Such a Quiet Place by Megan Miranda

CHAPTER 6

THERE WAS NO SIGN of Ruby when I woke. When I stepped out of my bedroom, groggy and light-headed, the house was eerily quiet. No scent of coffee or sound of her milling about. How familiar she had become once more, her absence now more jarring than her presence. The door to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom was open from where I stood in the loft, so I could see straight through to her darkened bedroom.

“Ruby?” I called, before taking a step inside the bathroom. The bed was a double pushed up against the far corner, and the turquoise comforter was thrown back haphazardly. The blinds were tilted shut so that streaks of light filtered through the gaps onto the floor.

Last night, after the news program with her lawyer, Ruby had taken a phone call and disappeared upstairs, never to reemerge. I’d heard her through the closed door—the low, periodic sounds of a conversation—but couldn’t make out what she was saying. Only her tone: clipped words, rising voice, before the room fell into a prolonged, unnatural silence.

Her room was empty now. I wondered how long it had been this way. Whether she’d gone out last night after I’d fallen asleep.

I backed out of the bathroom quickly, not wanting her to find me snooping, then descended the steps, hoping she was in the kitchen or lounging on the couch.

I didn’t see Ruby anywhere, and my heart rate slowly increased. She had no car—there were only so many places she could be. None of them good options.

My eyes scanned the downstairs for anything irregular—the front door was still locked, but the back… I walked closer until I could be sure: The back deadbolt was unlocked.

I threw open the door and there she was, on the worn white Adirondack-style chair that she’d moved to the opposite corner of the yard, into the single square of sun, her feet up on the matching wooden ottoman. “There—”

She put her finger to her lips, cutting off my comment. At first I heard only the birds, animals leaping from branch to branch in the trees behind us. But she tipped her head toward the high white fence that separated my yard from the one next door. There were voices, slightly muffled—I could just barely make them out. Not in the yard itself, more like someone had left a window open at their house.

Slowly, as we listened, the voices rose, gaining clarity in steadily rising emotion.

In all the years I’d lived next door to Tate and Javier Cora, I had never heard them fight. Argue, sure, in a gently teasing way—what they must’ve learned to do in front of others at the local middle school, where they both worked. If only you had remembered to take out the trash and Try not to forget the appointment this time. But never voices raised, accusations thrown. Not even during the investigation, when tensions were high and relationships were fracturing, fissures exposed everywhere. Tate and Javier had remained a united front.

Oh, but not today.

“You’re not thinking, Javi.” Tate’s words sounded like they were forced out through clenched teeth.

“I’m not thinking, I’m not paying attention—I’m always not doing something, according to you. Maybe you should be the one changing. Maybe you should just calm the fuck down for once.”

Ruby’s mouth fell open in exaggeration, eyes wide with glee. I felt my expression mirroring her own—a shared, delighted shock. I couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone Javier, telling Tate to calm down.

A beat passed, and then two—long enough for me to think they’d moved to another room—before Tate’s voice, high and tight, cut through the still morning. “Maybe you should get the fuck out of here.”

And then the sound of their back door being thrown open, Javier’s feet on the steps, and his rapid breathing, so close, on the other side of the fence. A flash of bright blue from his shirt as he passed back and forth.

We were stuck. I was standing at the bottom of the brick steps, trying not to give myself away. Ruby sat on the chair, one hand raised comically in mid-motion. She pressed her lips together. I felt myself holding my breath.

The unmistakable sound of texts being sent and received chimed from his side of the fence; he kept moving, a blur of blue passing through the slats. I wished I could see him, see what he looked like—whether his fists were balled up, whether his face had reddened—but the only way to see into your neighbor’s yard was from the second floor, and even then you could see only the back corners of the patio, where the gate gave way to the rise of trees beyond the fence line.

When Aidan and I moved in, Tate and Javier Cora became our closest couple friends. We spent evenings in their yard or ours, drinking beers, grilling, laughing. The guys would go out sometimes in the evenings together, and Tate and I would meet up at the pool, drinks in hand, chairs turned toward the lake, faces angled into the breeze.

After Aidan’s departure, it became clear they had known for a while that he’d been considering leaving me; neither of them seemed surprised. When I told Tate—the first person I wanted to see; I showed up on her front porch with righteous anger and a bottle of wine—it was obvious that someone had beaten me to it. And it was then I understood that, at some point along the way, Tate had decided not to tell me that my fiancé wasn’t in it for the long haul.

I thought of every opportunity she’d had to tell me. Every time I had mentioned the ideal time for the wedding—Oh, yes, May is perfect, she’d agreed, anything later and you’ll melt—or how we were waiting for Aidan to finish his program first. Afterward, whenever I looked at her, I could only wonder how long she must’ve known. How many times she and Javier had discussed it, how they must’ve felt such pity for me. Something that verged on embarrassment.

It was hard for a friendship to recover from that. Every time I saw them together, I pictured them discussing it, hushed whispers in their kitchen, where they could peer from their window straight into our living room: It’s not our place, Javi. Oh, but poor Harper. I don’t think she has a clue.

Another chime came from the other side of the fence, and Ruby raised one eyebrow, her whole face shifting into a question. I knew what she was implying, letting me fill in the blanks. Who would Javier be texting after a fight with his wife?

A window suddenly slammed shut. Their back door swung open, the hinges crying. A pause as some silent communication seemed to be happening: No one was moving; no one was speaking. Like Tate had just realized their mistake—the open window, their voices carrying.

Ruby pushed the wooden ottoman slightly with her bare foot so that it scraped against the brick of the patio, and I didn’t think it was an accident. A small smile broke onto her face. I heard Javier take a deep breath, heard his feet on the steps, the door closing, the lock turning with unnecessary force.

Ruby didn’t have to make a scene. She could disrupt the balance with the shift of her chair. With the mere possibility of her on the other side of a high fence. Her small smile stretched into a wide grin, and I shook my head, though I was grinning, too. I felt the last fourteen months dissipating—the bond threatening to form once more, the same one that had made our living arrangement so easy.

After Aidan left, Ruby had quickly joined me in my coolness toward Tate, picking up on some undercurrent. There had been a vacancy left behind, a sharp sting of betrayal, and Ruby had filled it.

“Wonder what that was all about,” Ruby said, standing from the chair. Then she ambled across the small brick patio, casting a quick glance toward the edge of the mulch bed, where the soil had been disturbed in sections. Rabbits, she had said, but it looked too organized. Too deliberate.

“Come on,” I said, gesturing for her to follow me inside. “How long were you out there?” I asked once the door was closed behind us. Always, always, tallying her minutes. As if I could control her actions by accounting for her time. Knowing how guilt emerged in the gaps: The time to unscrew the carbon monoxide detector from its spot on the ceiling; the time to take Fiona’s car keys from their spot beside the garage door; the time to start the car and run—down to the lake, down to the woods; the time to dispose of evidence and sneak back home—

“Not too long,” she said. “Hey, can I borrow your car today?”

My train of thought faltered. “I can drive you,” I said.

She skirted by me, walking past the kitchen into the foyer. “I have a meeting with my lawyer,” she said, her voice echoing as she headed for the stairs. “She’s coming through town and asked if I could meet her and the team in private. It’s in some business park, and I don’t know how long it will take.” She paused at the bottom step, one hand on the railing. “Okay?”

It was not. Handing over my car was not the same as an extra bathing suit, a pair of flip-flops. “I was planning to go to the grocery store,” I said.

“We can do that tomorrow,” she said, and I remembered that, with Ruby, you had to be firm and definitive, had to say what you meant. She would not give you the benefit of nuance or concede a point that had not been earned.

“I’ll call you an Uber,” I said, and her fingers curled tightly on the railing, the ragged nails bitten down to the quick.

“Harper,” she said, “the case is all over the news. I can’t have some kid with a license picking me up, driving me around, taking his shot for his fifteen minutes of fame after.”

The implied threat: Following her back here. People watching. Media vans camped outside, like they had been the days after her arrest—

Every decision was a balance, and I couldn’t see the right option, the right answer. I felt the pieces spinning out of my control.

She didn’t even wait for me to say yes.

WHEN SHE CAME BACKdownstairs a short time later with that brown leather messenger bag slung across her chest, she went straight for the drawer beside the front door, where I kept my ring of keys. This was another skill of hers, to push you into something, catch you on your heel before you realized what was happening. Asking, half as a joke, Any chance you could use a roommate, filling the backseat of her car and taking up residence in your house; saying, with the police on the front porch, Will you tell them, Harper? Tell them I didn’t do it? ThatI don’t have their key anymore? That I couldn’t have done it? So that the only thing you could possibly say, with her right there, eyes wide and searching, was Yes, of course, yes.

“Thanks, Harper, I owe you one,” she said, heading for the front door. My whole life, suddenly in her grip.

I followed her outside, watched as she slid into the driver’s seat of my car. She started the engine, lowered all four windows as if the inside of my car felt too contained. Hands on the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead—

“Like riding a bike, right?” She gave me an exaggerated grimace, and I wanted to ask, Do you even have a license? Is it still good? But more than anything, I wanted her gone—before anyone else noticed her sitting in my car. Ruby in my house. Ruby in my car. Slowly infiltrating my life once more.

“That’s what I hear,” I said.

She gave no indication that she heard me as the car glided down the slight incline.

I watched from the sidewalk as she drove to the stop sign, turning out of sight at the Seaver house, then I listened as the sound of the engine faded into the distance—not sure what I was waiting for. An accident? A change of mind or heart, my car suddenly returning up that same road? Ruby apologetic, stumbling out of the car, handing me back the keys, all the while saying, Oh my God, I don’t know what I was thinking.

A flash of movement in the front window of Charlotte Brock’s house caught my eye: curtains dropping back into place.

Of course people were watching. Whatever had happened at their meeting the night before, no one was reaching out to fill me in. This would probably make it worse.

I crossed in front of the Truett house and shuddered at the lingering scent of exhaust from my car. A trigger of a memory, my arms rising in goose bumps—Chase yelling at me to open the garage door as he turned off the car, then the mechanical churning so painfully slow as I held my breath—

The smell had taken a while to dissipate. It lingered so long that sometimes I wondered if it was what had brought me to their house that morning to begin with. Some subconscious understanding of wrong, only exacerbated by the barking dog.

Past the Truett house now, I marched up the porch steps to Charlotte’s front door, still feeling a chill, like the ghost of a memory following me in the dark.

When I rang the bell, I heard footsteps on the other side of the door—and then silence. As if someone was watching. Deciding.

“Charlotte, come on,” I called as I knocked.

The door abruptly swung open. Molly glanced past me.

“Hey, is your mom home?”

She blinked rapidly, long eyelashes and faint freckles on her cheeks, like her mother’s. Her gaze finally settled back on me. “No, she had to take Whitney to the dentist.”

I noticed her own teeth then, white and sparkly. I’d thought she had braces; she must’ve just had them removed. She ran her thumb along the top row now, like she was still getting used to the feeling.

As she started closing the door, I caught sight of the duffel bag in the hall, deep blue against the light gray walls, matching the set of landscape photographs hanging in the foyer. As if even this had been coordinated. The layout of their house was much the same as my own, but with a master down along with the two extra bedrooms upstairs, and decorated with a much better eye for design.

“You going out of town?” I asked.

Molly shifted to block my view, narrowed her eyes, a new distrust—as if the fact that I had harbored Ruby tainted my own character. As if she hadn’t known me for years.

“Mom wants us to go stay with our dad. But she didn’t check with him, and he’s not home.” Hand running through the ends of her dark hair, gathered over her shoulder.

Bob Brock had seemed as generic as his name, tall and thin and nondescript. Blandly handsome in person but nothing to remember. He had the type of face I thought I’d seen before. That had made me ask, Have we met? when I’d first moved in. Nothing like Charlotte, who was easy to notice, easy to remember. She had dark hair and freckles and looked much younger than her age. From a distance, walking together, Charlotte and her daughters could all pass for siblings. They were striking on their own, even more so as a group.

Even his job seemed ordinary—he worked in accounting. Which was what made what happened so hard to believe. Bob worked from home, depending on the project, and apparently had a habit of asking his girlfriend to park around the corner, keeping her car out of sight, and walk up our street, entering through their double garage, before she came into frame on their security camera.

But Margo Wellman had noticed the unfamiliar car at the curb, noticed the trend of the timing, and posted a photo to the message board of the blue sedan with a short blond woman exiting, because we had a strict no-solicitation rule. Anyone know this woman? she’d written. She’s been parking here every day this week around noon. I’ve never seen her before. And then Preston Seaver searched through his security feed and posted a clip of her walking past his house, sunglasses on, head down: Looks like she was heading up our street. But she never made it onto Charlotte’s camera next door. Charlotte was the one who posted: She never shows up on my video. Disappears somewhere between your front door and mine. ??

No one responded, not a word, until the truth sank in, and the drama shifted from the board to reality.

Charlotte was nothing if not detail-oriented and organized. She piled Bob’s things neatly into boxes and stacked them out front. We saw the locksmith’s van parked along the street before the end of the day.

The girls aligned themselves, as expected, with their mother—remaining here more often than not, even though their parents lived in the same town and shared custody. Bob had stuck it out with the girlfriend. Word was, he’d moved straight in with her on the other side of the lake after Charlotte had kicked him out.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Molly said to me, pushing the door closed. But she was too old to be wary of strangers—and anyway, I wasn’t a stranger. However much the sisters looked alike, their personalities were very different. Even though they were only a year apart, Molly was always the more cautious of the two, the more hesitant, the quieter. Sometimes, if her sister wasn’t around, you could forget she was there.

It was the older one, Whitney, who was bold. Who ran the lawn mower close to the window to get a glimpse of Ruby.

“Will you tell your mother I stopped by, please?” I asked.

“Tell her yourself tonight,” Molly said. “Isn’t there some big meeting at the clubhouse?” Bolder than I remembered, then. Older, anyway.

“By the way, no need to be nervous. She’ll be gone for a bit,” I said as I stepped back. Molly blinked twice, her face blank of emotion. “Ruby,” I continued. “You don’t have to hide out inside.”

Molly stared at me. “She’s guilty, you know,” she said, a tinge of disgust in her expression—at me or at Ruby, I wasn’t sure. “She shouldn’t be allowed to stay here.”

“Well,” I said, trying to remember myself at seventeen, how I hated being lied to by adults; how all I wanted then was honesty, “they didn’t prove it.” It was the one honest thing I could think of. I figured it was Charlotte’s job to explain the legal system to her children.

“Yes,” Molly countered with a roll of her eyes, a spot-on impression of her mother. “They did.” And then she shut the door, effectively ending the conversation.

AS I WALKED DOWNtheir porch steps, I saw Chase jogging up the street, his familiar broad frame, mechanical stride, quickening pace. I walked faster for home, hoping to avoid him. Knowing that Ruby was currently out in the world, having a discussion with her lawyer. I wondered whom she was referring to when she said Someone’s going to pay, whether it was only Officer Chase Colby of the Lake Hollow Police Department. Chase had already been placed on leave from the department, pending internal investigation. He had all the time in the world to let things fester. And now the source of all of his troubles, all he had lost, was here—with me.

I strode up my porch steps, head down. Had just shut the door behind me when I heard the steady stomp of his tread passing by. I peered out the front window, watching him retreat. Who needed a neighborhood watch when we knew Chase was watching?

The truth was, I didn’t blame him. I didn’t blame any of them, walking past the pool to get a closer look, pushing the lawn mower for a peek in our window, jogging by to check up on her—they weren’t the only ones who wanted to know what Ruby was doing here.

We’re going to sue,she said. On the news, the lawyer had implied that there was contention with the neighbors, with us, that Ruby had been wronged by more than the system. I no longer trusted that she would confide the truth to me, not anymore. If she ever had. Tell them, Harper. Tell them I couldn’t have done it—

It was instinct, at first, to want to believe her. Before her image was found on the cameras. Before the trial and the testimonies. I’d heard the echo of my brother in her plea, appealing to something baser inside of me.

Maybe that’s what made me confide in Kellen, in an ill-advised confession on Christmas night, after too much eggnog and not enough sleep. Thinking he would understand, tell me I had done the right thing.

By tradition, we spent Christmas Day with my mother’s side of the family, at the cape house we’d grown up in, and where she and sometimes Kellen still lived—occasionally by his choice, more likely by her heavy suggestion.

After dinner, we had made a joint escape from our extended family’s probing questions—Have you met someone new, Harper? How’s the job working out, Kellen?—seeking solace on the covered patio, even in the bitter cold.

We had always looked more similar than either of us would’ve preferred: large brown eyes and a downturned mouth; high cheekbones and a smile that felt familiar, reflecting back. At times, it made me believe we were closer than we really were.

And so I’d told him, in the dim glow of the yellow light beside the back door, with the voices muffled on the other side. My roommate was found guilty of killing our neighbors, I’d said, breaking the silence. I testified.

Kellen looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before. Like he wasn’t sure who I was, the secrets I kept. You knew she did it? he asked.

No,I said. I wasn’t sure.

His expression shifted again, to something darker, introspective. His breath escaped in a fog of chilled air. Shouldn’t you be sure before you testify?

But I’d thought that was the purpose of the trial. To present each piece as one, and to know beyond all reasonable doubt. I only told the truth. I’m not the one who found her guilty. As if we could each individually absolve ourselves.

The conversation had ended awkwardly, and I’d flown out early the next morning without saying goodbye.

But he’d called me a week later, on New Year’s Eve, close to midnight—holidays, the most acceptable times for reaching out—and apologized, as if he’d been thinking about it. Said he was projecting, then tossed in a self-deprecating line about himself—Like I should talk, right?—and some comment about how no one could ever be sure what other people were capable of. We’d said Happy New Year and hung up the phone and, in another Nash family tradition, hadn’t connected again since.

Now I heard the echo of his question: Shouldn’t you be sure? I wasn’t even sure what she was doing here now. But suddenly, with Ruby out, I saw the opportunity.

This time I approached her room with purpose.

Since the main door to her bedroom was closed, I entered the bathroom, like I had this morning, so as to disturb as little as possible. I took a closer look. On the counter were the essentials we had purchased online yesterday: fresh toothbrush and toiletries, half of them piled in the far corner, unopened. Humidity lingered in the bathroom, condensation clinging to the mirror, like she’d only just stepped out. I flipped the exhaust fan to circulate the air, and something fluttered overhead.

Above, a tight wad of paper had been wedged between the vent blades. I closed the lid of the toilet and stepped up carefully, balancing with one hand against the wall. Reaching up, my fingers brushed against the edge of a paper—a twenty-dollar bill that had unfurled, flapping with the gust of the fan. I leaned to the side, getting a better look at the roll of cash. If those were all twenties, that was far more money than I would’ve thought the lawyer would give her to get herself started.

From what I could see from this angle, there was an assortment of small bills—fives, tens, twenties. Like a hand had reached into a bucket of cash and randomly pulled. I couldn’t imagine her lawyer opening her wallet, counting out her assorted cash, and handing it over with a shrug, but I couldn’t figure out where else Ruby would’ve gotten it.

I quickly flipped the fan switch off.

My heart raced as I opened the cabinets under the sink, looking for more things she might’ve hidden, when I spotted a bright yellow pouch tucked behind the plumbing. I knelt on the ceramic tile and pulled it out. A small drybag, like we used when we were kayaking, to keep our phones and keys safe and dry.

It was empty.

She must’ve found this in the storage compartment of her kayak, buried under fourteen months of junk. Suddenly, I understood. This money hidden in the bathroom; the empty drybag under the sink; her fear that I’d gotten rid of the kayak and her insistence on taking it out—she had hidden her money there before her arrest. Maybe she’d been planning to make a run for it.

And now she was back for it.

A chill ran through me at the realization that maybe the neighbors hadn’t been paranoid with the rumors after her arrest. Their claims of money that had gone missing from a wallet, a purse, a house during a party. Maybe I had never known Ruby as well as I’d thought.

But I could feel my pulse slowing again, because I could finally make sense of her actions. She’d sneaked inside that first day, shoes in her hand, empty luggage in the hall. She was here, in my house, for the things she’d left behind. This was a series of steps I could trace forward and back, understand her motivation, see it through to its inevitable end: with her leaving this place.

Koda leaped off the edge of her bed in the connecting room, and I jumped, startled.

Ruby’s luggage sat in the far corner of the room. When I checked, it was still empty. I pulled open one of the drawers to the small dresser she’d brought over from her dad’s house when she moved, carefully searching through the clothes we had ordered together, tags still on. Some things, like the socks, remained in the plastic bag they’d arrived in.

There was nothing unexpected as I checked the rest of her drawers. I stood at the single window, peering out between the tilted blinds, where her room overlooked the back of our square patio and Tate and Javier Cora’s backyard. The branches of the trees outside the fences swayed, though there hadn’t been any breeze when I’d been out.

I pressed my face closer to the blinds, my forehead resting on the white slats. If someone was lurking in the line of trees beyond our backyards, I wouldn’t be able to tell, with the high fence blocking the view of the ground. Rows of tightly packed evergreens creating the illusion of privacy, so you would forget about the road giving way to another semicircle of houses directly beyond.

A squirrel, probably. We heard them all the time, hopping from the branches and scurrying across the roof. A quick pitter-patter of feet that set my heart racing every time.

I checked the closet last. Inside, the few wire hangers on the metal rod remained empty. A heap of dirty clothes was stacked in the dark corner, like she wasn’t sure what to do with them just yet. I dug my foot into the pile of fabric just to check. Nothing.

There wasn’t much else in the room to go through. A beige towel hung from the edge of the bed where the cat had been sleeping, and I resisted the urge to pick it up and hang it in the bathroom before it mildewed.

Before Ruby’s arrest, I had let the police in here myself, given them permission to search, when they were looking for the missing carbon monoxide detector. I was so sure they wouldn’t find it here—and they didn’t. The police ultimately believed that was why Ruby was spotted on Margo and Paul Wellman’s video feed, running toward the lake: to dispose of the evidence, though nothing was ever found.

I’d watched as they searched her room back then, methodically and carefully. I remembered all the places they’d checked. So I flipped the pillow over. Ran my hands along the comforter, then along the seams where the bed was pushed against the wall.

Finally, I reached between the mattress and box spring, sliding my arms up and down the length of the bed. My pinkie caught on something sharp near the head of the bed, and I jerked back. A dot of blood, the beginning of a wound; I brought it to my mouth to stop the sting. Then I reached my other hand carefully under the mattress again, and my fist closed on something small and metallic.

I recognized the item right away. It was a small paring knife. A familiar black handle with a sloping shape. Part of the set from my kitchen. Taken by Ruby from downstairs and stored, within reach, under her bed.

Like she was afraid of something.

I stood for a long time in that spot, listening to the sounds of my empty house. Wondering if I needed to be afraid of something, too.