Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  Something cold and clinical takes hold of my heart, like a wet latex glove. “Max brought you out here to rape you?”

  Jet lifts her closed fist to her mouth and breathes slowly. She looks like she’s struggling not to hyperventilate.

  “My father-in-law,” she says at length, “is obsessed with me. I know you think you know him, but you have no idea, okay? Max is sick. All those business trips he takes to Vietnam? Because of their lumber business? He goes to relive his war years and have sex with fifteen-year-old prostitutes. He’s told me I’m the closest thing around here to French-Vietnamese girls, which he claims are the most beautiful in the world. Today’s big news? He thinks about me every time he masturbates.”

  My stomach rolls like it does when a plane hits an air pocket, and a tingling fight-or-flight sensation goes through my legs. “How long has this been going on? His behavior, I mean.”

  “He’s always had a thing about me. But watching you and me make love two days ago pushed him over the edge. He’s snapped, Marshall. Halfway up this hill, he took out his cell phone and played me the video of us on the patio. He acted like I’d cheated on him, not Paul.”

  Again I remember Max sitting in my kitchen, casually commenting on Jet’s body and talking about wanting to screw Nadine. “I’m not surprised about Max being sexually aggressive. Even Dr. Kirby called him a ‘pussy hound’ yesterday. But why is he obsessed with you? His son’s wife?”

  Jet cuts her eyes at me but says nothing. This is clearly tough for her to talk about.

  “So he didn’t talk to you about the case at all?”

  “Nothing new. He was just stalling.”

  “What happened once he got you out here?”

  She settles back in her seat and recounts her story in a mechanical voice. “He drove right through the trees and parked by the water. I asked why he’d come here, but he just got out of the truck and told me to follow him. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a bad feeling, but he’d taken the keys with him. Before I got out, I looked around for anything I might use as a weapon. He keeps a tool bag in the backseat, just like Paul. I wanted a screwdriver, but I couldn’t get one without crawling back there. That hammer was sticking up, though, and I could just reach it. It was too big to hide, so I dropped it on the ground as I got out. At least it would be close in a crisis.”

  “That was smart.”

  She nods reflexively. “Once we were out of the truck, he didn’t waste time. He walked out on that pier and said we ought to go swimming to relax.”

  “Without clothes, I suppose?”

  “Naturally.”

  How many times did Jet and I do that out here?

  “Apart from being scared,” she goes on, “all I could think about was his cell phone. If I could get hold of it, I’d have two choices: try to get away with it—which would give me a chance to try Sally’s passwords on it—or just throw it into the middle of the pool and at least destroy the video. Getting away with it didn’t seem very likely at that point.”

  “I was watching by then, but it was hard to tell what was happening.”

  “As soon as I got close to him out on the pier, he pulled me to him. He started talking shit and touching my breasts. He tried to get a hand up under my top. It was like junior high. I tried to play it off as him kidding around. Then he pressed my hand against his penis. I jerked my hand back, and that’s when he ripped my top.”

  She shakes her head, obviously reliving each second. “Once it got that far, I knew he wasn’t going to stop. But I forced myself to relax, like I was going to submit. He pulled my hips against his. He was hard already, and I let him sort of dry-hump me standing up, until his eyes glazed over. Then I shoved him back and I broke for the truck.”

  “I saw that happen.”

  “Did you see how he just walked after me?” She shudders in her seat. “It felt like a damned monster movie. He knew he didn’t have to hurry up here. Motherfucker. For a second I thought about running out to the road or trying to hide in the woods. But I knew I couldn’t get away from him. Besides . . . I was just sick of it all, sick of him. So I picked up the hammer.”

  “I saw that, too,” I tell her, my mind hanging on to something she said. “And I know I can’t possibly understand the full horror of what happened back there . . .”

  “But?” she says. “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  I should just let this go. But I’ve known Jet a long time, and something isn’t adding up. She’s twenty years younger than Max, and four months ago she was running half-marathons. Since she isn’t physically hurt, I figure she’d have had a better-than-even chance of escaping him on this hill.

  “You said you knew you couldn’t get away from him,” I say gently. “So you turned around and picked up the hammer. Was it only the threat of rape tonight that made you do that?”

  “What?” Her breathing has become a sort of frantic wheeze. “What are you doing? Playing prosecutor? Are you saying defending myself against rape isn’t self-defense?”

  “I’m not saying that at all.”

  “It sounds like you are!” Her answer is almost a snarl, like a blow intended to drive away something she can’t face.

  “Jet, this is me. I love you. I came here to protect you. That’s all I want to do. But to do that, I need to know what’s really going on. Last night, you told me about a plan that could end in Max’s death. It could have been designed solely with that end in mind. And tonight you hit him in the head with a hammer.”

  She looks away from me, expels another rush of air.

  “I know you wanted his cell phone,” I press. “And I understand why. Max is an existential threat to us, no question. He’s threatened our lives. That video alone does.”

  No response. Just when I think she’s shut down completely, she says, “Tonight wasn’t the first time he tried to rape me.”

  The cold fist tightens around my heart. A hot wave of shame follows for doubting her initial story. “Will you tell me?”

  “He tried it six weeks ago. I stabbed him.”

  Stabbed him? Six weeks ago, she and I were making love every day. “Where did this happen?”

  “My house. He claimed he’d come by to see Kevin, but he knew Kevin wasn’t going to be there. And he’d sent Paul on an errand to Jackson.”

  “Jesus. What did you stab him with?”

  “A steak knife.”

  “Did anybody find out?”

  She shakes her head. “He probably got Warren Lacey to sew him up. He saw it coming, and I caught him in the side. But it was enough to get him off me.”

  I’m so dumbfounded by this story that it’s hard to know where to go from here. “Did you and I see each other that day?”

  “No. I told you I had business in Tupelo.”

  I remember that day now. “Last-minute trip,” I murmur. “You brought me back that Elvis guitar strap.”

  A pained smile lights her face for a moment. “I couldn’t have seen you without telling you about it. And I just couldn’t get into it then. I wasn’t ready.”

  “I understand. Look, I don’t want to push you . . .”

  “Another ‘but’? Go ahead. We’re stuck here anyway.”

  “I still feel like there’s something you’re not telling me. Maybe a lot.”

  She looks into her lap, biting her lip like an anxious little girl. “What if it’s terrible? What if it’s something you can’t live with?”

  I take her left hand and squeeze it. “There’s nothing about you I can’t live with. Nothing.”

  She laughs bitterly in the dark. We’re sitting less than a foot apart, yet a gulf has yawned open between us. Can thirty-two years of love not bridge that divide? “Jet . . . a year from now, we’re going to be married. But to get there, we have to get through this, whatever it is. Just tell me. There’s nothing to fear.”

  She nods, but her face is filled with torment, as though she’s fighting some invisible restraint. “Six weeks ago wasn’t the only other time,�
�� she says.

  I shift in my seat. “Okay. So he tried to rape you before that?”

  “No.”

  I blink in confusion, trying to understand. At first I don’t get her meaning. Then I do. The cold I felt earlier spreads through me like a numbing anesthetic. “You mean . . . Max didn’t just try to rape you? He succeeded?”

  She sets her jaw and looks straight through the windshield. “Yes.”

  I’ve clumsily driven my dull scalpel through thick scar tissue, exposing a necrotic cyst that threatens life itself. Max Matheson raped his daughter-in-law.

  “Will you tell me how it happened?” I ask softly.

  Jet sits silent in the moonlight falling through the windshield, looking out into the dark. She reminds me of crime victims I interviewed as a young reporter, people who had either suffered or witnessed violent acts and were struggling to maintain control. “It was about ten years ago,” she says in a monotone. “Sally was sick. She’d had colon surgery. I was helping take care of her. Tallulah and me. Tallulah was worn out, so I stayed up for a night and a day without sleep. I was exhausted. Paul was drunk, like he always was back then. He’d passed out in the den.”

  “This was in Max and Sally’s house?”

  She nods. “Max offered to spell me, so I could rest. I went to the guest room, but even though I was wiped out, I couldn’t fall asleep. I went into the kitchen for something to eat, and Max walked in. When I told him I couldn’t sleep, he gave me one of Sally’s pills. A Xanax. A big one. Then he went back in with Sally, and I went back to the guest room. The pill knocked me out.”

  Part of me doesn’t want to hear what follows, but I have probably heard worse. In 1993, as a college junior, I interviewed six Bosnian women who had been repeatedly raped in a camp set up solely for that purpose.

  Jet wipes her eyes with her torn blouse, then continues in the same lifeless voice. “When I first woke up, I thought it was Paul on top of me. He’d done that before, drunk. This is TMI, but . . . what brought me to my senses was how hard he was. And how rough. Paul was practically impotent by that time. Now and then he would take a Viagra, but he’d never admit it. The whole situation was just . . . shit.”

  “It was Max on top of you?” I prompt quietly.

  She nods, still facing forward.

  “He did this with Paul in the next room?”

  “Just down the hall. Max had seen enough of Paul in those years to know he wasn’t going to wake up, not even if I screamed.”

  “Did you? Scream?”

  “At first. Max just clapped his hand over my mouth and kept on ramming me. I could have screamed after that, but I started thinking about what would happen if I did. If Paul woke up and came in there. Would they fight? Would Paul get a gun? If he shot Max, would he go to jail? Or would Max kill Paul and find some way to blame him? Paul was taking drugs back then, a lot of them. Opiates, but some Adderall and other things, too. He bounced back and forth between zoned out and fighting mad. Anyway, as I lay there spinning all this out in my head, it suddenly ended. Max collapsed on top of me, then rolled off.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  Jet purses her lips like someone trying to recall a distant detail from childhood. “No. He didn’t even bother warning me not to tell anybody what he’d done. He knew nobody would believe me. Not in that family. He knew I wasn’t going to the police. The Poker Club owned the police then. They still do, but it was worse then. No rape kit evidence would ever have made it to a courtroom.”

  The enormity of what she’s telling me has overloaded my analytical faculties. All I can do is try to elicit as many facts as possible, to try to make sense of them later. “Was that the only time this happened?”

  “Yes, thank God.”

  “Why, do you think? If you kept quiet about it the first time?”

  She slowly shakes her head, as though trying to figure this out herself. “I think that’s complicated. You know Max—he always has to be the alpha male. I think he’d been watching me for a long time. He had to have me, to mark me, like a dog pissing on a tree. He saw his chance and he took it.”

  “That sounds like him, all right.” The full horror of Max’s act is almost too much to grasp. Yet one obvious question has risen in my mind. Should I shove it down deep and never voice it? Maybe. But if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this woman, I need to know the answer. “I get why you didn’t report it to the police,” I tell her. “And I agree that either Paul or Max would have killed the other over what happened. But . . . one thing about this doesn’t sound like you.”

  Jet looks at me from the corner of her eye, mistrust plain in her face. “What?”

  “Why didn’t you just leave? Take Kevin and run. Leave Mississippi. I realize it would have gotten difficult, but it’s hard to see how staying in that family would have been possible after what happened. I know you, Jet. I can’t see you staying after that.”

  I expect her to say, Because of Kevin. He was just a baby. They would have come after me, brought me back. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything.

  “Because of Kevin?” I lead her.

  She looks at me like she’s about to confirm that, but then she pulls back, like a parachutist hesitating in the open door of a plane.

  “Where was Kevin when this happened?” I ask, sensing something even more frightening in the darkness of what remains unknown to me. “He was, what, two at the time? Was he home with Tallulah?”

  She shakes her head.

  “He was in the house?”

  She hesitates, then nods.

  “My God. Did he hear any of it?”

  “No.”

  “Well . . . that’s good. Jesus, I can’t believe Max was crazy enough to try this again now. And more than once? I mean, I do believe it. But he’s under indictment for murder! He really must have lost his mind.”

  Jet shrugs, still not looking at me. “Yes and no. He’s the same man he always was, only worse.”

  “How crazy do you have to be to rape your son’s wife? And especially you. Knowing you could have told Paul about it? I mean, screw the cops—Paul would have killed Max if you’d told him. I have zero doubt about that.”

  “Maybe,” she says softly. “But that’s complicated, too. The physical tension between them. It’s always been an issue.”

  “I know. But even if you told Paul this tonight, ten years after the fact, he’d strangle Max with his bare hands.”

  She gives a halfhearted shrug. “You’re probably right.”

  A fearful possibility hits me. “Have you ever thought about telling Paul? I mean . . . with intent?”

  I see a new tension in her neck and face. My first read is that Jet has considered doing this, but something stopped her. “Hey?” I whisper.

  “I can’t tell Paul,” she says. “And Max knows it.”

  There’s something different in her voice. A new note of fear, even dread. “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because Max has something on me.”

  With that sentence, some of her dread passes into me. I turn in my seat and take her hands in mine. “What are you talking about? The video?”

  “No. This is something he’s had for years.” Before I can speak again, she looks up with tears in her eyes. “Max knows I can’t tell anybody what happened. Ever.”

  “Jet . . . what could be bad enough to keep you quiet about a rape?”

  She shakes her head, tears pouring down her face.

  “Did you have an affair with somebody? Something like that?”

  A bark of hysterical laughter escapes her throat. “God, no.”

  “Jet, there’s nothing you could have done that I can’t accept or forgive.” My mind is spinning out wild possibilities. “Did you hurt somebody? Like . . . run over somebody, and the Poker Club covered it up?”

  She looks bereft. “No.”

  “Then what?”

  She wipes her face on her sleeve, then takes a deep breath, as though gathering herself before
taking the jump I imagined before. Then she says, “Paul isn’t Kevin’s father.”

  I stare back at her, uncomprehending. “But . . . you said you didn’t have an affair.”

  “That’s right.”

  A wave of nausea precedes the truth. But at last it hits me, like a dagger slipped between two ribs. “Are you saying Kevin is Max’s son? From the rape?”

  “Now you’ve got it!” she says with false gaiety.

  Sixty seconds ago I thought I knew what horror was. This is beyond anything I could have conceived. And yet . . . it follows from the preface as naturally as pregnancy follows sex.

  “You’re not looking at me,” she says. “Can’t you stand to anymore?”

  I snap out of my shock and look into her mascara-smeared eyes. “You said the rape happened ten years ago. Kevin is twelve.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure I could tell you the whole truth, so I said ten years. But it was thirteen.”

  I feel like we’re sitting in some actors’ workshop, improvising an absurd situation to see how far we can carry it. But we’re not. This is real. This happened. To her. And my life is not what I thought it was. A nagging intuition tells me I should be alert for any movement outside the Explorer, but the idea of physical danger seems trivial compared to the threat of shattered trust. My mind is making what it can of the known information, trying to create a coherent or even sympathetic narrative.

  “So then . . . just after the rape, you didn’t know that Kevin had been conceived. You didn’t know you were pregnant. But you knew what Max had done, and that if you stayed in that marriage you’d have to see him every day. So . . . again . . . why did you stay?”

  Jet stares through the windshield as though waiting for someone to arrive and spare her from answering my question. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t. The core of it had to do with my marriage, I think. And with Paul’s problems. But I’m obviously not as strong or independent as I once thought I was.”

  “I’m not judging you,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  “Look,” she cries, pointing through the windshield.

  “Where?” I ask, scanning the dark road for Max.