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.

Sandra did.

A few minutes later, she came into the trailer in her dirty work clothes, saw my face, and immediately did a double take. “Jesus Christ, Rebecca, are you in labor?”

That was the first time Darrell saw me—really saw me—and realized that something was very wrong. But I shrugged off her comment with a forced smile. “I’m just a little uncomfortable.”

Sandra gaped at me as if to say, Honey, do you want your baby born on the floor? But when I didn’t say anything more, she sat down and wiped her brow. “I don’t know what you want, Darrell, but if Norm’s not here, I’m not answering questions.”

“Then how about you just listen?” he said.

She grabbed a cigarette from her pocket but didn’t light it. She waved it in the air and fiddled it with her fingers. “Whatever. Go ahead.”

“We confirmed what we suspected,” he informed her. “Brink met with Kip and Racer. Ajax was the one who introduced them.”

Sandra made a little spitting noise between her teeth. “Ajax, huh? Nice.”

“Now all four of them are dead.”

“Well, that’s a big loss,” she commented with heavy sarcasm, ignoring her intention to stay quiet.

Darrell passed her the photograph. “Someone left this picture on Ruby’s door. It shows Brink, Kip, and Racer together outside Norm’s trailer. Sometime not long after this picture was taken, Kip and Racer were murdered.”

Sandra studied the men in the picture. Her face bore no expression, no anger, no disgust, no sadness, no regret. Silently, she passed the photograph back to Darrell. “So what?”

“Did you take the picture? Did you leave it for Ruby to find?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Kip and Racer? And Brink? And Ajax?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Darrell ignored her denial.

“We received this tape, too,” he said.

He produced the cassette recorder and again played the conversation with Brink and his partner in Milwaukee. This time, strain overtook Sandra’s eyes as she understood the meaning behind what the men were saying. The lines of her hard life deepened on her face. Like me, she knew this conversation was not about scaring her off or roughing her up. This was about men who were planning to kill her, to treat her like a helpless animal, abused and then thrown away. They wanted to send a message to any woman who might follow in her footsteps by working at the mine: Don’t even think about it.

When the tape ended, Sandra nervously peeled the wrapper away from the cigarette and let the tobacco fall to the floor.

“Remember what I told you?” she said, eyeing me. “These people are evil.”

“I remember.”

“Did Ruby know?” she asked me.

I didn’t answer, but she read the truth in my silence. She curled her lip with disgust as if she were chewing on something foul. “Ruby may be the worst of all, you know. The others were men. I expect that shit from them. But Ruby lied to protect them, even knowing what they did. She threw me and all the other women to the wolves.”

Darrell put his hands on his knees and adopted a fatherly tone. “Sandra, it’s clear that Brink intended to do you harm. He said you would regret turning down the money. In light of this tape, that was obviously a threat. Did he tell you that your life was in danger if you didn’t quit the mine?”

“No. He didn’t say anything like that. I just figured the harassment would get worse, and the mine wouldn’t do shit to stop it. I was right.”

Darrell eased back in the chair and stared at her, letting the silence draw out in the trailer. Although there was really no silence around us. The ground vibrated. The metal walls shook. Men shouted. Engines rumbled. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, as if my brain could block everything out. It was cold in here, but sweat poured down my face. A spike drove through my back, or at least, that was what it felt like to me.

“You know what I think?” Darrell asked.

He used that calm voice I’d heard many times, the voice that lulled a suspect into confessing everything. Tell them a story. Use a few little bits of evidence to tie everything together, and hope they didn’t realize that he couldn’t prove anything he was saying.

Sandra shrugged. “Tell me. I can’t wait.”

“I think Brink underestimated you,” Darrell said. “Everyone underestimated you, didn’t they? They figured you’d fold. Quit. Run away. But you were tougher than they thought. A lot tougher. You had your kid to think about. So you stuck it out, no matter what the men did to you. After everything you’d been through at the mine, you weren’t going to let some lawyer scare you out of your job.”

In my head, their conversation began to go in and out, like poor reception on a television set. My breathing got ragged. I opened my mouth wide to suck in more air. I clutched the sides of the chair.

“See, I think you turned the tables on Brink,” Darrell went on. “You followed him from the resort. You saw him meeting with Kip and Racer, and you knew what that meant, didn’t you? The three of them were planning how to get rid of you. Right? Is that how it happened? You knew they’d come after you sooner or later, and you figured you’d better strike first. It was kill or be killed. It was self-defense.”

The pain inside me nearly lifted me out of my seat, shot me through the roof, sent me into space.

“How did it go down, Sandra? Did Brink leave? Once the plan was done, he wasn’t going to hang around in Black Wolf County. He’d want to be long gone when Kip and Racer grabbed you. Did you stay in the woods and wait for your chance? I studied the crime scene, so I know Racer was killed first. That makes sense. You wouldn’t have wanted to take them both on at the same time. Did you wait until Kip left, and you had an opportunity to confront Racer one on one? He was probably drunk. Easy prey. Easy to kill. And when that was done, you hung around until Kip came back, and you did the same thing to him.”

Sandra didn’t say anything. I’m not sure she was even paying attention to Darrell anymore. She was staring at me in horror.

“I don’t blame you,” Darrell went on. “I really don’t. Believe me, I know the kind of men Kip and Racer were. If they’d managed to get hold of you, they weren’t going to make it quick. Brink probably told them to enjoy themselves. Did you hear him talking about what they should do to you? Did they laugh about it? There just comes a time when you snap, Sandra. I get it. A time when you’ve taken all the abuse you’re going to take. Is that what happened? Is that why you killed them?”

I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.

The pain between my legs crashed toward shore like a tidal wave, and when it cascaded over me, I screamed. With my face beet red, I screamed. I lurched to my feet and screamed.

That’s the last thing I remember, Shelby. Everything else is black, until much later that night, when I was in the hospital and you were in my arms.