Shakespeare’s Christmas

Chapter Six

Since Emory was so fine-boned and fair, the swollen red eyes made him look rabbity. Those eyes hardly seemed to register my identity. He was completely preoccupied, eaten up from the inside out.

“Ah, yes? What can I do for you?” he asked me, his voice coming from a great interior distance.

“I’ve come to clean your house.”

“What?”

“That’s what I do for a living, clean. This is what I can offer you in your time of trouble.”

He was still bewildered. I was unhappy with myself, so it was more difficult to keep my impatience under wraps.

“My sister…” he faltered. “She’ll be coming tomorrow.”

“Then you need the house clean for her arrival.”

He stared some more. I stared right back. Behind him, down a dark hall, I saw Eve creep out of an open doorway. She looked like a little ghost of herself.

“Miss Lily,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”

It was what she’d heard her father say to callers all day, and her attempt to be adult gave my heart a little pang. I also wondered what Eve was doing at home, when I’d thought she was with the O’Sheas.

Emory finally stood aside so I could enter, but he still seemed uncertain. I glanced at my watch, letting him know how valuable I thought my time was, and that shook him from his lethargy.

“This is so kind of you, Miss… Bard,” he said. “Is there anything we need to…?”

“I expect Eve can show me where things are.” I am no grief counselor. I don’t know squat about children. But it’s always better to be busy.

“That would be good,” Emory said vaguely. “So I’ll…” and he just wandered off. “Oh, Eve,” he said over his shoulder, “remember your company manners. Stay with Miss Bard.”

Eve looked a little resentful, but she replied, “Yes, Daddy.”

The girl and I looked at each other carefully. “Where’s the baby?” I asked.

“She’s at the O’Sheas’ house. I was there for a while, too, but Daddy said I needed to come home.”

“All right, then. Where is the kitchen?”

Her lips curved in an incredulous smile. Surely everyone knew where the kitchen was! But Eve was polite, and she guided me to the back of the house and to the right.

“Where’s all the cleaning stuff?” I asked. I set my purse down on the kitchen counter, shrugged off my coat, and hung it on one of the kitchen chairs.

Eve opened a cupboard in the adjacent washroom. I could see that the laundry basket was full of clothes.

“Maybe you better show me the house before I start.”

So the little girl showed me her home. It was a large older house, with high ceilings and dark hardwood paneling and floors that needed work. I noticed the register of a floor furnace. I hadn’t seen one of those in years. A Christmas tree decorated with religious symbols stood in the living room, the family’s only communal room. The sofa, coffee table, and chair combo was maple with upholstery of a muted brown plaid. Clean but hideous.

Emory was slumped in the chair, his hand wrapped around a cold mug that had held coffee. I knew it was cold because I could see the ring around the middle. He’d had a drink after it had been sitting a spell. He didn’t acknowledge our passage through the room. I wondered if I’d have to dust him like a piece of furniture.

The master bedroom was tidy, but the furniture needed polishing. Eve’s room… well, her bed had been made haphazardly, but the floor was littered with Barbies and coloring books. The baby’s room was neatest, since the baby couldn’t walk yet. The diaper pail needed emptying. The bathroom needed a complete scrubbing. The kitchen was not too bad.

“Where are the sheets?” I asked.

Eve said, “Mama’s are in there.” She pointed to the double closet in the master bedroom.

I stripped down the double bed, carried the dirty sheets to the washroom, started a load of wash. Back in the bedroom, I opened the closet door.

“There’s Mama’s stool,” Eve said helpfully. “She always needs it to get things down from the closet shelf.”

I was at least six inches taller than Meredith Osborn had been, and I could easily reach the shelf. But if I wanted to look at what was behind the sheets, the stool would be handy.

I stepped up, lifted the set of sheets, and scanned the contents of the closet shelf. Another blanket for the bed, a box marked “Shoe Polish,” a cheap metal box for files and important papers. Then, under a pile of purses, I spotted a box marked “Eve.” After I’d snapped the clean sheets on the bed, I sent Eve out of the room to fetch a dustcloth and the furniture polish.

I lifted down the box and opened it. I had to clench my teeth to make myself examine its contents. My sense of invasion was overwhelming.

In the box were faded “Welcome, Baby” cards, the kind family and friends send a couple when they have a child. I quickly riffled through them. They were only what they seemed. Also in the box was a little rattle and a baby outfit. It was soft knit, yellow, with little green giraffes scattered over it, the usual snap crotch and long sleeves. It had been folded carefully. Eve’s coming home from the hospital outfit, maybe. But Eve had been born at home, I remembered. Well, then, Meredith’s favorite of all Eve’s baby clothes. My mother had some of mine and Varena’s still packed away in our attic.

I closed the box and popped it back into position. By the time Eve returned, I had the flowered bedspread smoothed flat and taut across the bed and the blanket folded at the foot.

Together, we polished and dusted. Eve naturally didn’t do things the most efficient way, since she was a grieving eight-year-old child. I am rigid about the way I like housework done and not used to working with anyone, but I managed it.

I’d had a pang of worry about Eve handling her mother’s belongings, but Eve seemed to do that so matter-of-factly that I wondered if she didn’t yet comprehend that her mother would not be returning.

In the course of cleaning that room I made sure I examined every nook and cranny. Short of going through the chest of drawers and the drawers in the night tables, I saw what there was to see in that bedroom: under the bed, the corners of the closet, the backs and bottoms of almost every single piece of furniture. Later, when I began to put the laundry away, I even caught glimpses of what was in the drawers. Just the usual stuff, as far as I could tell.

One drawer of the little desk in the corner was stacked with medical bills related to Meredith’s pregnancy. At a glance, it had been a difficult one. I hoped the furniture store had a group policy.

“Shake the can, Eve,” I reminded her, and she shook the yellow aerosol can of furniture polish. “Now, spray.”

She carefully sent a stream of polish onto the bare top of the desk. I swabbed with a cloth, over and over, then put the letter rack, mug full of pens and pencils, and box containing stamps and return address labels back in their former positions. When Eve excused herself to use the bathroom, I gritted my teeth and did something that disgusted me: I picked up Meredith Osborn’s hairbrush, which could reasonably be assumed to have her fingerprints on it, wrapped it in a discarded plastic cleaner’s bag, and stepped through to the kitchen and shoved it in my purse.

I was back in the Osborns’ bedroom, tamping the stack of papers so the edges were square and neat, when Eve came back.

“Those are Mama’s bills,” she said importantly. “We always pay our bills.”

“Of course.” I gathered the cleaning things and handed some of them to Eve. “We’ve finished here.”

As we began to work on Eve’s room, I could tell that the little girl was getting bored, after the novelty of helping me work wore thin.

“Where’d you eat last night?” I asked casually.

“We went to the restaurant,” she said. “I got a milkshake. Jane slept the whole time. It was great.”

“Your dad was with you,” I observed.

“Yeah, he wanted to give Mama a night off,” Eve said approvingly. Then the ending of that night off hit her in the face, and I saw her pleasure in the little memory of the milkshake crumple. I could not ask her any more questions about last night.

“Why don’t you find your last school memory book and show me who your friends are?” I suggested, as I got her clean sheets out of her little closet and began to remake her single bed.

“Oh, sure!” Eve said enthusiastically. She began to rummage through the low bookcase that was filled with children’s books and knickknacks. Nothing in the bookcase seemed to be in any particular order, and I wasn’t too surprised when Eve told me she couldn’t come up with her most recent memory book. She fetched one from two years ago instead and had an excellent time telling me the name of every child in every picture. I was required only to smile and nod, and every now and then I said, “Really?” As casually as I could manage it, I went through the books in the bookcase myself. The past year’s memory book wasn’t there.

Eve relaxed perceptibly as she looked at the pictures of her friends and acquaintances.

“Did you go to the doctor last week, Eve?” I asked casually.

“Why do you want to know that?” she asked.

I was floored. It hadn’t occurred to me that a child would ask me why I wanted to know.

“I just wondered what doctor you went to.”

“Doctor LeMay.” Her brown eyes looked huge as she thought about her answer. “He’s dead, too,” she said wearily, as if the whole world was dying around her. To Eve, it must have felt so.

I could not think of a natural, painless way to ask again, and I just couldn’t put the girl through any more grief. To my surprise, Eve volunteered, “Mama went with me.”

“She did?” I tried to keep my voice as noncommittal as possible.

“Yep. She liked Dr. LeMay, Miss Binnie, too.”

I nodded, lifting a stack of coloring books and shaking them into an orderly rectangle.

“It hurt, but it was over before too long,” Eve said, obviously quoting someone.

“What was over?” I asked.

“They took my blood,” Eve said importantly.

“Yuck.”

“Yeah, it hurt,” said the girl, shaking her head just like a middle-aged woman, philosophically. “But some things hurt, and you just gotta handle it.”

I nodded. This was a lot of stoical philosophy from a third grader.

“I was losing weight, and my mama thought something might be wrong,” Eve explained.

“So, what was wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Eve looked down at her feet. “She never said.”

I nodded as if that were quite usual. But what Eve had told me worried me, worried me badly. What if something really was wrong physically with the child? Surely her father knew about it, about the visit and the blood test? What if Eve were anemic or had some worse disease?

She looked healthy enough to me, but I was certainly willing to concede that I was hardly a competent judge. Eve was thin and pale, yes, but not abnormally so. Her hair shone and her teeth looked sound and clean, she smelled good and she stood like she was comfortable, and she was able to meet my eyes: The absence of any of these conditions is reason to worry, their presence reassuring. So why wasn’t I relaxing?

We moved on to the baby’s room, Eve shadowing my every step. From time to time the doorbell rang, and I would hear Emory drift through the house to answer it, but the callers never stayed long. Faced with Emory’s naked grief, it would be hard to stand and chat.

After I’d finished the baby’s room and the bathroom, I entered the kitchen to find that food was accumulating faster than Emory could store it. He was standing there with a plastic bowl in his hands, a bowl wrapped in the rose-colored plastic wrap that was so popular locally. I opened the refrigerator and evaluated the situation.

“Hmmm,” I said. I began removing everything. Emory put the bowl down and helped. All the little odds and ends of leftovers went into the garbage, the dishes they’d been in went in the sink, and I wiped down the bottom shelf where there’d been a little spillage.

“Do you have a list?” I asked Emory.

He seemed to come out of his trance. “A list?” he asked, as if he’d never heard the word.

“You need to keep a list of who brings what food in what dish. Do you have a piece of paper handy?” That sister of Emory’s needed to get here fast.

“Daddy, I’ve got notebook paper in my room!” Eve said and ran off to fetch it.

“I guess I knew that, but I forgot,” Emory said. He blinked his red eyes, seemed to wake up a little. When Eve dashed into the kitchen with several sheets of paper, he hugged her. She wriggled in his grasp.

“We have to start the list, Daddy!” She looked up at him sternly.

I thought that Eve had probably been hugged and patted enough for two lifetimes in the day just past.

She began the list herself, in shaky and idiosyncratic writing. I told her how to do it, and she perched on a stool at the counter, laboriously entering the food gifts on one side, the bringer on the other, and a star when there was a dish that had to be returned.

Galvanized by our activity, Emory began making calls from the telephone on the kitchen counter. I gathered from the snatches of conversation I overheard that he was calling the police department to find out when they thought Meredith’s body could come back from its autopsy in Little Rock, making arrangements for the music at the funeral service, checking in at work, trying to start his life back into motion. He began writing his own list, in tiny, illegible writing. It was a list of things to do before the funeral, he told me in his quiet voice. I was glad to see him shake off his torpor.

It was getting late so I accelerated my work rate, sweeping and mopping and wiping down the kitchen counters with dispatch. I selected a few dishes for Emory and Eve’s supper, leaving them on the counter with heating instructions. Emory was still talking on the phone, so I just drifted out of the room with Eve behind me. I pulled on my coat, pulled up the strap of the purse.

“Can you come back, Lily?” Eve asked. “You know how to do everything.”

I looked down at her. I was betraying this child and her father, abusing their trust. Eve’s admiration for me was painful.

“I can’t come back tomorrow, no,” I said as gently as I was capable of. “Varena’s getting married the day after, and I still have a lot to do for that. But I’ll try to see you again.”

“OK.” She took that in a soldierlike way, which I was beginning to understand was typical of Eve Osborn. “And thank you for helping today,” Eve said, after a couple of gulps. Very much woman of the house.

“I figured cleaning would be more use than more food.”

“You were right,” she said soberly. “The house looks so much nicer.”

“See ya,” I said. I bent to give her a little hug. I felt awkward. “Take care of yourself.” What a stupid thing to tell a child, I castigated myself, but I had no idea what else to say.

Emory was standing by the front door. I felt like snarling. I had almost made it out without talking to him. “I can’t thank you enough for this,” he said, his sincerity painful and unwelcome.

“It was nothing.”

“No, no,” he insisted. “It meant so much to us.” He was going to cry again.

Oh, hell. “Good-bye,” I told him firmly and was out the door.

Glancing down at my watch again as I walked out to my car, I realized there was no way to get out of explaining to my folks where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

To compound my guilt, my parents thought I’d done a wonderful Christian thing, helping out Emory Osborn in his hour of travail. I had to let them think the best of me when I least deserved it.

I tried hard to pack my guilt into a smaller space in my heart. Reduced to the most basic terms, the Osborns now had a clean house in which to receive visitors. And I had a negative report for Jack. I hadn’t discovered anything of note, except for Eve’s trip to the doctor. Though I had stolen the brush.

When Varena emerged from her room, looking almost as weepy as Emory, I put the second part of my plan into effect.

“I’m in the cleaning mood,” I told her. “How about me cleaning Dill’s house, so it’ll be nice for your first Christmas together?” Varena and Dill weren’t leaving for their honeymoon until after Christmas, so they’d be together at home with Anna.

Somehow, since my mission was to save Varena grief, I didn’t feel quite as guilty as I had when I’d told Emory I was going to clean his house. But I had a sour taste in my mouth, and I figured it was self-disgust.

“Thanks,” Varena said, surprise evident in her voice. “That would really be a load off my mind. You’re sure?”

“You know I need something to do,” I told her truthfully.

“Bless your heart,” Varena said with compassion, giving me a hug. Somehow, my sister’s unwanted sympathy stiffened my resolve.

Then the doorbell rang, and it was some friends of my parents‘, just back from a trip to see the Christmas decorations at Pigeon Forge. They were full of their trip and had brought a present for Dill and Varena. It was easy for me to slip off to my room after a proper greeting. I took a hot, hot shower and waited for Jack to call me.

He didn’t. The phone rang off the wall that evening, the callers ranging from friends wanting to check on wedding plans, Dill asking for Varena, credit card companies wanting to extend new cards to my parents, and church members trying to arrange a meal for the Osborn family after the relatives had arrived for Meredith’s funeral.

But no Jack.

Something was niggling at me, and I wanted to look at the pictures of Summer Dawn at eight. I wanted to ask Jack some questions. I wanted to look at his briefcase. That was the closest I could get to figuring out what was bothering me.

About eight-thirty, I called Chandler McAdoo. “Let’s go riding,” I said.

Chandler pulled into my parents’ drive in his own vehicle, a Jeep. He was wearing a heavy red-and-white-plaid flannel shirt, a camo jacket, jeans, and Nikes.

My mother answered the door before I could get there.

“Chandler,” she said, sounding a little at sea. “Did you need to ask us something about the other day?”

“No, ma’am. I’m here to pick up Lily.” He was wearing an Arkansas Travellers gimme cap, and the bill of it tilted as he nodded at me. I was pulling on my coat.

“This brings back old times,” my mother said with a smile.

“See you in a while, Mom,” I said, zipping up my old red Squall jacket.

“Okay, sweetie. You two have a good time.”

I liked the Jeep. Chandler kept it spick-and-span, and I approved. Jack tended to distribute paperwork all over his car.

“So, where we going?” Chandler asked.

“It’s too cold and we’re too old for Frankel’s Pond,” I said. “What about the Heart of the Delta?”

“The Heart it is,” he said.

By the time we scooted into a booth at the home-owned diner we’d patronized all through high school, I was in the midst of being updated about Chandler’s two stabs at marriage, the little boy he was so proud of (by Cindy, wife number two), and the current woman in his life-Tootsie Monahan, my least favorite of Varena’s bridesmaids.

When we had glanced at the menu-which seemed almost eerily the same as it had been when I was sixteen, except for the prices-and had given the waitress our order (a hamburger with everything and fries for Chandler, a butterscotch milkshake for me), Chandler gave me a sharp, let’s-get-down-to-it look.

“So what’s the deal with this guy you’ve hooked up with?”

“Jack.”

“I know his damn name. What’s his business here?”

Chandler and I stared at each other for a moment. I took a deep breath.

“He’s tracing an…” I stopped dead. How could I do this? Where did my loyalty lie?

Chandler made a rotary movement with his hand, wanting me to spill it out.

Chandler had already told Jack several things, operating on his affection for me. But the actual physical effort of opening my mouth, telling him Jack’s business, was almost impossible. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath. “A missing person,” I said.

He absorbed that.

“Okay, tell me.”

I hesitated. “It’s not my call.”

“What do you want from me, Lily?”

Chandler’s face was infinitely older.

Oh, Jesus, I hated this.

“Tell me what people were doing when Meredith Osborn was killed. I don’t know if that has anything to do with Jack’s job, Chandler, and that’s the truth. I was in that house, just a few feet away from her, and if there’s anything I know it’s how to fight.” I hadn’t known how that bothered me until I said it. “I didn’t have a chance to lift a finger to help her. Just tell me about that evening.”

He could do that without violating any laws, I figured.

“What people were doing. What happened to Meredith.” Chandler appeared to be thinking, his eyes focused on the saltshaker with its grains of rice showing yellower than the stark white of the salt.

I didn’t know I’d been holding my breath until Chandler began talking. He folded his small hands in front of him, and his face took on a faintly stern, stiff set that I realized must be his professional demeanor.

“Mrs. Osborn died, as far as I could tell by a visual exam, from multiple stab wounds to the chest,” he began. “She’d been hit in the face, maybe to knock her on the ground so the stabbing would be easier. The attack took place in the backyard. It would have required only a minute or two. She wasn’t able to move more than a yard after she was stabbed. Her wounds were very severe. Plus, the temperature was below freezing, and she didn’t have a coat on.”

“But she did move that one yard.”

“Yes.”

“Toward Varena’s little house.”

“Yes.”

I could feel my mouth compress in a hard line and my eyes narrow, in what my friend Marshall had once called my “fist face.”

“What kind of knife?”

“Some kind of single-blade kitchen knife, looked like, but we have to wait on the autopsy to be sure. We haven’t found any kind of knife.”

“Did you go in the Osborns’ house?”

“Sure. We had to see if the killer was in there, and the back door was unlocked.”

“So someone had made a noise, or called Meredith out of the house…?”

He shrugged. “Something like that, we figure. She wasn’t scared. She would have stayed in the house and locked the back door if she’d been scared. She could have called us. The phone was working, I checked. Instead, she went outside.”

Unspoken between us lay the inescapable conclusion that Meredith had seen someone she knew and trusted in the yard.

“When does Emory say he left the house?”

“About seven. He had the two little girls. He wanted to give his wife some time to herself, he said. She’d had a hard time with the baby’s birth, wasn’t getting her strength back, and so on.”

I raised my brows.

“Yes, the waitress confirms that Emory got to the restaurant about five after. It took about forty-five minutes for Emory and Eve to eat, and then the baby woke up and Emory gave her a bottle, burped her, the whole nine yards. So they left the restaurant maybe fifteen minutes after eight. Emory had some things to pick up at the Kmart, so he took the girls with him in there, and they got some vitamins and other junk… that brings us up to around eight-fifty, nine o’clock, somewhere in there.”

“Then he comes home.”

“Then he comes home,” Chandler agreed. “He was mighty tore up. Turned white as a sheet.”

“You had already searched the house?”

“Yes, had to. Didn’t find any evidence anyone but the family had been in it. Nothing suspicious in any way. No forced entry, no threatening messages in the answering machine, no sign of a struggle… a big zero.”

“Chandler…” I hesitated. But I could think of no other way to find out. “Did you search his car?”

Chandler shifted in his seat. “No. Do you think we should have?”

“Did you ask Eve if her dad had stopped back by the house for anything?”

“I did my best to ask her that. I had to be real careful how I put it, didn’t want the girl to think we figured her dad had done it. She’s just eight!” Chandler looked at me angrily, as if that were my doing.

“What did she say?” I asked, keeping my voice very quiet and level.

“She said they went to the restaurant. Period. Then to Kmart. Period.”

I nodded, looked away. “Where was Jess O’Shea?” I asked.

I could feel the heat of Chandler’s glare even though I was looking over at the chipped Formica counter.

“Dave asked Emory what church he went to, and when he said Presbyterian, we called Jess,” Chandler said slowly. “Lou said he was over in his office counseling a member of the congregation.”

“Did you call over there?”

“Yes.”

“Get an answer?”

“Yes. But he said he couldn’t come right that second.”

I wondered if Jess had actually come over to the Osborns’ house that night. I couldn’t remember if the scene between him and Emory the next day had given me a sense of an original encounter or a continuation of a dialogue begun the night before. I had been so embarrassed that I had tried to block out their conversation.

“Did he give a reason?”

“I just assumed he had to finish talking to whoever was there.”

The upshot was, Jess had been away from home and the police had not asked him to account for his time. There was no reason why they should, from their point of view.

Varena had told me Dill was going to spend the evening at home with Anna. I didn’t think Dill was the kind of father who’d leave Anna in the house by herself, but he could have worked it out somehow, I guessed. I wondered if I could think of a way to ask questions that wouldn’t make red flags go up in Varena’s mind.

“Lily, if someone’s safety is at stake, or if you have any idea at all who killed that poor woman, you are legally obliged to tell me. Morally, too.”

I looked into Chandler’s round brown eyes. I’d known this man my whole life, been friends with him, off and on, that long. When I’d come home to Bartley after my spectacular victimization and subsequent media bath, Chandler had been a constant visitor. He’d been between marriages, and we had gone out to eat together, ridden around together, spent time together so I could get away from my family and their love that was just choking me.

During that time, seven years ago, we had also shared a horribly embarrassing evening in the big pickup Chandler had been driving then. But I was sure we both did our best not to remember that.

“I don’t know the identity of anyone who is in danger,” I said carefully. “I don’t know who killed Meredith.” That was absolutely true.

“You should tell me everything you know,” Chandler said, his voice so low and intent it was as scary as a snake’s rattle.

My hands, resting on the worn gray and pink Formica of the table’s surface, clenched into hard fists. My heels dug into the wooden base of the booth, giving me launching power. A startled look crossed Chandler’s face, and he leaned away from me.

“What’s in your mind?” he asked sharply, and he brushed his empty plate to one side without taking his eyes off me, clearing his own deck for action.

For once, I was anxious to explain myself. But I couldn’t. I took a couple of deep breaths, made myself relax.

“You love this man,” he said.

I started to shake my head side to side: no. But I said, “Yes.”

“This is the one.”

I nodded, a jerky little up-and-down movement.

“And he doesn’t… he can handle… what happened to you?”

“He doesn’t mind the scars,” I said, my voice as light and smooth as the changing scenery of a dream.

Chandler turned red. His eyes left mine, focused on the pattern of the Formica.

“It’s OK,” I told him, just above a whisper.

“Does he… does he know how lucky he is?” Chandler asked, not able to think of any other way of asking me if Jack loved me back.

“I don’t know.”

“Lily, if you want me to have a serious talk with this joker, just say the word.” And he really meant it. I looked at Chandler with new eyes. This man would put himself through a humiliating conversation and not think twice about it.

“Will you make him go down on one knee and swear to forsake all others?” I was smiling a little, I couldn’t help it.

“Damn straight.”

This, too, he meant.

“What a great guy you are,” I said. All the aggression leaked out of me, as if I was a balloon with a pinhole. “You’ve been talking with Jack, haven’t you?”

“He’s an ex-cop, and no matter how his career ended,” and Chandler flushed uncomfortably since Jack had not exactly left the Memphis police force under creditable circumstances, “Jack Leeds was a good detective and made some good arrests. I called the Memphis cops, talked to a friend of mine there, as soon as I realized who he was.”

That was interesting. Chandler had known Jack was in town probably before I did-and had checked up on him.

“Fact is, the only thing this guy knew against Jack was that he’d hooked up with a shady cleaning lady,” Chandler said with a grin.

I grinned back. All the tension was gone, and we were old friends together. Without asking, Chandler paid for my milkshake and his meal, and I slid out of the booth and into my coat.

When he dropped me off at home, Chandler gave me a kiss on the cheek. We hadn’t said another word about Meredith Osborn, or Dr. LeMay, or Jack. I knew Chandler had backed off only because he owed me, on some level: The last time we’d been together had been a terrible evening for both of us. Whatever the reason, I was grateful. But I knew that if Chandler thought I was concealing something that would contribute to solving the murders that had taken place in the town he was sworn to protect, he would come down on me like a ton of bricks.

We might be old friends, but we were both weighted down with adult burdens.

Jack didn’t call.

That night I lay sleepless, my arms rigidly at my sides, watching the bars of moonlight striping the ceiling of my old room. It was the distillation of the all the bad nights I’d had in the past seven years; except in my parents’ house, I could not resort to my usual methods of escape and relief. Finally I got up, sat in the little slipper chair in the corner of the room, and turned on the lamp.

I’d finished my biography. Luckily I’d brought some paperbacks with me from Varena’s, anticipating just such a night… not that I would have picked these books if I’d had much choice. The first was a book of advice on dealing with your stepchildren, and the second was a historical romance. Its cover featured a guy with an amazing physique. I stared at his bare, hairless chest with its immense pectorals, wondering if even my sensei’s musculature would match this man’s. I found it very unlikely that a sensible fighting man would wear his shirt halfway off his shoulders in that inconvenient and impractical way, and I thought it even sillier that his lady friend would choose to try to embrace him when he was leaning down from a horse. I calculated his weight, the angle of his upper body, and the pull she was exerting. I factored in the high wind blowing her hair out in a fan, and decided Lord Robert Dumaury was going to end up on the ground at Phillipetta Dunmore’s feet within seconds, probably dislocating his shoulder in the process… and that’s if he was lucky. I shook my head.

So I plowed through the advice, learning more about being a new mother to a growing not-your-own child than I ever wanted to know. This paperback showed serious signs of being read and reread. I hoped it would be of more use to Varena than Ms. Dunmore’s adventures with Pectoral Man.

I would have given anything for a good thick biography.

I got halfway through the book before sleep overcame me. I was still in the chair, the lamp still on, when I woke at seven to the sounds of my family stirring.

I felt exhausted, almost too tired to move.

I did some push-ups, tried some leg lifts. But my muscles felt slack and weak, as if I were recovering from major surgery. Slowly, I pulled on my sweats. I’d committed my morning to cleaning Dill’s house. But instead of rising and getting into the bathroom, I sat back in the chair with my face covered by my hands.

Being involved in this child abduction felt so wrong, so bad, but for my family’s sake I couldn’t imagine what else I could do. With a sigh of sheer weariness, I hauled myself to my feet and opened the bedroom door to reenter my family’s life.

It was like dipping your toes into a quiet pond, only to have a whirlpool suck you under.

Since this was the day before the wedding, Mother and Varena had every hour mapped out. Mother had to go to the local seamstress’s house to pick up the dress she planned to wear tomorrow: It had required hemming. She had to drop in on the caterer to go over final arrangements for the reception. She and Varena had to take Anna to a friend’s birthday party, and then to pick up Anna’s flower girl dress, which was being shipped to the local Penney’s catalog store after some delay. (Due to a last-minute growth spurt, Anna’s fancy dress, bought months before, was now too tight in the shoulders, so Varena had had to scour catalogs for a quickly purchasable substitute.) Both Varena and my mother were determined that Anna should try the dress on instantly.

The list of errands grew longer and longer. I found myself tuning out after the first few items. Dill dropped Anna off to run errands with Varena and Mom, and Anna and I sat together at the kitchen table in the strange peace that lies at the eye of the storm.

“Is getting married always like this, Aunt Lily?” Anna asked wearily.

“No. You can just elope.”

“Elope? Like the animal?”

“It’s like an antelope only in that you run fast. When you elope, the man and woman who are getting married get in the car and drive somewhere and get married where nobody knows them. Then they come home and tell their families.”

“I think that’s what I’m gonna do,” Anna told me.

“No. Have a big wedding. Pay them back for all this,” I advised.

Anna grinned. “I’ll invite everyone in the whole town,” she said. “And Little Rock, too!”

“That’ll do it.” I nodded approvingly.

“Maybe in the whole world.”

“Even better.”

“Do you have a boyfriend, Aunt Lily?” Yes.

“Does he write you notes?” Anna made a squeezed face, like she felt she was asking a stupid question, but she wanted to know the answer anyway.

“He calls me on the phone,” I said. “Sometimes.”

“Does he…” Anna was rummaging in her brain for other things grown-up boyfriends might do. “Does he send you flowers and candy?”

“He hasn’t yet.”

“What does he do to show you he likes you?”

Couldn’t share that with an eight-year-old. “He hugs me,” I told her.

“Ewwww. Does he kiss you?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“Bobby Mitzer kissed me,” Anna said in a whisper.

“No kidding? Did you like it?”

“Ewwww.”

“Maybe he’s just not the right guy,” I said, and we smiled at each other.

Then Mom and Verena told Anna they had been ready to go for minutes and inquired why she was still sitting at the table as if we had all day.

“You can manage at Dill’s by yourself, can’t you?” Varena asked anxiously. She’d returned from dropping Anna off at the party, complete with present. “You sure don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, hearing my voice come out flat and cold. I’d enjoyed talking to Anna, but now I felt exhausted again.

Mother eyed me sharply. “You didn’t sleep well,” she said. “Bad dreams again?” And she and Varena and my father stared at me with matching expressions of concern.

“I’m absolutely all right,” I said, trying to be civil, hating them thinking about the ordeal again. Was I being disgustingly self-pitying? It was just being home.

For the first time it occurred to me that if I’d been able to stay longer after the attack, if I’d toughed it out, they might have become used to me again, and they would have seen my life as a continuation, not a broken line. But I’d felt compelled to leave, and their clearest, most recent memory of me was of a woman in horrible pain of both kinds, plagued by nightmares waking and sleeping.

“I’ll go clean now.” I pulled on my coat.

“Dill’s at work checking his inventory,” Varena said. “I don’t know how long he’ll be. We’ll be picking Anna up and taking her straight to Penney’s from the party. Then we’ll come back here.” I nodded and went to get my purse.

Mother and Varena were still fine-tuning their agenda when I walked out the door. My father was working a crossword puzzle, a half smile on his face as he caught snatches of their discussion. He didn’t loathe this wedding frenzy, as most men did or pretended to. He loved it. He was having a great time fussing about the cost of the reception, whether he needed to go to the church to borrow yet another table for the still-incoming gifts, whether Varena had written every single thank-you note promptly.

I touched Father’s shoulder as I went by, and he reached up and captured my hand. After a second, he patted it gently and let me go.

Dill owned an undistinguished three-bedroom, three bath ranch-style in the newest section of Bartley. Varena had given me a key. It still felt strange to find a locked door in my little hometown. When I’d been growing up, no one had ever locked anything.

On the way to Dill’s, I’d seen another homeless person, this one a white woman. She was gray-haired but sturdy looking, pedaling an ancient bicycle laden down with an assortment of strange items bound together with nylon rope.

The night before, my parents’ friends had been talking about gang activity at the Bartley High School. Gangs! In the Arkansas Delta! In flat, remote, tiny, impoverished Bartley.

I guess in some corner of my mind, I’d expected Bartley would remain untouched by the currents of the world, would retain its small-town safety and assurance. Home had changed. I could go there again, but its character was permanently altered.

Abruptly, I was sick of myself and my problems. It was high time I got back to work.

I started, as I like to do, with a survey of the job to be done. Dill’s house, which looked freshly painted and carpeted, was fairly straight and fairly clean-but, like the Osborns‘, it was showing signs of a few days of neglect. Varena wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of prolonged wedding fever.

I had no guide here to show me where everything was. I wondered if Anna would have been as interesting a helper as Eve had been the day before.

That recalled me to the purpose of my cleaning offer. Before anything or anyone could interrupt me, I searched Anna’s room for her memory book. As I searched, naturally I picked up her room, which was a real mess. I slung soiled clothes into the hamper, stacked school papers, tossed dolls into a clear Rubbermaid tub firmly labeled “Dolls and doll clothes.”

I found the memory book under her bed. Page 23 was missing.

I rocked back on my haunches, feeling as though an adversary had socked me in the stomach.

“No,” I said out loud, hearing the misery in my own voice.

After a few minutes trying to think, I stuck the book in the rack on Anna’s little desk and kept on cleaning. There was nothing else for me to do.

I had to face the fact that the page that had been sent to Roy Costimiglia and passed to Jack had almost certainly come from Anna’s book. But, I told myself, that didn’t have to mean Anna was Summer Dawn Macklesby.

The book being in Dill’s house perhaps raised the odds that someone besides Meredith Osborn might have mailed the page to Roy Costimiglia. At least, that was what I thought. But I wished I’d found the book anywhere but here.

If Anna was the abducted child, Dill could be suffering from the terrible dichotomy of wanting to square things with Summer’s family and wanting to keep his beloved daughter. What if his unstable wife had been the one to kidnap the Macklesby baby, and Dill had just now become aware of it? He’d raised Anna as his own for eight years.

And if Dill’s first wife had abducted Summer Dawn, what had happened to their biological baby?

As I paired Anna’s shoes and placed them on a rack in the closet, I saw a familiar blue cover peeking from behind a pair of rain boots. I frowned and squatted, reaching back in the closet and finally managing to slide a finger between the book and wall. I fished out the book and flipped it over to read the cover.

It was another copy of the memory book.

I opened it, hoping fervently that Anna had written her name in it. No name.

“Shit,” I said out loud. When I’d been young, and we’d gotten our yearbooks, or memory books, or whatever you wanted to call them, the first thing we’d done was write our names inside.

One of these books had to be Anna’s. If Jack’s basic assumption was correct, if the person who’d sent the memory book page to Roy Costimiglia wasn’t a complete lunatic, then the other book belonged to either Eve or Krista, and it was someone very close to one of them who had sent the picture. Like someone in their house. A parent.

Dill was using the third bedroom as a study. There was a framed picture of Dill holding a baby I presumed was Anna. The snapshot had obviously been taken in a hospital room, and Anna looked like a newborn. But to me all babies looked more or less the same, and the infant Dill was gazing at so lovingly could have been Anna, or it could have been another child. The baby was swaddled in a receiving blanket.

I cleaned, scrubbed, and worried at the problem. I straightened and dusted and vacuumed and polished and mopped, and the activity did me good. But I didn’t solve anything.

When I went in Anna’s room yet again to return a Barbie I’d found in the kitchen, I looked more closely at Anna’s collection of framed snapshots. One was of a woman I was sure must be Dill’s first wife, Anna’s mother. She was buxom, like Varena; and like Varena her hair was brown, her eyes blue. Aside from those superficial similarities, she didn’t look at all like my sister, really. I stared at the picture, trying to read the woman’s character in this likeness. Was there something tense, something a little desperate, in the way she was clutching the little dog on her lap? Was her smile strained, insincere?

I shook my head. I would never have given the picture two thoughts if I hadn’t known that the woman had eventually killed herself. So much despair, so well hidden. Dill had an unstable mother, had married an unstable wife. I was frightened that he could see something deep in Varena that we didn’t suspect, some inner weakness, that attracted him or made him feel comfortable with her. But Varena seemed sane and sturdy to me, and I have a built-in Geiger counter for the ripples of instability in others.

It felt odd to see Varena’s clothes hanging in half of Dill’s closet, her china in his cabinets. She had really and truly moved into Dill’s house. That intimacy bore in on me how much Varena would lose if Anna was someone else’s daughter, for surely there would be the scandal to end all scandals… media coverage, intense and drenching. I shivered. I knew how that could affect your life.

The wedding was so close. One more day.

Very reluctantly, I reentered Dill’s office and opened the filing cabinet. I had put on a pair of fresh rubber gloves, and I kept them on. That shows you how guilty I was feeling.

But this had to be done.

Dill was an orderly man, and I quickly found the file labeled simply “Anna-Year One.” There was a separate file for each year of her life, containing drawings, pictures, and a page of cute things she’d said or done. The school-age files were crammed with report cards and test scores.

As far as I was concerned, Anna’s first year was the most important. The file contained Anna’s birth certificate, a record of her immunizations, her baby book, and some negatives in a white envelope marked “Baby Is Born.” The handwriting wasn’t Dill’s. There was not a thing there that would prove Anna’s identity one way or another. No blood type, no record of any distinguishing characteristic. A certificate from the hospital had Anna’s baby footprints in black ink. I would ask Jack if the Macklesbys had similar prints of Summer Dawn’s. If the contour of the foot was completely different from Anna’s, surely that would mean something?

Blind alley. Dead end.

Suddenly I remember the negatives marked “Birth Pictures.” Where were the family photo albums?

I found them in a cabinet in the living room and blessed Dill for being orderly. They were labeled by year.

I yanked out the one marked with Anna’s birth year. There were the pictures: a red infant in a doctor’s arms, streaked with blood and other fluids, mouth open in a yell; the baby, now held by a masked and gowned Dill, the baby’s round little bottom toward the camera-presumably this one had been taken by a nurse. In the corner of the picture, her face just visible, was the woman in the picture in Anna’s room. Her mother, Judy.

And on the baby’s bottom, a big brown birthmark.

This was proof, wasn’t it? This was indisputably a delivery room picture, this was indisputably the baby born to Dill and his wife, Judy. And this baby, shown in a third picture cradled in the arms of the woman in the picture in Anna’s room, was absolutely positively the original Anna Kingery.

The elation at finding something certain helped me through the pang of guilt I suffered as I extracted the key picture from the album. It, too, went in my purse, after I’d returned the photo album to its former position.

I finished my cleaning, surveyed the house, found it good. I put the garbage in the wheeled cans, swept the front and back steps. I was done. I went back in to put the broom away.

Dill was standing in the kitchen.

He had a pile of mail in his hands, was shuffling through it. When the broom hit the floor, Dill looked up sharply.

“Hi, Lily, this was mighty fine of you,” he said. He smiled at me, his bland and forgettable face beaming nothing but goodwill. “Hey, did I scare you? I thought you heard me pull into the garage.”

He must have come in the back door while I was sweeping at the front.

Still tense all over, I bent to retrieve the broom, glad my face was hidden for a moment while I recovered.

“I saw Varena downtown,” he said, as I straightened and moved to the broom closet. “I can’t believe after all this waiting, it’s finally going to be our wedding day tomorrow.”

I wrung out a dishrag I’d forgotten and draped it neatly over the sink divider.

“Lily, won’t you turn to look at me?”

I turned to meet his eyes.

“Lily, I know you and I have never gotten close. But I don’t have a sister, and I hope you’ll be one to me.”

I was repelled. Emotional appeals were not the way to make a relationship happen.

“You don’t know how hard it’s always been for Varena.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“Being your sister.”

I took a deep breath. I held my hand palm up. Explain?

“She would kill me if she knew I was saying this.” He shook his head at his own daring. “She never felt as pretty as you, as smart as you.”

That didn’t matter now. It hadn’t mattered for more than a decade.

“Varena,” I began, and my voice sounded rusty, “is a grown woman. We haven’t been teenagers for years.”

“When you’re a younger sister, apparently you have baggage you carry with you always. Varena thinks so, anyway. She always felt like an also-ran. With your parents. With your teachers. With your boyfriends.”

What crap was this? I gave Dill a cold stare.

“And when you got raped…”

I’ll give him that, he went right on and said the word.

“… and all the focus was on you, and all you wanted was to get rid of it, I think in some way it gave Varena some… satisfaction.”

Which would have made her feel guilty.

“And of course, she began to feel guilty about that, about even feeling a particle of righteousness about your getting hurt.”

“Your point being?”

“You don’t seem happy to be here. At the wedding. In the town. You don’t seem happy for your sister.”

I couldn’t quite see the connection between the two statements. Was I supposed to wag my tail since Varena was getting married… because she’d felt guilty when I got raped? I didn’t have any active animosity toward Dill Kingery, so I tried to work through his thought.

I shook my head. I wasn’t making any connections. “Since Varena wants to marry you, I’m glad she is,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t about to apologize for being who I was, what I had become.

Dill looked at me. He sighed. “Well, that’s as good as it’s gonna get, I guess,” he said, with a tight little smile.

Guess so.

“What about you?” I asked. “You married one unstable wife. Your mother’s not exactly predictable. I hope you see nothing like that in Varena.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

“You take the cake, you really do, Lily,” he said, shaking his head. He didn’t seem to find that endearing. “You don’t say much, but you go for the throat when you decide to talk. I think that’s what your parents have been dying to ask me for the past two years.”

I waited.

“No,” he said, quite seriously now. “I see nothing like that in Varena. But that’s why I dated her for so long. That’s why our engagement went on forever. I had to be sure. For my sake, and especially for Anna’s sake. I think Varena is the sanest woman I ever met.”

“Did your wife ever threaten to hurt Anna?”

He turned white as a sheet. I’d never seen anyone pale so fast. “What-how-” He was spluttering.

“Before she killed herself, did she threaten to hurt Anna?”

It was like I was a cobra and he was a mouse.

“What have you heard?” he choked out.

“Just a guess. Did she try to hurt Anna?”

“Please go now,” he said finally. “Lily, please go.”

I’d certainly handled that well. What a masterly interrogation! At least, I reflected, Dill and I had been equally unpleasant to each other, though I might have the edge since I’d talked about something new, something that wasn’t common currency in Bartley-at least, judging by Dill’s reaction.

I was willing to bet I wouldn’t be invited to go on vacations with Dill and Varena.

It seemed possible that Dill’s first wife had been capable- at least in Dill’s estimation-of harming her baby. And page 23 was missing from a memory book that was most probably Anna’s.

I understood what the word “heartsick” meant. I tried to comfort myself with the thought of Anna’s birthmark. At least I’d learned one fact.

As I backed out of Dill’s driveway I discovered I didn’t want to go home.

I began cruising aimlessly-shades of being a teenager, when “riding around” had been a legitimate activity-and didn’t know where I was going until I found myself parking at the town square.

I went into the furniture store, and a bell tinkled as the door swung shut. Mary Maude Plummer was typing something into a computer at a desk behind a high counter in the middle of the store. Reading glasses perched at the end of her nose, and she was wearing her business face, competent and no-nonsense.

“Can I help you?” she asked and then looked up from the computer screen. “Oh, Lily!” she said happily, her face changing from the inside out.

“Come go riding,” I suggested. “I’ve got the car.”

“Your mom let you have it?” Mary Maude dissolved in giggles. She glanced around at the empty store. “Maybe I can, really! Emory,” she called. Out of the shadows at the back of the store, Emory Osborn materialized like a thin, blond ghost.

“Hello, Miss Bard,” he said, his voice wispy.

“Emory, can you watch the store while I take my lunch hour?” Mary Maude asked in the gentle, earnest voice you use with slow children. “Jerry and Sam should be back in just a minute.”

“Sure,” Emory said. He looked as if a good wind would whisk him away.

“Thanks.” Mary Maude fished her purse from some hidden spot under the counter.

When we were far enough away that Emory couldn’t hear us, Mary Maude muttered, “He should never have tried to come to work today. But his sister’s here, and she’s managing the home front, so I think he didn’t have anything else to do.”

We went out the front door like two girls skipping school. I noticed how professional and groomed Mary Maude looked in her winter white suit, a sharp, unwelcome contrast to me in my sweats.

“I’ve been cleaning Dill’s house,” I explained, suddenly self-conscious. I couldn’t remember apologizing for my clothes, not for years.

“That’s what you do for a living now?” Mary Maude asked as she buckled up.

“Yep,” I said flatly.

“Boy, did you ever think I’d end up selling furniture and you’d end up cleaning it?”

We shook our heads simultaneously.

“I’ll bet you’re tops at what you do,” Mary said, matter-of-factly.

I was surprised and oddly touched. “I’ll bet you sell a lot of furniture,” I offered and was even more surprised to find that I meant it.

“I do pretty well,” she answered, her voice offhand. She looked at me, and her face crinkled in a smile. “You know, Lily, sometimes I just can’t believe we grew up!”

That was never my problem. “Sometimes I can’t remember I was ever a teen,” I said.

“But here we are, alive, in good health, single but not without hope, and backed by family and friends,” Mary Maude said, almost chanting.

I raised my eyebrows.

“I have to practice counting my blessings all the time,” she explained, and I laughed. “See, that didn’t hurt,” she said.

We ate lunch at a fast-food place decorated with tinsel and lights and artificial snow. A Santa Claus robot nodded and waved from a plastic sleigh.

For a little while we just got used to each other. We talked about people we’d known and where they were now, how many times they’d been married and to whom. Mary Maude touched on her divorce and the baby she’d lost to crib death. We didn’t need to talk about my past; it was too well known. But Mary asked me some questions about Shakespeare, about my daily life, and to my pleasure it was easy to answer.

She, too, asked if I was seeing someone special.

“Yes,” I said, trying not to stare down at my hands. “A man from Little Rock. Jack Leeds.”

“Oh, is he the ponytail guy who showed up at the wedding rehearsal?”

“Yeah,” I said, not even trying to look up this time. “How’d you know?” Why was I even asking, knowing the Bartley grapevine as I did?

“Lou O’Shea was in yesterday. She and Jess have a bed on layaway for Krista for Christmas.”

“They seem like a nice couple,” I said.

“Yeah, they are,” Mary Maude agreed, dipping a french fry in a puddle of ketchup. She’d made a trail of paper napkins to keep her winter white in a pristine state. “They sure are having a hard time with that Krista since they had Luke.”

“That’s what I hear. You reckon she feels unloved now that the little boy’s here?”

“I suppose, though they were real open with her about her being adopted and telling her they loved her enough to pick her out. But I guess maybe she feels like Luke is really theirs, and she isn’t.”

I said I hadn’t realized that the O’Sheas were so open about Krista being adopted.

“Lou more than Jess,” Mary Maude commented. “Lou has always been more out-front than her husband, but I guess he’s had more practice at keeping secrets, him being a minister and all.”

Ministers do have to keep a lot of secrets. I hadn’t thought of that before. I got up to get some more tea-and another napkin for Mary Maude.

“Lou tells me the man you’re seeing is quite a looker,” Mary Maude said slyly, bringing the conversation back to the most interesting topic.

It had never occurred to me someone as conventional as Lou O’Shea would find him so. “Yes.”

“Is he sweet to you?” Mary Maude sounded wistful.

This was everyone’s day to want to know about Jack. First Anna, now Mary Maude. Weddings must bring it out in women. “Sweet,” I said, trying the word on Jack to see how it fit. “No. He’s not sweet.”

Surprise hiked up Mary Maude’s eyebrows. “Not sweet! Well, then! Is he rich?”

“No,” I answered without hesitation.

“Then why are you seeing him?” Suddenly her cheeks got pinker, and she looked simultaneously delighted and embarrassed. “Is he…?”

“Yes,” I told her, trying not to look as self-conscious as I felt.

“Oh, girl,” said Mary Maude, shaking her head and giggling-

“Emory is single now,” I observed, trying to steer the conversation away from me and into a channel that might lead to some knowledge.

She didn’t waste time looking shocked. “Never in a million years,” Mary Maude told me as she consumed her last french fry.

“Why are you so sure about that?”

“Aside from the fact that now it would mean taking on a newborn baby and an eight-year-old girl, there’s the man himself. I never met anyone as hard to read as Emory. He’s polite as the day is long, he never uses bad language, he’s… yes, he is… sweet. Old ladies just love him. But Emory’s not a simple man, and he’s not my idea of red-blooded.”

“Oh?”

“Not that I think he’s gay,” Mary Maude protested hastily. “It’s just that, for example, we were outside the store watching the Harvest Festival parade, back in September, and all the beauty queens were coming by riding on the top of the convertibles, like we did?”

I’d completely forgotten that. Maybe that was why riding in the Shakespeare parade had plowed up my feelings so deeply?

“And Emory just wasn’t interested. You know? You can tell when a man is appreciating women. And he wasn’t. He enjoyed the floats and the bands. He loved the little girls, you know, Little Miss Pumpkin Patch, that kind of thing, and he told me he’d even thought of entering Eve, but his wife didn’t like the idea. But those big gals in their sequin dresses and push-up bras didn’t do a thing for Emory. No, I’m going to have to look farther than the furniture store to find someone to date.”

I made an indeterminate noise.

“Now, we were talking earlier about Lou and Jess O’Shea. They were watching that parade catty-corner to where I was standing, and believe me, honey! That Jess can enjoy grown-up women!”

“But he doesn’t…?”

“Oh, Lord, no! He is devoted to Lou. But he’s not blind, either.” Mary Maude looked at her watch. “Oh, girl! I have to get back.”

We tossed our litter into a can and walked out still talking. Well, Mary Maude was talking, and I was listening, but I was agreeable to listening. And when I dropped her off at Makepeace Furniture, I gave her a quick hug.

I couldn’t think of anywhere to go but back to my parents’ house.

I walked right into yet another crisis. The couples dinner in honor of Varena and Dill, which had been rescheduled at least twice, was once again endangered. The high school senior who had been booked to baby-sit Krista, her little brother Luke, and Anna had caught the flu.

According to Varena, who was sitting at the kitchen table with the tiny Bartley phone book open before her, she and Lou had called every adolescent known to baby-sit in Bartley, and all of them were either flu victims or already attending a teen Christmas party the Methodist church was giving.

This seemed to be a crisis I had no part in other than to look sympathetic. Then a solution to a couple of problems occurred to me, and I knew what I had to do.

Jack would owe me permanently, as far as I was concerned.

I tapped Varena on the shoulder. “I’ll do it,” I told her.

“What?” She’d been in the middle of a semihysterical outburst to my mother.

“I’ll do it,” I repeated.

“You’ll… baby-sit?”

“That’s what I said.” I was feeling touchy at the sheer incredulity in my sister’s voice.

“Have you ever kept kids before?”

“Do you need a baby-sitter or don’t you?”

“Yes, it would be wonderful, but… are you sure you wouldn’t mind? You’ve never been… I mean, you’ve always said that children weren’t your… special thing.”

“I can do it.”

“Well! That would be-just great,” Varena said stoutly, obviously realizing she had to show no reservations, no matter what she felt.

Actually, I had kept the four Althaus kids one afternoon and evening when Jay Althaus had been in a car wreck and Carol had had to go to the hospital. Both sets of grandparents had been out of town. Carol had been a frantic, panicked, pathetic mother and wife by the time I answered her phone call.

So I knew how to change diapers and bathe a baby, and the oldest Althaus boy had showed me how to heat up a bottle. I might not be Mary Poppins, but all the children would be alive and fed and clean by the time the parents got home.

Varena was on the phone with Lou O’Shea, giving her the good news.

“She’s glad to do it,” Varena was saying, still trying not to sound amazed. “So Lily should be there about, what? Six? Will the kids have eaten? Oh, OK. And there’ll be Anna, Krista, your little boy… oh, really? Oh, gosh. Let me ask her.”

Varena covered the receiver. She was making a big effort to look cheerful and unconcerned. “Lily, Lou says they’ve agreed to keep the Osborn kids, too. At the time, they thought Shelley was coming with her boyfriend.” Shelley was the flu-ridden teenager.

I took a deep, cleansing breath, like I did in karate class before I began my kata. “No problem,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

I confined myself to a nod.

“That’s not a problem, she says,” Varena said chirpily into the phone. “Right, it’ll only last three hours at the most, two more likely, and we’ll be just a few blocks away.”

Sounded like Lou was a little concerned at the prospect of my baby-sitting such a mob.

The doorbell rang, and my mother hustled into the living room to answer it. I heard her say, “Hello, again!” with a kind of supercharged enthusiasm that alerted me. Sure enough, she led Jack into the kitchen with a pleased, proud air, as though she’d snagged him just when he was about to get away.

I found myself on my feet and going to him before I even knew I was moving. His arms slid around me and he gave me a kiss, but a kiss that said my parents were looking at him over my shoulder.

“Well, young man, it’s nice to see you again. We’d begun to think we wouldn’t get to lay eyes on you before you left town.” My father was being bluff and hearty.

Jack was wearing a blue-and-green-plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans, and his thick hair was brushed smoothly back, gathered at the nape of his neck with an elastic band. I patted his shoulder gently and stepped away from him.

“I saw a mighty lot of presents in the living room,” Jack said to my father. “Looks like you-all are having a wedding.” He smiled, and those seductive deep lines suddenly appeared in parentheses from his nose to the corners of his thin, mobile mouth.

Mother, Father, and Varena laughed, as charmed by his smile as I was.

“As a matter of fact,” Jack went on, “I hoped this would be appropriate.”

“Why, thank you,” Varena said, surprised and showing it, taking the shallow wrapped box Jack pulled out of one jacket pocket.

When I turned to watch Varena opened the present, Jack’s arm went around my waist and pulled me against him, my back to his chest. I could feel the corners of my mouth tug up, and I looked down at my hands, resting on the arms crossed below my breasts. I took a deep breath. I made an effort to focus on the box Varena was holding.

She lifted the lid. From the tissue, she extracted an antique silver cake server, a lovely piece with engraving. When Varena passed it around, I could see the curling script read “V K 1889.”

“This is just beautiful,” Varena said, delighted and not a little stunned. “However did you find it?”

“Sheer luck,” Jack said. He was pressed very firmly against my bottom. “I just happened to be in an antiques store and it caught my eye.”

I could see the wheels turning in my mother’s head. I knew she was thinking that this was a serious present. Such a gift announced that Jack planned to be seeing me for some time, since he was displaying such a great desire to please my family. My father’s face lit up (way too obviously) as the same idea occurred to him.

I felt I was watching a tribal ritual unfold.

“I have to put this somewhere conspicuous, so everyone’ll notice it,” Varena told Jack, plainly wanting him to realize she was very pleased indeed.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said.

And before you could say Jack Robinson, Jack Leeds was installed at my parents’ kitchen table, a grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of soup in front of him, Varena and my mother waiting on him hand and foot.

After he’d eaten, Mother and Varena practically threw us out of the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to help with the dishes. They were flabbergasted when Jack offered to wash. They turned him down with fatuous smiles, and by the time I climbed into Jack’s car I was torn between laughter and exasperation.

“I think they approve of me,” Jack said with a straight face.

“Well, you are breathing.”

He laughed, but he stopped abruptly and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. He started the engine.

“Where are we going? I have to be at the manse at 6:00,” I reminded him. Mother and Varena had immediately told Jack I’d volunteered to keep the kids.

“We need to talk,” he said. We were silent on the ride to the motel, Jack grim and taciturn, I uneasily aware that I was not on the same page.

As we turned on the corner by the Presbyterian manse, I thought of Krista, Anna, and Eve.

And, oddly, I suddenly remembered spending nights with other girls when I was really young. I remembered how I’d carry a whole suitcase full of stuff with me for an overnight visit, everything and anything I thought we might want to play with, or look at, or gossip about.

Including a memory book.