Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

“I know who Jenny’s father is.”

Even in the dark I can tell she has gone rigid. She turns away from me, then back, her chin held high. “How do you know? Did he tell you?”

“Tell me? God, no. He hates me. Why would he tell me?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you know this. It’s so pathetic.”

“I know it’s bad, Livy. I realize I can’t ever understand what it was-what it is-to be in your position.”

“How could you possibly know unless he told you? No one knows. He doesn’t even know. Not as far as I-”

“Your father doesn’t know about Jenny?”

She blinks. “My father? Of course he knows. But he doesn’t know, you know… who the father is.”

My mind reels, trying to parse the semantics. “Livy, who is Jenny’s father?”

“You just said you knew.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

Suspicion now. “If you don’t know, I’m not telling you.”

“Livy-”

“Who do you think it is?”

I take a step toward her, but she moves back, nearer the edge of the hill. As though she knows what I am about to say. As though she could fly from the edge of the hill if I dare speak the truth. “I think Jenny’s father is your father.”

She stares at me like she hasn’t heard correctly. Then she closes her eyes and lowers her head into her hands.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I say softly. “You-”

“Shut up, Penn. Please just shut up. You might say something even more asinine than you already have.”

“What?”

She takes her hands away from her face. She is not crying. She is staring at me with what looks like morbid curiosity. “Did you actually think my father raped me?”

Her voice is strong, but that could be the strength of denial, not truth. “I still think so. What I can’t figure out is how he forced you when you were eighteen.”

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 deja 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.”