Paul lived past suppertime, and the doctor said that that was something, at least. In the morning, Colette was feeling really big and slow, but after early Mass, she still drove to the hospital, an hour away in Lafayette. Paul’s father was asleep in the hall when she got there, his legs straight out from the chair, and she stepped into ICU with the permission of a drowsy nurse who was just going off night shift. Paul was still unconscious. His head was a monster’s, swollen and covered with a terrible violet bruise mixed in with the red-and-white scald. The nurse had told her that they could manage the exterior burns, but that the problem was inside, with the brain. They just didn’t know yet.

Colette looked at the tubes and knew that Bucky had done this because he believed that once Paul was dead, she would marry him. In a way, she had led him to think this. She’d put Paul like a strong fence between herself and Tyler. Now here was her ex-husband, dying maybe, because of something she’d said. This suffering was her fault, she realized. She thought of Bucky Tyler, how he spoke, the way he smelled, his creaking boots. She was at a crossroads where she could marry a man who stood a chance of becoming powerful and rich one day, or she could do something else—she didn’t know what, just that it could involve hard times, bad food, and cheap clothes.

Paul gasped and one eye opened wide, showing only white, and she came close, pulling the lid down with a thumb. “You’re going to get better,” she said into his swollen ear. “Come on, you.”

He cried out low, as though someone were working a knife through him in a dream, and Colette’s teeth slid together and closed. “Son of a bitch,” she said slowly, balling a fist.

*   *   *

In the parking lot she met the sheriff, a short man wearing a curled-up tan cowboy hat with a gold badge on the crown. He made her sit in her car before he would talk to her. “Colette, you’re big as a house. You better get someone to start riding with you.”

She gave him an ugly look, leaden-eyed. “You got any suspects?”

He made a clown face and rocked his head back and forth. “Well, we looking at the leads we got from a few interviews.”

“Please, no bullshit. You know Bucky Tyler did it.”

The sheriff looked around at the parking lot, at the live oaks seining a light north wind. “I know Paul got in a fight with him a long time back. But Tyler hired him. What kind of man would hire someone he wanted to kill?”

“You gonna check for fingerprints?”

“Colette, he owns the damned place. He crawls all over it.”