As she throws down her cigarette and stamps it out, a gleaming white King Ranch F-250 zooms toward us, then passes at seventy miles an hour. Without even thinking, I register it as Max Matheson’s truck. But what lingers in my mind is the outline of the woman who was sitting next to him in the cab.
Jet.
“What’s the matter?” Dixie asks. “You see a ghost?”
I dig out my burner phone and check it. No messages or missed calls. Looking down Highway 36, I see Max’s taillights as the Ford speeds away through the falling dusk. For a moment doubt makes me waver, and I think of asking Dixie if she saw Jet in that truck. But something stops me.
“Dixie, I need to borrow your Explorer.”
“What?”
“I need your truck.”
She looks at the Explorer as though trying to discern something that’s been invisible up to this moment.
“Dixie!”
Her face is a study in confusion. “But . . .”
“You can take my Flex. You’ll love it, it’s practically new.”
“What the hell’s going on, Marshall?”
“I’ll trade you back in a day or two. Do you want it or not?”
She looks back at my shining SUV. Then she shrugs. “Sure. What the hell?”
I exchange keys with her, then climb behind the wheel of her wreck and slam the door. I don’t know where Max could be taking Jet, but under the circumstances, her presence in that truck can’t be good. Closing my eyes, I turn the key and pray. The Explorer whines, stutters, coughs, then dies. Cursing, I floor the gas pedal and repeat the sequence. This time it ends with the engine rumbling to life.
“Don’t scratch my truck now!” Dixie hollers as I jerk the Ford into gear. She cackles as I peel off the worn asphalt shoulder, gunning the old engine in the faint hope of catching Max’s $80,000 pickup.
Chapter 37
I’m pushing Dixie Allman’s rattle-trap Explorer to ninety-five, and I’ve yet to see any sign of Max’s truck. Dusk is coming on fast. The land in the eastern half of the county is relatively flat, but there’s a fair amount of traffic on the highway headed toward Jackson. This makes it hard to discern different vehicles far ahead. I can’t figure where Max and Jet might be going, unless it’s to Max’s house in the Belle Rose development, which lies in this direction but ten miles farther east. I can’t imagine Jet going there with him, unless . . .
She’s trying to get hold of his cell phone.
What excuse would she have used to get him to drive her out into the county? A mobile client consultation? She could have faked car trouble and asked Max for a ride home. But would he buy that? Jet would have called Paul if she needed a ride home. Her husband might not be her first choice, but surely Max would know he would be her last.
Just as the Explorer reaches a hundred, I catch sight of Max’s pickup parked nose-out at a tiny store across the four-lane. Rather than hit the brakes, I zoom past the store so as not to draw attention to myself. There’ll be a turnaround soon, and if not, I can drive across the shallow median ditch. Why that store? I wonder, catching sight of a rutted cut-through a quarter mile ahead. Did Max need gas? The way he was parked, it almost looked like he was checking to see if anybody’s tailing him.
By the time I get the Explorer turned around, I remember that store sits at the junction of a narrow road that cuts north through the woods to the Little Trace. Max’s truck has already vanished when I reach it, but a pair of taillights that look like his flash in the distance, disappearing into the forest. If that’s him, all I need to do now is stay close enough to see which way he turns when he hits the Little Trace.
I consider texting Jet to make sure she’s all right, but something stops me. I can’t imagine that Max means her physical harm. Why go to the trouble of blackmailing us with the video if he intended to hurt her? Also, she still has value to him as his lawyer. No, the best plan is to hang back and be ready to intervene if anything crazy happens. I might be too late to help her if he gets violent, but if Jet were to leap from Max’s truck with his cell phone in hand, I could swoop in and rescue her on my borrowed, if battered, steed.
Three minutes on a narrow lane like a tunnel through trees takes me almost to the Little Trace. I use the time to text the contact info of Quinn’s archaeologist to Ben Tate, followed by a brief explanation. At the Little Trace, Max turns left, but as I turn to follow, I see him veer right onto another winding lane that leads farther north. Unless the memories of my youth are wrong, that little lane winds through the forest like a creek, eventually intersecting the worn asphalt of Cemetery Road. Which leaves me with a mystery. All three main routes out here—Highway 36, the Little Trace, and Cemetery Road—run east-west. If Max wanted to get somewhere on Cemetery Road, why ride this far out on 36, then cut north through the woods on crummy little roads?
I tap my brake pedal when I see his brake lights flash. Sure enough, he turns right onto Cemetery Road, heading east again. Now I’m in familiar territory. A few miles behind me stands the barn where Aaron and Gabriel are working to produce the front page of tomorrow’s gonzo edition of the Watchman. Only at the end of our magic summer did Jet and I cycle this far out, when we rode to the spring at Parnassus Plantation, which had replaced the Weldon barn as our private Eden. Parnassus lies about four miles east of here, and once you pass its gate, there’s nothing but woods till you hit the county line. Where could Max be headed? Maybe he owns or manages some timberland out this way?
I can already see Parnassus Hill in the distance to my left. Though it would be but a molehill in a mountainous state, locals took to calling the three-hundred-foot hump “the mountain” long ago. The thickly wooded hill is a smudge of dark green against the vivid purple sky, rising like a miniature volcano out of knee-high soybeans. Now that we’ve broken out of the forest, light seems plentiful again. Two cars separate me from Max’s F-250, which suddenly moves into the left lane and begins to slow.
Could he be headed to Parnassus?
A mile farther on, his brake lights flash, and he turns left at the brick-pillared gate of the plantation. The main road beyond that gate leads to a large Greek Revival mansion with two slave quarters standing behind it in the classic fashion. Even before I reach the gate, I see Max veer right off the main drive. About where he turned, a dirt road makes the long run across the empty fields to Parnassus Hill. With a chill of foreboding, I pull through the gate and park in the shadow of one of the great pillars. It’s still light enough that if I start across the flats right away, Max will likely see me in his rearview mirror. I’ve got to wait until he reaches the hill, then race across the fields while he’s climbing the back side.
While I wait, it strikes me that you can come to feel you own a place simply by spending time there. Someone else’s name may be signed to the deed in some courthouse file cabinet. But once you have walked it, worked it, made love on it, or bled on it, that land becomes part of you. The Weldon barn was that way for Jet and me, until the three freaks trespassed there and left the serpent of fear behind them. That close call drove us out here, to Parnassus.
At the summit of the hill lies a geologic anomaly for this area, a circular, spring-fed pool a hundred yards across. Thanks to the Artesian spring that is its source, the water stays cool all year round. The banks are grassy, but deer generally keep them trampled down enough to access the pool in a couple of places. That pool has a long history, and more names than are known. The Indian name has long been forgotten. The French christened the spring Bellefontaine and used it as a bathing spot. The English used a name I don’t recall. The slaves on Parnassus called it “the drowning pool” for some reason lost to history, but the owner of the plantation named it Delphi Springs. The bastardized version became “Delfey Springs” (coined by Confederate raiders who hid out there), and that’s what high school kids had called it since long before our time.