“Is that when Brink started paying Ajax? To keep him quiet?”
Ruby’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared with some of the anger I was used to seeing from her. “Paying him? What are you talking about?”
“Ajax had a separate bank account. He was getting five hundred dollars a month from somewhere. We suspect Brink was the one behind it, because the payments stopped after Brink died. And that makes sense if Brink wanted to stay clear of a murder investigation.”
“Five hundred dollars? A month? That little—”
Ruby hurled an obscenity at her dead husband.
“You didn’t know?” I murmured.
“No. He never told me. Sometimes I was surprised that he could afford the things he did. I had no idea he had that kind of money coming in on the side. He never let me near the bills. He said he would take care of everything.”
“Did Ajax have any contact with Brink after that summer?”
“Once,” Ruby replied, nodding. “When some new guy at the mine tried to feel me up, he called Brink and said the mine better get rid of the guy. They did.”
“What about when Brink was murdered?” Darrell asked. “Ajax had to be worried that Brink’s death was connected to Kip and Racer.”
“Yeah, he was scared about that. He was concerned that you’d figure out that he was connected to all of it, too. Or that—”
I stared at her. “What?”
“Or that the killer would figure it out and come after him next.”
“Did he have any idea who the killer was?” I asked.
Ruby focused on me with her wild eyes. “We both figured it had to be Sandra. I mean, you know what she’s like. You hit her, she hits back twice as hard. Ajax assumed Kip and Racer took her to the trailer to whack her, and she managed to take them out instead. And when Brink came back to town, she finished the job. But Ajax and I weren’t going to say anything about it.”
Darrell leaned across the table. “You said that someone else was there. What did you mean?”
Ruby drummed her painted fingernails nervously on the table, and then she pushed back the chair and got up. We heard her go to another room, and when she came back, she had a white number ten envelope in her hand. She pushed it across the table to us, and Darrell picked it up.
“I found this taped to my front door this morning,” Ruby told us. “I don’t know who did it, but to me, it felt like a threat. When I saw it, I figured I couldn’t keep any of this secret anymore. I’ve got my kids to think about. I was going to call you, but then you showed up before I had the chance.”
Darrell opened the envelope.
Inside was a black-and-white photograph. I leaned close to Darrell to examine it, and when I did, I couldn’t help the stunned gasp that escaped my lips. I don’t know what I expected, but the sight of that photograph felt like Mount St. Helens leveling forests in its path.
The picture had been taken among the dense trees, but I saw a glint of sunshine reflecting off a silver bullet. It was Norm’s Airstream trailer. There were three men standing near it, arranged close to each other in a half circle, and although the shot was slightly out of focus, I knew each of those faces well.
Kip Wells. Racer Moritz. Gordon Brink.
Together, seven years earlier. Together, before the murders happened.
“There was a witness,” Darrell murmured with a kind of wonder. “Someone saw them at the trailer.”
Yes. And that changed everything.
Chapter Thirty-Five
You’ll have to forgive me, Shelby, if the next few hours of that day are foggy in my memory. I was struggling to focus, and I’ve blocked out many of the details. I recall only bits and pieces, and the rest is just driftwood on a sea of pain and joy. But I’ll tell you what I can.
Darrell and I returned to his cruiser, but we didn’t go anywhere, not at first. We sat in the driveway outside Ruby’s house, and he stared at the photograph in his hand with a fixed concentration.
“Who took this picture?” he murmured, more to himself than to me.
That was the first question he was struggling with. Who saw Brink, Kip, and Racer together while their murder plot was unfolding? Because let’s be honest about their intentions. No matter what Ruby said, this was not an effort to scare Sandra into quitting. When you enter into this kind of plot, you don’t leave witnesses behind. They were going to do terrible things to her, and then they were going to bury her in the forest.
“It must have been Ajax,” Darrell speculated aloud. “He knew they were meeting. He hid out there with a camera in order to blackmail Brink later. That would explain why Brink was paying him.”
“That makes sense,” I said, through my own haze of confusion.
But Darrell wasn’t satisfied with his own explanation. “Except Ajax is dead. He didn’t tape the envelope to Ruby’s door. Whoever did that had to assume Ruby would give the photo to the sheriff’s department. This person wanted us to have it. Why?”
That was the other question. The burning question.
Not who took the picture, but where did it come from?
“There’s nothing incriminating in the photo itself,” Darrell went on, still wrapping his head around the puzzle. “The three men are all dead. It doesn’t help us figure out who killed them. And yet Ruby’s right. It feels like some kind of threat, showing up now. Like someone’s taunting us. But about what? What does the picture tell us?”
I felt it, too.
Even as my head swirled — even as I sweated and my heartbeat accelerated and I felt the first embers of what would become a ring of fire circling my middle — I sensed the malevolence behind the appearance of that photograph. An evil spirit, like a cold mist coming in from the sea.
Look what I know.
Look what I found.
“Someone had a key piece of the puzzle in their hands for seven years and deliberately kept quiet about it until today,” Darrell continued. “Who?”
I shook my head silently. I had no answers to give him.
Instead, I focused on what was happening to my body. Pain clamped onto my insides like a vise, knots of pain that came and went in intervals. My throat was choked with fear, and my brain whirled with uncertainty. What was happening to me? Was it you, Shelby? Were you coming soon? Or was I simply engulfed in the shock of seeing that photograph?
Darrell turned on the engine and said with his usual decisiveness, “Let’s go talk to Sandra.”
I should have told him no.
I should have been honest that my body was hoisting a flag of warning, but I found myself paralyzed, at a loss for what to do or say or think. I kept making excuses for what I felt. It was gas. It was nausea. It was pressure. It was stress. Anything but what it really was.
“Take me to the hospital,” I should have said. Not even home. I was already beyond going home.
But all I said was, “Yes, okay, let’s talk to her.”
We drove to the mine. That was about the worst place for me at that moment, filled with men and machines and dust and tumult, a dizzying chaos of noise reverberating in my head. I was trying so hard not to let everyone see the tornado of sensations whipping around me. Even Darrell was oblivious. I had to lean on him to make it to the work trailer, and he was so caught up in his questions and his mysteries that he didn’t realize — why couldn’t I just say it? — I was having a baby.
We sat inside while the foreman went to collect Sandra. He didn’t look happy about pulling her off the job again. Darrell and I said nothing, and I could tell that his mind was distracted, because he never even looked at me. Anyone who looked at me would have seen the truth.