Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Nine

Bobo Winthrop stopped by that night. He knew the whole story about Cliff Eggers.

“There was a stake hidden under the steps,” he told me, the relish of the young in his voice. We were sitting on my front steps, which are small and very public. I wanted the public part. There were good reasons I should not be along in a private place with Bobo. I had my arms around my knees, trying to ignore the ache in the pit of my stomach and the unpredictable flares of misery.

“Stake a-k-e, not steak e-a-k?”

He laughed. “A-k-e. Sharpened and planted in the dirt under the steps, so when the step gave way, his leg would go down into the area and be stuck by the stake.” He pushed his blond hair out of his face. He’d come from karate class, and he was now in his gi pants and a white tank top.

“I guess that would’ve happened to anyone’s leg,” I suggested.

“Oh. Well, yeah, I guess so. If his wife had come home before he did, she would’ve gotten hurt instead of him.”

I hadn’t thought of that, and I winced as I pictured Tamsin going through the step and being impaled on the stake. “Did he have to stay at the hospital?” I figured if Bobo knew all this, maybe he knew even more.

“Nope, they sent him home. It was really an ugly wound, Mary Frances’s aunt told me-she’s an emergency room nurse, Mrs. Powell is-and she said it looked worse than it really was. But it’s going to be really sore.” Mary Frances was one of Bobo’s former girlfriends. He had a talent for remaining on their good side.

Janet Shook came jogging down the street then, her small square face set in its determined mode, and her swinging brown hair darkened with sweat around her ears and temples.

“Stop and visit for a minute,” I called, and she glanced at a watch on her left wrist and then cast herself down on the grass. “Want a lawn chair?”

“No, no,” she panted. “The grass feels good. I needed to stop anyway. I’m still not a hundred percent after that knock on the head. And I had karate class, tonight. You should have been there, Lily. Bobo and I got to teach two ladies in their sixties how to stand in shiko dachi. But I missed running. I’ve signed up for a ten K race in Springdale next month.”

Janet and Bobo began a conversation about running- wearing the right shoes, mapping your route, maximizing your running time.

I laid my cheek on my knee and closed my eyes, letting the two familiar voices wash over me. At the end of a day in which I’d done mighty little, I managed to feel quite tired. I was considering Cliff’s leg going through the step-what a shock that must have been!-and the hostile visit of Detective Stokes. I mulled over green-eyed Officer McClanahan. I wondered if he’d seen the body of poor Saralynn Kleinhoff, if he’d looked at her with the same cool curiosity with which he’d eyed me.

Surely his face was familiar to me, too? Surely I had seen him before? I had, I was sure, after a moment’s further thought. I began to rummage around in my memory. He hadn’t been in a police uniform. Something about a dog, surely? A dog, a small dog…

“Lily?” Janet was saying.

“What?”

“You were really daydreaming,” she said, sounding more than a little worried. “You feeling okay?”

“Oh, yes, fine. I was just trying to remember something, one of those little things that nags at the edges of your mind.”

“What Marshall doesn’t realize,” Bobo said to Janet, evidently resuming a conversation that my abstraction had interrupted, “is that Shakespeare needs a different kind of sporting goods store.”

I could feel my eyebrows crawl up my forehead. This, from a young man whose father owned a sporting goods store so large there was a plan to start producing a catalog.

“Oh, I agree!” Janet’s hands flew up in the air to measure her agreement. “Why should I have to drive over to Montrose to get my workout pants? Why shouldn’t the kids taking jazz at Syndi Swayze’s be able to get their kneepads here? I mean, there are some things you just can’t get at Wal-Mart!”

I’d never seen Janet so animated. And she sounded younger. How old could she be? Wish some astonishment, I realized Janet was at least seven years younger than I was.

“So, are you totally satisfied with your job?” Bobo asked, out of the blue.

“Well.” Janet scrunched up her face. “You know how it is. I’ve run Safe After School for four years now, and I feel like I’ve got it down. I’m restless. But I don’t want to teach school, which is the only thing I’m trained for.”

“My family, we’re all merchants,” Bobo said.

It was true, I realized, though I’d never have thought to put it that way. Bobo’s family had made their money selling things; the sporting goods store that leaned heavily toward hunting and fishing equipment, the lumber and home supplies store, and the oil company that had supplied the money to build the Winthrop empire.

“So,” he resumed, “I guess it’s in my blood. See, what I’ve been thinking lately-now you tell me if you think this is a good idea, Janet, and of course you, too, Lily-I think that the sporting goods store isn’t really the kind of place most women and kids want to come into. What they want, I think, is a smaller store where they can come in without going through a lot of crossbows and fishing rods and rifles, a smaller store where they can find their running shorts and athletic bras and those kneepads you mentioned-the ones you need to wear when you take jazz dancing.”

“Tap shoes,” said Janet, longing in her voice. “Ballet slippers.”

“I think we really have an idea here.”

“It would be great,” she said, philosophically. “But ideas aren’t money to underwrite a store start-up.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Bobo said. He was grinning. He looked about eighteen, but I knew he was at least twenty-one now. “Because my grandfather’s will just got probated, and I happen to have a substantial amount of money.”

Janet gaped at him. “We’re talking serious? You weren’t just dreaming? You really think there’s a possibility of doing this?”

“We need to do a lot of figuring.”

“We?” Janet asked, her voice weak.

“Yeah. You’re the one who knows what we need. You’re the idea woman.”

“Well.” Janet sounded out of breath. “You actually mean it?”

“Sure I do. Hey Lily, would you mind if we finished Janet’s run and went over to her place to talk? What do you think about this idea?”

I felt rueful and old. “I think it’s a great idea for both of you.”

Janet’s face lit up like a torch. Bobo’s was hardly less excited. In a second, they were stretching before they began running. I noticed Bobo’s eyes running over Janet’s ass when she bent over. He gave a little nod, all to himself. Yep, it was a nice ass.

As they set off down the street, I had to smile to myself. All those hours I’d worried about Bobo’s inappropriate affection for me, all the times I’d tried to repulse him, hate him, fight my own shameful physical attraction to him… and all it took was Janet Shook’s brain, ass, and a dash of mercantile blood.

I went inside, and when I’d locked the door behind me, I laughed out loud.

The next morning-the next boring, boring, morning-I went to the library. I needed to swap my books, and I thought I might do some research on runaways. Jack had discussed printing a small pamphlet on the search for runaways, since so much of his business came from such searches. It would be good to feel I’d accomplished something.

The modest Shakespeare library was in the oldest county building, which was about the rank at which most Shakespeareans placed reading. In the summer, it was hot, and in the winter, the pipes clanked and moaned and the air was warm and close. The ceilings were very high. In fact, I believed the building had been a bank at one point in time. There was a lot of marble.

To humanize the building, the librarians had added curtains and area rugs and posters, and on pretty days the attempt worked. But today was not such a day; it was going to rain, and the uniform sullen gray of the sky was echoed in the marble. I stepped from the damp heat of the morning into the chilly marble interior and shivered. Through the high windows, with the happy yellow curtains pulled back to show the sky, I could see a silver maple tossing in a strong wind. The rain would come soon.

I consulted one of the computers, and began scribbling down a list of books and magazine articles. One article was very recent. In fact, it should still be in the current magazine area, a sort of nook made comfortable by deep chairs and an area rug.

After I’d read the article and made some notes, I picked up a copy of People and flipped through it, amazed all over again that the reading public would be interested in the outsider’s view of the life of someone they would never know. Why would a hairdresser in Shakespeare care that Julia Roberts had worn that designer’s slacks to the premier of a new movie? Would a bartender in Little Rock ever be the richer by the knowledge that Russell Crowe had turned down a part in that film?

Of course, here I was, reading the same article I was deriding. I held the magazine a little closer to peer at a ring some singer had paid a third-world budget to purchase. A ring… a celebrity magazine. Suddenly, some synapsis fired in my head.

The picture I remembered wasn’t in this magazine in particular, but I associated the picture with a magazine very like it.

How had I happened to see the picture? These things weren’t on my normal reading agenda. I pulled and prodded at my faint memory until I’d teased a thread loose. I’d seen the picture when I’d been at Carrie’s office, when I’d been dusting. The magazine had been left open in one of the rooms- which one? I could almost see the cover after I’d automatically flipped the magazine shut and returned it to a pile. The cover had been primarily ivory, with the picture of an actress-maybe Julia Roberts again-dressed in jeans and boots and a handkerchief, looking brilliant against the neutral color. Carrie’s office!

Trying to keep hold of the image in my memory, I drove to Carrie’s. Of course, her office was open and full of patients, and I explained to the receptionist that I wasn’t there to see the doctor, that I was trying to find something I’d lost the last time I’d cleaned. Gennette Jenks, the nurse, gave me a suspicious look, but then Gennette was always suspicious of me. A hard-faced woman in her fifties, Gennette was chemically brunette and naturally efficient, which was the only reason Carrie kept her on. I looked around the small front office, which was crammed with a fax machine, a copier, a huge bank of files, and mounds of paper everywhere. No magazines.

And no magazines in Carrie’s office besides a tattered old Reader’s Digest left there on the little table by the chair in front of the desk. That was the bad-news chair; because most often when Carrie invited patients into her office and sat behind her desk, that meant she was about to deliver bad news. I twitched the chair to a more hospitable angle.

The magazine I’d been seeking was in the big pile on the table by the waiting area, a few chairs at the end of the hall where caregivers could wait while their charges were being examined. I shuffled through the stack and extracted the cover I’d been searching for. I stepped sideways into the little room where the part-time clerk, a milkmaidish blonde with a lust for Twinkies, worked on insurance claims. This was the same room where Cliff Eggers had been working the morning I’d cleaned, and this was where I’d picked up the magazine and returned it to the pile. That explained why I’d remembered the magazine. I’d stood in there for such a long time while he talked to me, I’d had time to memorize the cover.

After nodding to the clerk, who gave me an uncertain smile in return, I began paging through the magazine. Once, twice… I was beginning to doubt myself when I noticed the jagged edge. Someone had removed a page from the magazine. Maybe it had had a great recipe for chicken salad on the other side-but on the whole, I doubted that. Someone besides me had found the picture interesting.

Now that I knew what issue of what magazine I needed, I returned to the library, dashing through the first blast of rain to push through the heavy glass doors. Lightning was making patterns in the sky and the wind had increased in pace, so the view through the high windows was ominous. Mary Lou Pettit, the librarian working the circulation desk, was clearly unhappy about the violence of the weather. As I crossed the large open area in front of the desk to reach the periodicals area, she caught my eye and gave an exaggerated wince, inviting me to share her anxiety. I raised my hand to acknowledge her, and shrugged.

To tell you the truth, I’ve always liked a good storm.

I’d checked the date on the magazine at Carrie’s office. Now I found that the one I wanted had been put away. I filled out a slip, handed it in, and waited ten long minutes while an aide looked in the periodicals storage room. I passed the time by watching the rain lash the windows in irregular gusts.

Refusing to peek until I was by myself, I sought out a half-concealed table in a corner behind the stacks. I turned to the page that had been clipped from the copy I’d checked. “Author protects privacy” was the uninspired headline, and I checked the other side to see if there was anything more interesting there. But it turned out to be an ad for a diet supplement, one I’d seen in many, many other periodicals, so I flipped back.

The author in question was a man of medium height and build, swathed in a track suit and baseball cap, further shielded with sunglasses. He was holding leashes with two little dachshunds trotting at the ends.

Okay. So this wouldn’t be an instant answer. I scooted my chair closer to the table and began to read. There was only one other person in sight, a bony and lashless young man who worked as a bagger at one of the grocery stores. He was reading a computer magazine. He seemed completely engrossed.

So I began scanning. Author of true-crime bestsellers Baby Doll Dead and Mother and Child, reclusive Gibson Banks… blah, blah, blah… real name kept completely secret by his publisher… only picture his publisher is allowed to release… “He probably rented the dogs for the picture,” said Gary Kinneally, the photographer. “He didn’t seem to care for them at all.”

I examined the picture again. I whipped out the little magnifying glass that attached to my key chain, a stocking stuffer last Christmas from my sister. I’d never had occasion to use it before, but now I was glad I had it. It took a moment’s practice to learn how to use it effectively, but finally I had it on the man’s face. I looked at his skin very carefully. The picture was not in color, but I could tell the hair was not dark. No mustache. I analyzed his body.

He was probably five foot ten, maybe one fifty-five or one sixty. I moved the magnifying glass over his hand, the one extended holding the leashes.

I looked at his hand real close. And then I looked again.

And then I got mad.

He wasn’t at the police station. It was his day off, the dispatcher told me. I was lucky not to encounter Claude on my way out.

How’d I know where his house was? I’d seen him coming out of it as I took one of my night walks. At the time, I hadn’t realized who he was, or at least what his cover identity was. At the right modest house on Mimosa Street, I pulled up front, not caring that I was halfway onto his lawn. I was across the sodden grass and onto his front porch before you could say, “Traitor.” I was too angry to raise my hand to knock. I turned sideways, raised my leg, and kicked.

Officer McClanahan looked up from his computer in understandable surprise.