Despite the Flex’s low ground clearance and the path being thickly overgrown by weeds, I make it all the way to the clearing around the Weldon barn. Jet is already there, waiting in front of her Volvo. She’s wearing the black dress from the funeral, and staring at the remains of the old cypress structure. The barn where she and I discovered each other has mostly collapsed. It’s being slowly consumed by kudzu and poison ivy. The second story sits only four feet off the ground and looks like rattlesnake heaven. I wouldn’t climb up into it unless I was running for my life.
While the barn itself has fallen in, the clearing looks exactly the same. The sun filters down through the canopy in thick yellow shafts, the only straight lines and angles the first people in this region would have seen. Lone wildflowers blossom in the shadows of the woods. I don’t know their names, but they’re more beautiful than any you’d find in the florist’s shop on Rembert Street. I see fewer and fewer butterflies in the world, but they still thrive here, fluttering among the vines at the edge of the clearing.
I park beside Jet’s Volvo, then walk over and hug her. After the cemetery, I worried that this might feel awkward, but here it seems natural. We hold each other for a full minute without speaking. We do not kiss. I feel myself responding to her body, and she must feel it, too, but we draw apart without going further. Then she leads me to the edge of the sunlight and sits in a patch of clover, tucking her legs demurely beneath her. I sit facing her with my arms around my knees.
“Do you remember the old black man who saved us from the druggies that day?” she asks.
“Hell, yes. It was night, really.”
“What was his name?”
“Willis.”
She laughs. “That’s right! He said my twelve dollars would feed him for a week. I hope it did. If I could find him now, I’d give him twelve hundred.”
She picks a white flower from the clover, then another. With delicate, assured fingers she ties one green stem around another with a tiny knot, beginning a necklace.
“What did you guys tell Kevin about Max?” I ask, stepping right into the unspoken issues between us.
Jet doesn’t look up. “We told him Beau Holland got his grandfather tangled up in some serious financial crimes. We said that Max thought Beau had been murdered by some crooked partners, and he felt his only choice was to flee the country. I tried to give him the impression that Max is living on a beach somewhere, drinking tequila under another name. Costa Rica, maybe. I did tell him that I doubted we’d ever see his grandfather again.”
“Did Kevin ever believe that Max hurt Sally?”
“I don’t think so. Once news of her illness got out, he latched on to that as a legitimate motive for suicide.”
I nod, thinking that’s probably best.
“Last night was pretty crazy,” she says, picking another flower and going to work on its stem with deft finger movements.
“That barely begins to describe it. I’d say the credit for saving us goes to you. You were ferocious. You scared those old guys to death.”
She shrugs. “We all did our part.”
“You made it sound like you and Paul are staying together.”
She looks up at last, her eyes noncommittal. “I said what I had to. I read the moment.”
“You read it well. I’m the only one who knew you were bluffing about the cache.”
She laughs softly. “I wasn’t bluffing.”
“What?”
“One hour before they threw me in that helicopter, all I had was the number of the account I’d set up in the Seychelles.”
“Then how—”
“Max’s phone. Before you and Paul left to dump his body, I took the cell phone he had on him. I punched in the first password from Sally’s necklace, and it opened like a charm.”
“My God. What was the second password to?”
“A password vault application on his phone. That’s what ‘MaiLoc1971’ opened. Once I got into that app, it was like Aladdin’s cave. I could have emptied those accounts if I’d had time. I was still going through the stuff when Wyatt’s guys showed up to grab me. I slid it under the credenza in your den two seconds before they kicked in the door.”
“But you remembered some account numbers?”
Jet taps her temple and gives me an ironic smile. “‘The Brain,’ remember? I’ve never been so thankful for being a number freak. If I hadn’t been able to quote those account numbers, we’d be dead now.”
“Yes, we would.” Given that we survived the ordeal under the pavilion, my mind has wandered back before those crisis moments, to the ones in my kitchen. “I’ve thought a lot about Max,” I tell her.
Jet’s mouth tightens. “He was going to kill us. All of us. You said that yourself. That was the only way he could get custody of Kevin.”
“I know. I’m sure of that. Max would have shot Paul on the patio.”
“Then he deserved what happened to him, didn’t he?”
I don’t answer. I’m thinking about a conversation I had with Nadine when she and I woke up this morning. It was that discussion that caused me to put Jet’s sapphire earrings in my pocket and bring them to this meeting, to give back to her.
“It’s changed, hasn’t it?” she asks. “Between us.”
“Yes.”
Her dark eyes deepen. “When did it change for you?”
I’m not sure how to answer this. “I don’t know if you ever really know something like that. You just feel one way—you see a future—and then you don’t.”
She peers into the shadows under the trees. “I know exactly when it was for me.”
“Really?”
“Last night. When Max said what he did about me—the sexual thing—and you believed him, not me.”
I don’t respond to this.
“I know what he said sounded credible,” she goes on. “But I told you he was lying. And you still decided that I was the liar.”
“You’re right. After we proved he had lied, I felt like throwing up. I was ashamed.”
Her lips compress like a child’s as she works to thread one troublesome stem into a tiny knot. “I’m probably being unrealistic,” she says. “But I want somebody who’ll believe me, even if what I swear to seems impossible.”
I know how she feels. On the other hand, two nights ago she completely fabricated the story about Max raping her, and I’d believed that. I can’t help but feel that’s what made me vulnerable to Max’s lie. I’d just as soon abandon this line of discussion, but I feel one point must be made.
“Paul didn’t believe you, either,” I remind her.
“No. He didn’t. But Paul and I have a child. That’s the difference.”
She’s right, even if Paul isn’t Kevin’s biological father. In every other way, Kevin is his son. But I wonder if a man who Jet lied to for so many years will ever be able to give her the trust she craves.
I held something back a moment ago: I know the exact instant that I realized Jet and I have no future together. It was last night under the Boar Island pavilion, when Beau Holland revealed that she was the one who had given up Nadine as the holder of Sally’s cache. I understand Jet giving a couple of thugs what they’d demanded from her. After all, they’d threatened her child. But afterward . . . she chose not to warn Nadine, or even me. She abandoned Nadine to her fate. I don’t know why she did that, and I’m not sure I ever want to know. But it changed my feelings about her forever.
“It’s all right,” she says, watching my face. “I understand.”
“What?”
“Nadine. The cache. I can’t really explain what I did.”
“How did you even know she had it?”