Only two things argued against this interpretation of the facts. The first was Leo’s persecution of my father. If I had gotten Livy pregnant, Leo’s attack would be easy to understand: a quest for vicarious revenge. But if Leo had impregnated Livy, the malpractice case made no sense. The second was Livy’s decision to carry the child to term. If her pregnancy had resulted from a rape by her father, her decision to keep the baby seemed unfathomable. Even the most dogmatic Catholic might consider abortion in those circumstances, and Livy wasn’t dogmatic.

I reflected upon Marston’s persecution of my father as I splashed water in my face from the motel lavatory and ate a handful of animal crackers Annie had left on the television. As soon as the sugar hit my bloodstream, I saw straight through to the truth of the malpractice lawsuit.

It was blindingly simple.

Maude Marston must have learned of her daughter’s pregnancy. And that pregnancy somehow had to be explained. What more likely candidate for fatherhood could there have been than Penn Cage, Livy’s most recent boyfriend? Whether Leo actually told Maude this lie or let her think of it herself did not matter. When the chance to persecute my father came, he jumped at it—his sole goal being to reinforce the initial lie about Livy’s pregnancy. The question of whether Maude might—at some level—have known of the incestuous relationship was something I didn’t even want to think about. But by trying to destroy my father as an act of “vengeance,” Leo more deeply concealed his mortal sin from his wife, and perhaps even from himself. I suppose it’s even possible that after twenty years of denial, he has convinced himself that I am Jenny’s father, the man who “ruined” Livy’s life.

Truth always clarifies, but with clarification comes a whirlwind of emotions no one can predict. My initial reaction was horror mixed with outrage. Suddenly even the murder of Del Payton seemed trivial. Payton burned to death in a few agonizing minutes. If I was right about Jenny Doe’s parentage, Livy had died a thousand times before she reached adulthood. She has been burning alive for more than thirty years.

I sat alone in the dark well of the night, pondering what to do with this terrible knowledge. After an hour I made some long-distance calls, irritating more than a few people. When dawn broke, I woke Kelly and spoke to him, and a few hours later we executed a ruse which left him surrounded by our FBI watchers at the Natchez Mall Cinema while Sam Jacobs drove me to the Baton Rouge airport in his Hummer. In Baton Rouge, I paid cash for a ticket to Dallas, where I changed planes for Albuquerque, and there boarded the ATR bound for the tiny airport at Crested Butte.