Shakespeare’s Christmas

Chapter Two

I wore the off-white blouse, gold vest, and black pants to the shower. I buttoned the blouse all the way up to the neck. My makeup was light and perfect, and my hair fluffed out in the right way. I looked fine, I decided, appropriate. I worked on relaxing, buckled into the backseat of my mother’s car.

We picked up Varena on the way. This was at least her second shower, but she was as excited and pleased as though celebrating her forthcoming marriage was an original idea.

We drove across town to the home of the shower hostess, Margie Lipscom. Margie was another nurse at the little Bartley hospital, which was always threatened with closing or being closed. Margie was married to one of the more prominent lawyers in Bartley, which was actually not saying much. Bartley is a Delta town, and in this phase of its existence, that means poor.

It meant that at least seventy percent of the town’s population was on welfare.

When I’d been growing up, it had just meant that Bartley was flat. You don’t know what flat is until you’ve lived in the Delta.

I missed the low, rolling hills around Shakespeare. I missed the ratty Christmas decorations. I missed my house. I missed my gym.

I would have given anything to be selfish enough to jump in my car and drive home.

I took slow, deep breaths, like I did before I attempted to lift a weight that was a real challenge. Like I did before we sparred in karate class.

Mom drove past Bartley’s dilapidated motel, and I glanced into its U of rooms. There was a car parked there- that, in itself, was nearly amazing-and it looked like… my heart began to stutter in an uncomfortable way.

I shook my head. Couldn’t be.

We parked on the street in front of the white-painted brick house all lit up like a birthday cake. There was a white-and-silver paper wedding bell fixed to the front door. A stout redhead stood just within the foyer… Margie Lipscom. I’d known her as a plump brunette.

My mother got patted, my sister got hugged, and I was greeted with a shriek.

“Oh, Lily! Girl, you look beautiful!” Margie exclaimed. She grabbed me and embraced me. I endured it. Margie was my age, had never been a particular friend of mine; she had grown closer to my sister when they began working together. Margie had always been a hooter and a hugger. She was going to fuss extra over me now, because she felt sorry for me.

“Isn’t she even prettier, Frieda?” Margie said to my mother. Overcompensating for her discomfort.

“Lily has always been lovely,” my mother said calmly.

“Well, let’s go see everyone!” Margie grabbed my hand and led me into the living room. I was biting the inside of my mouth. I was having a little flutter of panic and anger, the sort of nervous spasm I hadn’t had in a long time. A long, long time.

I found a smile and fixed it on my face.

After I’d nodded to everyone and said, “Tell you later,” in answer to almost every query, I was able to sit in a straight chair that had been crammed into a corner of the crowded living room. After that, all I had to do was aim a pleasant look in the direction of the loudest speaker, and I was fine.

This was a lingerie shower, and I’d gotten Varena a present when I’d shopped for myself in Montrose. She hadn’t expected a gift from me, hadn’t noticed me bring it into the house. She looked up at me in surprise when she read the card on the front. I may have imagined it, but she looked a little apprehensive.

My gift was a nightgown, full-length, with spaghetti straps and lace panels-sheer lace panels-over the breasts. It was black. It was beautiful. It was really, really sexy. As Varena was ripping off the paper, I was suddenly convinced I’d made a terrible mistake. The most daring garment Varena had received so far was a tiger-print teddy, and there had been some red faces over that.

When Varena shook out the gown and held it up, there was a moment of silence, during which I decided I might as well sneak out the back way. Then Varena said, “Wow. This is for the wedding night.” And there was a chorus of “Oooo” and “Oh, boy!”

“Lily, this is beautiful,” Varena said directly. “And I bet Dill’s gonna thank you, too!”

There was a chorus of laughter, and then the next gift was passed to my sister to open.

I relaxed and coasted on autopilot for the rest of the evening.

During the punch and cakes, the talk turned to Bartley’s purse snatcher. This seemed an urban sort of crime for Bartley, so I paid attention. Margie was saying, “And he stole Diane’s purse right off her arm and ran off with it!”

“Did she get a good look at him?” the minister’s wife asked. Lou O’Shea was a buxom brunette with a ski-jump nose and intelligent eyes. I’d never met her before. I hadn’t been to church, in Bartley or anywhere else, in years.

“Just a black guy, medium height,” Margie said. “Could be a hundred people.”

“She’s all right?” my mother asked.

“Well, he knocked her down to the sidewalk, so she had some scrapes and bruises. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

After a second’s thoughtful pause, a few eyes slid in my direction. I was the worse it could have been.

But I was used to that. I kept my face blank, and the little moment passed. A purse snatching did not seem as remarkable as it would have a few years ago. Now, with gang presence and drugs in every tiny town up and down the interstate and all in between, what happened to Diane Dykeman, a sales clerk at one of the local clothing stores, didn’t seem so bad. She seemed lucky to be unhurt, rather than unfortunate to have her purse snatched at all.

After a tedious two and a half hours we drove home, taking a different route this time since we were giving a lift to Lou O’Shea, whose husband had dropped her off on his way to a meeting. The Presbyterian manse was a large redbrick home that matched the adjacent church. I half listened to the backseat conversation between Varena and Lou, enough to gather that Lou, like Meredith Osborn, had an eight-year-old girl and another, younger child. When we pulled into the driveway, Lou seemed reluctant to get out.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t make Krista any fonder of Luke, him crying so much,” Lou told us with a heavy sigh. “She’s not too enthusiastic about her little brother right now.”

“Krista is Anna’s age, they play together a lot,” Varena reminded me.

“It’ll all straighten out,” my mother said in her soothing way. “Sooner or later you’ll find out why Luke cries all night, and he’ll stop. And then Krista will forget all about it. She’s a smart little girl, Lou.”

“You’re right,” Lou said instantly, back on her mettle as a minister’s wife. “Thanks for the lift. I’ll see you-all tomorrow afternoon!”

When we were driving away, Varena said, “Lou’ll be coming to the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night.”

“Isn’t it traditional to have the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding?” I didn’t want to sound critical, but I was faintly curious.

“Yes. Dill had originally scheduled it for that night,” Mother said. I was being subtly reminded that the groom’s family had the responsibility for the rehearsal dinner. “But Sarah May’s was already booked for the two evenings before the wedding! So we just moved it to three nights, and the couple giving the supper for Dill and Varena rescheduled it to the night before the wedding, bless them.”

I nodded, hardly paying attention. I was absolutely confident I would be told what to do, when. I found myself wanting to be alone so badly I could taste it. When we got to Varena’s, I unloaded the shower presents with great dispatch, and at my folks’ house, I said a brief good-night to Mom before heading for my room.

My father hadn’t yet gotten home from the bachelor party. I hoped he wasn’t drinking and smoking cigars. His blood pressure would soar.

I sat in the little chair in my room and read for a long time, a biography I’d brought with me. Then I hooked my feet under the bed and did sit-ups, I dropped and did pushups, and I did eighty leg lifts. After that, it was time for a relaxing shower. I noticed that my father had come in at some point and turned out the remaining lights.

But even after the hot shower, I felt itchy. I couldn’t walk in Bartley. People would talk about my family. The police weren’t used to me. They might stop me-if I saw any. The Bartley police force was not large.

I pushed the temptation away and forced myself to climb in the bed. I worked three crossword puzzles in a book I found in the bedside table drawer. Somehow, trying to think of a five-letter word meaning an earth-covered Indian dwelling did the trick. Finally, I was able to draw a curtain on a very long day.

Unfortunately, the next was more of the same.

Before noon, I decided that everyone in my family should have had to go to work until an hour before the wedding.

My father had taken two weeks’ vacation from the electric company. Since my mother was a housewife, she was always at work-but still in the house, constantly thinking of things that just had to be done. Varena had just taken three weeks’ leave from her job at the hospital, and even Dill was often leaving the drugstore to his normally part-time assistant, a young mother who was also a pharmacist.

More presents arrived, to be unwrapped and admired and entered on the list. More thank-you notes had to be written. The two other bridesmaids had to stop by and admire and check on last-minute plans. The minister, Jess O’Shea, came in for a minute to verify a couple of things. He had smooth dark blond hair and was quietly good-looking in a blocky, square-jawed way: I hoped he was as good as he was handsome, because I’d always imagined that ministers were prime targets for neurotic-or just hopeful-members of their congregation.

His little girl was in tow. Chunky Krista, whose hair was the same dark brown as her mother’s but not as perfectly smooth, was sleepy-eyed and cross with her baby brother’s nocturnal activity, just as Lou had predicted. Krista was in a whiny mood.

“Luke cried all night,” she said sullenly when someone asked her for the third time where her brother was.

“Oh, Krista!” one of the other bridesmaids said disapprovingly. Varena’s lifelong best friend, Tootsie Monahan, was blond and round-faced and low on brain cells. “How can you say that about a little kid like Luke? Toddlers are so cute.”

I saw Krista’s face flush. Tootsie was pushing the old guilt button hard. I’d been leaning against the wall in the living room. I shoved off and maneuvered myself closer to the little girl.

“Varena cried all night when she was baby,” I told Krista very quietly.

Krista looked up at me unbelievingly. Her round hazel eyes, definitely her best feature, fastened on me with every appearance of skepticism. “Did not,” she said tentatively.

“Did too.” I nodded firmly and drifted into the kitchen, where I managed to sneak Krista some sort of carbonated drink that she really enjoyed. She probably wasn’t supposed to have it. Then I wandered around the house, from time to time retreating to my room and shutting the door for ten minutes. (That was the length of time, I’d found from trial and error, before someone missed me and came to see how I was, what I was doing.)

Varena popped her head in my door about 12:45 to ask me if I’d go with her to the doctor’s. “I need to go in to pick up my birth-control pill prescription, but I want Dr. LeMay to check my ears. The right one is feeling a little achy, and I’m scared it’ll be a full-blown infection by the wedding day. Binnie said come on in, he’d see me before the afternoon patients stacked up.”

One of the perks of being a nurse was the quick in-and-out you got at the local doctors’ offices, Varena had told me years ago. As long as I could remember, Varena had suffered from allergies, which frequently caused ear infections. She had always developed them at the most inconvenient times. Like four days before her wedding.

I followed her out to her car with a sense of release. “I know you need to get out of the house,” Varena said, giving me a little sideways glance. We pulled out of the driveway and began the short hop to Dr. LeMay’s office.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only to someone who knows you,” Varena said ruefully. “Yes, Lily, it’s like seeing a tiger in a cage at the zoo. Back and forth, back and forth, giving all the people who walk by that ferocious stare.”

“Surely not that bad,” I said anxiously. “I don’t want to upset them.”

“I know you don’t. And I’m glad to see you caring.”

“I never stopped.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“I just didn’t have the extra…” Staying sane had taken all the energy I had. Trying to reassure other people had been simply impossible.

“I think I understand, finally,” Varena said. “I’m sorry I brought it up. Mom and Dad know, better than me, that you care about them.”

I was being forgiven for something I hadn’t done, or at least had done only in Varena’s opinion. But she was making an effort. I would make an effort, too.

Dr. LeMay was still based in the same little building in which he’d practiced medicine his entire career, all forty years of it. He must be nearing retirement age, his nurse Binnie Armstrong, too. They’d been a team for twenty-five years, I figured.

Varena pulled into one of the angled parking spots, and we went down the narrow sidewalk to the front door. A matching door, the one that had been labeled “Blacks Only” at the beginning of Dr. LeMay’s practice, had been replaced by a picture window. In the past five years, a set of bars had been installed across the vulnerable glass. Kind of wrapped up Bartley’s history in a nutshell, I decided.

The door had been painted blue to match the eaves, but the paint had already chipped to show a long-familiar shade of green underneath. I twisted the knob and pushed, stepping in ahead of Varena.

The little building was oddly silent. No phones ringing, no copier running, no radio playing, no piped-in music.

I turned to look at my sister. Something was wrong. But Varena’s gaze slid away from mine. She wasn’t going to admit it, yet.

“Binnie!” she called too cheerfully. “Lily and I are here! Come see her.” She stared at the closed door on the other side of the waiting room, the door leading back to the examining rooms and offices. The glass that enclosed the receptionist’s cubicle remained empty.

We heard a faint, terrible sound. It was the sound of someone dying. I had heard it before.

I took six steps across the waiting room and opened the second door. The familiar hall, with three rooms to the right and three rooms to the left, was now floored with imitation wood-pattern linoleum instead of the speckled beige pattern I remembered, I thought incongruously.

Then I noticed the advancing rivulet of blood, the only movement in the hall. I traced it, not really wanting to find the source, but in that small space it was all too obvious. A woman in a once-white uniform lay in the doorway of the middle room on the right.

“Binnie,” screamed Varena, her hands flying up to her face. But then my sister remembered that she was a nurse, and she was instantly on her knees by the bloody woman. It was hard to discern the contours of Binnie Armstrong’s face and head, she was so bludgeoned. It was from her throat the noise had come.

While Varena knelt by her, trying to take her pulse, Binnie Armstrong died. I watched her whole body relax in final abandonment.

I glanced in the door to the right, the one to the receptionist’s little office. Clean and empty. I looked in the room to the left, an examining room. Clean and empty. I moved carefully down the hall, while my sister did CPR on the dead nurse, and I cautiously craned around the door of the next room on the left, another examining room. Empty. The doorway Binnie lay in led to the tiny lab and storage room. I stepped carefully past my sister and found Dr. LeMay in the last room to the right, his office.

“Varena,” I said sharply.

Varena looked up, dabbled with blood from the corpse.

“Binnie’s dead, Varena.” I nodded in the direction of the office. “Come check Dr. LeMay.”

Varena leaped to her feet and took a couple of steps to stare in the door. Then she was moving to the other side of the desk to take his pulse but shaking her head as she went.

“He was killed at his desk,” she said, as though that made it worse.

Dr. LeMay’s white hair was clotted with blood. It was pooled on the desk where his head lay. His glasses were askew, ugly black-framed trifocals, and I wanted so badly to set them square on his face-as if, when I did, he would see again. I had known Dr. LeMay my whole life. He had delivered me.

Varena touched his hand, which was resting on the desk. I noticed in a stunned, slow way that it was absolutely clean. He had not had a chance to fight back. The first blow had been a devastating one. The room was full of paper, files and claim forms and team physicals… most of it now spotted with blood.

“He’s gone,” Varena whispered, not that there had been any doubt.

“We need to get out of here,” I said, my voice loud and sharp in the little room with its awful sights and smells.

And we stared at each other, our eyes widening with a sudden shared terror.

I jerked my head toward the front door, and Varena scooted past me. She ran out while I waited to see if anything moved.

I was the only live person in the office.

I followed Varena out.

She was already across the street at the State Farm Insurance office, pulling open the glass door and lifting the receiver off the phone on the receptionist’s desk. That stout and permed lady, wearing a bright red blouse and a Christmas corsage, was looking up at Varena as if she were speaking Navaho into the telephone. Within two minutes a police car pulled up in front of Dr. LeMay’s office, and a tall, thin black man got out.

“You the one called in?” he asked.

“My sister, in the office over there.” I nodded toward the plate-glass window, through which Varena could be seen sitting in the client’s chair, sobbing. The woman with the corsage was bending over her, offering Varena some tissues.

“I’m Detective Brainerd,” the man said reassuringly, as though I’d indicated I’d thought he might be an imposter. “Did you go in the building here?” Yes.

“Did you see Dr. LeMay and his nurse?”

“Yes.”

“And they’re dead.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone else in the building?”

“No.”

“So, is there a gas leak, or was there a fire smoldering, maybe smoke inhalation…?”

“They were both beaten.” My gaze skimmed the top of the old, old gum trees lining the street. “To death.”

“Okay, now. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do here.”

He was extremely nervous, and I didn’t blame him one bit.

“You’re gonna stay right here, ma’am, while I go in there and take a look. Don’t go anywhere, now.”

“No.”

I waited by the police car, the cold gray day pinching my face and hands.

This is a world of carnage and cruelty: I had momentarily put that aside in the false security of my hometown, in the optimistic atmosphere of my sister’s marriage.

I began to detach from the scene, to float away, escaping this town, this building, these dead. It had been a long time since I’d retreated like this, gone to the remote place where I was not responsible for feeling.

A young woman was standing in front of me in a paramedic’s uniform.

“Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you all right?” Her dark, anxious face peered into mine, her black hair stiff, smooth, and shoulder length under a cap with a caduceus patch on it.

“Yes.”

“Officer Brainerd said you had seen the bodies.”

I nodded.

“Are you… maybe you better come sit down over here, ma’am.”

My eyes followed her pointing finger to the rear of the ambulance.

“No, thanks,” I said politely. “My sister is over there in the State Farm office, though. She might need help.”

“I think you may need a little help yourself, ma’am,” the woman said earnestly, loudly, as though I was retarded, as though I couldn’t tell the difference between clinical shock and just being numb.

“No.” I said it as finally and definitely as I knew how. I waited. I heard her muttering to someone else, but she did leave me alone after that. Varena came to stand beside me. Her eyes were red, and her makeup was streaked.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

“The policeman told me to wait.”

“Oh.”

Just then the same policeman, Brainerd, came striding out of the doctor’s office. He’d gotten over his fit of nerves, and he’d seen the worst. He was focused, ready to go to work. He asked us a lot of questions, keeping us out in the cold for half an hour when we’d told him the sum of our knowledge in one minute.

Finally, we buckled up in Varena’s car. As she started back to our parents’ house, I switched Varena’s heater to full blast. I glanced over at my sister. Her face was blanched by the cold, her eyes red from crying with her contacts in. She’d pulled her hair back this morning in a ponytail, with a bright red scarf tied over the elastic band. The scarf still looked crisp and cheerful, though Varena had wilted. Varena’s eyes met mine while we were waiting our turn at a four-way stop. She said, “The drug cabinet was closed and full.”

“I saw.” Dr. LeMay had always kept the samples, and his supplies, in the same cabinet in the lab, a glass-front old-fashioned one. Since I’d been his patient as a child, that cabinet had stood in the same place with the same sort of contents. It would have surprised me profoundly if Dr. LeMay had ever kept anything very street-desirable… he’d have antibiotics, antihistamines, skin ointments, that kind of thing, I thought vaguely. Maybe painkillers.

Like Varena, I’d seen past Binnie’s body that the cabinet door was shut and everything in the room was orderly. It didn’t seem likely that the same person who would commit such messy murders would leave the drug cabinet so neat if he’d searched it.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” I told Varena. She shook her head. She didn’t, either. I stared out of the window at the familiar passing scenery, wishing I was anywhere but in Bartley.

“Lily, are you all right?” Varena asked, her voice curiously hesitant.

“Sure, are you?” I sounded more abrupt than I’d intended.

“I have to be, don’t I? The wedding rehearsal is tonight, and I don’t see how we can call it off. Plus, I’ve seen worse, frankly. It’s just it being Dr. LeMay and Binnie that gave me such a wallop.”

My sister sounded simply matter-of-fact. It hit me forcefully that Varena, as a nurse, had seen more blood and pain and awfulness than I would see in a lifetime. She was practical. After overcoming the initial shock, she was tough. She pulled into our parents’ driveway and switched off the ignition.

“You’re right. You can’t call it off. People die all the time, Varena, and you can’t derail your wedding because of it.”

We were just the Practical Sisters.

“Right,” she said, looking at me oddly. “We have to go in and tell Mom and Dad.”

I stared at the house in front of us as if I had never seen it.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

But it was Varena who got out of the car first. And it was Varena who told my parents the bad news, in a grave, firm voice that somehow implied that any emotional display would be in bad taste.