Victory is written on Leo’s face like blood after a hunt, and the wolfish blue eyes are laughing. I have not struck another human being in anger since I was fifteen years old, but my knee rises into his groin with preternatural speed and force. The air explodes from his lungs. As he doubles over, my elbow crashes into the side of his head, just the way a Houston police detective once taught me.
“Stop it!” Livy screams. “Penn, stop!”
She is running around the car to get between us. Some part of my brain knows I should stop, but I’m still moving forward, pursuing Leo as he staggers back. He shakes his head and raises his big left hand to his jaw. I draw back my fist, then freeze as a silver derringer appears before my nose as though by magic. He must have had it palmed all along, a little nickel-plated gambler’s special.
“Go ahead, you little pissant,” he snarls. “Go ahead.”
“Daddy?” Livy stands two feet behind her father, her voice riding a current of hysteria.
“Go inside, baby. You don’t want to see this.”
“Daddy, I love him.”
This simple declaration hits Leo like an arrow. He actually flinches, like a bear struck between the ribs, and an expression of pure hatred comes over his face. “Go inside, Livy! This boy’s forgotten his place. He assaulted me on my property.”
But Livy doesn’t go. The three of us remain locked in our positions, a pathetic standoff on the edge of tragedy that lasts until Daniel Kelly’s rented Taurus rolls slowly up the drive.
Kelly parks alongside the cars, five feet from us, and rolls down his window like a tourist asking for directions. But what comes through his window is not a map but a Browning Hi-Power pistol, which he points at Leo’s head.
“Please go inside the house, sir,” he says.
“Who the hell are you?” Leo asks, keeping the derringer in my face.
Kelly’s suntanned face remains calm, as though he were listening to a soothing piece of music. “I’m the man who’s going to end your life unless you take that gun in the house.”
“Bullshit,” Leo grunts. “Get the fuck off my property.”
“I’m here to do a job, sir,” Kelly says in the same lazy voice. “Don’t make yourself part of it.”
At last Leo really looks at Kelly, and the muscles in his jaw tighten. He has vastly multiplied his family fortune by accurately judging men’s characters. And whatever he sees in Daniel Kelly’s eyes convinces him that today is the wrong day to tempt fate. He lowers the derringer.
“You just made yourself part of my job, sonny.” He raises two fingers in a little toodle-loo gesture, then turns and walks up the broad steps of his mansion.
“Livy,” he says without turning around. “Your mother needs you.”
“I’m coming.” She steps toward me and tries to take my hand, but I pull it away. “Make a public apology, Penn,” she pleads. “Please. Do that, and I’ll convince Daddy to drop the suit.”
“It’s too late for that.”
She looks at me sadly. “You can’t play my father’s game and win. Not in this town. Not in this state. Nobody can. You could lose everything you have.”
“You’ve got a short memory, Livy. Your father lost his case against mine twenty years ago, and he’s going to lose this one.”
“That was different. It was a weak case to start with.”
“Then why did he take it?”
Unreadable emotion flares in her eyes. “I don’t know. But I do know you nearly fainted when he told you that man had been arrested. He was your last hope, wasn’t he? He was your case. If you walk into that courtroom Wednesday, you’ll be like a lamb going to slaughter.”
I step back from her, trying not to think of Peter Lutjens. “That’s my problem. Your problem is a lot bigger than that. Your whole life is built around some secret tragedy whose real victim is a girl crying alone in a room three miles from here. What are you going to do about that?”
Her eyes go cold again. “Nothing. And you’d better not either.” She turns and walks up three steps, then looks back to me. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the trial.”
This time she goes all the way up and through the massive door.
I get into the BMW and start to leave, but Kelly pulls his Taurus in front of it, blocking my way. Then he gets out and comes around to my window.
“Boss? To an objective observer, it looks like you’re trying awful hard to get killed.”
“I’ve learned some upsetting things in the past half hour. I haven’t even begun to understand them yet. All I know is that I want to nail that son of a bitch more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life, other than to save my wife from dying. And that was beyond my power.”
“Maybe this is too,” Kelly says gently. “I wouldn’t mind bringing that bastard down a peg myself. But things seem pretty seriously stacked against you. Sometimes you’ve got to pull back. Regroup. Fight another day.”
“No,” I say doggedly, perhaps stupidly. “If I let the momentum die, Marston and Portman will never pay for whatever they did. Any evidence that exists will disappear.” Althea Payton’s words sound in my head like a ghostly refrain. “If not now, when. You know?”
A skeptical grunt. “Yeah, maybe.”
“I’ve got one shot left, Kelly.”
“What?”
“Dwight Stone. He knows the truth. He could bring down the whole damn temple.”
“Caitlin says he won’t testify.”
“He wants to help me. I know he does. But he’s got a daughter in the FBI. That gives Portman total control of her life, and by extension, Stone’s.”
“So, what can you do?”
“I’m going back to Colorado.”
The old Kelly smile returns to his lips. “Well . . . I was ready for a change of scenery anyway.”
“Do we still have FBI surveillance covering us?”
“I’ve seen them three times today. They’re good.”
“That’s okay. You’re going to keep them nice and busy for me.”
“Yeah, and . . . ? How do we lose them?”
“We don’t. This time I’m going alone.”
CHAPTER 34
The American Eagle ATR plows into a trough of turbulence, drops like a stone, then catches an updraft from the Rocky Mountains below and settles out again. I and my fellow passengers are thirty miles from Crested Butte, Colorado, and I can’t wait for the wheels to hit the runway. When I flew out of Baton Rouge, it was ninety degrees. When I changed planes in Dallas, it was sixty-eight. In Colorado there’s two feet of snow on the ground, my plane is three hours behind schedule because of the unexpected storm, and the only thing I know about ATR aircraft is that they fly like hogs with ice on the wings. But that isn’t the only reason for my anxiety. In less than an hour I will be face to face with former special agent Dwight Stone, the only man on earth who can give me what I need.
The desire for revenge I felt when I attacked Leo Marston at Tuscany yesterday seems trivial now. I am a different man than I was yesterday. The past I thought I knew is dead. Because last night I faced a truth so terrible I can hardly accept it even now.
After Kelly and I left Tuscany, we drove straight to the motel. I felt an overwhelming desire to hug Annie, the daughter I knew beyond any shadow of doubt to be mine. After spending the evening watching television with her, I put her to bed and sent Kelly out for a bottle of Absolut. For the first time in years I drank with the sole purpose of getting drunk. It didn’t take long, and drunkenness brought with it the blessed inability to ponder clearly the events of twenty years before. Who was sleeping with whom. And when. And why, if I “really thought about it,” as Livy had told me to do, I would know that I could not possibly be Jenny Doe’s father. I passed out in a chair, and if my mother hadn’t knocked on my door to check on me, I might not have fathomed the truth until much later. As it was, I awakened in the midst of a nightmare, tortured by images I could not have conceived of the day before.
Livy told
me the truth.
I am not Jenny’s father.
I know this because the last time Livy and I ever made love—prior to this week—was one week after graduation, and she was just starting her period. She had been a couple of weeks late at the time, and we were both terrified she was pregnant. When her cycle resumed, we celebrated by going to a hotel—which we almost never did—and making love. At that point Livy had two weeks left in Natchez before leaving for the summer program at Radcliffe. I was miserable because earlier in the spring I had promised my father I would go to Shiloh with him after graduation. Of my two remaining weeks with Livy, I was going to give up one to tromp over a Civil War battlefield. I consoled myself with the knowledge that we would both be at Ole Miss in the fall, but when I got back from Shiloh, Livy had already left for Cambridge, and I did not see her again for more than a year.
During that time, I naturally considered the possibility that Livy could be pregnant. But I was fairly certain that, while it was possible for a woman to conceive while having her period, the odds against it were high. I later learned that a woman can have a period while she’s pregnant, but by then I’d written off the possibility altogether. Given that Livy’s sister had had an abortion, I was certain that Livy would have done the same in the event of pregnancy, and certainly not run off for a year like some “girl in trouble” from Peyton Place. But clearly I had been wrong to assume that. The question was, why?
At Tuscany, Livy had told me in no uncertain terms that I was not Jenny’s father. If I wasn’t, who was? Livy delivered Jenny nine months after leaving Natchez. The father had to be someone she’d slept with immediately after that last period. Given Livy’s shadowy sexual history, that could easily be someone I did not know. But when I jerked awake last night in a clammy sweat of panic, I knew that Jenny’s father was not unknown to me. This knowledge came to me even before I consciously apprehended it, announcing itself with a wave of horror that sent me running to the bathroom.
Jenny’s father is Leo Marston.
As sickening as this idea was, I could not push it from my mind. Only this conclusion made sense of every incomprehensible action and statement that had followed, right up to the present. Livy’s inexplicable promiscuity during high school. Her mother’s chronic alcoholism. Not telling me about her pregnancy, then disappearing for a year, cutting herself off from family and friends. Starting life in Virginia as though her life in Mississippi had never existed. Settling in Atlanta. And most telling, her unwillingness to speak to Jenny even twenty years after her birth. What had seemed so cruel hours before suddenly made sense. Jenny was a living reminder of something so terrible that Livy simply could not face it. What had Livy said on the bridge, when I asked if she could ever live in Natchez again?
Not while my parents are alive . . .
The idea that Leo had sexually abused his daughter from childhood on left me feeling hollowed out, like a wasting disease. Everyone in Natchez thought Livy Marston had enjoyed the most privileged and perfect childhood anyone could, free from want, full of love and adoration. But how many times had she told me that Tuscany was a prison, not a palace? How many times did I discount her laments as the whining of a spoiled rich girl? The night we first began to get close, when she confessed the date rape by an older boy at school . . . had that been a fictionalized version of rapes by her father? Were they still going on even then? It was difficult to imagine Livy submitting to Leo’s advances at that age. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds, but by eighteen Livy was a strong, athletic girl. Yet I know very little about abuse, and so much human strength springs from the mind, not the body. Was Livy’s entire childhood a lie? Were her stellar performances in every facet of high school and college life part of some elaborate coping mechanism designed to conceal the awful reality she lived behind the walls of Tuscany?
Only two things argued against this interpretation of the facts. The first was Leo’s persecution of my father. If I had gotten Livy pregnant, Leo’s attack would be easy to understand: a quest for vicarious revenge. But if Leo had impregnated Livy, the malpractice case made no sense. The second was Livy’s decision to carry the child to term. If her pregnancy had resulted from a rape by her father, her decision to keep the baby seemed unfathomable. Even the most dogmatic Catholic might consider abortion in those circumstances, and Livy wasn’t dogmatic.
I reflected upon Marston’s persecution of my father as I splashed water in my face from the motel lavatory and ate a handful of animal crackers Annie had left on the television. As soon as the sugar hit my bloodstream, I saw straight through to the truth of the malpractice lawsuit.
It was blindingly simple.
Maude Marston must have learned of her daughter’s pregnancy. And that pregnancy somehow had to be explained. What more likely candidate for fatherhood could there have been than Penn Cage, Livy’s most recent boyfriend? Whether Leo actually told Maude this lie or let her think of it herself did not matter. When the chance to persecute my father came, he jumped at it—his sole goal being to reinforce the initial lie about Livy’s pregnancy. The question of whether Maude might—at some level—have known of the incestuous relationship was something I didn’t even want to think about. But by trying to destroy my father as an act of “vengeance,” Leo more deeply concealed his mortal sin from his wife, and perhaps even from himself. I suppose it’s even possible that after twenty years of denial, he has convinced himself that I am Jenny’s father, the man who “ruined” Livy’s life.
Truth always clarifies, but with clarification comes a whirlwind of emotions no one can predict. My initial reaction was horror mixed with outrage. Suddenly even the murder of Del Payton seemed trivial. Payton burned to death in a few agonizing minutes. If I was right about Jenny Doe’s parentage, Livy had died a thousand times before she reached adulthood. She has been burning alive for more than thirty years.
I sat alone in the dark well of the night, pondering what to do with this terrible knowledge. After an hour I made some long-distance calls, irritating more than a few people. When dawn broke, I woke Kelly and spoke to him, and a few hours later we executed a ruse which left him surrounded by our FBI watchers at the Natchez Mall Cinema while Sam Jacobs drove me to the Baton Rouge airport in his Hummer. In Baton Rouge, I paid cash for a ticket to Dallas, where I changed planes for Albuquerque, and there boarded the ATR bound for the tiny airport at Crested Butte.
The pilot has begun his descent, plowing up the long mountain valley from the southeast. The snowy majesty of the Rockies leaves me unaffected. At my core, in the moist and primitive darkness, a malevolent seed is germinating. A desire not to publicly humiliate Leo Marston, not even to destroy his career as a lawyer and judge by sending him to Parchman prison, but to end his very life. To remove him from the world. Not in Del Payton’s name, but in Livy’s. And in mine. For the life he stole from us.
I will soon be listening to former special agent Dwight Stone explain why he cannot tell a jury what he knows about Leo Marston and John Portman. He will soberly tell me about his daughter, the FBI agent. And he will expect me, as a father, to understand his position.
But I will not understand.
I have a surprise for Dwight Stone.
The snow has stopped when we touch down at Crested Butte, but thankfully the car rental company has fitted the tires of my Ford Explorer with chains. I am unaccustomed to icy roads, but it doesn’t take me long to get the hang of it. The problem is that only the main roads have been plowed. The forest service road leading up into the mountains (and Stone’s cabin) is plowed only to the summer houses by Nicholson Lake. The jeep track that breaks off from that is impassable, at least for someone of my limited mountain skills, so I have no choice but to abandon the Explorer near a large gravel pit and trek up between the mountains on foot.
It takes less than twenty yards to understand the necessity for snowshoes, a type of footwear I have never worn in my life. In my thinly padded windbreaker and tennis shoes, I am practically begging f
or frostbite, but Stone’s cabin can’t be more than three miles away. It’s after three o’clock, but I should have plenty of light to make it. I rang Stone’s phone from the airport to make sure he was there, and hung up as soon as he answered. I don’t want him or anyone tapping his phone to know I’m coming until I arrive.
The jeep track is invisible in the snow, but by roughly following the course of the Slate River upstream, I must eventually strike on Stone’s cabin, which is situated practically on top of it. Today the Slate, which was only ten or fifteen feet wide on my last trip, is a roaring flood of blue-black water sluicing down the valley like a logging flume. After a seeming eternity of slipping, falling, digging through drifts, and cracking my elbows and butt, I make my way past the entrance of an old mine, along the base of Anthracite Mesa, and up to the edge of a slot canyon, where the Slate is compressed into a raging chute that rockets over an eight-foot vertical drop. I pick my way along the edge of the canyon with care, knowing that a tumble into that water could easily kill me.
At last Stone’s cabin comes into sight, nestled among the tall spruce and fir trees between the jeep track and the river. There’s a welcome column of smoke rising from its chimney. I have not been this cold for many years. I stop to catch my breath and marshal my strength, then push on for the last two hundred yards like a climber going for the summit of Everest.
Stone answers his door with a pistol on his hip. The first words out of his mouth are, “You damn fool.” Then he jerks me inside, slams the door, and darts to the front window, where he stands peering through the curtains.
A fearsome array of weapons lies on the coffee table before the sofa—a hunting rifle, two shotguns, several automatic pistols—and a huge fire crackles in the fieldstone fireplace. The curtains over the back windows are shut, blocking the view toward the Slate and the trees beyond.