“I don’t even know what’s down there.”
“Well, from what Ruby told me, it’s gruesome. If you think this will put you or the baby at any risk—”
“Darrell, either tell me the truth, or let’s just go downstairs, okay?”
“Yes. Okay.”
I took hold of the railings with both hands. Darrell made sure I didn’t fall as we headed down the steps to the cool basement. It was large, sprawling under the footprint of the entire house, but unfinished, with a concrete floor and foundation walls and wooden crossbeams overhead. The floor had no carpet, just a few throw rugs in the middle of the room and a minefield of children’s toys. The lights were plain bulbs with chain pulls, tucked among layers of insulation.
“Where is he?” I murmured.
“Far back, Ruby told me. Past the washer and dryer.”
Darrell led the way. I felt a sense of confusion and dread as I followed behind him, because I truly had no idea what we would find. It was hard for me to imagine Ajax killing himself. His ego wouldn’t allow it. I had visions of a sex game with one of his girlfriends gone wrong. If you believed what the women at the 126 were saying, autoerotic asphyxia was all the rage. Or maybe a jealous husband had finally had enough of Ajax sleeping his way through the married women of Black Wolf County.
Whatever was in my mind, I wasn’t ready for what we found at the back of the basement.
Ahead of me, Darrell froze in the way he did when he had to swallow down his bloody flashbacks of the war. I heard him hiss under his breath. He turned back to stop me from going inside, but I did anyway. My eyes absorbed the scene in an instant. It was a small, windowless interior room, with nothing but a twin bed inside. No sheets, no blankets, just a mattress and a single pillow.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. I simply couldn’t believe it.
Ajax lay on the bed, naked and very dead. Not suicide. Not a sex game. This was the past come to life again. Just like Kip Wells and Racer Moritz. Just like Gordon Brink. His wrists and ankles had both been tied, and his fixed eyes were wide, filled with a kind of terror I’d never seen on Ajax’s face before. His body had been flayed, sliced open head to toe. His organs were on display, some squeezing out like worms where his abdomen had been severed. The entire mattress below him was soaked red, completely red, as if it had been sewn out of burgundy fabric. Blood made a lake on the floor, too, and splatter filled all the concrete walls, where it had dripped into long streaks like pinstripes.
“No,” I murmured, grabbing my head and blinking over and over in pure shock. “It can’t be. This can’t be happening.”
But it was.
Months had passed, but the monster had returned. There on the wall, we saw the message scrawled in blood taken from Ajax’s corpse. Four deaths with the same signature, the way it had been left every time:
I am the Ursulina
Chapter Twenty-Three
Upstairs, I needed a drink of water. I found Ruby alone in the kitchen. Her deep-red hair was greasy and loose around her shoulders. She gripped the counter with both hands and stared out the window at her expansive backyard. Her tears had dried on her face, and a fierce, almost wild expression had replaced the sadness. Her jaw was clenched so hard I thought she might bite through her tongue. Her survival instincts were kicking in, the mother of three kids left alone. One thing I knew about Ruby. She was hard as nails.
“I’m really sorry about Ajax,” I told her.
Her head jerked around on her swanlike neck when she heard me. Her eyes looked ready to light me on fire. “What are you doing here?”
“Darrell needs to ask you some questions.”
“That’s not what I mean. What are you doing here? I can’t believe you’d show your face in my house.”
I shook my head in complete bafflement. “Ruby, I don’t understand. I mean, I know you’re a wreck over Ajax, but what exactly did I do to piss you off? Is this still about the thing at the 126? Because I’m sorry, but that wasn’t my fault.”
She didn’t say anything, but her eyes made an eloquent shift from my face to my belly and then back up again. My forehead wrinkled with a moment of confusion before it dawned on me what she thought.
“Are you serious?” I burst out, unable to control my reaction. “Do you think this is Ajax’s baby?”
“Isn’t it?” she snapped.
“No! I hope to hell he never said it was.”
“He didn’t have to. One of your neighbors saw him going into your place last January. Do you think I can’t read a calendar? You’re a worthless little slut. Everyone around here knows the truth.”
She was out of control, but I let it go. Her husband had just been murdered, and she was lashing out at anyone she could. I happened to be in the firing line. But I struggled not to scream back at her.
“Look, Ruby, I know how horrible this is, and I know how scared you are for the kids. You don’t have to believe me about this, but I never slept with Ajax. Never, not once, not ever. It didn’t happen. This isn’t his baby. I swear.”
I saw the look in her eyes. She wasn’t convinced.
“Fine,” I said, giving up. “Believe whatever you want. Right now, the main thing is, someone killed your husband. Darrell’s trying to figure out who it was, and he needs to talk to you.” I cupped my belly, where you were kicking for all you were worth, sweetheart. “Unless you somehow think I managed to do that in my condition, too.”
Ruby inhaled sharply, her nostrils flaring like a thoroughbred on the racecourse. She stormed past me. I followed, crossing through the living room, where several of our high school friends had heard the whole argument. They all shot me looks that said they didn’t believe me, either. I guess I’m naive. All year, people around town had apparently been speculating about me and Ajax, and I didn’t even know it. None of the stories had gotten back to me, I suppose because people were too nice or too embarrassed to tell me what others were saying. Ajax himself hadn’t seemed any different with me when I went back to work as the department secretary. Maybe he was less flirtatious, but I wrote that off to him having no interest in sleeping with me while I was pregnant.
I made my way to the room off the garage that Ajax had used as his beer-drinking rec room, complete with a Centipede game machine and full-size pool table. Playboy posters of naked women filled the walls. Ruby sat on a brown leather sofa. Darrell was already at Ajax’s rolltop desk, removing papers from a drawer and stuffing them into a box. I sat down on the other end of the sofa, and Ruby’s hostility blew at me like a cold wind.
“What are you doing with all that?” Ruby asked Darrell.
“We have to take everything from his desk and review it.”
“Why?”
“I need to go through Ajax’s papers, in case there’s anything that would tell us who killed him. Threats, that kind of thing.”
“Well, I need it all back,” Ruby said. “I have bills to pay. With Ajax gone, it’s up to me.”
“Of course. We’ll go through it this afternoon, and I’ll have someone drop off whatever we don’t need back at your house. If we keep anything, I’ll get you a list of what it is.”
“I don’t want her going through it,” Ruby said with a glance at me. “Whatever’s in there is private.”
Darrell sighed. Something in his face told me that he knew what Ruby’s problem with me was, even though he’d kept me in the dark about it. “Whatever we find stays inside the department, Ruby.”
She shot me one more venomous stare. Then she swept strands of her red hair out of her face. “So what do you want to know?”