Jet shrugs, still not looking at me. “Yes and no. He’s the same man he always was, only worse.”
“How crazy do you have to be to rape your son’s wife? And especially you. Knowing you could have told Paul about it? I mean, screw the cops—Paul would have killed Max if you’d told him. I have zero doubt about that.”
“Maybe,” she says softly. “But that’s complicated, too. The physical tension between them. It’s always been an issue.”
“I know. But even if you told Paul this tonight, ten years after the fact, he’d strangle Max with his bare hands.”
She gives a halfhearted shrug. “You’re probably right.”
A fearful possibility hits me. “Have you ever thought about telling Paul? I mean . . . with intent?”
I see a new tension in her neck and face. My first read is that Jet has considered doing this, but something stopped her. “Hey?” I whisper.
“I can’t tell Paul,” she says. “And Max knows it.”
There’s something different in her voice. A new note of fear, even dread. “Why not?” I ask.
“Because Max has something on me.”
With that sentence, some of her dread passes into me. I turn in my seat and take her hands in mine. “What are you talking about? The video?”
“No. This is something he’s had for years.” Before I can speak again, she looks up with tears in her eyes. “Max knows I can’t tell anybody what happened. Ever.”
“Jet . . . what could be bad enough to keep you quiet about a rape?”
She shakes her head, tears pouring down her face.
“Did you have an affair with somebody? Something like that?”
A bark of hysterical laughter escapes her throat. “God, no.”
“Jet, there’s nothing you could have done that I can’t accept or forgive.” My mind is spinning out wild possibilities. “Did you hurt somebody? Like . . . run over somebody, and the Poker Club covered it up?”
She looks bereft. “No.”
“Then what?”
She wipes her face on her sleeve, then takes a deep breath, as though gathering herself before taking the jump I imagined before. Then she says, “Paul isn’t Kevin’s father.”
I stare back at her, uncomprehending. “But . . . you said you didn’t have an affair.”
“That’s right.”
A wave of nausea precedes the truth. But at last it hits me, like a dagger slipped between two ribs. “Are you saying Kevin is Max’s son? From the rape?”
“Now you’ve got it!” she says with false gaiety.
Sixty seconds ago I thought I knew what horror was. This is beyond anything I could have conceived. And yet . . . it follows from the preface as naturally as pregnancy follows sex.
“You’re not looking at me,” she says. “Can’t you stand to anymore?”
I snap out of my shock and look into her mascara-smeared eyes. “You said the rape happened ten years ago. Kevin is twelve.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure I could tell you the whole truth, so I said ten years. But it was thirteen.”
I feel like we’re sitting in some actors’ workshop, improvising an absurd situation to see how far we can carry it. But we’re not. This is real. This happened. To her. And my life is not what I thought it was. A nagging intuition tells me I should be alert for any movement outside the Explorer, but the idea of physical danger seems trivial compared to the threat of shattered trust. My mind is making what it can of the known information, trying to create a coherent or even sympathetic narrative.
“So then . . . just after the rape, you didn’t know that Kevin had been conceived. You didn’t know you were pregnant. But you knew what Max had done, and that if you stayed in that marriage you’d have to see him every day. So . . . again . . . why did you stay?”
Jet stares through the windshield as though waiting for someone to arrive and spare her from answering my question. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t. The core of it had to do with my marriage, I think. And with Paul’s problems. But I’m obviously not as strong or independent as I once thought I was.”
“I’m not judging you,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“Look,” she cries, pointing through the windshield.
“Where?” I ask, scanning the dark road for Max.
“Down by the gate. Headlights!”
Chapter 39
Sure enough, a half mile from Parnassus Hill, a pair of blue-white LED headlights sits motionless where the plantation’s gate should be.
“Maybe it’s teenagers,” I suggest, “looking for a place to make out.”
“They’ve come through the gate,” Jet says in a taut voice.
She’s right. Far below, the lights are cutting across the field now, moving fast.
“You think Max called the police?” I ask.
“He couldn’t have. I have his cell phone.”
“Let me see it again.”
She digs into her back pocket and brings out the big smartphone I saw earlier. “That looks like the Samsung he had in my house yesterday.”
“Maybe that’s the landowner down there,” Jet suggests, still watching the headlights. “Maybe he saw Max’s lights earlier, and he’s just now checking them out.”
“No. Mr. Hales would be coming from the direction of his house, not the main gate. Do you think Max could have had two cell phones on him?”
“No. I went through his pockets.”
“Every one?”
“Yes.”
“Then he must have had one in his truck.”
“We just wiped it down! I didn’t see any phone.”
I shake my head in anger and regret. “All I know is that Max is shadier than we ever thought about being. If anybody would carry two phones, it’s him. I kept the truck doors shut so the light would stay off. Maybe it was down in a door pocket or something.”
“Goddamn it!” she curses. “We can’t be this unlucky.”
The headlights are halfway to the hill and moving faster than any trespassing teenager or poacher would likely drive. While other possibilities certainly exist, all my instinct tells me that whoever is in that vehicle was summoned here by the wounded man on top of the hill. If we’re going to get off Parnassus alive, we may have to fight our way down.
The Samsung in Jet’s hand lights up as she punches numbers into it.
“What are you doing?”
“What I should have done the second I found the phone. Trying the passwords from the back of Sally’s necklace.”
“You memorized them?”
She looks up at me like I’m an idiot. It was a stupid question. The public school kids didn’t call Jet “the Brain” without reason. She has an eidetic memory for numbers.
“How can this be?” she asks, stabbing the keypad again. “The only possible phone password of the two is the shorter one, and it doesn’t work. Now we can’t even be sure this phone has the video on it.”
“It might not. Instead of using cash burner phones, Max may have kept two identical Samsung phones to fool Sally. A clone phone.”
Jet shakes her head and stuffs the Samsung back into her pocket. “That car’s got to be some random person, right? Or maybe Hales called the sheriff’s department, thinking we’re poachers.”
“That’s better than the alternative. Although a deputy or game warden will call in Max’s truck if he finds it abandoned.”
“That beats Max running out of the woods yelling that I tried to kill him. I told you we should have finished it back there.”
Knowing what I know now, I’m starting to think she’s right. “If Max called whoever’s in that car, then we know he has another cell phone.”
“Which means I went through all that shit for nothing,” she says in a grim voice.
“Listen. We’re going to sit tight in these trees until that car passes. It could be anybody. Russo and his mob guys. Even Paul—”
“Don’t say that.”
“It could be, Jet. We’re going to get down in our seats. Don’t even breathe when they pass.”
We hunker down below the doorframes, like teenagers on a lover’s lane trying to make themselves invisible to a cop. The headlights have vanished below, which means our new visitor is climbing the hill.