I laugh in amazement. “If Max had known that, he’d have died of a stroke weeks ago.”
“Or murdered Sally,” Nadine says in a cold voice.
“True. Look, I know you said Sally was sharp, but all this sounds pretty high-tech. Are you sure she didn’t have the help of a tech-savvy young attorney?”
Nadine nods. “Positive. Sally had read mysteries and true crime for fifty years. She also watched a lot of TV. That may sound quaint to you, but while her friends were watching Downton Abbey, she was bingeing on The Wire and The Americans. It was actually The Americans that inspired her plan.”
“How so?”
“Do you know the show? It’s a Cold War setting. And one episode involved the so-called Dead Hand system. Are you familiar with that?”
“I did a paper on it when I was at UVA. It’s a system that fires nuclear missiles even after your country has been destroyed. It’s put in place to deter a first strike by the other side. Even if your whole population has been wiped out, the Dead Hand fires every missile you have left, destroying the ‘victorious’ opponent.”
This earns me a smile from teacher. “Sally adapted that doctrine to marital warfare.”
I think about this for a quarter mile. “Here’s where I’m confused. How was the cache itself supposed to function? What were you supposed to do with it? Sally created this weapon, which she gave to you. Then she warned Claude Buckman that if Max ever revealed his secret, the Poker Club would be destroyed. But they don’t know what the secret is. So how did Sally’s Dead Hand system work? How does the cache keep Max quiet? Was it meant to be a threat only? Never used?”
“Oh, no. If it were only a threat, Sally wouldn’t have needed to create it.”
“Except to bolster the threat at the beginning.”
“Uh-uh. That cache exists to destroy them all if Max ever tells Kevin or Paul the truth about Kevin’s paternity. Sally was deadly serious about that.”
“Well, that’s a crappy plan. Once Max tells the secret, Kevin and Paul are screwed for life, whether Max and the Poker Club are ruined or not.”
Nadine smiles with secret knowledge. “Unless there’s an early-warning system. A trigger to alert me if it looked like Max was going to spill the beans.”
“What could that be?”
Nadine raises her eyebrows. “You mean who. Tallulah, of course.”
The elegance of Sally’s system takes my breath away. “Tallulah practically lives with Max and Kevin,” I think aloud. “She’d know if Max was coming apart, edging up to the line.”
“Exactly.”
“And she loved Sally. Tallulah probably saw Max becoming obsessed with Kevin long before Sally did. Max was lucky she kept quiet about it for so long.”
“I think his luck is running out.”
“I’m surprised the club didn’t kill Max the day after Sally called Buckman. To remove all risk of the cache being used. Pine told me that some members wanted to do that.”
“Give them time. They’ve only known about the cache for two days,” Nadine reminds me. “You know they’re shitting bricks right now. But most of those old bastards love Max. And from my analysis of the cache, Max seems to be the main liaison between the Poker Club and Azure Dragon. That probably makes him especially valuable to them.”
“So . . . that night at the hotel, when Max and Sally fought in public. Was she planning to execute her plan? Or did the fight push her to it?”
“I think Sally knew what she was going to do that night. She started that fight to bolster her frame-up of Max.”
I’m amazed by the cold precision of Sally’s plan. “What if she hadn’t been able to reach Buckman on the phone that night?”
“She’d have moved down the list to Blake Donnelly. If she couldn’t get Blake, then down again until she reached a club member. But Sally knew all those men well, and their wives even better. She knew Charity Buckman would put her through to Claude—especially after seeing them fight at the Aurora.”
“I can’t get over how gracious Sally was to us that night, while this was in her head. But . . . you had to suspect something?”
“I didn’t, really. Not that night. She looked so alive, even happy, right up until that argument.”
I think back over the timeline of that night. “You stayed at my house that night. I’m the one who told you she’d been shot. You didn’t show much emotion.”
“I was shattered, Marshall. All I could see was Sally sitting at my kitchen counter, drinking wine and trying to pretend things weren’t hopeless. That night, when I left you to get dressed for our digging expedition at the mill site, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up.”
“I’m sorry. You know, some of this would have been useful to know these past couple of days.”
“I realize that. It’s been hard watching you struggle to figure all this out, when I knew the answer all along. But I promised Sally I wouldn’t tell a soul. And I took that promise seriously.”
“I get it. She was your mother’s best friend.”
Nadine looks over at me, and I see her lower lip quivering. For the first time, I feel like she’s about to lose her composure.
“There’s the road,” I tell her, and she looks grateful for the distraction.
We turn left, and kudzu-choked trees close around the car. Instead of voicing the next thing that comes into my head, I lay my hand on her arm, and she smiles sadly. Crunching over gravel in the dark, I feel the fatigue of an endless day burying me like sand. Then the trees open out to the clearing and the pond, which has a cold sheen in the moonlight. Three cars and a pickup truck sit outside the barn. Yellow light leaks from beneath the big sliding door, and as Nadine parks, I see a cigarette flare in the dark.
Opening the passenger door, I hear a deep voice say, “Yo. Who goes there?”
“Marshall McEwan. This is my dad’s place.”
“What’s the password?”
“Purple Rain,” Nadine says from behind me.
“Yes, ma’am. Welcome back.”
A big black man holding a rifle materializes out of the darkness. He reaches out and slides the barn door to the side, spilling light into the night. The sentry who challenged me looks about fifty, and his rifle is an AR-15 with a forward pistol grip and military scope.
Once through the door, I smell chemicals, ink, and heated paper. Aaron and Gabriel Terrell stand over by the big German offset press, while a group of teenagers sits in a circle of folding lawn chairs, all looking at their cell phones. Aaron waves and starts toward us. Before he covers ten feet, the kids break into an a cappella gospel rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.”
“Looks like you recruited a youth army,” I say, shaking Aaron’s hand.
He grins through his white beard. “We gon’ be all right on the foldin’ and delivery. Got some more drivers comin’ soon.”
Despite the excitement I felt about witnessing this spectacle—or even taking part in it—I wobble on my feet. “I noticed you have some security out there.”
“My idea,” Nadine says from beside me.
“That guy didn’t look like any church security guard.”
Aaron chuckles. “Hey, man, just ’cause I grew up in the church don’t mean I don’t know some brothers from the other side of the street. We got somebody riding shotgun with Ben, too.”
Nadine says, “Is anybody using those army cots you found earlier? Marshall’s hit a wall.”
“I see that. They’re all free right now. Got three set up in the back corner over there. Two more on the other side. We keep the boys separated from the girls when they lay down. On my watch, anyway.”
“You going to be able to get that front page printed?” I ask.