Page 84 of Such a Quiet Place
I wasn’t sure whether Whitney needed help that night; whether she wanted to talk to someone; whether she just wanted to wash away the evidence of a night out before returning home. It was all forgotten the next morning when we discovered what had happened.
We hid everything else we had done that night.
“I promise, Charlotte,” I said, speaking more forcefully. “Whitney didn’t hurt the Truetts.”
Charlotte froze only for a beat before nodding once. “Then I did the right thing. Ruby was guilty.” Creating in herself, once more, a righteous person. Someone justified in her actions.
I shivered. Who was this person I’d lived beside for so many years? “Did the rightthing? Youpoisonedher! Were you going to say anything when I picked up that mug?” Realizing, with horror, that the antifreeze had been in Ruby’s mug all along. That Ruby must’ve put it down, forgotten where it was, and taken mine after. But she’d already consumed it earlier at the party—had appeared drunk, increasingly unsteady on her feet. And we had watched her slowly succumb to it, unaware.
“I saw you rinse it out, Harper. Don’t be so dramatic.”
“Don’t be so…” I closed my eyes, the rage within me growing. “No one did it, Charlotte!” I was yelling now. “No one killed the Truetts! It was an accident. A terrible fucking accident. A tragedy. But no one did it.” I showed her the box under my arm.
“What is that?” she asked, because it was so dark inside, and nothing could be clear in here. Not what we had done or what we were doing. Everything felt buried under a haze of heat and disorientation.
“Come on,” I said, walking toward the back door, and she didn’t object.
But she wrapped her hand around my upper arm as we descended the back steps. To an outsider, it might look like she was helping me.
“Stop,” she said as we stood in the center of the patio. I took a deep breath of air, turned the box to face her. The print was visible in the moonlight. The words on the label clear to see.
“A carbon monoxide detector,” I said. “Brandon had ordered this before his death. Their old one failed. No one took it and hid it anywhere. It was just a terrible accident. It was no one’s fault.”
Her gaze met mine, and the whites of her eyes reflected my own horror in the moonlight. “You don’t know that,” she said. “The police would’ve found that. Or seen it on his credit card.”
“He ordered it with a gift card,” I said. “It came to the school, and I never opened it. Ruby found it, though.”
Ruby had fourteen months to run through the series of events, unspooling every one of them, knowing that she wasn’t to blame. And if she wasn’t, then who was?
The suspicion fueling her search. The sickening truth that she’d uncovered. A defense so difficult to prove—there wasn’t somewhere else to cast the blame. There wasn’t someone else to reveal.
There was no one.
“Let me see,” Charlotte said, wresting it from me. But I had a tight grip on it and pulled it farther from her reach.
“Don’t you see what you’ve done?” I asked, expecting her to give something—some show of remorse or regret. To show something real. But she couldn’t do that. She was too far gone, too committed to the path. There was no way back and no way out.
I saw her then, saw everything she had done to get to this point, and what she must’ve been willing to do to maintain it. The righteous cause: to protect her family. Built on presumptions and lies.
She stared at me, and I saw her gaze roam around the patio, the open doorway to the house—and I knew she couldn’t stop now.
I raced out the back patio, the gate creaking sharply, the wood hitting the fence on the other side. I had to get home, lock the door, call someone—
“Stop it!” she called, and I felt her arm wrenching mine back, just outside my fence line.
“What are you doing?” The voice came from beside us. We turned to face it together.
Tate stood before us with a gun in her hand, haphazardly pointed toward the ground.
“Why do you have a gun, Tate?” I asked. Her hair was in a bun, and she was wearing a matching pajama set, and she looked so young—so disconnected from the gun in her hand.
“Why do you think?” she asked, gesturing with it. “For protection. For our protection. Why were you in the Truett house?” Her arm swung wildly in the direction of the open gate behind us, and I cringed as the gun arced my way.
“Tate,” Charlotte said, “my God, put down the gun. We’re just talking things through—”
“I heard you,” she said as her back gate creaked behind her, swaying in the wind. “I heard yelling.”
“Everything’sfine,” Charlotte said. “Tate, go back to bed. Put the gun away, and—”
