to the line.”
“Exactly.”
“And she loved Sally. Tallulah probably saw Max becoming obsessed with Kevin long before Sally did. Max was lucky she kept quiet about it for so long.”
“I think his luck is running out.”
“I’m surprised the club didn’t kill Max the day after Sally called Buckman. To remove all risk of the cache being used. Pine told me that some members wanted to do that.”
“Give them time. They’ve only known about the cache for two days,” Nadine reminds me. “You know they’re shitting bricks right now. But most of those old bastards love Max. And from my analysis of the cache, Max seems to be the main liaison between the Poker Club and Azure Dragon. That probably makes him especially valuable to them.”
“So . . . that night at the hotel, when Max and Sally fought in public. Was she planning to execute her plan? Or did the fight push her to it?”
“I think Sally knew what she was going to do that night. She started that fight to bolster her frame-up of Max.”
I’m amazed by the cold precision of Sally’s plan. “What if she hadn’t been able to reach Buckman on the phone that night?”
“She’d have moved down the list to Blake Donnelly. If she couldn’t get Blake, then down again until she reached a club member. But Sally knew all those men well, and their wives even better. She knew Charity Buckman would put her through to Claude—especially after seeing them fight at the Aurora.”
“I can’t get over how gracious Sally was to us that night, while this was in her head. But . . . you had to suspect something?”
“I didn’t, really. Not that night. She looked so alive, even happy, right up until that argument.”
I think back over the timeline of that night. “You stayed at my house that night. I’m the one who told you she’d been shot. You didn’t show much emotion.”
“I was shattered, Marshall. All I could see was Sally sitting at my kitchen counter, drinking wine and trying to pretend things weren’t hopeless. That night, when I left you to get dressed for our digging expedition at the mill site, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up.”
“I’m sorry. You know, some of this would have been useful to know these past couple of days.”
“I realize that. It’s been hard watching you struggle to figure all this out, when I knew the answer all along. But I promised Sally I wouldn’t tell a soul. And I took that promise seriously.”
“I get it. She was your mother’s best friend.”
Nadine looks over at me, and I see her lower lip quivering. For the first time, I feel like she’s about to lose her composure.
“There’s the road,” I tell her, and she looks grateful for the distraction.
We turn left, and kudzu-choked trees close around the car. Instead of voicing the next thing that comes into my head, I lay my hand on her arm, and she smiles sadly. Crunching over gravel in the dark, I feel the fatigue of an endless day burying me like sand. Then the trees open out to the clearing and the pond, which has a cold sheen in the moonlight. Three cars and a pickup truck sit outside the barn. Yellow light leaks from beneath the big sliding door, and as Nadine parks, I see a cigarette flare in the dark.
Opening the passenger door, I hear a deep voice say, “Yo. Who goes there?”
“Marshall McEwan. This is my dad’s place.”
“What’s the password?”
“Purple Rain,” Nadine says from behind me.
“Yes, ma’am. Welcome back.”
A big black man holding a rifle materializes out of the darkness. He reaches out and slides the barn door to the side, spilling light into the night. The sentry who challenged me looks about fifty, and his rifle is an AR-15 with a forward pistol grip and military scope.
Once through the door, I smell chemicals, ink, and heated paper. Aaron and Gabriel Terrell stand over by the big German offset press, while a group of teenagers sits in a circle of folding lawn chairs, all looking at their cell phones. Aaron waves and starts toward us. Before he covers ten feet, the kids break into an a cappella gospel rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.”
“Looks like you recruited a youth army,” I say, shaking Aaron’s hand.
He grins through his white beard. “We gon’ be all right on the foldin’ and delivery. Got some more drivers comin’ soon.”
Despite the excitement I felt about witnessing this spectacle—or even