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comfort in it.
    His thoughts raged. He needed to find the man who’d left his wife for dead. But his heart was at odds, torn between health and vengeance, an ungracious emotion that left him in anguish. He knew if he could get his hands around the neck of the man who did this to his wife, he’d offer no quarter. And in his mind he had only one possible suspect: Sloan Parnell.
    “You want any coffee?” Reverend Poole asked.
    “Yes,” Tom said, waking from the nightmare ever so briefly.
    “Let’s go get us some. The coffee’s down the hall.”
    So the two men walked the corridor to the hospital cafeteria and drank for a half an hour. After they finished the coffee, the pastor prayed with Tom for his wife’s restoration and strength to weather this calamity through the mercy of God.
     
    Four days later, Sara was out of the coma but still in the hospital. The doctors said in time she would recuperate, though her shoulder was broken and there were other injuries to her face and genitalia. She could barely speak. Several of her teeth had been knocked out during the attack, and she was struck with an inexplicable palsy on one side of her face.
    She claimed to have no memory of the attack. No images. Nothing. Her speech was staccato. “I can’t—uh—uh—re—mem—ber—any—thing,” she told Tom.
    “That’s okay, honey, rest,” he said. For some reason he could not pin down, Tom doubted her complete memory lapse. But he was not a cruel man, and he did not want to press her for details. He wished he didn’t have to work at the brickyard. Had he been at home when the predator arrived, he could have defended her. Tom asked for a second week off from work, which was granted with pay, something he didn’t expect.
    Corrine came to the hospital to sit with Sara, even though Tom was available to stay. Tom went to town and bought a new GE television set, and he got James Luke to help him put it in the living room where it awaited Sara’s return home. Tom climbed a sweet gum tree in the backyard, thirty feet up, and installed an antenna to get decent reception.
    Marshal Brownlow stopped by the Hardin home that evening. He brought a casserole wrapped in tinfoil that his wife had sent over. Despite the friction over the forest fires, Brownlow seemed to be genuinely concerned about the fate of this family in his jurisdiction. By contrast, the Baxter Parish Sheriff’s Office hadn’t shown any interest in the case whatsoever. Rarely did the sheriff do anything south of Liberty City unless there was a fierce public outcry, and he did even less in the Ninth Ward, which had its own marshal and special dedicated tax to pay for the office. The sheriff’s main base was in Ruthberry and the north end of the parish where his supporters lived, his chief campaign funders being the old-money landowners. Some of these families had been in power for more than a century.
    The marshal’s office could perform any police work in the ward, as well as handling civil papers and security for the Ninth Ward Court in Milltown. Sometimes it seemed that the marshal served as the only real law in the Ninth Ward.
    “You got any idea about who did this to my wife?” Tom asked the marshal. He and Brownlow stood outside on the front porch.
    The marshal smoked. “Not any leads or suspects. Nothing at all. We got the state police to fingerprint the house, but not a thing’s come of it so far,” the marshal said.
    “I want you to go see Sloan Parnell. I had to knock the hell out of him over at Beam’s feed store a couple of weeks ago.”
    “And you don’t like him so you think he’d go and rape your wife? Come on, Tom. That’s a far stretch.” He snuffed out the cigarette on the porch post and tossed the butt into the yard.
    “He’s Judge Parnell’s grandson, and he’s marked with a real bad seed. What’s wrong? Are you scared of him?”
    “I ain’t scared of no man.”
    “You’re full of shit. Every man is scared of