A flash of heat crossed Paul’s face.
“Did you hear me?” his father asked.
“That’s bullshit.”
“Not according to your wife.”
“What are you saying?”
“Jet told Sally that she slept with Marshall back in 2005. When his Afghanistan book came out. He stopped in Jackson on his book tour. Marshall’s wife had just had their kid. She wasn’t on tour with him. Jet went to his hotel. Six weeks later she realized she was pregnant. Your mother told me you and Jet had been trying for a long time to have a kid, with no luck. Well, she popped Marshall during that stop in Jackson, and that was it. He planted one in her. That’s Kevin, as much as I hate to admit it.”
Paul got up off the chair, then fought to keep his balance. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“I know you don’t. But you have to. Because you have to be smart from now on.”
Paul hated the way his father talked to him. Smart from now on . . . like he’d been stupid all his life up to now. Paul folded his arms across his chest to keep from punching something. “That lick to your head scrambled your brains, Pop. Kevin looks like me. Like us. Like our side of the family. Everybody says that.”
Max nodded. “We see what we want to see. And other people tell us what they think we want to hear.”
“Are you saying other people know about this? Or suspect it?”
“No. Just that seeing a resemblance is subjective. Next time you look at Kevin, you’re going to see Marshall in his face. So get ready for it.”
“Bullshit!”
Max sighed, then gingerly rubbed the bandage on his head. “I know this is tough. But you have to face it squarely. Can you swear to me you’ve never had a funny feeling about Kevin? A distance? A feeling that maybe he wasn’t quite yours?”
Paul closed his eyes. He couldn’t let those thoughts in. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to hold himself upright.
“Listen to me, Paul, like you’ve never listened in your life. Jet’s a lawyer, and she’s been thinking about this for a long time. Marshall’s no dummy, either. They’ve got a plan, I guarantee it. She wants to divorce you, go back to Washington with Marshall, and marry him. And she means to take Kevin with her.”
“You’re lying.”
“She told me herself last night, right before she hit me with that goddamn hammer. What she didn’t tell me, Marshall did.”
“When? Last night?”
“Yes, but I went to see him the other night, too. I showed him the video. Tried to scare him away from her.”
Paul could barely contain his fury, but at the root of it was shame. How could all this be happening without him even suspecting it? “Why didn’t you tell me, Pop? Why did you waste all this time?”
His father looked at him with more empathy than Paul could ever remember seeing in his face. “I never wanted you to have to know this, son. I wanted to handle it for you. Protect you. You don’t deserve what they’ve done to you. It would be tough for any man to handle. And you haven’t had the easiest time these past years.”
Paul felt his balance going. “So what the hell were you doing out on that hill last night?”
“I asked them both to meet me out there. I didn’t want anybody seeing us together. I told them they were crazy and had to end it. I told them that if they kept on, things would end badly for them, but Kevin would go through hell, too. Marshall wouldn’t listen. He and I got into it. I was getting the best of him, but Jet went to my truck and got my hammer. She would have killed me if Marshall hadn’t stopped her. But they sure didn’t mind leaving me out there to die of exposure.”
“I’m going to take Kevin from her,” Paul heard himself say. “She’s never going to see him again.”
“I know that’s your first instinct—”
“First instinct! What else would I do?”
“Think, that’s what. Kevin’s very existence is proof that Jet committed adultery. But follow that string out a little. Say you get a DNA test proving Kevin was fathered by Marshall. The endpoint of that may be divorce, but not divorce with you getting custody. Because the god-awful truth is that Kevin is Marshall’s son. You ain’t gonna wind up with him. He’ll be lost to us forever if you go that route.”
“Surely not in Bienville,” Paul argued. “What good is all the power your damn club has if it can’t get a judge to give me custody of Kevin?”
“Ordinarily, I’d agree. But this paternity problem can’t be got around. Blood outweighs everything else. Now, there’s ways around it, of course. But they’re not legal.”
“Like?”
Paul saw a familiar light in his father’s eyes. “Plant a pound of cocaine in Marshall’s house. I’ve already broken in there once, just to take a look.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure. But the thing is, that won’t shut him up. He could still talk from prison. And Jet could still take Kevin away from you.”
“Then what? I know you. I know this is leading to something.”
Max ground his jaw as if in pain, then spoke in a voice devoid of all emotion. “There’s only one answer to this, son. Something’s got to happen that leaves only one parent alive. You. Then there’s no doubt whatever. You’d have custody forever, and no one would ever ask for a DNA test. Why would they? Nobody alive would even suspect the truth.”
“You’re talking about murder.”
His father shrugged. “I’m taking about justice. I’m talking about a woman taking another man into her bed and wrecking a marriage. A man whose life you saved in wartime, who then turned around and betrayed you when you were at your lowest point.”
Paul could hardly make himself believe that Jet and Marshall were capable of that level of betrayal. “They told you they mean to leave and take Kevin?”
“Paul, you’re nothing to them but an obstacle to be gotten around.”
Paul leaned over and took hold of the bed frame with his left hand. He was afraid he might throw up.
“I told you I went in his house,” Max said. “Look what I found.”
Max reached into a slot in his cell phone case and brought out a folded piece of ruled notebook paper. Paul took it from his father with quivering hands and unfolded it. What he saw was the intricate pencil doodle of a talented junior high school girl, the kind of thing Jet would spend most of an hour on during history class. He knew Jet had drawn it, because of the Arabic flourishes around the letters, which made the whole thing look like some sultan’s ceiling in an Ottoman palace. The shading variations alone looked like the work of a professional artist. All this Paul registered in the time it took to draw a breath. But what lasted longer, what burned itself into his brain and heart, were the letters at the center of the design: Jordan McEwan. Contained in those two words was the dream of young Jordan Elat Talal, who would years later become Jet Matheson. Scrawled across the bottom of the intricate design were more words, much smaller, yet even more painful, because they were obviously more recent. Written with a pen, they read: Remember this?! Prophecy after all!
“Son?” Max said.
A tear fell onto the paper, staining it gray. Paul had not cried in more years than he could remember, except on a couple of occasions when Kevin had made him so proud that he could not contain his emotion.
“It’s gonna be all right,” his father said. “I know it’s bad now, but we’re gonna make it right. We just have to work it out.”