“Salina considered them a risk. She’s very protective of you.”
“You put George Nichols in the lake? Chase Johnson?”
“To protect Abigail from what Salina had done.”
“Why did you leave Ronnie Saints in the boathouse?”
“I didn’t know about Ronnie,” Jessup said. “Didn’t know they were meeting. Didn’t know she’d killed him until Caravel Gautreaux saw you put him in the lake.”
“Caravel?” That was news.
“Creeping around in the dark, looking for her daughter, I suspect. She’s too smart to come near the main house, what with the dogs and all; but she saw the body from a distance and called the police. Thought she had a chance to screw Abigail good, like twenty years of hate finally found a chance to let loose.”
“What is it with those two?”
“Jealousy. Resentment.” Jessup rolled his shoulders. “Who the hell knows?”
Michael pushed thoughts of Caravel Gautreaux from his head, felt all the things he’d learned. He had a sister he could never acknowledge, and a long-dead brother he would never have the chance to meet. He had choices to make, and a mother he might very well kill. “How did you learn about Salina Slaughter?”
“What do you mean?”
“You tracked down Arabella Jax; you learned all this.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know about Salina Slaughter in the first place?”
“Ah…”
“It’s a simple question.”
“Oh, shit.” Jessup walked away, shaking his head. He stopped a few feet away, stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at the sky.
“Jessup…”
“She torments me. It amuses her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Salina comes to me at night. I slept with her twice before I knew it was her. I thought it was Abigail. I told her I loved her. I thought… you know.”
“But it was Salina?”
Jessup sighed, unhappy. “My life’s been hell ever since.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Cool mist hung in the gorge as Michael turned the Rover onto the steep, muddy track that led to the creek where his brother had been drowned. The sun was below the ridge but rising, the morning still and gray as he rolled in, quiet. There were no license plates on the car, nothing to identify him. A few dogs lifted their heads, but they seemed as worn and uncaring as everything else.
Michael touched the gun beside him. He’d killed a lot of people over the years, but had never done so in anger or hate.
That was about to change.
He’d tried to move on after meeting with Falls, tried to sleep, but every time he closed his eyes he saw a dead brother and Julian broken; saw Abigail as a child in that cold and filthy house of horrors. He saw them as they could have been, then as they were, and it was like a wall of spinning mist, like he could stretch out a hand and touch a storm of ruined lives. Even now, the scope of her depravity confounded him. In a lifetime defined by violence and the code of violent men, Michael had never seen a soul as poisoned as his mother’s. There was no restraint to her selfishness, no boundary. She’d made one child kill another, laughed about it.
And now the bitch was going to pay.
He moved deeper into the gorge, found Arabella Jax in bed and put the muzzle against her forehead. She woke clear-eyed and nasty. No confusion. No doubt about the gun in her face. “I told you no lies,” she said.
“Do you know who I am?”
Her eyes rolled left, but Michael had already moved the shotgun. The room smelled of mildew, festering leg. Michael felt cold, quiet rage as he looked down on the woman who’d brought him into the world, then left him in the woods to die.
“Give me a cigarette,” she said.
Michael pushed the barrel hard against her forehead, and the fear came out in her. Her mouth opened wide, fingers hooked in the sheets. “You drowned a baby in that creek,” Michael said. “I want to know where he’s buried.”
A sly look spread on her face, wheels turning. “What’s it to you?”
Two seconds passed. “He was my brother.”
She processed that fast, eyes moving up him and then down. “Am I supposed to get all weepy, now?”
“You should probably get ready to die.” Michael thumbed the hammer, but she shrugged off the threat.
“I heard somebody found you boys. They wrote about it in the paper.”
“You could have just drowned us.”
She laughed a bitter laugh. “There may not be a hell, but I don’t plan on taking chances. That’s Abigail’s job.” She pushed up in bed, as if daring him to pull the trigger. “I guess you know her after all, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Michael stepped back. “Get out of bed.”
“Get me a cigarette.”
Michael dragged her out of bed. She hit the ground with a thump, then stood, shaking and angry. There may have been fear left somewhere, but Michael couldn’t see it. He snatched a robe off a chair, flung it at her. “Put it on.”
“You ain’t gonna shoot your own momma.”
“Put it on.”
“Outside of that cocksucker Jessup Falls, I ain’t met a man yet with the strength to squeeze a grapefruit, let alone a trigger. If you were that kind of man, I’d be bleeding already. I’d be-”
Michael made her bleed. He whipped the gun and hit her hard enough to knock her down on the bed. A red line oozed on her cheek; after that, she cooperated. The robe went on, fuzzy slippers that used to be pink. She took a cane off the back of a chair and limped outside, slow and stunned and wary. Light was beginning to filter down, and the hollow yellowed out as they followed a narrow footpath around the shack and then into the woods. She looked back twice, then said, “You going to kill me?”
“Maybe I’ll break your legs and leave you out here to die.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Thinking about it.”
They walked for five minutes, forest pushing in. She stumbled once, and caught herself. “Where’s the other one?”
“Other what?”
“Where’s your brother?”
“Just keep walking.”
They came to a place where a beech tree rose up, ancient and gray-skinned and proud. On its bark, someone had long ago carved a cross above the initials RJ. The carvings had stretched as the tree grew; now they were wide and rough, barely legible above a patch of smooth ground. “Well, there you go.” She waved a spotty
