Page 41 of Such a Quiet Place
Feeling more secure, I checked every corner of this house, assuring myself that we were alone. Checking each lock, closing the curtains.
All the while, thinking of Ruby sleeping upstairs with the knife under her bed. The blasé way I’d walked outside, unsure whether I’d left this house unsafe, unguarded, when everyone knew I was on watch tonight.
How sure I had been when I’d told Ruby that no one would be out there tonight.
How wrong I had been. How unquiet our street truly was.
Heart still racing, I picked up the paper left behind in the foyer, and a photo slipped out once more.
It was a printout of the same image, of that dog-bone key chain. But the frame had been pulled farther out, everything else gaining context: a person running down the sloped wooded path toward the lake—the water nothing more than a darkness stretching into the distance.
A black line obstructed the left side of the frame, and it took me a moment to make it out.
A black iron bar, surrounding the pool.
The photo had been taken from a distance. But not from the security camera of someone’s house. It had been snapped from the corner of the pool, from inside the fence. Where Mac had stood the other day, beckoning me closer.
The image was black and white, taken in the dark, but I could make out different details this time. Jean shorts and pale legs and sneakers, the Nike swoosh reflecting in the moonlight.
Details that could be identifiable.
A scene that someone had silently watched, standing at the edge of the pool deck.
I unfolded the paper it had arrived inside. Two words typed in black ink. A simple, stark message: WE KNOW.
