Zion (17 page)

On Monday morning, the marshal’s secretary Mrs. Lott called Sara Hardin’s office at the college library. Brownlow had put off the call as long as possible, but now he felt as though he had no choice but to do the interview about her rape and beating.

Sara was on the other line waiting when Mrs. Lott buzzed him.

“Hello, Mrs. Sara. This is Marshal Brownlow. How are you this morning?” he asked.

There was a long pause, and she took a deep breath, a slight gasp. “I’m fine. Is everything all right?”

“Well, I reckon it will be all right bye and bye, or as good as it’ll ever be, Lord willing. I’m calling on account I need to talk to you about something that has come to light about your assault in 1964.”

“Why would you need to do that? Did you find out who did it?” Her voice cracked.

“No, but I have a lead. I need to ask you some questions about what all you remember.”

“Marshal, I don’t have any better memory now than I had back then. In fact, I recall far less today.” Her voice cracked again. She sounded truly shaken.

“I need to try and clear the air on some things. I suspect nothing’ll ever come of it. But I do need to talk to you if I can,” he said.

“You know, I really don’t remember anything. I was hurt so bad. It affected my short term memory, and it’s been a very long time ago.”

“Mrs. Sara, I do need to see you face-to-face if you’d oblige me. Today if possible. Can you come over to my office when you get off work this afternoon?”

“I suppose I can,” she said, sounding like she’d been caught off guard but resigned to the invitation.

“Thank you. What time can you be here?”

“I’m off work at four-thirty. I can be there at ten before five, no later than five.”

“And I do appreciate your cooperation. If you talk to Tom beforehand, tell him I send my kind regards.”

“Yes, Marshal.”

He sat deep in his chair after he hung up the phone. Any time in the past forty years, he would have smoked a cigarette, but he reminded himself that he’d quit. He reached into his desk drawer and took out a piece of mint candy and unwrapped the wax paper and placed it into his mouth. The bottle of gin was gone. He threw it out along with a new carton of Winstons during the first morning he got back to work after the heart attack.

Sara arrived at the office a few minutes before five. She drove a little silver AMC Gremlin, which they had bought because it got good gas mileage and was dependable. They paid monthly notes to the Tickfaw State Bank. She was almost quivering as she got out of the vehicle and walked to the door.

As best she could, she tried to recall what she’d said a decade earlier, and she’d been rehearsing every detail since she spoke to the marshal on the telephone. While at the library, she wrote out her story longhand, the whole lie told in 1964, and then studied it and threw it away after she’d cut it up into a thousand pieces with a pair of scissors. To be safe, she placed the little pieces into three different trash cans in different sections of the library. Now she was anxious that the lies she’d told years ago were coming upon her like her worst possible fear.

The little walk from the car to the marshal’s building were some of the hardest steps she’d made in her entire life. She opened the office door, and Mrs. Lott welcomed her inside. Rita Lott was a long-time member of Little Zion Methodist, and now Sara worried that the meeting with the marshal would be all over the church, though she had not been attending worship lately.

Mrs. Lott buzzed the marshal and tried to make small talk. He came to the front room and waved Sara inside his office. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

“Well, I’m here,” Sara said.

He shut the door behind them.

She saw the recorder on the desk and took it in with an element of shock, but she tried not to stare or mention it.

“How’s Tom getting along?” the marshal asked.

“He’s fine.”

“And Wesley?”

She stalled a second to collect her thoughts and glanced at the silent recorder. “He’s about to graduate from Baxter State, and he’s enrolling at the university in Lafayette.”

“That’s mighty good to hear, Sara. Mighty good. He’s growing up like Priscilla. She’s at Centenary College in Shreveport, and she’ll be studying in London, England, this fall for a whole semester. I’ll have to take a second job to pay for the trip, but she’s going.” He grinned, an element of pride and self-deprecating humor used as a way to disarm the woman across from his desk.

“Priscilla’s such a pretty girl.”

“Thanks to her mama, she is. Mary Anne and I have sure missed seeing you at church.”

“Well, I’ve been busy working at the house and taking a class at LSU. Sunday is my only free day to get things done. I’ve been sick some lately, too.” She felt unconvincing in her tall tale.

“I hope everything shapes up for you and you get to feeling better. Now Sara, I should tell you that I drove up to Natchez, Mississippi, in order to speak to James Luke Cate. I’ve interviewed others as well—”

She interrupted. “Why are you going back to all of this? Do you have a new lead?” Sara moved forward in her chair, her black patent leather purse held tight in her lap. She tried not to appear nervous, and she attempted to look genuinely concerned about the investigation, as if she wanted the marshal to make an arrest and solve the old crime.

“Kind of. A person came forward with some new information. I don’t know if anything’ll ever come of it, but I have to believe you’re the key witness.” Brownlow paused, as if trying to let things sink in.

“Oh.” Her eyes cut to the recorder. Then back to the marshal without turning her head. She hoped he hadn’t seen her look at the machine again with her eyes, but she knew her fear must show like a bright light.

“I’m going to tape our little visit with this machine if I can figure out how to turn it on.” He gave a reassuring smile and turned on the recorder with a loud click.

Sara slumped in the chair, her prepared defense lost. She looked worn out with her long gray hair, and she was having trouble breathing. Her right pinkie twitched atop her black purse like a tremor.

“I really do wish you wouldn’t tape this,” she said, pleading.

But the recorder started rolling when he clicked the button. He acted as though she hadn’t said a word. He raised a brow and looked at her. “Well, let’s go on and get started. This is Donald Brownlow, Marshal of the Ninth Ward, Baxter Parish, Louisiana, and I’m here in my office at five o’clock on Monday, July 15, 1974, interviewing Mrs. Sara Hardin of Zion.”

She placed her left hand over the trembling right finger, but the tremor spread from the pinkie to the whole hand, which she pushed down into her lap, praying the marshal wouldn’t see it.

“Sara, I know some of this’ll probably be a little unsettling for you, and I’m sorry about it, but I need to rule some things out. I’m really dealing with two events, your attack and the death of Sloan Parnell, and how they might somehow be related together.”

“All right,” Sara said, still stunned. She wished to God she hadn’t shown up in the first place. This was a big mistake, she thought.

“Can you tell me a little about your relationship with Sloan Parnell?”

Again, she couldn’t understand how everything turned on her all of a sudden after so many years. She stammered, “I didn’t really know him.”

“But you did know him.”

“Ah, a little. I knew his family, one might say. I know the Parnells. Everyone knows who they are. It was so very long ago. I do seem to recall seeing him around once or twice now that you mention it. I suppose we chatted at the public library in Pickleyville a few times.”

“Sara, I need you to take this the right way, and I don’t mean no lack of respect by it. As you say, this has been a long time ago, over nine years, but did you ever have relations of an intimate nature with Sloan Parnell? I have an informant that says you did.”

At first she made a low grunting noise in her throat, a smoker’s hoarse cough. She voiced a strange sound, “waaah-waaah-waaah.” The sound came from her lips and mouth, an odd shrieking noise that fell off her tongue like a moan, an ecstatic utterance, as if drawing near to Christ at a frontier camp meeting as Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury preached the gospel. Her next word was “naa-naa-noo,” and the denial came out from her face like a dagger, and she almost confessed to shocking things, details of the affair, but she stopped herself cold. It was on the tip of her tongue, and she knew it. She gathered herself. There was very little natural light in the room. The window shade was drawn tight. Sara blinked her eyes, making them look strained in the lamp light. The artificial light did no justice to the dark words on the edges of her lips.

“No, I did not,” she said. “I’m a married woman.” She recalled having sex with Sloan. She remembered sex with James Luke over the course of a decade, more times than she could count. During the weeks preceding her attack, she’d had sex with James Luke and Sloan on the same day. She brought James Luke into her marriage bed, and she slept with Sloan at the old Parnell place.

James Luke had taken the day off from work and was casing the old Parnell place to burn it when he saw Sara pull into the long driveway. There she was, driving Tom’s truck into the belly of the beast.

When she got back to her house in Zion, James Luke was on the front porch waiting for her smoking a cigarette. Jubal was loose in the yard, a link snapped from wear on his chain, and James Luke was petting the dog when she got out of Tom’s truck.

Later she undressed in the bed and waited for him to join her. He’d never said a word about seeing her two hours earlier at the Parnell place. Then he confronted her about being at Sloan’s house. He beat her unmercifully, almost to the point of death. He raped her. The one thing he made her understand before he finished with her was that he’d murder Wesley if she ever said a word. He’d kill the boy like a sack of kittens thrown into a creek, he told her.

The woman stared blankly, expressionless, caught up in her own suppressed memories.

“Sara,” he said, he tapping the edge of the desk with a finger.

She sat dazed.

He tapped louder, and she made eye contact. “Sara. Why don’t you go on and tell me the whole truth? You appear mighty shook up. The Lord says ‘the truth will set you free’.”

“I really can’t remember anything, Marshal,” she said. She was thinking that she’d saved her son’s life. Maybe she’d saved Tom who would have killed James Luke, and maybe her, too, and gone to jail for the rest of his days. By lying, she was the only one hurt. She’d preserved what life she had with Tom and Wesley. She always considered it an act of courage.

“Did James Luke and Tom kill Sloan?”

“I don’t believe they did. I wasn’t there, but I don’t think so. It was clearly an accident.”

He raised his voice. “I know for a fact that you’ve lied to the sheriff’s department. You’ve lied to me today. You could be charged with obstruction. I have a sworn statement from a witness that says you slept with Sloan and James Luke.” He was bluffing, which was the key to any good interrogation. He’d been a lawman long enough to use necessary shock to rattle a subject.

“I bet it was that bitch Charity LeBlanc,” she said under her breath.

The marshal blew out the air from his lungs and stared at the woman across the desk. He didn’t acknowledge her comment. “I reckon I’ve got just a few more questions if I can figure what’s left to ask,” he said.

The marshal drove home for the day, but the house was empty. Mary Anne had gone to Shreveport to visit with their only child who was working at First Methodist Church in a children’s summer program. Shreveport was the city where her church-related college was based. Soon, Priscilla was going to leave the country for the first time, a major event for the family. Mary Anne had graduated from Centenary College thirty-three years earlier with a degree in French. It was a wonder how she and the marshal had gotten along as well as they did, considering the marshal’s lack of formal education. He graduated from high school at seventeen and never looked back. The couple worked well together and made a home out of their differences as much as they did their similarities. Regardless, they had mutual fidelity, and they did not mind spending time alone. After the heart attack, there were times when he desired to sit down in the quiet and reflect on his years, which, he knew, were shortened, fleeting like a flicker of flame in the wind if his luck didn’t hold out or providence didn’t grant longevity.

So he looked forward to the evening while she was gone as a chance to relax a little and pursue his favorite pastime, his bloodhound dogs. They weren’t the fastest or the smartest of dogs, but they did have the keenest nose. Some experts said bloodhounds with their droopy faces had some of the best noses in the animal kingdom, capable of sniffing out a single molecule among millions. Brownlow believed in God, but if he didn’t have any faith, he’d often said the existence of a bloodhound would be enough evidence to sway him. Just one search and rescue mission to find a lost child would make him think the animal was a true miracle of creation and proof of divine governance in an often chaotic world.

During the evening, he retreated to his kennel while it was still daylight. The hounds began barking, leaping as he walked back to the concrete slab and hurricane fence. His two bloodhounds were hardy and loud, plenty of loose skin around the jowls and neck. They jumped up on the fence when they saw him coming.

“Dixie and Duke, quiet on down,” he hollered over their barking. He took a leather leash from a post. The roof was a few inches above his head, and it kept the sun off the dogs. Heat and sun were bad on bloodhounds, and he was always wary of losing one to stroke in the Louisiana sun. Under harsh conditions, they could die or come close to death in a single afternoon heat wave.

Brownlow opened the gate. “Come here, Duke,” he said, as if he needed to say anything with the dogs clamoring for his hand and affection. The big red hound poked his nose out of the door, and he clipped the leash to the collar. He then led the dog through the gate and into the backyard. Duke was the younger of the two dogs and a less experienced tracker. He was a good dog already, but he needed more work. The marshal rubbed the dog’s slick coat for a moment as he looked on, hound eyes longing. Brownlow and the dog went toward the house and his Dodge pickup truck. Once he dropped the tailgate, Duke loaded into the bed and entered a large kennel that was bigger than a typical dog box. It appeared jail-like and was the size of the truck bed and tall enough for a man to stand in. The floor was filled with horse hay for comfort. On top, an aluminum roof kept out the sun and rain.