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"I didn't say that. Not at all."
"It's what happened, though, isn't it?"
"Maybe I had them killed. It's what they deserved. I'm glad they're dead."
"I think it's all right to feel that way," I said.
"What are you going to do with what I've told you?"
"Take you home or to a treatment center in Lafayette."
"I don't want to go into treatment again. If I can't do it with meetings and working the program, I can't do it at all."
"Why don't we go to a meeting after work? Then you go every day for ninety days."
"I feel like everything inside me is coming to an end. I can't describe it."
"It's called 'a world destruction fantasy.' It's bad stuff. Your heart races, you can't breathe, you feel like a piano wire is wrapped around your forehead. Psychologists say we remember the birth experience."
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, then cracked the window as though my words had drawn the oxygen out of the air.
"Lila, I've got to ask you something else. Why were you talking about a Hanged Man?"
"I don't remember that. Not at all. That's in the Tarot, isn't it? I don't know anything about that."
"I see."
Her skin had gone white under her caked makeup, her eyelashes stiff and black and wide around her milky green eyes.
I WALKED THROUGH THE rain into the hospital and rode up in the elevator with Lila's tissue-wrapped spray of carnations in my hand. Helen Soileau was in the waiting room.
"You get anything?" I asked.
"Not much. She says she thinks there were three guys. They sounded like hicks. One guy was running things," she replied.
"That's got to be Harpo Scruggs."
"I think we're going about this the wrong way. Cut off the head and the body dies."
"Where's the head?"
"Beats me," she said.
"Where's Purcel?"
"He's still in there."
I walked to the open door, then turned away. Clete was sitting on the side of M
egan's bed, leaning down toward her face, his big arms and shoulders forming a tent over her. Her right hand rested on the back of his neck. Her fingers stroked his uncut hair.
THE SKY CLEARED THAT night, and Alafair and Bootsie and I cooked out in the back yard. I had told the sheriff about my conversation with Lila Terrebonne, but his response was predictable. We had established possible motivation for the execution of the two brothers. But that was all we had done. There was no evidence to link Archer Terrebonne, Lila's father, to the homicide. Second, the murders still remained outside our jurisdiction and our only vested interest in solving them was the fact that one of the shooters wore an Iberia Parish deputy sheriffs uniform.
I went with Lila to an AA meeting that night, then returned home.
"Clete called. He's in New Orleans. He said for you not to worry. What'd he mean?" Bootsie said.
* * *
