guilty that I wasn’t rifling through Buck’s files and maps without delay, but given that I hadn’t found any bones at the rental house, I didn’t think the task was urgent. There would be time to go through the stuff after Jet left and before the party. I did watch Denny Allman’s edited drone video, which was a masterpiece featuring superimposed GPS coordinates, and I made a note to pay Denny well for that footage. I wasn’t sure what I could do with it, other than go out to the mill site in the middle of the night and risk being killed to try to unearth evidence that an army of technicians would be unlikely to find. Publishing the video to the Watchman’s website might be an option, but the video on its own proved little. I took another swallow of Heineken and watched the tree line.
The first sign I usually see is Jet walking out of the shadows beneath those trees, sixty yards away. A few times she has driven her car across the grass and right up to the patio, but leaving her car visible beside my house is too dangerous, even with my security gate. Though only Jet and I know the code required to open the gate, a single electrical glitch could allow a mailman or UPS driver to ride up to the house and recognize Jet’s Volvo. When it comes to risk, we’ve pushed the envelope a few times, but in general we’ve worked hard to eliminate any chance of disaster.
That’s the only way we’re going to get what we want.
Most extramarital affairs begin with the understanding that they’re not going anywhere. This pragmatic truth isn’t generally stated, but both parties—even first-timers—usually grasp the unwritten rules of the game. We’re not in this to blow up our families. They may be deluding themselves, of course. One may be acting out of desperation, grabbing for a ripcord to escape a marriage they’ve become convinced is a trap. Another might have fallen truly in love, or at least under the grip of romantic delusion, which becomes the equivalent of a ticking bomb.
Jet and I are different. We’re not playing a game. We wanted each other long before I moved back to Bienville, and not simply to consummate the desire that had gone unfulfilled for so long. The love that bloomed when we were kids had survived a nearly thirty-year separation during which we were alone together only twice. If I were self-indulgent, I might call us star-crossed lovers, but the truth is much simpler:
I was stupid.
The first time I saw Jet alone after I left Bienville for UVA was during her senior year of college. She was finishing a year early at Millsaps, a small liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi, and she’d flown up to Washington to tour Georgetown Law School. Without telling anyone—including me—she made a quick side trip to Charlottesville. We spent the whole day together, and we slept together that night. Only in the morning did she tell me that she’d been seeing Paul on and off since he’d gotten back from Ranger duty in Somalia. This revelation—along with the shaved-to-stubble pubic hair that greeted me when she wriggled out of her pants—told me that much had changed in her life. I felt sure the grooming choice was Paul’s preference, though she denied it.
I had no right to be angry. When I left Mississippi, I left for good. Except for a few Thanksgivings and Christmases, I hadn’t been home. Paul, on the other hand, had left the army and was working for his father, only forty miles from Millsaps. When I asked Jet what the chances were that she would choose Georgetown, she told me zero—she couldn’t afford it. She’d only come up to see me. She would be entering Ole Miss Law School in the fall.
After that, she and Paul saw each other in a hit-or-miss fashion, at least for some years. But after Jet got her law degree, she took a job with a firm in New Orleans, and they eventually got back together for real. Eight years after our UVA rendezvous, in 2001, she called me from the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C., where she was attending a National Bar Association conference. I met her in a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel, and this time she was straight with me about why she’d come. She’d been dating Paul exclusively for two years, and she sensed that he was