Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [68]
“Yes?”
“Hello, Ruby,” Tobias said.
“Jody is dead.” Ruby came right out with it.
“Excuse me?”
“Your wife died in a fire.” Ruby didn’t see what use it would be prettying up an ugly fact.
There was a long, awful silence.
“How?” he finally asked.
“It’s partially my fault. I was being stalked. My stalker set the bungalow on fire,” Ruby said.
“Bungalow?”
“Where Jody was staying. I was in there talking to her. The guy set the place on fire.”
Ruby was having trouble making complete sentences. She stuttered out the rest of it. How she couldn’t get Jody to leave the bungalow. How the roof collapsed. She left out the part about the leg.
“She thought she looked bad.” Ruby couldn’t get this out of her head. How Jody apparently had died because she didn’t want the world to see her looking like shit. “She wanted to brush her hair or something.”
Tobias kept falling into long silences, and Ruby would gently remind him she was there, at the other end of the line.
“What did you tell the police about me?” he eventually asked in a small, resigned-sounding voice.
“I gave them your home phone number since you’re next of kin.”
“You didn’t tell them?”
“That you were trying to extort your wife for money? No. I didn’t see the point. She’s dead. You lost a leg. That has to be enough.”
“The cops won’t be looking for me?”
“Only to notify you about your wife.”
There was another long silence.
“I have to go now,” Ruby said.
“Yes,” Tobias said. “All right.”
Ruby squeezed her puppy to her chest. He licked her chin.
20. PARADISE
It was hot for mid-September, the mercury tickling 95 and a huge low-slung sun casting haze over Belmont.
Ruby locked herself inside Violet’s office so she could change her clothes in privacy. Spike jumped onto the ancient office couch, spun around in two circles, then plopped down and closed his eyes, immediately falling asleep. Ruby envied him.
She took the crazy pink and white seersucker dress out of the suit bag. She’d bought it a week earlier on a shopping expedition with Jane, who’d finally come back from India. They’d had a restorative afternoon together, spending money on frivolous items and cheering each other up. Jane was recovering from hideous intestinal parasites she’d gotten in India, and Ruby was taking baby steps toward feeling less skittish and haunted. Buying the absurd pink and white dress helped. Only now she had to wear the damned thing. Juan the Bullet was making his debut in a little more than an hour, and Ruby had to sit in a box with the owners. She had to look festive.
There was a knock at the door, and Ruby’s heart missed a few beats. She was still nervous all the time, jumping at the slightest sound. She figured it would be like this for a while.
“Ruby?” It was Violet.
“Just a minute.” Ruby zipped up the dress. She’d had to change in Violet’s office since Ed had banished her while he got Juan the Bullet ready—banished her gently and apologetically the way he did most things with her lately, but banished.
Ruby opened the door to let Violet in.
“Oh!” Violet seemed genuinely shocked. “You look fantastic!”
“I don’t look like a drag queen?”
“Stop being ridiculous.”
“Okay,” Ruby shrugged.
“They’re here again,” Violet said, lowering her voice.
“Who?”
“Tobias and Miller.”
“Oh,” said Ruby.
In some convoluted version of Stockholm syndrome, Tobias and his kidnapper, Elvin Miller, had become bizarrely inseparable. Tobias didn’t have any business at the track, but a few days after Jody’s death he started turning up at Violet’s barn to stare forlornly at the horses he didn’t own. Violet didn’t have the heart to ban Tobias, but having him around made her nervous. What’s more, Miller, whose job it was to navigate the wheelchair through thoroughly inaccessible areas of the back-stretch, was a reckless driver and sometimes spooked the horses.
“Will you say hello? Tell them Juan the Bullet is racing?”
“Won’t that make Tobias feel shittier?” Ruby asked.
“I think it would cheer him up.”
“Okay,” Ruby shrugged again.
“I’ll see you in the clubhouse