“I saw him right at five o’clock when I was leaving the office. He was in the doorway of the boiler house, talking to that blond guy, LeBlanc’s redneck.”

“We talked to Gatlin,” the sheriff said, almost under his breath. “He’s got a good alibi.”

“Alibi?”

Again, a silence on the line. “Colette, somebody locked Paul up in a boiler and turned on the water and the fire. He had to cut his way out with a damned chisel.”

She sat down on the floor in the hall, letting her dark hair fall into her lap. “Somebody tried to kill him?”

“It’s the damnedest thing. We trying to figure what’s going on down here. Did Paul piss somebody off real bad?”

Now the silence was on her end of the line.

“Colette?”

“No. Nobody but me,” she told him.

The sheriff gave a little laugh. “Look out.”

“Have you seen him?” she asked.

“Yeah. I seen him.”

“You see a lot of bad accidents. How does he compare?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to tell you.”

“Just make a comparison. I need an opinion right now.” She looked up at the cypress crown molding in the high hall, trying not to cry.

The sheriff stammered around for a minute, then said, “For a live man, he looks pretty bad.”

“Yep,” she said quietly. “That’s what I thought, too.”

*   *   *

At noon, Paul’s sister, Nan, called. She said Paul was going into convulsions and that Colette shouldn’t drive back to Lafayette.

Colette twisted the phone cord as if trying to choke bad news in the line. “Can’t they give him something?”

“If they give him anything else, they’ll kill him. I’ve never seen nothing like this. I was going to bring the kids in to visit him just in case, you know. But I didn’t want them to see this. Colette, some bastard cooked him like a crawfish.”

“I saw,” she said.

“Did the sheriff talk to you?”

“He called and told me it wasn’t an accident.”

“What the hell? Who would do that to him?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly, looking out toward the street.

*   *   *

Colette woke her father at three and led him out to the porch, where she had the usual cups of coffee waiting for them on a tray.

“Ah,” he said, as though three o’clock coffee was a surprise.

“How are you feeling today, Daddy?” She pushed his hair out of his eyes and straightened his wing collar.

“Fine, baby,” he told her, blowing easily on his coffee, then taking a slow, hissing sip.

“Is the coffee sweet enough?”

He nodded. “Just like Mamma fixed it for me.”