Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

though it turns out no one had ever really let her be a child, she still behaved like one at times. Being around her was amusing and exasperating and, occasionally, illuminating. She was very easy to love.’

(I was? I have never before considered this.)

He tells Ruby so many stories, all the things he paid attention to. He talks about my mother, and my birthdays. About my growing love of photography, and how I treasured an old Leica. He’s now certain I stole that camera from that ‘no-good teacher’, the man I had told him about, but only just (I should have known Noah would comprehend what really went on between Mr Jackson and me). He says I loved the Chrysler Building with a passion, that I often sounded like an unpolished Joan Didion when I described New York, and that when he first saw me, I looked for all the world like the homeless waif I was. He even cries a little when he talks about the last time he saw me, how I was annoying him before bed, clunking around on the piano, restless in a way he should have noticed. More than anything, he wishes he had kept me up late, pushed harder to uncover my secrets.

‘If I had known …’

Noah trails off and Ruby, thick with everything she has been told today, reaches for his hand. When he doesn’t pull back, she squeezes her fingers around his.

‘How could anyone know,’ she says softly, and when she asks him if it would be okay for her to visit again sometime soon, he says yes.

It isn’t until much later that afternoon, as Ruby sits on her bed channel-surfing, and thinking about everything Noah told her, that something Tom said yesterday comes back to her.

She was out here, taking her pictures.

Ruby sits up, pushes her fingertips together, brings her hands to her mouth. Noah said something about a Leica, didn’t he? Amongst all those other startling, beautiful stories. She concentrates hard, hears Noah saying Alice loved her old camera and had planned to enrol in a photography school, so she could keep taking pictures of her beloved New York. Was this common knowledge, something already out there? In all the articles and forums and news bulletins she has scoured since the murder, Ruby can’t recall coming across anything about a camera. Turning off the TV, she opens her laptop, googles my name for the thousandth time. She finds no mention of a camera or photography or pictures in any of the news stories. Next, Ruby returns to her favourite sleuthing websites, scans post after post for discussions around why Alice Lee was out there by herself that morning in Riverside Park. Perhaps Tom has been here on these forums, too. Indulging his fascination with the dead girl from his neighbourhood, and that’s where he picked up such a specific piece of information. Clicking through the scores of entries, Ruby encounters the usual theories—prostitution, sleeping rough, online dating gone wrong—but once again, no mention of anything to do with Alice Lee taking pictures in the park.

A girl was murdered here.

Ruby’s heart begins to hammer.

She tries to pull other sentences to the surface. Thinks hard about Tom’s questioning of her, sees a flash of him snapping when that jogger came too close. It’s nothing, it has to be nothing. That kiss clearly unsettled her, and she’s been spending too much time on those damn forums, finding tenuous connections, potential matches—Snap!—where there are none. It’s just because she’s lonely again. Trying to fill up the absence of Death Club any way she can.

Still. A thought comes creeping in, persists. What if it’s no accident that she and Tom crossed paths again this week? If Ruby had gone back to that rocky beach a week ago, or a week before that, would she have found this man already there, looking out over the water, just as she herself had done that morning? What if Tom had been there well before she came along, and she was simply the one to discover the damage he’d left behind?

What if. What if. What if.

What if Tom was always there, in that nice spot by the river, waiting to see what happened next.

She won’t ever think of her foot cracking down on something round and black, the shattering of the plastic lens cap I lost when I was making my way down to the river, with the Leica tucked under my jacket to protect it from the rain. In my haste, I never even noticed when the cap dislodged and fell to the ground.

With so much that has happened since that morning, Ruby has long forgotten her prayer to the god of lost things. Which means she’ll never realise I accidentally told her about the camera, right from the beginning.

No matter.

She has a bigger realisation waiting for her. She really is almost there.

TWENTY-TWO

WHEN RUBY IS BUZZED UP TO SUE’S APARTMENT, LENNIE IS already seated in the kitchen chopping vegetables, sharp metal perilously close to her fingertips each time she brings down the blade.

‘Don’t disappear on us again,’ Sue had gently scolded when she opened the door, but Lennie is less subtle when Ruby walks into the room.

‘Where the fuck did you go, Ruby?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ruby says, feeling her eyes start to water. ‘I had some things to figure out on my own.’

The two women had responded to her SOS text within minutes; before she knew it, she was on her way to their Brooklyn apartment building for the first time, comfort and a home-cooked meal beckoning.

Something weird has happened. I need to talk to you both.

That was the message Ruby had sent, after going over Tom’s comments again and again. Feeling as if she might go crazy in her small room, she had reached out with her heart in her throat. To find Sue and Lennie still open to her was a relief, cool air rushing into a stifling room.

Taking