He didn’t consider himself a sentimental man. He wasn’t the type to wistfully return to the town of his boyhood or attend a high school reunion and get maudlin over his fourth bourbon. A child of the Depression, he had always moved forward, never back. His war experiences in Korea had only reinforced this habit. But there was one building in Natchez that Tom never passed without a tightening in his chest, and the events of the past twelve hours had brought him back to it like an icy comet returning to the star where it began its journey through the cosmos.

The house stood on Monroe Street, a rambling one-story structure in the shadow of the massive water tower that supplied the north side of town. In this residence Tom had first begun practicing medicine as a civilian, after being discharged from the army in 1962. He only passed it now on the rare occasions when he broke his own rule and attended a service at Webb’s Funeral Home, or when he made a house call on the north side of town. But today he’d parked his aging BMW beside the wrought-iron fence that bordered the yard of his old office, and stared at the familiar oak door while images of the distant past flowed through his mind.

A surgeon named Wendell Lucas had founded the clinic that once occupied this house. Over the years Lucas had hired a progression of young GPs to handle daily patients and refer him the appendectomies and gallbladder resections that gave him his living. Lucas was a better businessman than a surgeon, and the GPs who had good business sense moved on after three or four years, establishing their own practices in Natchez or other towns. But Tom had cared only about practicing medicine, and having the old surgeon take care of the business side of things freed him up for that, so he’d remained in the arrangement. He had always known the older man was taking advantage, but he was too embarrassed for Lucas to confront him about it. Peggy had ridden Tom about it sometimes, but after enough years even she had given up, and then in 1980 Lucas finally retired to play golf full-time. Tom abandoned the old clinic and moved into a modern new office complex beside St. Catherine’s Hospital, the same one he occupied now.