Shakespeare’s Champion

Chapter Seven

Getting Jack to his apartment, though it was just a few yards away, was quite a challenge. At least it was his day off, and his shoulder would have a chance to rest before he had to show up at Winthrop Sporting Goods. It would have looked better if he could have worked out at Body Time this morning, but it was beyond even someone as determined as Jack Leeds. He was hurting.

I gave him my last hoarded pain pill to take when he got home. He stowed it in his pocket. Then, when nothing was passing on Track Street, he ducked out my kitchen door and into my car. I backed out and drove out of my driveway and into the Garden Apartments driveway, going all the way to the rear parking area. When I was closest to the door, so close it would be hard to see from the rear windows of the top apartments, Jack jumped out and went inside. I pulled into Marcus Jefferson’s former space and followed him in, to provide myself with a reason for entering the apartment parking lot. Even to me, this seemed a bit overly careful, but Jack had just given me a look to reinforce his admonishment that “these people” were very dangerous.

So I climbed the stairs to work in Deedra’s apartment, which was absolutely normal and gave me a bona fide reason to enter the building at this hour. I carried my caddy of cleaning materials up the stairs, expecting Jack would already be in his apartment and trying to get his clothes off to bathe, without upsetting his wound. I’d offered to help, but he wanted my day to run absolutely normally.

Far from being empty, the landing was full of men and suspicion. Darcy and the bullish Cleve Ragland were waiting in front of Jack’s door. They were having a face-off with Jack, who was standing with his keys in his hand.

“… don’t have to tell anyone where I spend the night,” Jack was saying, and there was a cold edge to his voice that meant business.

He hadn’t wanted us to be publicly associated. For that matter, neither had I. I should unlock Deedra’s apartment and trot back downstairs to get my mop, leaving Jack to stonewall his way through this. That was what he’d want me to do.

“Hey again, Lily,” Darcy said, surprise evident in his voice. He looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but Cleve was showing signs of wear and tear. He hadn’t shaved, and maybe had slept in his clothes.

“You keep long hours, Darcy,” I replied, depositing my caddy at Deedra’s door and joining the little group. Jack glared at me.

“We just come by here to see if Jared was all right,” Darcy said, and his flat blue eyes swung back to Jack. “We rung him last night after the robbery and got no answer.”

“And I was telling you,” Jack said just as coldly, “that what I do on my time off is my business.”

I approached Jack from his left, put my arm around him, blocking the wounded side in case they tried clapping him on the shoulder.

“Our business,” I corrected him, looking steadily at Darcy.

“Whoo-ee,” Darcy said, sticking his hands in his own jean pockets as if he didn’t know what to do with them. His heavy coat bulged up in semicircles around his tucked hands.

Cleve glanced from me to Jack and back again, and said, “Reckon ole Jared got lucky.”

Immediately the tension eased. Jack slowly looped his arm around me. His fingers bit into my shoulder.

“Well, you were being a gentleman,” Darcy said approvingly.

“Now you got your question answered, can I get in my apartment?” Jack said, making an effort to sound amiable. But I could hear the anger pulsing in his voice.

“Sure, man. We’re going this very minute,” said Darcy, a broad grin on his face that I wanted to wipe right off. I promised myself I would if I got half a chance.

Jack stepped between Darcy and Cleve, put his key in the lock, and turned it as they started down the stairs. He automatically stood back to let me enter first, then shut the door behind us. Jack relocked it and went over to the window to see if his “friends” really left.

Then he swung around to face me, his anger open now and misdirected at me.

“We talked about this,” he began. “No one was going to connect us.”

“Okay, I’m gone,” I said shortly, and started for the door.

“Talk to me,” he demanded.

I sighed. “How else could you have gotten out of that?” I asked.

“Well, I… could have told them I’d driven to Little Rock to see my girlfriend.”

“And when they said, ‘Then why was your car parked here all night?’ ”

Frustrated, Jack brought his fist down on a little desk by the window. “Dammit, I won’t have it!”

I shrugged. No point in all this now. If he was going to act like a jerk, I’d go downstairs and get my mop. I had to work.

When I was on the top stair, he caught me. His good hand clamped down on my shoulder like iron. I stopped dead. I turned very slowly and said to him in my sincerest voice, “How about saying, ‘Thanks, Lily, for bailing me out, even though you had to stand there and be leered at for the second time in twelve hours’?”

Jack turned whiter around the mouth than he had been, and his hand dropped from my shoulder.

“And don’t you ever, ever restrain me again,” I told him, my eyes staring directly into his.

I turned, and with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I went down the stairs. When I came up with the mop, I stood on the landing for a second, listening. His apartment was silent. I went into Deedra’s to work.

So much drama, so early in the morning, left me exhausted. I scarcely registered the unusual order in Deedra’s apartment; it was as if she was trying to show she’d changed her social habits by keeping her apartment neater. As I put away her clean underwear, I noted the absence of the pile of naughty pictures of herself she had kept underneath her bras. I expected to feel good about Deedra’s changed lifestyle, but instead, I could barely manage to finish my cleaning.

As I dumped the last waste can into a plastic bag, I admitted to myself that even more than tired, I felt sad. It would have been a pleasant treat to have had a morning to think of Jack in the relaxed warmth of good sex, in the glow of-what could I call it? Happiness. But, thanks to his pride-as I saw it-we’d ended on a sour note.

There was a pile of pierced earrings on Deedra’s dresser, and I decided to just sit there and pair them up. For a minute or two that was simple and satisfying; after all, they match or they don’t. But my restless mind began wandering again.

A pretend robbery during a mysterious meeting at Winthrop Sporting Goods, in the middle of a most inclement night. The blue flyers that had caused so much trouble. The long, heavy black bags that the Winthrop house had been burgled to get-where were they now? The three unsolved murders in tiny Shakespeare. The out-of-place Mookie Preston. The bombing. I couldn’t make sense of all the pieces at one time, but the shape of it was wrong. This was no group of fanatics with a coherent manifesto at work; it all seemed very sloppy. For the first time, I considered what Carrie had said about the timing of the bombing. If the goal had been to kill lots of black people, the explosion had come too late. If the goal had been to “merely” terrorize the black community, the explosion had come too early. The deaths in the church had enraged the African-American people of Shakespeare. Whoever had planted the bomb did not represent white supremacy, but white stupidity.

As I locked Deedra’s apartment-scorning to even cross the landing and listen at Jack’s door-and descended the stairs to drive to Mookie Preston’s modest rental, I thought about the unexpected, normally concealed aspects of the people around me, the part I was seeing the past few days. It was like seeing their skeleton beneath their outer flesh.

Bluff, hearty good ole boy Darcy Orchard, for example: I’d worked out with Darcy for years, and seen only the good-natured sportsman. But last night I’d seen him tracking a man, at the head of a pack of hunters. Beneath his yard-dog exterior, Darcy was a wolf.

I’d always known that about Tom David Meicklejohn. He was naturally cruel and sly, naturally an able and remorseless hunter. He was reliable in what he undertook, whether good or bad. But Darcy had kept this facet of his character buried, and something or someone had unearthed it and used it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine what would have happened if the pack had caught Jack.

And I found myself almost sure they would have killed him.

I began work at Mookie’s house in a grim mood. Of course her place couldn’t be as dirty as it had been the first time I’d cleaned it, but every week she did a grand job of retrashing it. I scrubbed the bathroom in silence, trying to ignore the little questions and comments she tossed to me as she passed by the open door.

Mookie showed me her cuts from the bombing. They’d been caused by flying splinters, and they were healing well. She inquired after my leg. Would the woman never shut up and settle down to her work?

Once I got the bathroom decent again, I moved into the bedroom. This old house had big rooms and high ceilings, and Mookie’s low modern bed and chest of drawers looked out of place. The bare wooden floors made a bit of an echo, footsteps clacking unnaturally loud. Maybe she liked the noise, maybe it kept her company.

“You know,” Mookie said, making one of her abrupt appearances, “they haven’t got a clue who planted that bomb.” She’d been reading the papers. I hadn’t.

“Is that right?” I asked. I really didn’t want to talk.

“The device that started the explosion was a wristwatch, like the one you’ve got on,” Mookie said. She was very angry, very intense. I’d had enough angry and intense already today. “All the chemicals in the bomb were things you could order from any chemical supply house. All you’d have to do is not order everything from one place, so they won’t get suspicious.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said pointedly.

“It’s in books you can check out of the library here!” she said, her hands flying up in a gesture of complete exasperation. “It’s in books you can buy at the bookstore in Montrose!”

“So it’s probably almost as easy to make a bomb as it is to buy a rifle,” I said, my voice calm and even.

The rifle was not under her bed any longer.

“A rifle’s legal.”

“Sure.” I was careful not to turn and look her in the eyes. I didn’t want any kind of confrontation. That, too, I’d had enough of already today.

After I changed the sheets and dusted the bedroom, I looked around for an empty bag to dump the contents of the plastic garbage pail, which was full of soiled tissues, balls of hair, and gum wrappers. There, next to a Reebok shoe box, was a dark red plastic bag, and it bore the distinctive logo of Winthrop Sporting Goods.

I tried to persuade myself that there was nothing odd about this. People did mostly buy their sports shoes at Winthrop’s, because the store carried a great selection and would special-order what they didn’t have in stock.

But I’d seen another red plastic bag the week before. And I remembered seeing yet another crammed into the kitchen garbage. Mookie was going to Winthrops’ very frequently.

Slowly I dumped the garbage pail into the bag and went to the bathroom to empty another one. Mookie barely glanced at me as I cleared the one by her desk. Her coarse reddish hair was braided today, and she was wearing wind-suit pants and a turtleneck. She was tapping computer keys with great energy. The same charts were taped to the wall behind her.

There was a pile of library books on the desk, studded with slips of paper marking pages she wanted to refer to.

“How does a genealogist work?” I asked.

For once, she’d been engrossed in what she was doing, and she took a minute to focus on my question.

“Mostly by computer these days,” she answered. “Which is great for me. I do work for a company that advertises in small specialty magazines, or regional mags, like Southern Living. We trace your ancestry for you if you give us some basic information. The Mormons, oddly enough, have the best records; I think they believe they can baptize their ancestors and get them into heaven that way, or something. Then there are county records, and so on.

“Did you want your folks traced?” she asked me now, a hint of amusement in the set of her mouth.

“I know who my family is,” I said, and spoke the truth, for my mother’s idea of a great Christmas present was a family tree ready-framed for my wall. For all I knew, she’d hired Mookie Preston’s company to do the research.

“Then you’re lucky. Most Americans can only name as far back as their great-grandparents. They’re shaky after that.”

I tried to think of myself as lucky.

I failed.

I wanted to sit in the battered armchair in front of her desk and ask her what I really needed to know. Why was she here? What trouble was she getting into? Would I come to work next week and find her dead, for sticking her nose into a hornet’s nest and getting stung?

Mookie laughed uneasily. “You’re looking at me funny, Lily.”

Bits of information slid around in my head and rearranged into a pattern. Lanette had come looking for Mookie secretly one night. Mookie had moved to town right after Darnell Glass had been killed. Mookie had an Illinois license plate.

Lanette had returned to Shakespeare after living in Chicago for a time. I studied the round line of Mookie’s cheeks and the strong column of her neck, and then I knew why she seemed familiar.

I gave Mookie a brisk nod and went back to work on the kitchen. Mookie was Darnell’s half-sister. But there seemed no point in talking to Mookie about it: Strictly speaking, it wasn’t my business, and Mookie knew better than anyone who she was and what she had to mourn. I wondered whose idea it had been to keep silent. Had Mookie wanted to do some kind of undercover work on the murder of her brother, or had Lanette been unwilling to admit to the town that she’d had a liaison with a white man?

I wondered if Lanette had left for Chicago pregnant.

I wondered if the father was still alive, still here in Shakespeare. I wondered if he and Mookie had talked.

The rifle, black and brown and deadly, had spooked me. I hadn’t seen loose firearms in anyone’s house since I began cleaning. I’d polished my share of gun cabinets, but I’d never found one unsecured and its contents easily available; which didn’t mean the guns hadn’t been there, in night tables and closets, just that they hadn’t been quite so… accessible. I felt I hadn’t been meant to see the rifle, that Mookie’s carelessness had been a mistake. I had no idea what Arkansas gun laws were, since I’d never wanted to carry a gun myself. Maybe the rifle was locked in Mookie’s car trunk.

I remembered the targets. If they were typical of Mookie’s marksmanship, she was a good shot.

I thought of the pack of men who’d been after Jack. Darcy knew Mookie’s name and address. I thought of him thinking the same thoughts about Mookie that I’d been thinking.

I gathered up my things and told Mookie I was leaving. She was coming outside to check her mailbox at the same time, and after she’d paid me we walked down the driveway together. I thought hard about what to say, if to speak at all.

Almost too late, I made up my mind. “You should go,” I said. Her back was to me. I already had one foot in the car.

She twisted halfway around, paused for a moment. “Would you?” She asked.

I considered it. “No,” I said finally.

“There, then.” She collected her mail and passed me again on her way back into that half-empty echoing house. She acted as though I wasn’t there.

When I got home that night, all the sleeplessness of the night before and the emotional strain of the day hit me in the face. It would have done me good to go to karate, blow off some tension. But I was so miserable I couldn’t bring myself to dress for it. Waves of black depression rolled over me as I sat at my bare kitchen table. I thought I’d left death behind me when I’d found this little town, picked it off the map because it was called Shakespeare and my name was Bard-as good a reason as any to settle somewhere, I’d figured at the time. I’d tried so many places after I’d gotten out of the hospital: from my parents’ home to Jackson, Mississippi, to Waverly, Tennessee… waitressed, cleaned, washed hair in a salon, anything I could leave behind me when I walked out the door at the end of the workday.

Then I’d found Shakespeare, and Shakespeare needed a maid.

When Pardon Albee had died, it had been a small thing, an individual thing. But this that was happening now, this craziness… it was generated by a pack mentality, something particularly terrifying and enraging to me. I’d experienced men in packs.

I thought of Jack Leeds, who would never be part of any pack. He’d get over being mad at me… or he wouldn’t. It was out of my hands. I would not go to him, no matter how many grieved girlfriends and widows passed through my mind. Sometimes I hated chemistry, which could play such tricks with your good sense, your promises to yourself.

When the knock came at the front door, I glanced at the clock on the wall. I’d been sitting and staring for an hour. My injured hip hurt when I rose, having been in the same position for so long.

I looked through the peephole. Bobo was on my doorstep, and he looked anxious. I let him in. He was wearing a brown coat over his gi.

“Hey, how are you?” he asked. “I missed you at karate. Marshall did, too.” He added that hastily, as though I would accuse him of hogging all the missing that was going around.

If it had been anyone but Bobo, I wouldn’t have opened the door. I’d known him since he was just beginning to shave; he’d sometimes been arrogant, sometimes too big for his britches, but he had always been sweet. I wondered how this boy had gotten to be my friend.

“Have you been crying, Lily?” he asked now.

I reached up to touch my cheek. Yes, I had been.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, wanting him to not notice, to drop it.

“Yes, it does,” he said. “You’re always beating yourself up, Lily. It does matter.” Amazingly, Bobo pulled a clean handkerchief from his coat pocket, and wiped my cheeks with gentle fingers.

This was not the way conversations with Bobo usually went. Usually he told me how his classes were going, or we talked about a new throw Marshall had taught us, or the boy Amber Jean was dating.

“Bobo,” I began uneasily, puzzled. I was trying to think how to proceed when Bobo acted instead, decisively. He gathered me up and kissed me hard, with an unnerving degree of expertise. For a few shocked seconds I stood quietly accepting this intimacy, feeling the warmth of his mouth against mine, the hard pressure of his body, before my internal alarm system went off. I slid my hands up and pressed gently against his chest. He instantly released me. I looked into his face, and saw a man who desired me.

“I’m so sorry, Bobo,” I said. “I hope I’m always your friend.” It was a dreary thing to say, but I meant it.

Not that pushing him away was effortless: It was all too easy to envision welcoming Bobo-young, vigorous, strong, handsome, endearing-into my bed. I’d been hoping to wipe out bad memories with good ones; Bobo and I could certainly give each other a few. Even now I felt the pull of temptation, as I saw his face close around the pain.

“I-have someone else,” I told him. And I hated the fact that what I said was true.

“Marshall?” he breathed.

“No. It’s not important who it is, Bobo.” I made another effort. “You have no idea how tempted and flattered I am.” The unevenness of my voice gave witness to that. I saw the pride return to his face as he heard the truth in what I was saying.

“I’ve cared about you for a long time,” he said.

“Thank you.” I never meant anything as much. “That makes me proud.”

Amazingly, after he’d opened the door to leave, he turned and lifted my hand and kissed it.

I watched his Jeep pull away.

“Touching scene,” Jack Leeds said acerbically.

He stepped out of the shadows in the carport and walked across the little patch of lawn to my front door. He stood inches away, his arms crossed over his chest, a sneer on his face.

I could truly almost feel my heart sinking. I thought of closing the door and locking it in his face. I wasn’t up to another scene.

“Did you give him the time of his life, Lily? Golden boy, no past to slow him down?”

I felt something snap in me. I’d been pushed beyond some limit. He could read it in my eyes, and I saw him start to uncross his arms in sudden alarm, but I struck him as hard as I could in the solar plexus. He made a sound and began to double over. I folded my arm, aimed the point of my elbow at the base of his skull. I pulled it at the very last instant, because it was a killing blow. But I had pulled the blow too soon, because he could launch himself at me. He knocked me back inside my front door onto the carpet. He kicked the door shut behind him.

This was the second time Jack had had me pinned. I wasn’t going to have it. I struck his hurt shoulder, and over he went, and then I was on top. I had his jacket gripped with one hand while my other twisted his knit shirt, tightening the neck band, my knuckles digging into his throat while he made a gagging noise.

“Oh yes, Jack, this is love, all right,” I said in a trembling voice that I hardly recognized. I rolled off him and sat with my back to him, my hands over my face, waiting for him to hit me or leave.

After a long time I risked a look at him. He was still lying on his back, his eyes fixed on me. He was visibly shaken, and I was glad to see it. He beckoned me with an inward curl of his fingers. I shook my head violently.

After another long time I heard him move. He sat behind me, his legs spread, and pulled me back against him. His arms crossed in front of me, holding me to him, but gently. Gradually I calmed, stopped shaking.

“We’re okay, Lily,” he said. “We’re okay.”

“Can this poor sense of timing be why you have such a- checkered career-as a lover?” I asked.

“I-am-sorry,” he said between clenched teeth.

“That helps.”

“Really sorry.”

“Good.”

“Can I-?”

“What? What do you want to do, Jack?” He told me. I told him he could try.

Later, in the quiet of my bed, he began to talk about something else. And all the pieces began to fall into place.

“Howell Winthrop, Jr., hired me,” he said. We were lying facing each other. “He told me a week ago not to trust you.” I could feel my eyes open wide as I absorbed all this. “You saw the men last night. You have to have figured it out.”

“I guess Darcy is involved. All the others?”

“Yes, and a few more. Not the whole town, not even a sizable proportion of the white males. Just a few mental misfits who think their dicks are on the line. They think their manhood is tied up in keeping blacks, and women for that matter, in their place.”

“So they meet at Winthrop’s Sporting Goods.”

“The group evolved that way. Most of them are passing through there to buy things pretty often anyway, so it just happened. Ninety-eight percent of the people that patronize Winthrop’s are just regular nice people, but the two percent… Howell didn’t know anything about it until he noticed that guns were being bought through the store accounts that didn’t show up in the store. And it wasn’t even Howell that noticed it.”

“Oh no.” I thought for a moment. “It was Del.”

“Yeah, Del Packard. He went to Howell. Howell told him not to tell anyone else. But he must have.”

“Poor Del. Who killed him?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know if Del knew more than he told Howell, or if they were just scared of him telling it to the police-maybe they even asked Del to join them and he refused-but one of them took Del out.”

“Surely not all the Winthrop’s employees are in on it?” So many people worked at Winthrop’s, at least twenty men and four or five women who did office work. Added to the staff of the Winthrop-owned lumber and home supply business right next door… and there was Winthrop Oil…

“No, not by a long shot. Only three or four men at the Sporting Goods place, that I’ve been able to make sure of. And a couple, maybe three men from the place next door. Plus a few guys who just joined in, like Tom David and the one you told me was Cleve Ragland. The day they came to steal back the bags at the Winthrops’ house, they were in Cleve Ragland’s car.”

Since Jack was in a tell-all mood, I decided I would ask as many questions as I could.

“What was in the black bags?”

“Guns. And rifles. For the past four years Jim Box has been the man who ordered for the store. Someone got the bright idea for Jim to order a little more than he thought Winthrop’s could sell. Then they were going to stage a robbery and list those arms as stolen, which is why that excuse popped into their minds so quickly last night, I guess. They’d figured if they set up a robbery, no one could blame the store-Howell-if the guns were used for illegal stuff. Instead of walking out with one weapon at a time, they began stockpiling what they wanted in the storeroom at the back of the store in two black bags, waiting for the right moment to stage the break-in. They should’ve gone on and moved their pile after Del died, but we’re not talking big brains here.”

“Then you and Howell took the bags.”

“Yeah, everyone in on it was gone to lunch, so we loaded them into Howell’s car and drove out to his house.” He kissed me. “The day I saw you there. You had the strangest expression on your face.”

“I couldn’t figure you two out. I was thinking you and Howell were maybe-thataway.”

Jack laughed out loud. “Beanie’s safe.”

“Why did you put them in Howell’s house?”

“We wanted to see who’d come after them. We knew by then who on Howell’s payroll was involved, but not the names of the rest of the group. I also figured lying concealed in Howell’s house would be safer than hiding at the store every night, waiting for the staged burglary to take place. So Howell told Darcy about this strange cache of arms he’d found in the store, how he thought he’d keep them at his house until he decided whether he should call the police or not.”

“Wasn’t that just a little more dangerous for Howell and his family?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.

“Well, I knew the day they were going to try. And Howell has this conviction they won’t hurt him or his family. He has this weird sense of-like he owes them, because they work for him. He doesn’t even seem to want to turn them in when he finds out who it is… and he wants to know exactly. It’s strange. He doesn’t want anyone falsely accused, and I can respect that. But it’s like there’s something he’s not telling me.”

I should have listened to that sentence harder, mulled over it like I mulled over so many things. But I was still trying to understand Jack and Howell’s plan of action. So far, frankly, it didn’t seem that much better than the thieves‘. “So you hid out in Beanie’s closet. To wait and see who came to call.”

“Yeah. And you came in. I knew who you were the minute you hit me, but I didn’t know your name.”

“You hadn’t heard the men talk?”

“I’d heard people mention Lily, but I didn’t know that was you. You didn’t look like any maid I’d ever seen, or any karate expert, either. Or any weight lifter.”

“What did I look like?” I asked, very close to his face.

“Like the most exciting woman I’d ever seen.”

Every now and then, Jack said exactly the right thing.

He whispered, “I wanted to touch you. I just wanted to lay my hands on you.” He demonstrated. “When Howell heard about the bomb he called me and told me to go down to the hospital to verify how many hurt and dead there were. He knew it would seem strange if he did it. He’s sure one of his employees set the bomb, and he wanted to know if one of them had been brought in hurt. He thought maybe they’d hang around to see the explosion, get caught in it. So I went down to the hospital. It was eerie. I just walked in, and strolled through the halls looking. No one stopped me, or asked me what my business was there. The idea was a good one, but it didn’t pan out. No one associated with the group was brought in injured. But I saw you on the gurney.”

“You were at the hospital! I thought it was a dream.”

“It was me. I wanted to stay, but I knew that would look strange.”

“You asked me if there was anyone you could call for me.”

“I wanted someone to come take care of you. And I wanted to know if there was anyone ahead of me. Everyone had told me you were with Marshall. I felt he was pretty formidable competition. If you’d asked me to call him…”

“What would you have done?”

“I would have called him. But I would have tried to find some way to pry you loose when you were feeling better.”

We didn’t talk for a while.

I got up to get a drink, came back.

“Why do you think Howell doesn’t trust me?” I asked. That stung me. I had kept faith with the Winthrop family over and above the demands of my paycheck.

“I don’t know. When I was asking him who had keys to the house, as a matter of routine, he said, ‘The maid,’ and he said you’d worked for him for four years and he was sure you were absolutely reliable. But then, about a week ago, he called me into his office first thing in the morning to tell me to avoid you, that he thought you were in on something.”

He kissed me to show me how little he’d listened.

“I can’t think of what I’ve done to earn Howell’s mistrust.” I stowed that away to think of later. “What’s their goal in stockpiling all these weapons?”

“From what I’ve pieced together, their goal is to start a white supremacist militia group here, using Cleve Ragland’s hunting camp as a training base. They want to be a big-time organization rather than a few bastards who grouse and murder children in bombings.”

“Have you heard anything about Darnell Glass?” I asked.

Jack lay back, pushed his hair back with his fingers. “It’s strange,” he said finally. “It’s like there were two things going on. After meeting most of the men who are involved in this, at least I think I’ve met most of them, what I’ve been impressed with most is their stupidity. Keeping the arms they were stealing at the store: dumb. Trying to steal them back from Howell’s house: dumb. Spray-painting Deedra’s car, and that was the boy who works at the loading dock at the Home Supply store-I actually saw him do it-there again, dumb. I think Deedra snubbed him when she went in the store to get a new curtain rod, so he got her back. Then the bomb. The day after the bomb went off, when they’d heard Claude Friedrich and you were hurt and Sheriff Schuster was killed- they were all hangdog as hell. I think it bothered them about the little girl, too. You know why that all happened? The bomb didn’t go off at the right time. That I did overhear, directly, Jim and Darcy venting their guilt. They were trying to shift the blame to the victims-you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Sheriff Schuster shouldn’t have agreed to attend the meeting. Claude should have gotten out faster. The little girl should have been home doing her homework. Crap like that.”

“They killed those people out of incompetence.” I closed my eyes. I remembered the scene inside the church.

“There are groups that like to kill as many black people as they can, Lily, and don’t care what age they get. These guys, no… they hadn’t ever built a bomb before and they got it wrong.”

“How’d they get it in the church before the meeting?”

“The church is unlocked during the day. Jim just chanced it, best as I can piece it out.”

I felt sick.

“But Darnell, they haven’t said anything about him?”

“No, but your name has come up a bunch of times.”

“Wait.” The most important question of all hadn’t even occurred to me until now. Jack was new at the store. Why would they trust him to keep silent? “How can you overhear all this?”

“Lily, I put a bug in the employee lounge.”

“Is that legal?”

“Well…”

“Hmmm.”

“It’s not exactly true to say they haven’t talked about Darnell’s murder,” Jack said, perhaps to distract me from wondering about how much illegality he’d put up with. “They all feel like he got what was coming to him. Don’t ask me to explain their thinking, because that’s impossible. And then they mention you, because I gather that was a real brawl. Did you have to pitch in?” He turned me to face him and looked me in the eyes. His own eyes were serious. I ran my finger down his cheek, down his scar, traced his neck to his collarbone.

“Don’t think I haven’t had regrets that the whole thing happened, that I happened to be there, even. I’m no activist. I want to be left alone. But I was there, and he was outnumbered, and those boys would’ve beat the shit out of him.”

Jack absorbed that, accepted it. “But you see, from their point of view,” he said, very quietly, “you defended Darnell, and you were there at Howell’s when they came to reclaim the rifles, and you were in the church when it blew up. That’s too many coincidences for them, no matter that you were minding your own business in every instance.”

“Do they think I’m you? Do they think I’m some kind of detective?”

“They think you like black people too much and they do think you might have something to do with their not being able to get the guns back. Then I spend the night with you on the very night they’re trying to find out who was spying on them. So they wonder about you, a lot. At the same time, it seems like they have a weird kind of respect for you.”

“How did they come to chase you last night?”

“I was hidden in a sort of niche I’d made. If you think the customer part of the store is overwhelming, you should see the back of the store. Someone could live back there for a week and no one would ever know. Anyway, I knew they were going to be meeting after hours in the storeroom, and it’s not bugged. I wanted to know what they were planning.”

“How’d they know you were there?”

“You’re going to laugh,” he said gloomily, and I had a feeling I really wasn’t. “The boy, Paulie, who works at the Home Supply store, brought his dog with him. He’s real proud of that dog, talks about it all the time. It cost some ungodly amount. A bluetick hound, I think. The dog sniffed me, started barking. It seemed smarter to run for it than to wait until they came to investigate.”

I was right. I wasn’t laughing. “They would have killed you.”

“I know it.” He lay staring at my ceiling, thinking about that real hard. “I don’t think all of them were in on Darnell’s murder, but they would have killed me last night because they were all together and they were scared.”

“Do you think they’re suspicious now?”

“Maybe. I got a phone call today from Jim. He said he’d heard from Darcy that I was courting Lily Bard. He suggested I’d be better off with some more traditional girl.”

“Courting, huh? That what this is?”

“Damn if I know. But I like it, whatever we call it.”

“And I’m a girl,” I said thoughtfully. “A nontraditional girl.”

“Screw tradition, in that case,” Jack murmured.

“So what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to keep on like I have been, as long as I can. Collecting the tape every night, listening to it, copying it, phoning Howell with any information I can glean. Waiting for him to decide what he’s going to do; after all, he’s my boss.” Jack put his arms around me. “Lily, I get stubborn and mad and do the wrong thing sometimes. If I was really a great detective, I’d tell you I can’t see you until this over. Maybe I’m putting you in even more danger than you’re already in. But maybe somehow, since they still believe my cover, I’m giving you a little credence with them. If a bad boy like me is interested in you, you can’t be a snitch, they figure-I hope. But I just don’t know.”

He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed. I was treated to a view of his bare back and bottom. I enjoyed it very much. I traced his spine with my finger, and he arched his back. “You can tell,” he said, not looking at me, “that I have a real problem with impulsiveness.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, deadpan.

“Let’s not joke about this, OK. I came to your house when I was wounded, brought you under more suspicion, maybe. Put you in danger. I made love to you on impulse. I can’t regret that. I’d stay in bed with you for a year if I could. But I was impulsive starting that affair with Karen, and she died.” He turned a little to meet my eyes. “I can’t let my thoughtlessness put you in danger, like it did her.”

“I don’t guess you’ll be able to stop it. And I’m not Karen Kingsland.” There was a certain edge in my voice.

“Lily, listen to me! I know you’re strong, I know you think of yourself as a tough woman, but this is not just one opponent who fights fair. This is a pack, and they would kill you… and maybe not straightaway.”

I stared at him. Somehow I had lost pleasure in the view.

“You’re saying-stop me if I get this wrong, Jack-you’re saying that I only think of myself as tough, I’m really not… that I can only win if my opponents fight fair… that Darcy and Jim and Tom David would rape me if they had the chance. Gosh, why would that occur to me?”

“I know you’re getting mad,” he said, turning around and looking down at me. “And I probably deserve it, but I just can’t let anything happen to you. You just can’t be involved in this in any way, any longer.”

“You’ll just stop by when you have a minute to fuck? Insult my other guests?”

His sculpted lips tightened. He was beginning to get mad, too.

“No. I shouldn’t have said anything about Bobo being here. I had no right. And I told you I was sorry. Hey, I never said anything about the cop sending you flowers, and they were still sitting on your kitchen table with the card stuck in them.”

“Which, of course, you had a perfect right to read.”

“Lily, I’m a detective. Of course I read it.”

I gripped my head with my hands. I shook it to clear it.

“Go,” I said. “I can’t deal with you right now.”

“We’re doing this again,” he said helplessly.

“No, you are.” I meant it. “You screw my brains out after telling me we shouldn’t be publicly involved. Okay, I admit, I screwed you right back, and I publicly involved us-to save your ass. You spill your guts to me-on impulse-tell me my employer doesn’t trust me, tell me I may or may not be in serious danger, and then tell me not to involve myself in the resolution of this mess.”

“Put that way, I admit, it doesn’t sound like I’m doing the right thing by you.”

“Gosh, no kidding.”

“Why do we get so-so-crossways? I’m trying to do the right thing! I don’t want you to get hurt!”

“I know,” I said. I sighed. “You need to go on now. Come back and talk to me-somewhere public-when you decide what your current policy is.”

He stood. His face was full of conflict. He held out his hand.

“Kiss me,” he said. “I can’t leave like this. This is something real we have.”

Almost unwillingly, I held out my hand, and he pulled me up to kneel on the bed. He bent over and kissed me hard on the mouth. I felt the heat begin to slide through me again. I pulled back.

“Yeah. It’s real,” he said, and dressed. He dropped a kiss on my head before he went out the door.