Page 73 of Such a Quiet Place
Her hand went to her mouth, her fingers trembling. “It was supposed to be simple,” she continued. “But then the police arrived early in the morning, and at first I thought it was about us. I’d had nightmares that night—that we’d hit something other than a deer. How close we had come… to ruining our lives.”
A shudder ran through her, transferring straight to me. All the little things we hid to protect ourselves. All the small mistakes that could lead to the incrimination and ruin of someone else.
“Javier had to get a rental from the dealer, and the neighbors wanted to know why, of course, because they didn’t know whythere was a vehicle they didn’t recognize lingering on the street. Scared Charlotte’s girls, even. We were all so scared back then, remember? So we said we bought it. Traded the old one in. Kept this one instead. So yes, it was reckless and stupid, but it was unrelated, I promise. It wouldn’t have exonerated her. All it would’ve done was ruin our lives.”
“It did matter,” I said. Ruby’s time line was theonlything that mattered. And they had to make it stick. “No one knew she had been out front. It didn’t add up in the time line.”
“That was your fault,” she said, turning on me—a new place to shift the blame.
“What?”
“Your insistence that she’d come in at two in the morning. Maybe you heard wrong—the front door, the back door, you were upstairs, right? But the timing was off, from what you were saying. We were going to tell the police we saw her, just not say it was on the video. We were going totell,because we thought it was the right thing to do. But Chase said it was best to keep it simple. It wouldn’t change anything. And cameras counted more than a witness.”
“Chase said that?” He had lied. When he’d told Javier to keep it simple, he was, indeed, trying to close up her time line. Trying to make it stick.
“What time?” I asked.
She looked to the clock over the oven, then back to me. “Four a.m.”
“You’re sure,” I said. “You’re sure it was her. That she was coming back home at four a.m.”
She shrugged. “That’s what we saw.”
It didn’t make any sense. It was possible Ruby could’ve left again, come back. But she would’ve stayed hidden. It was inconsistent, and Ruby was nothing if not consistent—in the way shetainted my friendship with Tate, in the way she sowed discord; she thought she was better than all of us here. She would not have made that mistake.
There was only one answer, and it nauseated me. Made me take a step back even as Tate called after me. “I have to go,” I said.
“This is why we didn’t say anything,” she said. “It only complicates a simple case.”
But she was wrong. The explanation was alarmingly simple. Horrifyingly clear.
Ruby had come home at four in the morning, not two.
Someone else had been out there, just like she said.
And whoever was out there had been the one to sneak in the back door of my house that night.
Whoever I’d heard—it was not Ruby.
