Page 26 of Such a Quiet Place
“I think she came back for her things.” I didn’t specify the money she’d left behind, hidden in her old kayak. I cleared my throat. “And… did you see her lawyer on TV the other night?”
Charlotte shook her head, mug frozen. But the lack of movement gave her away—she was holding her breath. Intrigued despite herself. I wanted to shake her, break through the surface, share a secret. But it was like she thought any show of emotion lost her the upper hand. Like she had to be the person you wanted something from, needing nothing in return.
“Ruby said they’re going to sue,” I finally said.
Charlotte lowered the mug back to the counter. “Suewho,exactly?”
I tipped one shoulder, then added cream and sugar to my mug. I really did need the caffeine, my head fuzzy from the sporadic night’s sleep. “She didn’t say. But she went to meet with the lawyer yesterday.”
She raised her eyebrows again. “And?”
“And she hasn’t come back yet.”
Charlotte let out a deep breath. “Maybe she’snotcoming back. Maybe this has nothing to do with”—she waved one manicured hand over her head—“any of us.” The same thing I had hoped.
“Well,” I said, after taking my first sip of perfectly brewed coffee, “she has my car. So I do, in fact, hope she returns in this case.”
Charlotte closed her eyes and laughed softly despite herself. “Oh, Harper,” she said, and I knew I was forgiven. That I was back in the role she expected me to inhabit. Too trusting, too naive. Too blinded by my desire to see the good in everyone. The last to know when Aidan was going to leave. The last to accept the truth about Ruby but forgivable for the pattern of my own nature.
“I know, I was caught off guard. I didn’t exactly tell her she could use my car,” I said. “But in her defense, I didn’t tell her she couldn’t.”
Charlotte gave the tiniest shake of her head and a look that bordered on patronizing. Like she was getting ready to impart some sage advice; she’d gazed deep into my soul and found the flaw, and now she would expose it, to fix it. “Well, I think you’re going to need to tell her to leave. Once you get your car back,” she said.
“How, exactly, can I do that?” I asked. Half sarcastic, but also, I wanted to know. She was the mother of two teen girls, elbow-deep in the issues of an entire school community, and you knew she could put things into context. I wanted to imagine what Charlotte would’ve done had Ruby walked in her front door unannounced.
“It’s not her house, Harper. It never was.”
“She paid rent,” I countered. She was up front with the checks, paying me in installments of three months at a time, the ideal tenant. Said money always made things awkward, and she didn’t want me to have to ask her for it. She made sure she was always ahead of the curve.
Charlotte put a hand over mine. “You’re a good person, but you don’t owe her, Harper. She is acriminal.” I pulled my hand back abruptly, and her eyebrows pushed together, the single line between them deepening. The only sign of her age. “You don’t thinkshe’s innocent, do you?” she asked. Leaning forward finally, like we would share that secret after all. Her face scrunched up in disgust for a fleeting moment. “It was a technicality, Harper. An injustice.”
Except it wasn’t a single technicality. The entire investigation and trial had been tainted from the start. Chase wasn’t a misfiled piece of paperwork. He was a very real person involved in a very real investigation, with a hand in every corner of it. The message board had been the proof. According to Ruby’s lawyer, there was more that we didn’t even know. Evidence that had been withheld. People who should’ve known better.
“We don’t know that,” I said. “The whole thing, the investigation, it was so fast, don’t you remember?”
Once the focus settled on Ruby, the dominoes fell quickly and succinctly, improbably sinking her. Her half-smile on all of the news pieces. The time line, forced between camera still shots.
Charlotte folded her hands on the counter, the very vision of a mother advising her children. “Look, let’s pretend. Let’s go ahead and pretend. Ruby was out there that night. She was seen by various cameras. At the very least, she knew something, and she said nothing. She was seen running down to the lake. She lied. You heard her sneaking in the back door at two in the morning. Does that strike you as an innocent person?”
It didn’t. But Ruby didn’t strike me as guilty before her arrest, either. “There was no motive,” I said, looking out the kitchen window, where you could see straight into the Truett house next door—the curtains gone, the entire house stripped and empty. That was what had irked me the most. Apparently, you didn’t need a motive to convict, but it kept me up at night. Kept me on her side longer than most. There was no reason for Ruby to do it, so I could therefore believe she hadn’t done it.
“She stole from them, you know. From Brandon and Fiona.”
My gaze jerked back to Charlotte. “What? Did you tell thepolice this?” After Ruby was arrested, there were so many rumors. I’d just never heard any related to this.
She sat back on the stool, mug in hand again. “Of course. But they couldn’t bring it up in trial. There was no one to vouch for it. But Chase knew. They all knew. Fiona said money had gone missing.”
“She thought it was Ruby?” Fiona still let Ruby walk their dog, still let her have a key. It didn’t track.
Charlotte shrugged. “Never said. You know how Fiona was, though, a little…” She let the thought trail as if we could not discuss the limitations of the dead. But I knew what she meant.Removed. Condescending. Uninterested in the rest of us.Charlotte continued, “I only remember because she opened her wallet once to pay me for when we all got the group rate to aerate the yards, remember? She opened her wallet and frowned, and I could tell something was wrong. She was clearly flustered, called Brandon asking if he’d taken the money in her wallet. And when he said he hadn’t, she was shaken, I could tell. She looked straight at Ruby, who was out washing her car.” Charlotte pressed her lips together, and I knew what she was remembering: Ruby in a bikini top, cutoff shorts, everyone looking despite themselves.
“It could’ve been anyone,” I said. “Or maybe Fiona was wrong. Ruby didn’t need the money.” They called her a grifter, but that wasn’t true—she’d paid me to stay after Aidan left me with the mortgage; she’d helped me out of a bad situation. They called her a charmer, a fake. A person who got what she wanted. But she was locked up for the last fourteen months, and no one believed her, so that wasn’t true, either.
Even as I said it, I pictured that money again, stashed in the bathroom, damp in my hand—
Charlotte shrugged. “Who said she needed it? Like some spoiled, bored child. It’s not the first rumor I heard about Ruby,though I assumed she’d grown up since then. Always seeing what she could get away with.” As if everything could be traced back to boredom. “My guess, the Truetts knew it was her. Maybe they confronted her. Maybe they asked her for the key back, and she knew she had to do something.”
“You can’t think she would kill over that? Come on.”
