Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

Is Ruby okay, then? No. Like I said, she has not chosen the easy path here. She could have let me go already, turned me over to the people whose job it is to think about me. Instead, her need to know who I am has come on like a fever; after her interview with Detective O’Byrne, she has stayed holed up inside her room, moving between the bed and the bathroom, as if taking a third or fourth shower might cool her down. It never does, so she crawls back under the sheets, half wet, stares at the ceiling, until she switches on her laptop again, goes back to her search for fresh headlines and threads of new information about the investigation. The city honks and buzzes outside her window, beyond her closed blinds there are millions of people going about their days and their nights, doing the things they always do, good or bad, or both, but Ruby wants to shut all that living out. Now that she feels closer to the dead.

Cassie says she should come home. Says she was right to question Ruby’s safety and the wisdom of her travelling alone.

Away from her laptop, there is only one safe place Ruby can think of.

The precinct is on a regular, residential street decorated with thin-trunked trees. Spears of metal make the first-floor windows of the street’s ornate row houses look like little jail cells, but for the most part, the location feels innocuous, homely, and Ruby would not have guessed there was a police station nestled in the neighbourhood. When she’d walked here for her formal interview, she’d followed the blue dot on her phone and was confused when she arrived, thinking: this is a street where people should be making dinner and playing with children, not investigating robberies and assaults and all the hidden, broken things. But then again, so much happens behind closed doors. Perhaps, she reasoned, it made sense for the police to slot themselves in amongst all that domesticity, amongst the kitchens and lounge rooms and curtains being closed around everyday life.

Best to keep the police close to home, maybe.

Seventy-two hours after my murder, on a grey-skied morning, Ruby finds herself returning to the precinct. She walks past the building a dozen times, but she never goes up to the entrance, cannot bring herself to do more than hover across the street. It is enough for her to stare at the front doors, to know there are people like Detective O’Byrne and Officer Jennings, that kind policeman, working away inside. Solving crimes, helping people, keeping them safe. Just a few days ago, she thought, This is how people go crazy. Now she understands she had no idea back then. What it means to need answers no one can give you.

Her body was found by a jogger. Such a famous line. Two anonymous women connected by just seven words. Just how close had they come to each other that morning? Close enough to change roles, play each other’s parts?

The victim is estimated to be in her mid-thirties. She is 5'7, 155 pounds. She has brown hair, and brown eyes. She has a tattoo of a heart on her right wrist.

Was Ruby’s life decided in the time it took to put on her running shoes? Had she arrived in the park just a few minutes earlier, might she have been the one in danger?

(How close do we all come?)

As she stands across from the precinct, Ruby thinks about Detective O’Byrne. By now, she has seen him many times on the news, read every single article about him she could find. It was no surprise to discover he is famous in his field, a respected, much decorated investigator known for solving many of the area’s high-profile cases. The grim stuff, the murders of women and children, cases Ruby skipped over at first, but often returns to in the dark, pressing her tongue against the exposed nerve of violence when she cannot sleep. She wonders how much more Detective O’Byrne knows about this particular murder than what has been shared with the public so far. A girl was assaulted, strangled. A seemingly random attack. The perpetrator’s DNA was found under the victim’s fingernails (and other places Ruby doesn’t like to think about). This is all common knowledge now. But what new secrets has the girl’s body offered up to the medical examiners and photographers and crime scene investigators? Three days on, obviously not enough to give away her identity. Posters with a detailed sketch at their centre have now gone up around Riverside: Do you know this woman?

(A forensic artist has approximated my face, painted a small smile at my lips, coloured right up to the edges of me. It could almost … but the artist has softened my expression, widened my eyes. I look like a girl who knows nothing of the world. Who is going to recognise that?)

There must be more that he knows, Ruby thinks of O’Byrne, today. She can almost see him shifting all of the different pieces from hand to hand, rubbing the truth between his fingertips until it sparks. An odd image, and when she looks down, Ruby sees that she herself is pressing thumb to forefinger, a new and nervous twitch.

‘Does he know who you are, Jane?’

Ruby doesn’t mean to say this sentence out loud, but the words slip from her mouth, just as Officer Jennings quietly comes up beside her. She jumps, their faces mirroring surprise and recognition. He thinks Ruby looks nicer in the light, sexy even, then scolds himself for such an inappropriate thought. Smith sent him outside, said the Australian woman from the Riverside case had been standing out front of the building all morning, and he should probably go see if she was okay.

‘Ah … Ruby?’

She nods and ducks her head at the same time, embarrassed. Jennings is looking at her with concern, and she remembers his softness down by the river. The