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

‘Do you really think he could have done it? This Tom guy.’

Still, Ruby doesn’t know for sure. How could she. Reading true crime threads and wandering around the internet with her imaginary magnifying glass could never prepare her for this. Not even seeing the machinery of a murder investigation up close, those forensic investigators, Jennings, her clumsy interview with O’Byrne, could give her the tools she needs to determine Tom’s motives down at the river yesterday, or any of the days before. How do you crawl into the mind of a murderer, and would it look any different from that of any other man, when you got down to it?

‘For all I know,’ Ruby answers slowly, ‘Tom is a great guy. Just a little forward. And a bit weird about Alice. That’s not enough to make him a murderer.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Sue responds. ‘And so what I’d like to ask you is this. Something we don’t ask ourselves enough. Do you trust your instinct, Ruby?’

The question feels as large as the room, and all three women pause to consider it. Thinking about the nights they’ve crossed the road to avoid a parked car with its lights still on or pretended to make a phone call when someone walks too close behind them. Remembering the times they have shifted seats on public transport, or said no, thank you, to that offer of a drink. Self-preservation as a replacement for instinct, because being right would be the real danger here.

Ruby feels her body arch toward this sudden realisation, a shudder that almost lifts her from the floor.

‘I’m afraid to be right,’ she says, holding out her arms to examine the tiny hairs standing up from her skin. ‘Because—can you imagine what that would mean?’

Something Josh had said to her that night at the secret bar comes back to her now. When they finally knew my name.

‘They’re not always monsters, Ruby. Sometimes they’re normal guys, who turn out to be capable of terrible things.’

It is a truth so small she almost missed it. So did I. But there it is. Half-hidden by the rocks and the dirt.

Just waiting to be found.

You mustn’t blame me for what happens next. Though I suppose some of you saw it coming. And maybe it is my fault. The way it all plays out. But I would never purposefully put Ruby in danger, please know that. I would have shown her this last, important detail in a different way if I could.

She can’t sleep. Lennie and Sue thought she should go to the police straight away.

‘In the morning, maybe,’ she’d said before she went home, thinking, hoping, the midnight hours might help her find the words she would need to make that call. Knowing Detective O’Byrne would need something more concrete than her instinct, her discomfort. But the words don’t come. Instead, her head is filled with half-finished conversations. Weeks, months, years of them, and Tom’s voice is the loudest now. Something—everything—is wrong with their interactions, this seems obvious now. Why did he … and why would he … and what was he … Ruby kicks off the bed covers in frustration. What is it that she’s missing here?

Tom knows something about Alice.

That’s what she returns to, time and again. The impossibility of it, and yet.

She was out here, taking her pictures.

It doesn’t make sense that he knows this. She is the one who found the body, she is the one who has spent night after night following breadcrumbs all over the city, piecing it all together. How can Tom be in possession of such an important detail that she herself did not know?

Fuck it.

This feels just like that other morning. The room too small, her thoughts too big. To Ruby, it almost feels like a dream as she gets up in the dark, puts on her running shoes. When she exits her apartment, makes her way toward Riverside Park, the streets are just as empty as that other morning. It’s not raining today, that is something different. But the stillness, the silence, her frustration, feel exactly the same. Checking her watch, Ruby calculates the sun will be up in half an hour. The sky is already changing colour, lifting up off her nose, and this emboldens her, lengthens her strides as she enters the park.

I can feel the adrenaline coursing through her now, the way it propels her toward the river, and I want to yell Stop! Find a way to turn her around. I would open up the sky, pour torrents of rain if I could. Crack the earth open, bring down the trees. But she keeps running, she can’t see me or hear me, and she cannot see what is waiting for her, down on those rocks. I speed between the river and the track she makes through the park, desperate to keep her away. There are other runners, cyclists, dotted around the park this early morning, and I try to rearrange them, move them into her path, but nothing works. Gusts of wind, branches bending; my panic is the lightest touch, and Ruby is moving too fast to feel it.

And then, mercifully, she stops. The sky is still dark, the river darker, and she stands, suspended high above the place where it happened. Knowing there are steps just ahead of her that will take her down to the water. She wonders: is this what Alice felt? Heading down to the river that morning? An inexplicable pull toward the water, a wilful ignorance of her own safety, because she had something she wanted, needed, to do.

What on earth were you doing in the park that morning?

Ruby takes the steps carefully, quietly. When she reaches the middle level of the park, she finally sees what I have been trying so desperately to keep her from: Tom Martin below her, standing on the rocks, shifting something from hand to trembling hand. He has come here every morning this week,