Louisiana Bigshot

eating sour apples, but obviously he couldn’t bring himself to whip Jason’s ass right here in the cemetery.
    Talba seized the moment to buttonhole Mary Pat. “What’d you think of the service?”
    Mary Pat was crying. “Oh, Talba, she was right. These people are savages!” Talba liked her better all of a sudden. “They ought not to be allowed to live.”
    “What happened to her? What was the minister talking about?”
    “I swear to God I haven’t the least idea.”

Chapter Nine
    “You’re her best friend. She must have talked to you about it.”
    The redhead shrugged. “Okay, I knew there was something. I just figured her father molested her. That’s the thing people usually don’t talk about. But I don’t
think
that’s what that slimeball meant. This is something the whole town knew about. Listen, she had a shrink—she was talking to somebody; I sure wasn’t going to press her about it. You know, half the time—I’m ashamed to say this, but half the time people say they have some awful traumatic thing in their pasts that’s just too wounding to talk about and once you find out what it is, it seems almost trivial. You know what I mean?
    “I mean, not trivial—but not anything that hasn’t happened to a lot of people—and something they really ought to just get over. Do I sound harsh? It’s terrible for them and all, but you just want to shake them and say, ‘Move on; enough already.’ Well, Clayton was moving on, and she wasn’t dramatizing, and frankly, I didn’t even want to hear about it—that’s what shrinks are for.” She gave her head a shake, which made the beaded strands of her earrings click together.
    “But you’re the one who said you’d been through so much together—divorce, heroin…”
    “But this other thing happened earlier. We didn’t have to talk about it. There was too much bad stuff happening today to worry about yesterday.”
    In one way the minister’d been right, Talba thought—Babalu really had had her share of bad luck. It was just too bad he couldn’t see how well she’d come out of it.
    Whatever “it” was, though, she was determined to find out before the day was over. Glad she’d brought her rental car, she packed Jason off and headed for the parish library. To her immense relief, the librarian was a black woman. For a moment Talba considered asking her if she knew the story herself, but she was in her twenties—perhaps a bit young to have known Clayton.
    After ascertaining that the librarian did, indeed, have microfilm of the
Clayton Weekly Courier,
she asked for the three years that Clayton Patterson would have been in high school. This was one of Talba’s least favorite forms of research—why, oh, why, couldn’t all these things be online? But she endured the tedium long enough to plough through Clayton’s sophomore year and most of her junior year before she finally found what she was looking for—a banner headline shouting BANKER’S DAUGHTER SCALPED.
    The first three paragraphs told the story:
    Clayton Patterson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. King Patterson, remains in guarded condition today after being attacked by an intruder who broke into her bedroom and inflicted severe scalp wounds with a machete.
    Only hours after the attack, sheriff’s deputies arrested Donny Troxell, 17, a classmate of Miss Patterson's at Clayton High School. The injured girl’s father said the two had been dating, but his daughter had recently broken up with Troxell.
    Talba’s heart speeded up: she’d seen the name Donny Troxell before, and recently—in Clayton’s datebook. Trying to ignore the pounding, she plowed on.
    Sheriff Dickie Ransdell told the Courier he had "incontrovertible evidence" that Troxell was the assailant.
    The evidence turned out to be a blood-stained, hair-bearing machete, which had been found in Troxell’s car.
    Talba pressed on, finding about fifteen more stories as Clayton recovered and Troxell was brought to trial. The girl’s injuries were gruesomely detailed: she’d been attacked from the left, the machete shearing several inches of scalp cleanly away from her skull, yet, fortunately, leaving it attached by a thread. Eventually, after several surgeries, some of them performed by a New Orleans plastic surgeon, she’d made a complete recovery.
    Throughout, from the first story to the sentencing, she claimed she never saw her attacker.
    Talba thought back to the tiny scar she noticed the week before Clayton