“It’s time you told us the truth, Ruby,” Darrell said. He had a calm seriousness in his voice that made you hate to keep secrets from him.
Ruby still didn’t look up. “The truth about what?”
“Everything. Ajax. The lawsuit. Gordon Brink.” Darrell paused before dropping the guillotine. “Kip and Racer, too.”
There it was. She finally looked at us, with a little flinch that gave it all away. At the mention of Kip and Racer, fear flitted across Ruby’s pretty face like wind through the tall grass. We’d been right about everything. She knew. All this time, she’d been covering up a guilty secret, along with her husband.
“What are you talking about?” Ruby asked lightly, still pretending to be in the dark.
Darrell put the tape recorder on the table and pushed play. I heard it again, the conversation between Gordon Brink and his managing partner. I listened to Brink discussing in a cold, horrifying way his intent to arrange for payback against Sandra Thoreau. Ruby listened, too. There was no mistaking on her face that she knew exactly what these two men were discussing.
“That’s Gordon Brink,” Darrell said, “but I think you know that.”
“Yes. I recognize his voice.”
“This was recorded seven years ago. You don’t have to read too far between the lines to know what he’s talking about.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ruby replied. But she did.
“Gordon Brink tried to bribe Sandra Thoreau to quit the mine,” Darrell continued, with a snake’s patience. “When that didn’t work, he had a backup plan. In other words, he was going to make sure something bad happened to Sandra. And the men who were going to carry it out for him were Kip Wells and Racer Moritz.”
Ruby’s lips puckered nervously. “What does that have to do with me?”
“Brink wasn’t local. He didn’t find Kip and Racer on his own. He needed someone who knew the area, who could make an introduction. We both know that the person who helped him was Ajax.”
Ruby didn’t deny it. Or confirm it. She did what guilty people do and tried to wriggle out from the truth. “I don’t see how you expect to prove that after all this time. Not with Ajax gone.”
“I talked to the sheriff of Mittel County today,” Darrell retorted. “Seven years ago, he called Ajax to tell him that Kip and Racer had reached out to Norm. So Ajax knew. He checked Norm’s trailer. He found the two of them hunkered down in the forest. Ajax could have brought a team of deputies out there and arrested them, but he had other plans for Kip and Racer, right? Those plans involved Gordon Brink.”
Listening to Darrell made me think about how things might have been different. Fate hinges on the smallest of accidents.
If a deputy hadn’t overheard Norm talking to Kip and Racer on the courthouse pay phone, there would have been no hint of where they were hiding. Ajax never would have checked Norm’s trailer, and Gordon Brink never would have met Kip and Racer. The rest of the dominoes wouldn’t have fallen. There would have been no Ursulina murders.
All the other ripples, the ones that came later, never would have happened, either. I wouldn’t have joined the sheriff’s department or visited that lake where Tom Ginn was stranded. There would be no you, Shelby.
So maybe some things are simply meant to be.
Maybe we can’t escape fate. One way or another, it has its way with us.
Ruby reflected on what to say. Really, she shouldn’t have said anything at all. What we had was nothing but suspicion and conjecture, but I could see that with Ajax gone, Ruby was tired of concealing her husband’s crimes. She wanted the weight lifted from her shoulders.
“Am I at risk myself?” she asked. “Are you going to arrest me for the murders?”
“Were you involved in any of them?”
“No.”
“Was Ajax?”
“No.”
“Do you know who killed them?”
“No.” Then she added, “But someone knows what happened. Brink, Kip, Racer. Someone was there.”
Darrell’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What do you mean?”
But Ruby didn’t answer us right away. Instead, she went back to the earliest part of the story.
“You’re right, you know,” she admitted wearily. “Seven years ago, Brink came to town to try to get Sandra out of the mine. They figured if she quit, the rest of the women would go, too.”
“How did you find out? Sandra says nobody knew.”
“Ajax was visiting me at the mine. He spotted two of the senior managers talking with an out-of-towner. I didn’t know who he was, but Ajax had been out at the Fair Day that morning, and he’d seen the same man talking to Sandra. He put two and two together. You know Ajax. He could smell a dirty deal a mile away. Whatever was going on, he figured there was money to be made from it. So he followed Brink to the 126 and offered to help with whatever Brink was doing. He had his uncle call one of the execs at the mine and tell him they could trust Ajax with anything they needed. Jerry’s been in the mine’s pocket for years.”
“Jerry knew?”
Ruby nodded. “Jerry knew.”
“What did Ajax and Brink talk about?”
“How to get rid of Sandra.”
“They talked about killing her?”
Ruby shook her head, and her eyes widened. “No, no, they were just going to scare her, maybe rough her up a little. Not murder. Ajax wouldn’t have gone for that.”
“Did you know this was going on?” Darrell asked.
“No! I swear I didn’t. I would have told him to stop it. But he didn’t tell me until later. Until after Kip and Racer were murdered. At that point, there was no going back.”
“So what was the plan?”
“Brink wanted locals who could do the dirty work on Sandra,” Ruby went on. “He was looking for a couple of men who had nothing to do with the mine and who couldn’t be traced back to him. Ajax said he’d put out some feelers. But the next day, he got a call about Kip and Racer, and he figured out where they were hiding. They were perfect. He talked to them and said he could either turn them in, or he could look the other way if they did a job for a friend. He offered to get them off the hook on the liquor store heist, too. They jumped at it. Ajax told Brink where they were hiding and set up a meeting.”
“Did Ajax go, too?”
“No. He made the intro, that’s all. Brink gave him a thousand bucks cash for setting it up, but Ajax made Brink go by himself. I don’t know...”
“What?”
“Ajax didn’t say so, but I wondered if he knew what Brink was really doing. Maybe he thought the plan was to kill her, and he didn’t want to be there when they talked about that.”
“So what went wrong?” Darrell asked.
Ruby shrugged, as if she’d asked herself the same thing many times. “I have no idea. Neither did Ajax.”
“Now’s not the time to hold anything back, Ruby.”
“I’m not. I swear. Ajax went to the Fair Day to talk to Brink a couple of days later, but Brink was already gone. He’d left town. So Ajax went out to the trailer. Jesus. He saw the bodies, and he ran. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that scene. He didn’t go back until Norm found Kip and Racer and called you.”
“Did Ajax try to contact Brink?” Darrell asked.
“Sure he did. He called him at the law firm, but Brink denied knowing anything about the murders. Ajax said Brink sounded stunned to hear what had happened. Brink said Kip and Racer were alive when he left. The deal was done, and he wanted to be long gone when Kip and Racer went after Sandra. He had no idea who’d killed them.”
We heard hesitation in her voice.
“But?” Darrell asked.
“But Ajax thought Brink was hiding something.”
“Like what?”
“Ajax didn’t know.”