’s your mom?” I asked. The house behind her was still, the lights dimmed. Like she had been pretending not to be home.
“Not here,” she said, face stoic, starting to close the door once more.
“Wait,” I said, placing my foot in the gap between us, propping the door open. Because I thought I finally understood what had kicked off the arrival of those messages.
It was me.
Me, standing in this doorway, telling Molly that Ruby had not been proven guilty.
And Molly insisting that she was.
I saw her expression again—the distrust and uncertainty. Not of Ruby, so close to her house. But of me knowing something. Of me marching up her porch that day, looking to talk to Charlotte. Me implying that Ruby might’ve been innocent.