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.