“You never saw a report? Max could be lying.”
“He tried to show me the test results, but I refused to look. I didn’t need to, Marshall. I’ve seen Max in Kevin’s face and body ten thousand times. A hundred thousand. And it kills me every time. I think it’s driven me close to crazy.”
“No one else saw the resemblance?”
“Of course they did.” Exasperation has entered her voice. “But why should that bother anybody? To other people, Max is Kevin’s grandfather by blood.”
A pair of headlights appears in the distance. Totally normal, yet the sight of them nudges up my stress level.
“And Sally? She never suspected?”
“No, thank God.”
This I find hard to believe. “She never said anything to you. That’s all you know for sure.”
Jet is shaking her head. “She never knew, Marshall. Sally would have said something.”
Despite Jet’s certainty, I’m starting to wonder about Sally’s suicide. “Didn’t you tell me Sally tried to talk to you on the day before she died?”
She runs her hands back through her hair, then shakes her head with sudden violence. “Are you suggesting she killed herself because she figured out the truth about Kevin?”
I look away from the road long enough to see the last of Jet’s emotional fortitude crumble. She bends over as though she might throw up, then covers her eyes with her left hand.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to understand it all. Because if Max is still alive, we’ve got big problems. I need to figure out what he might do. Sally’s death never made sense to me, not as a suicide.”
“Until now, you mean.”
“Well . . . I never believed that bullshit alibi about Nadine’s mother. But if Sally figured this out . . . she really might not have been able to live with it.”
The headlights are almost upon us, undimmed by the rude driver behind them. The interior of the Explorer fills with light, and Jet shields her swollen eyes with her hand. After the truck roars past, I say, “What if Sally didn’t figure it out? What if Max told her the truth that night?”
“Why would he? To purposefully hurt her? He’s threatened to tell Paul before, even Kevin. But never Sally. Not first.”
Yet another epiphany rocks my perception of the situation. “Think about this. If Sally knew about Kevin, why would she kill herself? Why not Max? Seriously. Maybe she did try to kill him that night, and they struggled over the gun. Maybe Max killed her out of self-defense. But he can’t explain that to anybody without revealing the truth about Kevin.”
“Don’t say that,” Jet whispers. “Don’t even think that. I can’t deal with that.”
As much as she wants to avoid all culpability in Sally’s death, that scenario sounds more reasonable than anything else has to me. “There’s only one thing that makes me believe that’s not it,” I think aloud.
“What?”
“The blackmail cache she made. The one that’s scaring the Poker Club to death. That shows premeditation on Sally’s part. That’s the piece that doesn’t add up, no matter what kind of math you use. She puts together something that can destroy not only Max but all his partners, then doesn’t use it. Why?”
“I can’t think about it right now,” Jet says in an exhausted voice. “I can’t think at all.”
“We have to figure this out. Sally gave that cache to somebody else. Why? What were they supposed to do with it?”
“Didn’t they send you a piece of it? That PDF file?”
“I don’t know who sent me that. It could have been the person with the cache, but I don’t know for sure.”
Jet is thinking again; I can see it in her rigid posture. “All I know is this,” she says. “If Sally really figured out that Max is Kevin’s father, the only thing she would have cared about was making sure Paul and Kevin never learned the truth. And framing Max for murder wouldn’t guarantee his silence. He could broadcast it live from death row if he wanted to. Farewell world, I’m Kevin Matheson’s father!”
This nightmarish image makes me shudder. “I can actually see Max doing that. You’re right. So we haven’t got to it yet. The bottom of all this.”
We ride in silence for a mile or so, and three cars pass us in that time. We’re not far from the eastern edge of Bienville. Before I can even filter my thought, I say, “Paul never suspected that Kevin might not be his?”
Jet turns to me, and this time I see something in her eyes that’s hard to look at—her awareness of her husband’s weakness and his potential for lethal overreaction.
“If even a germ of that thought was born in Paul’s head,” she says, “he would crush it. He’d kill himself before he’d admit that’s the reality of our lives.” She touches a finger to her lips. “Maybe that’s what he’s been doing all these years.”
It’s nearly impossible for me to believe that this has been Jet’s existence for more than a decade. Since the year before my son was born, she has lived with this lie every minute of every day, knowing that at any moment Max could blow her family apart. I’m surprised she didn’t kill him years ago. Or herself.
“I don’t know how you’ve stood the stress.”
She sits back in her seat and exhales slowly. “I’m not sure I have. What do they call people like me in war? Walking wounded?”
“Did Max ever let you forget about it?”
She stares into an invisible void between us, the way I saw guys in war zones do after getting bad news from home. “Honestly? For the first eight or nine years, it was fine. Max kept his distance. And Kevin was such a gift that he accomplished the impossible. You know how people say babies can’t save a marriage? They don’t know what they’re talking about. Kevin was literally Paul’s salvation. He redeemed us.”
I recall the miraculous effect my own son had upon me. He was the only tonic that ever eased my grief for my brother. “Believe it or not, I understand.”
“I know you do.”
She reaches out and takes my hand again. We’re in the periphery of Bienville. There are more cars on the road, and I see the first highway lights a half mile ahead. “When did Max start to change?”
“It’s hard to say. About three years ago I really started to notice. The more he aged—or the more Sally aged, really—the more attention he started paying to Kevin. And to me. You know women age faster than men. Sally was beautiful, but you can only turn the clock back so far. Max still lives like he’s forty.”
“The son of a bitch could pass for ten years younger than he is.”
“Oh, he’s starting to creak a little. He feels the reaper out there in the dark. But during those good years, Max coached Kevin’s athletic teams, taught him to hunt—all the things Kevin loves doing now. I didn’t realize then what the result of that would be. Max was stealing Kevin from Paul. I’m not kidding. That damned traveling baseball team has taken over their lives. Kevin lives for it. This past year and a half, I’ve watched Max become more obsessed every month. He wants that boy. He wants to be his father. To live as his father.”
“And he wants you.”
Jet nods with what looks like desperation.
A terrifying thought has risen from a dark place in my mind. “Do you think Max has ever thought about trying to get Paul out of the way?”
In the light of the dashboard, I see something chilling in her eyes. “I don’t think he’s thought of much else for the past year. He said it out loud tonight. He didn’t talk about killing Paul. But setting him up in Dallas or Atlanta with a new business and all the money he could ever need.”
“Without Kevin or you? Max is crazy if he thinks Paul would ever do that.”
Jet looks back at me like someone grieving a death that hasn’t happened yet. “He would tell Paul the truth first. To drive him away.”
“Push him to suicide, you mean.”
She closes her eyes. “That’s a short push.”