believe. “She never said anything to you. That’s all you know for sure.”
Jet is shaking her head. “She never knew, Marshall. Sally would have said something.”
Despite Jet’s certainty, I’m starting to wonder about Sally’s suicide. “Didn’t you tell me Sally tried to talk to you on the day before she died?”
She runs her hands back through her hair, then shakes her head with sudden violence. “Are you suggesting she killed herself because she figured out the truth about Kevin?”
I look away from the road long enough to see the last of Jet’s emotional fortitude crumble. She bends over as though she might throw up, then covers her eyes with her left hand.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to understand it all. Because if Max is still alive, we’ve got big problems. I need to figure out what he might do. Sally’s death never made sense to me, not as a suicide.”
“Until now, you mean.”
“Well . . . I never believed that bullshit alibi about Nadine’s mother. But if Sally figured this out . . . she really might not have been able to live with it.”
The headlights are almost upon us, undimmed by the rude driver behind them. The interior of the Explorer fills with light, and Jet shields her swollen eyes with her hand. After the truck roars past, I say, “What if Sally didn’t figure it out? What if Max told her the truth that night?”
“Why would he? To purposefully hurt her? He’s threatened to tell Paul before, even Kevin. But never Sally. Not first.”
Yet another epiphany rocks my perception of the situation. “Think about this. If Sally knew about Kevin, why would she kill herself? Why not Max? Seriously. Maybe she did try to kill him that night, and they struggled over the gun. Maybe Max killed her out of self-defense. But he can’t explain that to anybody without revealing the truth about Kevin.”
“Don’t say that,” Jet whispers. “Don’t even think that. I can’t deal with that.”
As much as she wants to avoid all culpability in Sally’s death, that scenario sounds more reasonable than anything else has to me. “There’s only one thing that makes me believe that’s not it,” I think aloud.
“What?”
“The blackmail cache she made. The one that’s scaring the Poker Club to death. That shows premeditation on Sally’s part. That’s the piece that doesn’t add up, no matter what kind of math you use. She puts together something that can destroy not only Max but all his partners, then doesn’t use it. Why?”
“I can’t think about it right now,” Jet says in an exhausted voice. “I can’t think at all.”
“We have to figure this out. Sally gave that cache to somebody else. Why? What were they supposed to do with it?”
“Didn’t they send you a piece of it? That PDF file?”
“I don’t know who sent me that. It could have been the person with the cache, but I don’t know for sure.”
Jet is thinking again; I can see it in her rigid posture. “All I know is this,” she says. “If Sally really figured out that Max is Kevin’s father, the only thing she would have cared about was making sure Paul and Kevin never learned the truth. And framing Max for murder wouldn’t guarantee his silence. He could broadcast it live from death row if he wanted to. Farewell world, I’m Kevin Matheson’s father!”
This nightmarish image makes me shudder. “I can actually see Max doing that. You’re right. So we haven’t got to it yet. The bottom of all this.”
We ride in silence for a mile or so, and three cars pass us in that time. We’re not far from the eastern edge of Bienville. Before I can even filter my thought, I say, “Paul never suspected that Kevin might not be his?”
Jet turns to me, and this time I see something in her eyes that’s hard to look at—her awareness of her husband’s weakness and his potential for lethal overreaction.
“If even a germ of that thought was born in Paul’s head,” she says, “he would crush it. He’d kill himself before he’d admit that’s the reality of our lives.” She touches a finger to her lips. “Maybe that’s what he’s been doing all these years.”
It’s nearly impossible for me to believe that this has been Jet’s existence for more than a decade. Since the year before my son was born, she has lived with this lie every minute of every day, knowing that at any moment Max could blow her