Shakespeare’s Christmas

Chapter Four

“Is he going to be OK?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. He was sad, and angry, too, though I wasn’t sure where the anger came in. Maybe his own helplessness. “All those years of eating wrong and not exercising… but the main thing is, he just has a bad heart.”

I sat up, too, and put my arms around Jack. For a moment he accepted the comfort. He rested his head on my shoulder, his arms encircling me. I’d taken the band off his ponytail, and his long black hair fell soft against my skin. But then he raised his head and looked at me, our faces inches apart.

“I have to do this, Lily. For Roy. He took me in and trained me. If it was anyone but him, any case but one involving a child, I’d turn it down since it concerns someone close to you… but this I have to do.” Even if Anna Kingery turned out to be Summer Dawn Macklesby, even if Varena’s life was ruined. I looked back at him, the pain in my heart so complicated I could not think how to express it.

“If he did that,” Jack said, so intent on me he had read my silent thoughts, “you couldn’t let her marry him anyway.”

I nodded, still trying to accommodate this sharp pang. For all the years we’d spent apart, for all our estrangement, Varena was my sister, and we were the only people in the world who shared, who would remember, our common family life.

“This has to be resolved before the wedding,” I said.

“Two days? Three?”

I actually had to think. “Three.”

“Shit,” Jack said.

“What do you have?” I pulled away from him, and his head began to lower to my breasts, as if drawn by a magnet. I grabbed his ears. “Jack, we have to finish talking.”

“Then you’ll have to cover up.” He got his bathrobe out of the tiny closet and tossed it to me. It was the one he carried when he traveled, a thin, red, silky one, and I belted it around me.

“That’s not much better,” he said after a thorough look. “But it’ll have to do.” He pulled on a T-shirt and some Jockeys. He set his briefcase on the bed, and because it was cold in that bleak motel room, we both crawled back under the covers, sitting with our backs propped against the wall.

Jack put on his reading glasses, little half-lens ones that made him even sexier. I didn’t know how long he’d used them, but he’d only recently begun wearing them in front of me. This was the first time I hadn’t appreciated the effect.

“First, to find out who the little girls were, Roy hired Aunt Betty.”

“Who?”

“You haven’t met Aunt Betty yet. She’s another PI, lives in Little Rock. She’s amazing. In her fifties, hair dyed a medium brown, looks respectable to the core. She looks like everybody’s Aunt Betty. Her real name is Elizabeth Fry. People tell her the most amazing things, because she looks like… well, their aunt! And damn, that woman can listen!”

“Why’d Roy send her instead of you?”

“Well, surprise, but in some situations I don’t blend in like Aunt Betty does. I was good for the Shakespeare job since I look just like someone who’d work in a sporting goods store, but I don’t look like I could go around a small town asking for the names of little girls and get away with it. Right?”

I tried not to laugh. That was certainly true.

“So that’s the kind of job Aunt Betty’s perfect for. She found out who prints the most school memory books in the state, went to them, told them she was from a private school and she was looking for a printer. The guy gave her all kinds of samples to show her parents committee.”

Jack seemed to want me to acknowledge Aunt Betty’s cleverness, so I nodded.

“Then,” he continued, “Betty comes down to Bartley, goes in to see the elementary school principal, shows her all the samples of memory books she has, and tells the principal she works for a printing company that can give them a competitive bid on the next memory book.”

“And?”

“Then she asks to see this year’s Bartley memory book, notices the slide picture, asks the principal who the photographer was, maybe her company might be able to use him for extra work. Betty figured the shot was good enough to justify the lie.”

I shook my head. Betty must be persuasive and totally respectable and nonthreatening. I’d known the elementary school principal, Beryl Trotter, for fifteen years, and she was not a fool.

“How does it help, having the whole book?” I asked.

“If worst had come to worst, we would have looked at all the faces in the class section until we had them matched, so we could get their names. Or Betty would have called on the man who took the picture and coasted the conversation along until he told her who the girls were. But, as it happened, Mrs. Trotter asked Betty to have a cup of coffee, and Betty found out everything from Mrs. Trotter.”

“The names of the girls? Their parents? Everything?”

“Yep.”

This was a little frightening.

“So, once we had the names of the parents, we were able to do some background on the O’Sheas, since he’s a minister and they have several professional directories that give little biographies. Dill, too, because the pharmacists have a state association. Chock full of information. The Osborns were harder. Aunt Betty had to go to Makepeace Furniture, pretend she’d just moved in and was shopping for a new table. It was risky. But she managed to talk to Emory, find out a few things about him, and get out without having to give a local address or mention any local relatives whom he could check up on.”

“So then you knew the names of the girls and their parents, and some facts about their parents.”

“Yep. Then we got busy on the computers, and then I started traveling.”

I felt overwhelmed. I’d never talked to Jack in any depth about what he did. I’d never fully realized that one of the qualifications for a successful private detective is the ability to lie convincingly and at the drop of a hat. I pulled away from Jack a little. He took some papers from his briefcase.

“This is a computer-enhanced drawing of Summer Dawn as she may look now,” he said, apparently not conscious of my unhappiness. “Of course, we have photographs of her only as an infant. Who knows how accurate this is?”

I looked at the picture. It looked like someone, all right, but it could have been any of the girls. I decided that the drawing looked most like Krista O’Shea, because it depicted Summer Dawn still plump-cheeked, like the baby snapshot the newspaper had printed.

“I thought these were supposed to be really accurate,” I said. “Does it look so anonymous because she was a baby when she vanished?”

“Partly. And as it happens, none of the pictures of Summer Dawn was really good to use for this. The Macklesbys took fewer pictures of her than of their other two children because Summer Dawn was the third child, and the third child just doesn’t get photographed as much as number one and number two. The picture that appeared in the newspaper was really the best one the parents had. They had an appointment to get Summer’s picture made the week she disappeared.”

I didn’t want to think about that. I shuffled the top drawing, looked at the other three. The second was of the same face but framed by long, straight hair. In the third, a somewhat thinner-cheeked version of Summer Dawn was topped with short, wavy hair. There was a fourth, with medium-length hair and glasses.

“One of her sisters is nearsighted,” Jack explained.

Eight years.

“She has sisters?” I kept my voice level. At least I tried.

“Yeah. Two. They’re fourteen and sixteen, now. Teenagers, with posters on their walls of musicians I’ve never listened to. Closets full of clothes. Boyfriends. And a little sister they don’t remember at all.”

“The Macklesbys must have money.” Hiring a private detective for all those years would be expensive, and paying for the extra services of Aunt Betty and Jack.

“They’re well-off. Simon Macklesby reacted to the kidnapping by throwing himself into his work. He’s a partner in an office supplies business that’s taken off since offices became computerized. No matter how much money they’ve got, the Macklesbys were lucky they went to Roy instead of to someone who would really soak them. There were months when he didn’t have anything to show them, no work to do. Some guys… and some women… would’ve made things up to pad the file.”

It was a relief to find that Roy was as honest as I’d always thought him, after Jack’s obvious admiration at Aunt Betty’s creative lying. There was a separation, thank God, between lying on the job and relating to people in real life.

“What do you know?” I asked him, my fear finally showing in my voice.

“I know that the O’Shea girl is adopted, at least that’s what the O’Sheas’ neighbors in Philadelphia recall.”

I remembered the slight change in Jess O’Shea’s face when I’d asked him how the big-city hospital had been different from the tiny one in Bartley.

“You’ve been to Pennsylvania?”

“Their Philadelphia neighbors were seminary students like Jess, so naturally they’ve scattered. I’ve used other PIs in Florida, Kentucky, and Indiana. According to the people who’d talk to us, the O’Sheas arranged to adopt the baby girl of the sister of another seminary student. The O’Sheas had gotten a pretty discouraging work-up from a fertility specialist in Philadelphia. The sister had to give the baby up because she was in late-stage AIDS. Her family wouldn’t take the baby because they believed the baby might be carrying the disease. It didn’t matter that the baby had tested negative. In fact, the couple in Tennessee, the one I interviewed myself, are still convinced the little girl might have been ‘carrying’ AIDS, despite the testing the doctors did.”

I shook my head. “How do you get people to tell you this?”

“I’m persuasive, in case you hadn’t noticed.” Jack ran his hand down my leg and leered at me. Then he sobered.

“So why are the O’Sheas still on your list?”

“One, Krista O’Shea is in the picture that Roy got. Two, what if this isn’t the same girl they adopted?”

“What?”

“What if the tests were wrong? What if that child was born with AIDS, or died from some other cause? What if Lou O’Shea abducted Summer Dawn to take her place? What if the O’Sheas bought her?”

“That seems so far-fetched. They were up in Philadelphia for at least a few months after they adopted Krista. Summer Dawn was abducted in Conway, right?”

“Yes. But the O’Sheas have cousins living in the Conway area, cousins they visited when Jess finished the seminary. The dates coincide. So I can’t rule them out. It’s circumstantially possible. If they bought Summer Dawn from someone who abducted her, they would know that was illegal. They maybe pretended the baby was the one they’d adopted.”

“What about Anna?” I asked sharply.

“Judy Kingery, Dill’s first wife, was mentally ill.”

I’d resumed studying the pictures. I turned to stare at Jack.

“Her auto accident was almost certainly suicide.” His clear hazel eyes peered at me over his reading glasses.

“Oh, poor Dill.” No wonder he’d taken his time dating Varena. He would be extra cautious after a hellish marriage like that, yoked to a woman with so many problems after his upbringing by a woman who was not exactly compos mentis.

“We can’t be sure the wife didn’t do something crazy. Maybe she killed their own baby and stole Summer Dawn as compensation. The Kingerys were living in Conway at the time the baby was taken. Maybe Judy Kingery snatched Summer Dawn and gave Dill some incredibly persuasive story.”

“You’re saying… it might be possible that Dill didn’t know?”

Jack shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said but not with any great conviction.

I blew out a deep breath of tension. “OK, Eve Osborn.”

“The Osborns moved here from a little town on the interstate about ten miles from Conway. He’s worked at furniture stores since he got out of junior college. Meredith Osborn didn’t make it through a whole year of college before she married him. Emory Ted Osborn…” Jack was peering through his glasses at a page of notes. “Emory sells furniture and appliances at Makepeace Furniture Center. Oh, I told you that when I told you Betty went to meet him there.”

Makepeace Furniture Center was Bartley’s best. It sold only upscale furniture and appliances, and it was located on the town square, having gradually crept through two or three buildings on one side.

“Emory have any criminal record?”

Jack shook his head. “None of these people do.”

“Surely there’s something that excludes Eve Osborn?”

“You know her?”

“Yes, I do. The Osborns own the little place my sister lives in. It’s right in back of their house.”

“I’ve driven by. I didn’t realize your sister rented the cottage.”

“Did you know that Meredith Osborn baby-sits both Anna and Krista from time to time? I met the mother and the little girl, Eve, when I was at Varena’s a couple of days ago.”

“What did you think?”

“There’s a new baby, a girl. Mrs. Osborn is about as big as some twelve-year-olds, and she seems nice enough. Eve is a… well, a little girl, maybe a little shy. Real thin, like her mother. I haven’t met Emory.”

“He’s small, too, thin and blond. He’s got that really fair coloring, light blue eyes, invisible eyelashes. Looks like he still doesn’t have to shave. Very reserved. Smiles a lot.”

“So, where was Eve born?”

“That’s why she can’t be eliminated. Eve was a home birth,” Jack said, both eyebrows raised as far as they could go. “Emory delivered her. He’d had some paramedic training. The baby evidently came too fast for them to get to the hospital.”

“Meredith had the baby at her house?” Though I knew historically that women had been having their babies at home far longer than they’d had them in hospitals, the idea jarred me.

“Yep.” Jack’s face expressed such distaste that I found myself hoping Jack was never trapped in a stalled elevator with a pregnant woman.

We stayed snuggled in the bed and each other’s warmth a while more, talking ourselves in circles. I could not make this go away, and I could not stop Jack from investigating, even if I thought that right… which I didn’t. I had tremendous pity for the anguished parents who had been wanting their child for so many years, and I had pity for my sister, whose life might be ruined in the three days before her wedding. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to affect the outcome of Jack’s investigation.

It had been a long day.

I thought of the scene in the doctor’s office, the devastation that had visited the two aging workhorses in their old office.

Wrapping my arms around my knees, I told Jack about Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong. He listened with close attention and asked me a lot more questions than I could answer.

“Do you think this could be connected with what you’re investigating?” I asked.

“I don’t see how.” He took off his glasses, put them on the night table. “But it does seem like quite a coincidence that they’re killed this week, just when I come on the scene, just when there’s a new development in the Macklesby case. I’ve tried to be very discreet, but sooner or later in a town this size, everyone’s gonna know why I’m here. You’re providing me with cover right now, but it won’t last if I ask the wrong questions.”

I looked at Jack’s watch then and slid out the bed. The room felt even colder after I’d been warmed by Jack. I wanted more than anything to lie beside him tonight, but I couldn’t.

“I have to get back,” I said, pulling on my clothes and trying to make them look as neat and straight as they had been earlier.

Jack got out of bed, too, but not as rapidly.

“I guess you have to,” he said with an attempt at wistfulness.

“You know I have to go to their house tonight,” I said, but not harshly. He’d pulled his slacks on by then. I was putting on my jacket when he began kissing me again. I tried to push him away when he made his first pass, but at his second, I put my arms around him.

“I know that you having gotten the implant, me not using a condom anymore, means you know I’m sleeping only with you,” he told me.

It meant something else, too. “Ah… it means I’m not sleeping with anyone else, either,” I reminded him.

After a moment of pregnant silence, he squeezed me so tightly I could not breathe, and he made an inarticulate noise. Suddenly I knew we were feeling exactly the same thing-just for a second, a flash, but it was a flash so bright it blinded me.

Then we had to bounce away from each other, frightened by the intimacy. Jack swung away to put on his shirt; I sat down to slide my feet into my shoes. I ran my fingers through my hair, took care of a button I’d skipped.

We were silent on the ride to my house, the bitter cold biting into our bones. When we pulled into the driveway I saw one light burning on the dimmest setting, in the living room. Jack leaned over to give me a quick kiss, and I was out of the car in a wink, running across the frosty lawn to the front door.

I locked the door behind me and went to the picture window. Looking out the small triangle unobscured by the Christmas tree, I saw Jack’s car back out and start back to the motel. The sheets of his bed would smell like me.

Once in my room, where my mother had left a lamp on, I slowly undressed. It was too late to shower; it might wake my parents, if they weren’t in their room lying awake to make sure I was home safe, like they’d done when I was a teenager. There was no counting the sleepless nights I’d given them.

Fleetingly, I thought about Teresa and Simon Macklesby. How many good nights’ rest had they managed in the eight years since their daughter had vanished?

The murders of the doctor and his nurse, the strain of the wedding rehearsal, and the shock of all Jack had told me should have kept me awake. But being with Jack had drained the tension from me. Even if we hadn’t had sex, I thought with some surprise, I would have felt better. I crawled in my bed, turned on my side, slid my hand under the pillow, and was immediately asleep.

The next day I had showered and dressed before I came out to have some coffee and breakfast. I’d done some sit-ups and leg lifts in my room so I wouldn’t feel like a slug the rest of the day. My parents were both at the table, sections of newspaper propped up, when I got a mug from the cabinet.

“Good morning,” my mother said with a smile.

My father grunted and nodded.

“How was your date last night?” Mother ventured when I was sitting with them.

“Fine,” I said. My toast popped up, and I put it on a plate.

Dad peered over his glasses at me. “Got home late,” he observed.

“Yes.”

“How long you been dating this man? Your mother says you told her he was a private detective? Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

I answered the safest question. “I’ve been dating him for a few weeks.”

“You think he might be serious?”

“Sometimes.”

My father regarded me with some exasperation. “Now, what does that mean?”

“I think it means she doesn’t want to answer any more questions, Gerald,” Mother said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, hiding a little smile.

“A father needs to know about men who are seeing his girl,” my father said.

“This girl is almost thirty-two,” I reminded him, trying to keep my voice gentle.

He shook his head. “I don’t believe it. Why, that would make me old, gosh dog it!”

We all laughed as the little touchy moment passed.

Dad got up to shave, following his nearly invariable morning routine. He stuck his head back in the door just as I bit into my toast. “Can you make any kind of living as a detective?” he asked, then hurried away before I could either laugh or throw my toast at him.

“The paper says,” my mother began when I’d finished my coffee, “that Dave LeMay and Binnie Armstrong were killed right before you and Varena found them.”

“I thought so,” I said after a pause.

“You touched them?”

“Varena did. She’s the nurse,” I said, reminding my mother that I was not the only one present when awful things happened.

“That’s true,” my mother said slowly, as one who has received a revelation of which she’s half proud, half dismayed. “She has to deal with things like that all the time.”

“That bad or worse.” Once upon a time, Varena had given me a graphic description of a motorcycle rider who’d stretched out his arm at the wrong moment and come into the hospital without it. A passerby had had the presence of mind to wrap it in the blanket his dog sat on when it rode in the car and bring it into the hospital. I had seen bad things… maybe just as bad… but I didn’t think I could have dealt calmly with that. Varena had been excited-not by the crisis but by her team’s effective response.

Evidently she didn’t talk about some aspects of being a nurse, at least to our mother.

“I never quite pictured her job that way.” Mother looked thoughtful, as if she were seeing her younger daughter in a different light.

I read the comics for a minute or two, Ann Landers, the horoscopes, the scrambled words, the “find the errors” drawing. I never had time to do this at home. Thank God.

“What’s on the agenda today?” I asked, without feeling one bit excited. The pleasure of Jack’s presence in town had faded, to be replaced by the gnawing anxiety of his suspicions.

“Oh, there’s the shower at Grace’s in the afternoon, but this morning we have to go to Corbett’s to pick up a few things they called us about.”

Corbett’s was the town’s premier gift shop. Every bride with any claim to class went to Corbett’s to register her china and silver patterns, and also to indicate a range of acceptable colors that would look good in the bride’s future kitchen and bath. Corbett’s also carried small appliances, pricey kitchenware, and sheets and table linens. Many brides left an all-encompassing list at Corbett’s. Varena and I had always called it the “I want it” list.

Two hours later-two dragging, boring hours later-we were in Varena’s car, parallel parking on Bartley’s town square. The old post office crumbled on one side, while the courthouse, in the center on a manicured lawn, was festooned with Christmas decorations. Unlike Shakespeare, Bartley was holding on to its manger scene, though I had never found plastic figures in a wooden shed exactly spiritual. Carols blared endlessly from the speakers located around the square, and all the merchants had lined their store windows with twinkling colored lights and artificial snow.

If there was a true religious emotion to be felt about Christmas, I had been too numbed by all this claptrap to feel it for the past three years.

I was glad to see Varena click the “lock” button on her key-ring control, and the car gave its little honk! to show it had received her command. Naturally we all looked at the car as it made the sound, a senseless but natural reaction, and I almost didn’t see the running man until too late.

He was coming for us out of nowhere, his hand already outstretched to grab my mother’s purse, which she was clutching loosely under her right arm.

With a positive rush of pleasure, I planted my left foot, came up with my right knee, and flicked my foot out to catch him in the jaw. In real life (as opposed to movies) high kicks are risky and energy draining: The knee and the groin are much more reliable targets. But this was my chance to land a high kick, and I took it. Thanks to hours and hours of practice, my instep smacked his jaw correctly, and he staggered. I got him again on the way down, though it was not as effective an impact. It hastened his fall rather than damaging him further.

He managed to land on his knees, and I seized his right arm and twisted it sharply behind him. He screamed and hit the pavement, and I kept his arm behind and up at an angle I knew to be extremely painful. I was on his right, out of reach of his left hand if he could manage to lever himself up to grab for my ankle.

“I’ll break your arm if you move,” I told him sincerely.

He believed me. He lay on the sidewalk, panting for breath-sobbing for breath, really.

I glanced up to see my mother and sister staring not at their assailant but at me, with stunned amazement making their faces foolish.

“Call the police,” I prompted them.

Varena kind of jumped and ran into Corbett’s. She was doing a lot of police calling these days. The Bard sisters were on a roll.

The man I’d downed was short, stocky, black. He had on a ragged coat, and he smelled. I figured this was probably the same man who’d taken Diane Dykeman’s purse a couple of days ago.

“Let me up, bitch,” he said now, having gathered enough breath to speak.

“Be polite,” I said, my voice harsh. I gave his arm a yank upward, and he screamed.

“Oh, Lily,” my mother gasped. “Oh, honey. Do you have to…?” Her voice trailed off as I looked up to meet her eyes.

“Yes,” I said. “I have to.”

A siren went off right behind me. The patrol officer must have been two blocks away when he got the call from the dispatcher, so he put on his siren. It nearly made me lose my grip. The car had “Bartley Police Department” printed in an arc over the Bartley town symbol, some complicated mishmash involving cotton and tractors. Under the symbol, the word “Chief” was centered in large letters.

“What we got here?” called the man in the uniform as he bounded up on the sidewalk. He had brown hair and a neat mustache. He was lean except for a curious potbelly, like a five-month pregnancy. He looked at the man on the sidewalk, at my grip on his arm.

“Hey, Lily,” he said, after assessing all this. “What you got here?”

“Chandler?” I said, peering up at his face. “Chandler McAdoo?”

“In the flesh,” he drawled. “You caught you a purse snatcher?”

“So it seems.”

“Hi, Miz Bard,” Chandler said, nodding at my mother, who nodded back automatically. I looked up at her shocked face, thinking as I did so that nothing could make her feel better for a little bit. Being the victim of a random crime was a shocking experience.

Chandler McAdoo had been my lab partner in high school, one memorable semester. We had done the frog thing together. I had been holding the knife-or the scalpel? I couldn’t remember-and I had been on the verge of going silly-girl squeamish, when Chandler had looked me straight in the eye and told me I was a weak and useless critter if I couldn’t cut one little hole in a dead frog.

He was right, I had figured, and I had cut.

That wasn’t the only thing Chandler McAdoo had dared me to do, but it was the only dare I’d taken.

Chandler bent over now with his handcuffs, and with a practiced move, he had my prisoner cuffed before the man knew what was happening. I rose, with a courteous assist from Chief Chandler, and while I was telling him what had happened, he hauled the cuffed man to his feet and propelled the prisoner toward the squad car.

He listened, made a call on his radio.

I stared at every move he made, unable to square this man, this police chief with his severe haircut and cool eyes, with the boy who’d gotten drunk with me on Rebel Yell.

“Where you think he came from?” Chandler asked, as if it weren’t too important. My mother had been coaxed inside the store by Varena and the sales clerks.

“Must have been there,” I decided, pointing at the alley running between Corbett’s and the furniture store. “That’s the only place he could’ve been hiding unseen.” It was a narrow alley, and if he’d been just a few feet inside it, he would have been invisible. “Where was Diane Dykeman when her purse was snatched?”

Chandler cocked an eye at me. “She was over by Dill’s pharmacy, two blocks away,” he said. “The snatcher dodged back in the alley, and we couldn’t track him. I don’t see how we could have missed this guy, but I guess he could have hidden until we’d checked the alley behind the store. There are more little niches and hidey-holes in this downtown area than you can shake a stick at.”

I nodded. Since the downtown area of Bartley was more than a hundred and fifty years old, during which time the Square businesses had flourished and gone broke in cycles, I could well believe it.

“You stay put,” Chandler said and strode down the alley. I sighed and stayed put. I glanced at my watch once or twice. He was gone for seven minutes.

“I think he’s been sleeping back there,” Chandler said when he reemerged onto the sidewalk. Suddenly my high school buddy was galvanized, and there wasn’t any languid small-town-cop air about him anymore. “I didn’t find Diane’s purse, but there’re some refrigerator cartons and a nest of rags.”

Chandler had that saving-the-punchline air. He bent into his car and used the radio again.

“I just called Brainerd, who answered the call on the murder cases,” he told me after he straightened. “Come look.”

I followed Chandler down the alley. We arrived at the T junction, where this little alley joined the larger one running behind the buildings on the west of the square. There was a refrigerator carton tucked into a niche behind some bushes that had made their precarious lives in the cracks in the rough pavement. Chandler pointed, and I followed his finger to see a length of rusty pipe close to but not visible from the carton, as I figured it. The pipe had been placed on a broken drain that had formerly run from the top of the flat-roofed furniture store to the gutter, and the placement rendered it all but invisible if it had not been stained at one end. The pipe, more than two feet long and about two inches in diameter, was darker at one end than the other.

“Bloodstains?” Chandler said. “Dave LeMay, I’m thinking.”

I stared at the pipe again and understood.

The same man who might have beaten to death the doctor and his nurse had come that close to my mother. For a savage second, I wished I had kicked him harder and longer. I could have broken his arm, or his skull so easily while I had him down on the sidewalk. I stared out of the alley. I could just glimpse the man’s profile as he sat in Chandler’s car. That face was vacant. Nobody home.

“You go on in the store, Lily,” Chandler said, maybe reading my face too easily. “Your mama might need you right now, Varena too. We’ll talk later.”

I spun on my heel and strode down the alley to the street, to enter the glass-paned front door of Corbett’s. A bell attached to the door tinkled, and the little crowd around my mother shifted to absorb me.

There was a couch positioned opposite the Bride’s Area, where all the local brides’ and grooms’ selections of china and silverware were displayed. Mother was sitting on that sofa, Varena beside her explaining what had happened.

Another police car pulled to the curb outside, spurring more activity. Amid all the bustle, the telephoning, and the concern on the faces of the women around her, my mother gradually recovered her color and composure. When she knew Mom was okay, Varena took me aside and gripped my arm.

“Way to go, Sis,” she said.

I shrugged.

“You did good.”

I almost shrugged again and looked away. But instead I ventured a smile.

And Varena smiled back.

“Hey, I hate to interrupt this sister-sister talk,” Chandler said, sticking his head in the shop door, “but I gotta take statements from you three.”

So we all went down to the little Bartley police station, one block away, to make our statements. What had happened had been so quick and simple, really just a matter of a few seconds, that it didn’t take long. As we left, Chandler reminded us to stop by the station the next day to sign our statements.

Chandler motioned me to remain. I obediently lagged behind. I looked curiously at him. He didn’t, wouldn’t, meet my eyes.

“They ever catch ‘em, Lily?”

The back of my neck prickled and tightened. “No,” I said.

“Damn.” And back into his tiny office he strode, all the equipment he wore on his belt making every step a statement of certainty. I took a deep breath and hurried to catch up with Mom and Varena.

We still had to go back to Corbett’s Gift Shop. The women in my family weren’t going to let a little thing like an attempted theft deter them from their appointed rounds. So we slid back into our little wedding groove. Varena got the basket full of presents she’d come to pick up, Mother accepted compliments on Varena’s impending marriage, I was patted on the back (though somewhat gingerly) for stopping the purse snatcher, and when my adrenaline jolt finally expired… I was back to being bored.

We drove home to open and record the presents. While Mother and Varena told Daddy about our unexpectedly exciting shopping expedition, I wandered into the living room and stared out the front window. I switched on the Christmas tree lights, found that they blinked, shut them off.

I wondered what Jack was doing.

I found myself thinking about the homeless man I’d kicked. I thought of the redness of his eyes, the stubble on his face, his dishevelment, his smell. Would Dr. LeMay have remained seated behind his desk if such a man had come into his office? I didn’t think so.

And Dr. LeMay must have died first. If he’d heard Binnie Armstrong speaking to an unknown man, Binnie being attacked, he would never have been caught sitting. He would have been up and around the desk, struggling, despite his age. He had been a proud man, a man’s man.

If that sad specimen had made his way into the doctor’s office when it was officially closed, Dr. LeMay would have shown him the door, or told him to make an appointment, or called the police, or referred him to the emergency room doctor who drove out from Pine Bluff every day. Dave LeMay would have dealt with the homeless man any number of ways.

But he wouldn’t have stayed behind his desk.

The intruder would have had the pipe in his hands. He hadn’t come upon a rusty pipe in the doctor’s office. And if the intruder had entered with the pipe, he had intended to kill Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong.

I shook my head as I stared out the living room window. I was not a law enforcement officer or any kind of detective, but several things about the homeless-man-as-murderer scenario just didn’t make sense. And the more I thought about it, the fishier it seemed: If the homeless man had killed Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong, why hadn’t he robbed the place? Could the horror of what he’d done have driven him out before he accomplished his purpose?

If he was innocent, how had the murder weapon-what Chandler McAdoo seemed to think was the murder weapon-come to be in the alley? If this man was clever enough to hide Diane Dykeman’s purse, which he almost certainly had stolen, why hadn’t he been clever enough to get rid of the evidence of a much more serious crime?

I’ll tell you what I’d do, I thought. If I wanted to commit a murder and pin it on a throwaway person, I’d put the murder weapon right by a homeless man, moreover a black homeless man… someone with no local ties, no likely alibi, and already reported to be a purse snatcher.

That’s what I’d do.

The back door to the doctor’s office had been locked, I recalled. So the murderer had come in the front, as Varena and I had. He had walked past the doorway of the room in which Mrs. Armstrong was working, and she had not been alarmed. Binnie Armstrong had been lying in the doorway, so she had calmly continued whatever she had been doing in the little lab.

So. The murderer-carrying the pipe-walks into the office, which is officially closed. The murderer passes Binnie Armstrong, who stays right where she is. Then the murderer had gone into Dr. LeMay’s office, looked at the old man on the other side of the piled desk, spoken to him. Though the killer had had a length of pipe in one hand, still the doctor hadn’t been alarmed.

I felt goosebumps shiver down my arms.

Without warning-since Dr. LeMay was still in his chair, which was still pushed right up to the desk-the murderer had lifted the pipe and hit Dr. LeMay over the head, kept hitting him, until he was just tissue. Then the killer had stepped out into the hall, and while Binnie was hurrying from the lab to investigate the awful sounds she’d heard, he hit her, too… until she was on the verge of death.

Then he’d stepped out the front door and gotten into his vehicle… but surely he must have been covered in blood?

I frowned. Here was a snag. Even the most angelic of white men could not step out in front of the doctor’s office in the daytime with blood-soaked clothing, carrying a bloody pipe.

“Lily?” My mother’s voice. “Lily?”

“Yes?”

“I thought we’d have an early lunch, since the shower is this afternoon.”

“OK.” I tried to control the lurch of my stomach at the thought of food.

“It’s on the table. I’ve called you twice.”

“Oh. Sorry.” As I reluctantly dipped my spoon into my mother’s homemade beef soup, I tried to get back on my train of thought, but it had rolled out of the station.

Here we all were, sitting around the kitchen table, just as we had for so many years.

Suddenly, this scene seemed overwhelmingly bleak. Here we still were, the four of us.

“Excuse me, I have to walk,” I said, pushing away from the table. The three of them looked up at me, a familiar dismay dragging at their mouths. But the compulsion had gotten so strong that I could no longer play my part.

I threw on my coat, pulled on gloves as I left the house.

The first block was bliss. Even in the freezing cold, even in the face of the sharp wind, I was by myself. At least the sun was shining in its watery winter way, and the clear colors of the pines and holly bushes against the pale blue sky made my eyes blink with pleasure. The branches of the hardwood trees looked like a bleak version of lace. Our neighbor’s big brown dog barked and trailed my progress for the length of his yard, but he stopped at that and gave me no more trouble. I remembered I had to nod when cars went past, but in Bartley that was not so frequent, even at lunchtime.

I turned a corner to put the wind behind me, and in time I passed the Presbyterian church and the manse, where the O’Sheas lived. I wondered if the toddler, Luke, was letting Lou sleep. But I couldn’t think about the O’Sheas without thinking of the picture that Roy Costimiglia had received in the mail.

Whoever sent that picture obviously knew which girl was the abducted Summer Dawn Macklesby. That particular picture, attached to that particular article, sent to the Macklesbys’ PI, was intended to lead Roy Costimiglia to one conclusion. Why hadn’t the anonymous sender gone one step farther and circled the child’s face? Why the ambiguity?

That was a real puzzle.

Of course… if you could figure out who’d sent it… you could find out why. Maybe.

Great piece of detection, Lily, I told myself scornfully, and walked even faster. A brown mailing envelope that could be bought at any Wal-Mart, a picture from a yearbook that hundreds of students had purchased… well, one copy would be missing that page now. Page 23, I remembered, from looking so hard at the one in Jack’s briefcase.

Of course, the whole thing was really Jack’s problem. Furthermore, it was a problem Jack was being paid to solve.

But I needed to know the answer before Varena married Dill Kingery. And the fact was evident that, though Jack was a trained and dogged detective, I was the one on the inside track, here in Bartley.

So I tried to imagine some way I could help Jack, some information I could discover for him.

I couldn’t think of a damn thing I could do.

But maybe something would come to me.

The harder and longer I walked, the better I felt. I was breathing easier: The claustrophobia induced by family closeness was loosening its knot.

I glanced at my watch and stopped dead in my tracks.

It was time for Varena’s shower.

Luckily, I had been meandering around in my parents’ neighborhood, so I was only four blocks away from their house. I set out quickly, arriving at the front door within minutes. They’d left it unlocked, which was a relief. I dashed to my bedroom, skinned out of my jeans and sweater, and pulled on my black pants-blue blouse-black jacket combination. I checked the shower location and dashed out the door.

I was only ten minutes late.

This was a kitchen shower at the home of Mother’s best friend, Grace Parks. Grace lived on a street of large homes, and hers was one of the largest. She had daily help, I remembered, and I cast a professional eye over the house as I entered.

You wouldn’t catch Grace looking relieved to see me, but the lines bracketing her generous mouth did relax when I came in. She gave me a ritual hug and a pat on the shoulder that was just a little too forceful, as she told me my mother and sister were in the living room waiting for me. I’d always liked Grace, who would be blond until the day she died. Grace seemed indestructible. Her brown eyes were always made up, her curvy figure had never sagged (at least on the surface), and she wore magnificent jewelry quite routinely.

She slid me into a chair she’d saved right by my mother and answered a question from one of the assembled guests even as she was putting the pencil and notepad in my hands. I stared at it blankly for a moment until I realized I’d been assigned the task of recording the gifts and givers.

I gave Mom a cautious smile, and she cautiously smiled back. Varena gave me a compound look, irritation and relief mixed in equal parts. “Sorry,” I said quietly.

“You made it,” my mother said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact.

I nodded at the circle of women in Grace’s huge living room, recognizing most of them from the shower two days ago. These people would be just as relieved as Varena to have the wedding over with. More people seemed to have been invited to this shower; maybe since Grace had such a large home, she’d told Varena to expand the basic guest list.

Because I’d been thinking of their daughters, I particularly noticed Meredith Osborn and Lou O’Shea. Mrs. Kingery was sitting on the other side of Varena, which was a relief. It seemed unfair to me that Dill should have such a nerve-wracking mother after his wife had been unstable enough to kill herself. I could see why he’d be attracted to Varena, who had always seemed to be one of the most stable and balanced people I’d ever known.

It was the first time I’d realized that. It’s strange how you can know someone all your life and still not spell out her strong and weak points to yourself.

This shower had a kitchen theme. All the guests had been asked to include their favorite recipe with their gift. As we began the grand opening, I got busy. My handwriting is not elegant, but it is clear, and I tried to do a thorough job. Some boxes were stuffed with little things rather than a single gift, like a set of dish towels. Diane Dykeman (she of the snatched purse) had given Varena a set of measuring spoons and measuring cups, a little scale, and a chart of weight equivalencies, and I had to use my most microscopic writing to enter everything.

This was really an excellent job to have, I decided, because I didn’t have to talk to anyone. The story about me kicking the purse snatcher wasn’t town currency yet, and Mother and Varena were avoiding the subject. But I was pretty sure it would begin to make the rounds when time came for refreshments.

When that moment arrived-when all the gifts had been opened and Grace Parks had vanished for a significant time-she reappeared at my elbow and asked me to pour the punch.

It occurred to me that Grace understood me pretty well. I gave her an assessing look as I took my place at one end of her massive oval dining table, polished to a gleaming shine, bisected by a Christmas runner and covered with the usual shower food: nuts, cake, finger sandwiches, mints, snack mix.

“You’re like me,” Grace said. She gave me a direct look. “You like to be busy more than you like to sit and listen.”

It had never crossed my mind that I was in any way like the elegant Grace Parks. I nodded and began to fill my ladle for the first one around the table-Varena, of course, the honoree.

I had to do no more than say “Punch?” after that and smile and nod.

After a long time, it was over, and once again we loaded gifts into the car, thanked Grace profusely, and drove home to unload.

After I’d changed back to jeans and the sweater, Varena asked me if I’d go to her cottage with her to help pack. She’d been moving her things slowly into Dill’s house over the past month, beginning with the things she needed least.

Of course I agreed, relieved both at the prospect of being busy and of being helpful. We had a quick sandwich and went over to the cottage, with a few stops along the way. Dill, Varena told me, was spending some quality time with Anna, who’d been showing signs of being overwhelmed by all the wedding excitement.

“I’ve reached the point where all I can do here at my place is sleep,” she told me, after she’d put her sweats on. “But I kept the lease up until the end of December, because I really didn’t want to move back in with the folks.” I nodded. I could see that once she did that, she and Dill would have lost whatever privacy they had. Or did Varena just want to ensure she had a break from our parents?

“What do you have left to pack?”

Varena began to open closets, showing me what she hadn’t managed to empty out before now.

We’d stopped behind some stores to collect boxes. Downtown had been empty, now that most of the businesses were closed. It was fully dark at six o’clock this time of year, and the night was very cold. The cottage seemed warm and homey in contrast to the blackness outside.

I was assigned to pack the tiny closet by the front door, which contained things like extra lightbulbs, extension cords, batteries, and the vacuum cleaner. As I began to pack them in a sturdy box, Varena started wrapping some pots and pans with newspaper. We worked in comfortable silence for a little while.

Varena had just asked me if I wanted some instant hot chocolate when we heard the sound of someone walking outside the cottage.

The scare we’d had that morning must have made us jumpy. Both of us raised our heads like deer hearing the sound of the hunter’s boots. Peripherally, I saw Varena turn to me, but I shook my head slightly to make her keep silent.

Then someone kicked the front door.

Varena shrieked.

“Who is it?” I called, standing to one side of the door.

“Jack,” he yelled. “Let me in!”

I caught my breath in a rattling gasp, frightened and furious at being so. I yanked the door open, ready to let him know how much I appreciated being jolted like that. The words died in my throat when I opened the door. Jack was carrying Meredith Osborn. She was covered in blood.

Behind me I heard Varena pick up the phone, punch in 911. She spoke tersely to whoever answered.

Jack was haggard with shock. Some of Meredith Osborn’s blood was smeared on him. He was breathing raggedly. Though she was a small woman, he’d been carrying her as a dead weight.

Varena picked up a sheet she’d just folded and flung it over the couch in one movement, and Jack gladly laid the little woman down. When he’d deposited his burden he stood for a moment with his arms still curved. Then with a groan he straightened them, his shoulders moving unconsciously in an effort to relax strained muscles.

Varena was already on her knees beside the couch, her hands on her landlady’s wrist. She was shaking her head.

“She’s got a pulse, but it’s…” Varena shook her head again. “She’s been lying outside.” The dying woman’s face was ice-white, and the cold was rolling off the tiny body, eddying through the warm room.

We heard the sound of the ambulance in the distance.

Meredith Osborn opened her eyes. They fixed on mine.

Someone had struck her across her face, and her lips were cracked, had bled. Underneath the blood, they were blue, to match the tinge of her fingernails.

Her mouth opened. “The children,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry,” Varena said instantly. “They’re fine.”

Meredith Osborn turned her gaze from my face to Varena’s. Her mouth moved again. She tried as hard as she could to tell Varena something.

Instead, she died.