A bitter laugh. “That’s easy. He didn’t. Christ. First you accuse my father of murder. Now incest? Could you possibly be more sick?” She holds her palms out to me. “Have I done something to deserve this?”
“I’ll tell you what you did to deserve this. You told me you wanted a future together and then disappeared. You let your father try to destroy mine without lifting a finger to stop him, and went on with your life as though none of it ever happened.”
“My God, Penn. We were just kids! Haven’t you grown up yet? After twenty years?”
“Have you? You’ve been chasing me around like the lost love of your life, trying to relive our past, pulling me into bed every chance you got. Was all that heat manufactured to distract me from going after your father?”
At last she gives me an unguarded look. “No.”
“If my incest idea is so off the mark, why did you treat that poor girl like you did? You gave Jenny up for adoption, which is understandable. But she had a pretty shitty life, and when she showed up at your door looking for a little information, maybe an explanation, you treated her like dirt. And your father did worse.”
“How dare you judge me. You don’t know anything about it.”
“You’re right. Why is that?”
Her eyes flash in the dark. “You want an explanation? All right. Remember the week after graduation? The week you went touring battlefields with your dad?”
“I remember.”
“I had two weeks before Radcliffe. The senior parties were still going on. Everybody was getting as drunk as they had been before graduation, maybe drunker. Someone from South Natchez threw a party on one of the sandbars past the paper mill. It was wild. Trucks driving all over the sand, people shooting guns, skinny-dipping. One car even went into the river. You were out of town, so guys were hitting on me all night. Ray Presley was there, watching me for Daddy, like he always did. At some point the police showed up. Ray put me in his truck and talked to one of the cops, got me past the roadblock.”
She turns toward the river, and the wind carries much of her voice away. “I was as drunk as I’d ever been, and I decided to play a little game. Ray was always watching me, making me nervous, hanging around like some malevolent shadow. And I’d always heard these stories . . . how he’d killed people, been in prison, other stuff. Anyway, I started teasing him. I asked if he’d ever killed anybody, and he admitted that he had. I asked him what it was like, what prison was like, stuff like that. Then I told him I’d always heard this story about how he had the biggest thing in town. You know, his equipment. He kept driving, but I could see I was getting to him, he was gripping the wheel so hard. So I said, Hey, is it true or what? And he said, Only one way to find out. It was like a dare, you know? So I said, Okay, let’s see it.”
The knowledge of what’s coming hits me like a blow to the solar plexus. “Livy . . .”
She holds up her hand; she means to tell this story no matter what. “So, he unbuckles his belt and takes it out. While he’s driving. And it was. I mean, the stories were true. I know this sounds gross—Ray Presley, right? What a creep. But he was only thirty-five or so then. Younger than we are now. So, I took the dare further. I thought I’d drive him a little crazier, to get back at him for all the times he’d ogled me. It was the stupidest thing I ever did. He pulled off Lower Woodville Road, right into the woods. I knew then things were slipping out of control, but I wasn’t sure how to get out of it. I figured, you know, just be calm, let him kiss me, touch him enough to get it over with and get out of there. The next thing I knew my dress was around my chest and he was raping me.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
She turns to me, her eyes bright with pooled tears. “A little too real for you? I think I passed out the first time. I woke up later and it was happening again, outside the truck. I started screaming, so he stuffed my dress into my mouth. It was like being simultaneously strangled and bludgeoned to death from the inside. When it was over, we got back into the truck, but he wouldn’t leave. He was completely freaked out. I think he thought my father was going to kill him, so he just sat there, trying to figure out what to do. He sat there for twenty minutes with me screaming at him, trying to get out and run, going crazy. Then he did it again. I knew then that he was crazy. I mean, three times in an hour, that’s just not normal for a thirty-five-year-old man.”
The déjà vu is almost too powerful to endure. Livy and I once sat in the dark while she told me the story of being raped by a high school football player during a date. Twenty years later, only the context has changed.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea. I couldn’t even have imagined that.”
“But isn’t it such a touching little story?” Her tears are rolling down her cheeks now. “Ray Presley, proud father of my first and only child.”
I want to hold her, but I think she would probably hit me if I touched her.
“I couldn’t believe I even conceived,” she says, wiping her face. “But I did. And you think I should have welcomed Jenny with open arms.” She modulates her voice into a hysterical exaggeration of a TV mom: “Hello, sweetheart! Where have you been all my life? Give Mama a hug!”
The delirium in her voice sends chills through me. “Jenny had nothing to do with what Presley did to you that night.”
“She is that night to me! Don’t you get that? Do you think I could ever look at her without reliving every second of those rapes?”
I shrug and stay silent. I am not a woman. I can’t know. “When I told you Presley was coming to kill your father, you said you hoped he would come.”
“I’d kill him in a minute,” she says in a flat voice. “Like stepping on a cockroach.”
“I knew it was something like this. Something dark.”
“Dark? The whole thing is so Sally Jessy Raphael it makes me want to vomit.”
“You didn’t tell your father Presley had raped you?”
A shadow of shame crosses her face. “No. I’d started the whole thing, hadn’t I? I suppose I could have lied and said he attacked me out of the blue, but my father is pretty hard to lie to. He’s scary that way. He sees dishonesty in people.”
“Maybe because he’s so dishonest himself.”
“Don’t, Penn.”
“But he knew you were pregnant. Eventually, I mean.”
She nods. “My sister told him. She’d gotten pregnant three years before, and Daddy made her get an abortion. It really messed her up. Our great Catholic parents practically forcing her to terminate her pregnancy. You’d think that when I turned up pregnant, she would have done all she could to help me hide it. But she’d felt inferior to me her whole life. I was the special one, the adored one. She just had to tell them that I’d screwed up as badly as she had.”
“Livy, why in God’s name did you have the baby? Under the circumstances—”
“Under the circumstances, I wasn’t thinking rationally, okay? After the rape I was so upset, I went to Radcliffe a week early. Two months later, when I found out for sure I was pregnant, I thought about terminating it. But then my sister blabbed, and the next thing I knew, my father was in Cambridge trying to force me to have an abortion. You know how he and I are. The simple fact that he tried to force me was enough to make me refuse, especially after all the lip service he’d paid to Catholic dogma. But more than that, the pregnancy gave me a chance I’d never had before. An absolute excuse to break the pattern laid out for me before I was born. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want to spend four years at Ole Miss in a sorority full of girls majoring in fashion merchandising and looking for husbands.”
“Thanks for telling me in time to change my plans.”
A momentary look of penitence. “I’m sorry about that. I never told you to go there.”
“No. You just talked about how wonderful it would be if we were both there. What I can’t believe is that you let your parents think I had gotten you pregnant. You did, didn’t you? That’s the root of all
the pain that came after.”
She takes a deep breath and sighs. “I suppose I did.”
“Suppose, nothing. You didn’t have the guts to admit you teased Ray Presley into raping you, but you didn’t mind letting me take the blame for knocking you up.”
“Penn, you don’t understand. When Ray took me home that night, he threatened me. He said that if I told my father what had happened, he’d kill my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“He knew I wouldn’t care about myself. Ray said my father might kill him for hurting me, but he’d thank him for killing my mother. And on some level . . . I felt like he might be right. Daddy was such a bastard to Mother back then.”
A wave of shame rolls through me, shame for thinking Livy was so selfish and shallow that she would let my family pay for something that was someone else’s fault without any excuse. But the shame passes quickly. Livy is twisting the truth even now.
“You’re lying. I don’t mean about the threat. I’m sure Presley threatened you. But you’ve always cared about yourself. More than anything else. And I don’t think you would have bought Ray’s threat, not for long. He was scared shitless of your father. He still is, in some ways. And when Leo decided to go after my father out of revenge, you could have spoken up. You could have said, Daddy, it wasn’t Penn. But you didn’t. You knew why he took that suit, and you never said a damn word to change his mind.”
“It was too late by then. I was at Virginia and—”
“I flew up there to see you! And you said nothing. You’re gutless, Livy. I never knew that about you until now.”
“I suppose I am. About the big things.”
“Just like your father. He wanted a man dead, but he didn’t have the balls to do it himself. He was district attorney, and he arranged to have an innocent man killed for profit.”
“That is such bullshit.”
“You think so? You’ll find out different tomorrow. Your father and Ray Presley set up one of the most heinous murders I’ve ever come across, and J. Edgar Hoover covered it up to keep your grandfather happy. To keep them pulling for Nixon in the sixty-eight election.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“Never mind.”
Her face has taken on a strange cast. “I met him once, you know. Hoover. When I was a little girl. Up in Jackson with my father.”
“Oh, they were big buddies. And the root of their friendship was the murder of Del Payton.”
She shakes her head as if I’m hopelessly insane.
“By sundown tomorrow your father will be indicted for murder, unless he can kill my witnesses. And he’s trying hard, believe me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your father and John Portman tried to kill me last night.”
She shakes her head. “You’re lying.”
“When have you known me to lie, Livy? Ever? Your father killed for money and power in 1968, and he’ll do it now to cover his ass. That’s all he’s ever been about. He’s played every angle and skimmed every deal, from factory locations to backroom adoptions. Everything’s money to him.”
Livy has gone still. “What do you mean, backroom adoptions?”
“Come on. That can’t be news to you. I saw a record of the private adoptions he handled over the years. He did about twenty of them, and yours was one. Jenny’s, I mean. For big money too. Big for those days, anyway.”
She reaches out and touches my arm. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”
“You really don’t know? Remember those records you and Leo took out of his office last week? The ones he tried to burn?”
“Yes.”
“There was a scrap of paper in there, a record of income from adoptions. He pocketed thirty-five grand off of yours. One of the highest prices paid for any baby on the list. I guess he wanted top dollar, since the baby came from his gene pool.”
The blood has drained from her face.
“Look at it, if you don’t believe me. I’ve been carrying the list around in my wallet since the day Jenny told me her story. I thought it was a record of our child being given away.”
“Let me see it.”
I pull out my wallet and fish the scrap of yellow paper from the bill compartment. Livy snatches it away and holds it up in the blue glow of the streetlight across the road, trying to read in the dark. Her face is in shadow, but after a few moments the paper starts to quiver in her hand.
“That son of a bitch,” she murmurs. “That son of a bitch.”
“You still think I’m lying?”
“That he would profit from my pain like that . . .”
“I doubt he gave it a second thought. Making money was his habit. Everything that passed through his hands had to turn a profit. You should know that better than anyone.”
She looks up at last, her eyes empty of everything but desire for the truth. These are the eyes I knew in high school. “Do you really believe my father ordered Del Payton’s death?”
“It’s not a question of belief. I know.”
“You can prove it?”
“If my witnesses reach the courtroom alive.”
She folds the paper slowly. “I’m going to do something you may not believe. I’m going to do it because I don’t believe my father killed Del Payton. I can’t believe that. But if it should turn out that he did, I won’t protect him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The papers you requested under discovery. Business records, all that?”
“Yes.”
“You got sanitized versions. There’s another set of files. One that nobody sees. Not the IRS, not anybody.”
My heart jumps in my chest. “You realize that withholding those papers from the court—”
“Is a felony? I’m not telling you this to hear the Boy Scout oath repeated back to me. Before I tell you where those files are, I want a promise from you.”
“What?”
“Any evidence of illegal activity that doesn’t directly pertain to the death of Del Payton, you’ll forget you ever saw.”
“Livy—”
“That’s nonnegotiable.”
“All right. Agreed. Where are these files?”
She bites her bottom lip, still resisting the deeply bred urge to protect her family’s secrets. “Ever since I was a little girl, Daddy kept his sensitive papers in a big safe under the floor of his study. He called it his potato bunk, whatever that means. If he’s hiding anything from you, it’s in there.”
“How can I get a look in there? He’s home tonight. Isn’t he?”
“He’s probably upstairs by now. Mother’s been flipping in and out for the past few days. He’s probably up there feeding her Darvocet and Prozac cocktails.”
“What about the off-duty cops he called?”
“They won’t look twice at you if I drive you in.”
She looks sincere. But it’s anger that’s driving her now. Her relationship with her father has always been one of extremes, love and hate commingling in proportions that change too fast to be assayed. To see the secret safe in Leo Marston’s study, I’ll have to go back to Tuscany. And at Tuscany, on this night, Leo could kill me and tell the police anything he wanted. He could even have one of his cops kill me. My only real protection would be the woman standing before me.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask.
She folds the paper in half, then twice again, into a tiny rectangle which she slips between the buttons of her blouse and into her bra. Her eyes shine with utter resolution.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
CHAPTER 38
The grounds of Tuscany are dark. I parked my mother’s shot-up Maxima at a gas station a quarter mile up the road from Tuscany’s gate, then got into Livy’s Fiat for the ride to the estate. As we approached the gate, she took a remote control from her purse, touched a button, and the barred fence slid back into itself. That was twenty seconds ago. We should have seen t
he lights of the mansion well before now.
“Livy—”
“I know. I’ve never seen it like this. The floodlights are always on.”
“I told you he was scared of Presley.”
“Look,” she says, pointing at a dim light high in the trees. “They’re on the third floor. Mother’s room.”
I close my hand around the butt of the gun in my waistband. Ike’s gun.
A thin beam of light slices through the darkness and comes to rest on the windshield of Livy’s car. I start to pull the gun, but then our headlights sweep across a black police uniform.
Livy slows to a stop.
The cop walks around to her window and shines his light onto her chest, sparing her the direct glare of the beam.
“Evening, Miss Marston. Everything okay?”
“Yes. My friend and I are going in for a drink. Have you seen anything suspicious?”
“No, ma’am. Not a thing.”
“Why are all the lights off?”
“Your daddy said he didn’t want nobody taking potshots through the windows.”
“I see.”
“Don’t you worry. Billy and me are on the job.”
“I feel so much better knowing that.” She gives him a synthetic smile, then rolls up her window and drives on.
Tuscany materializes suddenly, like a spectral palace in the moonlight, ringed by towering oaks and dark magnolias. Livy pulls around to the back of the mansion and parks in a small garage.
“There’s a new entrance here,” she says. “To the pantry.”
She unlocks the door, then takes my hand and leads me quickly through the enormous house: pantry, kitchen, breakfast room, parlor, living room. The interior is shrouded in darkness, but the sense of space, of high ceilings and broad doorways, communicates itself through the sound of our footsteps and the way the air moves. Livy stops me by putting her hand against my chest, then opens a door, peeks inside, and pulls me through.
Leo’s private study looks as though it had been surgically removed from an English manor house, shipped to America, and meticulously reconstructed inside Tuscany. The paneling alone must be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Livy sets her purse on the desk and points to a Bokara rug on the floor before it.