“Until Max started getting older?”
“Right. And Sally. We went through all this last night. Kevin started turning into the boy Paul never quite was, at least in Max’s eyes—”
“And Max wants him. God, this is bad. If Paul ever learns the truth, it’ll end in violence. No question.”
Jet gives me a sickly smile. “Do you think anything else would have brought me here like this? The explosive vest, remember? Max has his hand on the detonator. And there are a lot of people standing close to me.”
Me, for one. “He won’t keep your secret forever, Jet. Max wants that boy. And he wants you.”
“I know.” Her eyes close again. “All I can do now is try to postpone that day.”
“Or hope Max dies.”
Her eyes open. There’s a burning light in them that wasn’t there before. “I did what I could in that direction last night. But the bastard lived.”
I’ve got a much deeper appreciation than I did last night of why she wanted Max dead on Parnassus Hill. Very gently, I ask, “Did he really try to rape you last night?”
“He did.”
“And six weeks ago? When you stabbed him?”
She looks away. “Not that time, no. That was the first time he threatened to tell Paul and Kevin the truth. He told me he loved me, that we were meant to be together, and Kevin was the proof. I lost my shit. I couldn’t stand to listen anymore. I grabbed a knife off the counter and aimed for his stomach, but he jerked left and caught the blade in his side.”
“Dr. Lacey must have patched him up that time, too.”
“I guess. But last night was worse, Marshall. He told me if I didn’t break it off with you and divorce Paul, he was going to ask Paul to step aside. He repeated that when he called me today, from the hospital.”
The colloquial syntax sends a chill through me. “What does ‘step aside’ mean in that context?”
“Set Paul up in Dallas or Atlanta—in theory expanding their business. Once Paul was committed, Max would tell him the truth about Kevin. Threaten to cut him off completely if he resisted. No job, no inheritance, nothing. Then make sure my divorce went smoothly and I got custody.”
“That’s delusional,” I whisper. “Paul wouldn’t go for that, no matter how much money Max gave him. In fact, Paul would blow his brains out.”
“Max’s?” she asks. “Or his own?”
I think about this. “Max’s first, then his own. That’s my bet.”
Jet slides her chair back and stands, then begins pacing between the table and the back window. “I think Max believes Paul would kill himself, leaving no obstacle between Max and a life with Kevin and me.”
“Except me,” I remind her. “And he sent you here to end that.”
She nods but says nothing. Reflecting on Max’s desire to remove me from his life makes me miss Nadine’s pistol, which I slipped into the rag drawer by the refrigerator before Jet arrived. If Max were not bedridden in University Hospital in Jackson, I wouldn’t risk being even that far from the gun. As I look into Jet’s tired face, Tallulah Williams’s description of the “funny time” in the Matheson home comes back to me.
“Jet, I get that you basically used Max as a sperm donor. But it’s not like you used a turkey baster.”
Her head turns sharply, and I see a warning in her eyes.
“I have to ask you something,” I say in a low voice.
“Please don’t,” she says, reading my mind.
“How many times, Jet?”
She raises her hand to her face, covers her eyes.
“Jet . . . ?”
“Three, okay? I checked to be sure I was ovulating. Then I did it.”
“Where?”
“Don’t.”
I wish I could save her the pain of this. But I can’t. “I hate myself for asking, but I need to know.”
She blows out a rush of air, trying to bleed off anger or guilt. “Once at their house. In the guest room, like I told you last night.”
Only in a very different way than you described. “And the other two times?”
“At the spring.”
This takes me aback. “Delphi Springs? On Parnassus Hill?”
She nods, looking at the curtained window.
“Where we used to go,” I say softly. The awful symmetry of this makes me hate her for an instant. The thought of Max plunging into Jet’s willing body beside that pool gives me vertigo—
“It was the most secluded place we could think of,” she says, still refusing to look at me.
“Not Max. He manages thousands of acres of timber. Even you could have found some other place.”
She turns back to me in desolation. “Does it matter what patch of grass my naked ass lay on? I did it, Marshall. I gave myself to him. Surely that’s the only relevant fact.”
She’s right. We stare at one another without words. This is a new experience, to watch each other with something like loathing. Perhaps we don’t loathe each other so much as ourselves. We say nothing, for there seems nothing to say. My mind makes a few silent forays into the twisted logic of the situation, but my instinct for self-preservation pulls it back. Jet giving herself to Max was like a snake eating its own tail. By consummating her relationship with him, she turned herself inside out, becoming a living negative of the person she was before, and subverting a fundamental family dynamic. She achieved the goal she sought, a son for her suicidal husband, but at what cost? It’s hard not to believe that on the day Kevin Matheson was conceived, the seed of his family’s destruction was planted. And three nights ago, Sally Matheson died.
Who will be next?
Given the true state of affairs in the Matheson family, it’s easy to see how Jet might have viewed me as the only means of escape within her grasp. Knowing I’d never stopped loving her, she could have lured me here in the hope that I could somehow extricate her from the terrible web that bound her, without destroying everyone in it. But her hope was in vain. No one could accomplish that.
“So what now?” I ask, feeling exhausted and close to despair.
“I’m going to go,” she says. “I know I’ve wounded you. I look in your eyes, and I see that you can’t imagine touching me. Don’t deny it. Maybe that will change, I don’t know. I only want to be sure you know one thing. I loved you when we were kids, and I never stopped. I loved you when I came to you before I married Paul. I’ve loved you the whole time I was married. I know you don’t trust me now. But when you think about all this later, consider one thing: to tell you the truth was to risk losing you. It meant that every time you looked at Kevin, you would think of Max. Every time you made love to me . . . the same. Which would have killed any hope for us. Telling you also meant confronting it myself—in the daylight world, outside of Max and me, who were the only two who knew for thirteen years.”
“Tallulah knew.”
“She never told me that.”
“Do you believe now that Sally figured it out?”
Jet turns back toward the window. “I don’t know,” she says distractedly. “Did you hear something?”
“No. What?”
“A deer, maybe? A hoof on concrete?”