“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.
“I know you’re freaking out about what I told you,” she whispers, finding my eyes in the darkness. “Can you still love me?”
“I still love you. Don’t even think about that. It’s just . . . it’s like everything suddenly went four-dimensional. I can’t believe you’ve carried that secret alone for thirteen years.”
“Not alone. I’d welcome carrying it alone. Max has known. That’s the hell of it.”
A dozen new questions rise, but I simply nod in the dark.
“The reason I didn’t tell you before,” she says, “is because I never wanted you to look at Kevin and think of Max. And I never wanted you to make love to me and think of Max.”
“I understand.”
“Would you tell me now if you felt different about me? I mean it.”
“Yes. I just wish I’d known about this when I saw you swing that hammer. I’d have run over there and helped you finish the motherfucker off.”
She squeezes my arm in the dark, then lays her cheek against my shoulder. I strain my ears, listening for the low note of an engine, but I hear only our ticking motor and the high whistle of crickets in the night.
“Whoa,” I whisper, gripping her arm. “The sky just got brighter.”
“I see it.”
A crazed drummer beats out an arrhythmic solo in my chest. I’m praying that nothing on this Explorer reflects light back to the eye of whoever’s behind the wheel of that vehicle. For the first time, I’m glad to be in Dixie Allman’s rust bucket. Without being obvious, I reach down and grip the butt of my pistol, then slide it up into my lap.
The headlight beams grow brighter, turning our windshield into a blue-white trapezoid. An isosceles trapezoid, I think crazily.