duty. Again he saw her face tilt up to Marshall’s. Thirty years had fallen away from her in that moment. Hell, she even walked different when Marshall was around. A stab of pain hit Paul in the back of his neck, near the base of his skull. He reached into his top drawer and twisted the cap off a prescription bottle, then ground an Oxy between his back teeth before swallowing the fragments. I should’ve asked Dr. Lacey for another ’scrip at that meeting, he thought, shaking the bottle.
“Goddamn IEDs,” he muttered. “Sometimes I wonder if you haji bastards got me after all.”
Chapter 14
The eighteen-mile strip of asphalt known as the Little Trace began as a deer path in pre-Columbian times, was widened by Indians hunting the deer, then centuries later was taken over by whites traveling from Fort Bienville to the Natchez Trace, where it crossed the eastern edge of Tenisaw County. In those days outlaws would lie in wait along the trail, ready to ambush travelers unprepared to defend themselves with powder and shot. What irony that Buck, who chose to live along that historic route, would be murdered by modern outlaws exploiting that same weakness.
As I turn onto the Little Trace east of town, I wonder who might have staked out Buck’s house, waiting for his grieving widow to depart so that they could ransack the place. But before I’ve covered two miles, my thoughts return to Jet and her father, and to Paul Matheson, who is quite capable of killing me if he finds out I’m sleeping with his wife. To be clear, Paul isn’t simply capable of killing me; he’s been trained to do it. And unlike a lot of men with that training, Paul has used what he knows—just like his father did in Vietnam. I’ve seen him do it.
By the time Jet and I began our senior year, Paul had graduated from St. Mark’s and left for Ole Miss, and this opened the possibility of a new life to me. Thanks to Buck Ferris—and my failed suicide attempt—I had rejoined the world of the living by then. My home life sucked, but at least Dad had settled into a well-worn groove of pretending I was part of the furniture. My struggle with Adam’s death was something I pressed down deep in order to survive. The loss of Jet still stung, even after three years, but Paul leaving town had taken a weight from my shoulders.
During the previous year, my athletic pursuits had forced me into constant contact with him. We’d played football and basketball and even run track together, which meant that we’d spent hundreds of hours in each other’s company. We shared locker rooms, showers, bus rides, fast-food joints, team suppers, and crazy stunts in the dead of night. Despite the fact that he’d essentially taken Jet away from me, all this activity allowed our childhood friendship to reassert itself. We parted on good terms when he left for Oxford, but there was no denying the sense of relief I felt as he drove away from my house in the Corvette that had been his graduation present from Max.
To my surprise, when school started I found that I had become something of a star in my own right at St. Mark’s. In many ways, “Goose” McEwan seemed a character apart from me, but because he was accepted by all, life was easier when I pretended to be him. My grades had always been the best on the sports teams, and after Paul’s class graduated, I suddenly emerged as a replacement for my dead brother—or at least a reasonable facsimile of what everyone’s expectations for Adam had been. (To everyone except my father, of course.)
With Paul no longer around, Jet and I found ourselves thrown together almost every day. We were awkward around each other at first, but before long the feelings we’d shared during our magical summer returned, and nervousness blossomed into mutual attraction. In physics class one day an analogy hit me: Paul had stood between us like a lead shield separating radioactive masses. The moment he was withdrawn, Jet and I surged toward criticality.
Paul hadn’t broken up with her when he left for Ole Miss, as so many college-bound guys did when dating juniors. He’d promised he would come home every weekend, even though Ole Miss was four hours away. As it turned out, Paul didn’t return to Bienville for seven weeks, and that left Jet and me sufficient time