Page 40 of Jethro

"Shadow Warriors," she repeated. "It sounds like something out of a comic book."

"It's more like a platoon, Missy. A dozen men who did the government's dirtiest work, came home, and joined together so they'd have something to do with their hands." He pulled at his tie. It felt like it had been strangling him since noon.

"They have it on tape. My voice. Your letter. Dustin's name and Lawrence's name. If that boy so much as trips on a curb, it goes to the FBI. They told me there's nowhere on earth we could go that they couldn't find us." He swallowed. "I’ve been thinking about it all day because I believed them."

For a long time, Missy said nothing at all. The grandfather clock in the hall counted off the seconds. Carter had seen his wife angry a thousand times, had watched her reduce caterers to tears and club presidents to stammering, but he had never seen her like this.

Her face had gone perfectly smooth, like water over something drowned. When she finally rose, she walked to the window and looked out at the live oaks with her back to him.

"She planned it," she said. "The phone call. The letter going to her old address. She knew you'd go running down there to play the worried father. Our daughter set a trap, Carter, and you walked into it smiling."

"I walked into it because you sent me. It was no trap. She had no clue we’d go that far."

"Don't." She turned, and the rage came up through the smoothness like a fin breaking the surface. "Do you understand what you've done? We can't touch him. We can't touch her. The trust is gone. This house is hers. In three days, Dustin Morgan stops being patient, and now there's a recording with our names on it sitting in some fireman's sock drawer."

"Then it's over," Carter said quietly. "We sell what we have to. We pay Dustin and Lawrence back on a schedule. We hire a lawyer for the accounting. Maybe we get ahead of it and go to Aurora ourselves before..."

Missy laughed, a short, ugly sound.

"Ahead of it. On a schedule. With what, Carter? Your firm hasn't made real money since the fund collapsed. Your bank shares pay a dividend I could spend in a weekend. The lake house is mortgaged twice, and the yacht club is three months behind on our dues." She crossed the room and stood over him, close enough that he could smell the wine and the Chanel.

"I was born a Thibodeaux. Married a Langley. I will not be poor. I will not be the woman they whisper about at the Garden Club, the one who used to have money. I would rather be dead." She let the word hang there. "I would rather a great many people be dead."

"Langley Capital is mine," Carter said. "My father's name is on that door. The seat on the Crescent Gulf board is mine. Whatever you're thinking, you leave both of them alone."

She smiled at him then, the same smile she had worn on the cover of the debutante issue of New Orleans Magazine in 1989 and touched his cheek with two cool fingers.

"Of course, darling. Go to bed. You look exhausted."

He went. He lay awake until nearly three, listening to her move through the rooms downstairs, opening drawers in his study, and the soft, steady scratch of a pen on paper.

The tea started again on Thursday.

In thirty-four years, Missy had never once made him a cup of anything. That was Margie's job. Margie had kept house for twenty-two years. She made the coffee, the gumbo, and the beds, and in every way that mattered she had raised Aurora while Carter traveled and Missy chaired luncheons.

But on Thursday afternoon it was Missy who climbed the stairs to his study with a silver tray, the good Haviland cup on its saucer, a lemon wedge, and a little pot of honey.

"Chamomile," she said, setting it at his elbow. "For your nerves. You haven't slept a full night since you went to that horrible diner. It wouldn’t surprise me if you have some sort of food poisoning."

“I didn’t eat anything,” he said calmly. He took a sip of the tea. It was bitter beneath the honey, a faint metallic edge, like a penny on the tongue. He noticed it. He drank it anyway.

By Sunday he had a headache that sat behind his eyes like a thumb pressing in. By Tuesday his hands had begun to tremble, and his stomach would not hold anything but crackers. By the following Wednesday he could not climb the stairs without stopping on the landing to rest, and on Thursday, one week to the day after the first cup, he did not get out of bed at all.

Dr. Alden Pryce came to the house that afternoon with his old leather bag. He had been the Thibodeaux family physician for thirty years, had played golf with Missy's father every Saturday until the old man died, and owed his house in Old Metairie to a loan Missy's father had arranged on very generous terms.

He listened to Carter's chest, shone a light in his eyes, and pronounced it a stubborn virus on top of exhaustion and nerves. Then he wrote something on his prescription pad, tore off the page, and did not give it to Carter. He gave it to Missy.

Carter knew. He had known since the second afternoon, when he came downstairs early for a newspaper and saw his wife through the half-open pantry door.

She stood at the counter with her back to him, a small amber bottle with the label scraped off in one hand. She was measuring something into the Haviland cup with the same concentration she usually gave to seating charts. He had stood in the hallway and watched her, and then he had gone back upstairs before she turned around. When she brought him the tray twenty minutes later, he thanked her and drank every drop.

He could not have said why. He thought about it in the long, gray afternoons with the curtains drawn. He thought about Aurora at seven in her red plastic helmet, saving the azaleas. He thought about the papers he had signed to send her away, the doctors he had paid to write the word unstable after her name, hoping she would cave to the marriage plans. Instead, she went overseas and somehow Missy controlled that as well.

He thought about five people who had died in a cannery fire. He had told himself for so long that it wasn't his fault that he had nearly come to believe it. The cup always arrived warm, and he always drank it.

Missy Langley had never done anything halfway in her life, and she did not intend to start with ruin.

The key was a document she had found in the bottom drawer of Carter's desk that first sleepless night. It was a durable power of attorney, drawn up in 2019 by Hollis Marchand when Carter had his first heart scare. Missy had insisted on it, and Carter had signed it in the lawyer's conference room without reading a word, the way he signed everything she put in front of him.