The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(60)

"You really thought you didn't hurt him?"

A turkey buzzard hovered above us, probably betting that two humans dumb enough to stand outside in this heat wouldn't last for long.

"When Jimmy and I got engaged," Ruby said, "Garrett pulled me aside, told me I was making a mistake. That was the first time I realized how hurt he was. When things started going bad between

Jimmy and me, Garrett just got more dismal. It became impossible for the three of us to work together. Tres, I thought I was doing something good, getting Garrett involved in the startup. I thought I was making amends."

This struck me as either the most brazen lie or the most pathetically sad truth I'd ever heard.

"You signed away the company," I told her. "If you were trying to make amends, you failed spectacularly."

She glared at me. "Yesterday we were in agreement. Now I'm a traitor? "

"Yesterday I didn't know you'd been cruising the Farallons with Matthew Pena. I didn't know about the back door in the software."

My words hit her like an Arctic front. She laced her fingers around her beer bottle, looked out at the lake long enough to count every buoy in the boating lane.

"You don't understand."

"You wanted to sell from the beginning. You said yourself—it was getting impossible for you to work with Garrett and Jimmy. When your partners wouldn't go along with the sale, you helped Pena force the situation. Maybe you didn't realize how zealous he would be."

"You're suggesting I would sabotage my own company?"

"How'd you work it, Ruby? What did Pena promise you—just extra money?"

Her eyes zigged their way down from my face to my chest. Her anger seemed to be collapsing from the inside. "Just extra money. That's good, Tres."

"Pena doesn't quit when he's won," I warned her. "He won't leave you alone. If you come clean, maybe I can help."

She shook her head. "You're cute, and all, Tres. But sorry—I don't do the damselindistress routine. There's nothing going on I can't handle."

A speedboat went by, far out in the channel. I watched its line of wake roll toward us, hundreds of yards, until it broke against the shore, lifting Ruby's red racing boat in a gentle swell.

"If everything's so great," I said, "why are you here?"

Ruby absently swatted a mosquito from in front of her eyes. "I couldn't apologize to Garrett, so I thought I would apologize to you."

"Nice try."

Her smile was fragile, covering a world of fear.

The scary thing was that despite everything I suspected about her collaborating with Pena, despite the fact that her exhusband had been murdered, despite the fact that she was quite possibly the worst thing that ever happened to my brother with the exception of the northbound train—I found myself wanting to help her.

In part, I wanted to undermine Pena, to prove to myself that his influence over people wasn't total. But my instinct to help Ruby went deeper than that.

I felt like out of the three people who'd created Techsan, I might relate to Ruby the best. The past weighed on her as heavily as it weighed on Garrett or Jimmy, and yet she'd done her best to get out from under the McBride legacy—to make her marina business pay off, to build her tower. I couldn't help admiring that, and I couldn't blame her for getting disillusioned with Jimmy and Garrett, either. I had a growing suspicion that if there were one person in the world I might be able to talk to honestly about my brother, it would be Ruby McBride.

"When you came here on Sunday," I said, "you were looking through Jimmy's things.

You picked out Clara's picture, her journal."

"I wanted to understand the Other Woman."

"You wanted to know why Jimmy was obsessed with his mother's past."

Ruby lifted the unfired pot, cradled it in her lap. "With Jimmy—there was always something going on that he didn't share, always something else taking up his thoughts, even when he was working nineteen hours a day on Techsan. That's what attracted me to him. When you have ninety percent of someone's attention—I suppose it drove me crazy, not knowing where that other ten percent was focused."

"And did you find out?"

She shook her head. Her eyes were getting teary, red. "It's the goddamn Elavil, okay?

It's not me. The alcohol . . ."

"Don't protect Matthew Pena, Ruby. He's not worth it."

She looked down at the vase—the smooth surface, muddy with unfired glaze, the ribbed interior made by Jimmy's fingers. "You still think he murdered Jimmy. You think I helped."

She waited for me to respond. I didn't.

I was thinking about leaving, heading back up to the dome for a bitter, silent supper with my cat, when Ruby said, "You really want to believe someone else killed Jimmy.

Someone besides Garrett."

"Don't you?"

She looked at me defiantly. "Then where'd they go afterward?"

"You mean to get away."

"You came rushing down from the house, right? You would've heard a boat. Coming down here, so soon after the shots, you would've run smack into the killer if he'd tried to get away up the road. The only person you saw was Garrett."