Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Ten

“Miss Bard,” he said, getting up very, very slowly. “Are you all right?”

“I think not,” I said, softly. The rainwater was trickling down my face. I shivered in the air conditioning because my clothes were soaking wet.

“I have no intention of attacking you,” he pointed out, and I realized I had dropped into fighting stance, my body aligned sideways to him, my knees bent, my hands fisted; the left one in chamber, the right one poised in front of me.

“I might attack you, though,” I said. I circled to the right a little. He was stuck behind his computer desk, and it was hard to see what he could do about it. I was interested to find out. “I know who you are,” I told him.

“Damn. I ripped the picture out of the magazine at the doctor’s office when I was there for my allergy shot. I knew there were lots more copies around town, but so many people could see that one.”

I sensed movement and glanced toward the door that led into the back of the house. Two little dogs stood there, the dachshunds from the picture. They didn’t bark, but stared at me with round brown eyes and wagged their tails in a slow and tentative way.

I looked back quickly to “Officer McClanahan.” He hadn’t budged.

“Was it them that gave me away?” he asked. His voice was calm, or he was working mighty hard to make it seem so.

“The ring.”

He looked down at his finger. “I never even thought of it,” he said, his voice heavy with chagrin. “The dogs, yes. But I never thought of the damn ring.” It was heavy and gold, with a crest of some kind with one dark blue part and one white, as background; I hadn’t been able to tell the colors from the picture, of course, but I could tell dark and light. “My college ring,” he told me.

“The dogs weren’t just props,” I said.

“No, and I laughed like hell when I read that story,” Gibson Banks said. He pointed at the dogs. “This is Sadie, and this is Sam.” His face relaxed into a smile, but mine didn’t. If he thought cute names for his dogs would charm me, he had the wrong woman. “I can tell you’re very angry with me,” he continued, the smile fading.

“No shit,” I said. I moved a little closer and the dogs came in to sniff me. I didn’t react to their cold noses pressing my ankles, and I didn’t take my eyes off him.

“Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to hit me, or what?”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” I said. I was at ease with standing and thinking about what to do, but he was getting jumpy. My breathing was even and good, the discomfort in my pelvis now only a slight ache, and I was fine with kicking him.

I wondered if Jack would come back to Shakespeare to bail me out of jail, and I wondered if the trial would take very long.

“You betrayed me, and my friend Claude,” I said.

“I misled you.”

“You came to write about my life, without telling me.”

“No, not your life.” He actually looked indignant.

I found myself feeling strangely embarrassed, guilty of some form of hubris. “Jack’s?”

“Not even Jack’s, as fascinating as it is to any aficionado of true crime that you two are a couple.”

“Who, then?”

“Tamsin Lynd,” Gibson Banks said.

“Does Claude know who you are?” All the fire left me, abruptly and without warning. I eased into a chair close to the desk.

“He knows I’m Gerry McClanahan, a police officer who wanted to live in a small town.”

“That’s who you really are? Your real name?”

“Yes. I spent fifteen years on the St. Louis force before I found out I liked writing just as much as I liked being a cop. Since then, I’ve lived all over America, moving from case to case. Europe, too.”

I held up my hand to stop his digression. “But Claude doesn’t know you’re also Gibson Banks.”

Gerry glanced down, and I hoped he really was feeling a little ashamed. “No. I’ve never taken a real job to be closer to a story before. I figured it was the only way to stay hidden in a town this small.”

I ran a hand over my face. Claude had one cop who was a writer in disguise, another who was obsessed with proving her own version of a current case. “I’m going to tell him,” I said.

“I wish I could persuade you not to, but I hear Chief Friedrich and his wife are your friends.”

“Yes.” Gerry McClanahan, aka Gibson Banks, didn’t sound upset enough to suit me.

“What about Tamsin Lynd?”

“She’s my counselor.”

“What do you think about what’s happening to her?”

“I’m not giving you a quote. If you think you’re going to put me in your book, you deserve anything you get.” I felt like someone was boring through me with a giant awl. My poor life, so painfully reconstructed, and it was all about to be destroyed. “Don’t write about me,” I said, trying not to sound as though I were begging. “Don’t write about Jack. Don’t do it.” If he could not hear the despair, he was a stupid man.

If he had smiled I might have killed him.

But-almost as bad-he looked cool and detached. “I’m just here in Shakespeare following the Tamsin Lynd story,” he said after a long pause, during which the sound of the rain dripping from the roof became preternaturally loud. “A middle-class woman of her level of education, in her line of work, being stalked by a madman as she moves around America? That’s a great story. You know Tamsin and Cliff have moved twice to escape this guy? But somehow he always finds out where she is and begins leaving her tokens of his-what? His hatred of her? His love of her? And she’s this perfectly ordinary woman. Bad haircut, needs to loose some pounds. It’s amazing. It could happen to anyone.” Gerry McClanahan was speaking with such gusto that I could tell he was delighted to have someone to talk to.

“But it’s happening to her. She’s living this. You’re not watching a movie,” I said, slowly and emphatically. Talking to this man was like talking to glass. Everything I said bounced off without penetrating.

“This case has even more twists than even you can imagine. Look at finding you, such a name in true crime books already, and Jack Leeds, whose television clip is a true piece of Americana.”

He was referring to that awful footage of Karen’s brains flying all over Jack’s chest when her husband shot her. I had a moment of dizziness. But McClanahan hadn’t finished yet.

“And you’re just sidebars! I mean, think. One of the counselees getting killed in the counselor’s office? That’s amazing. This case has turned upside down. When it’s over, and I wrap up my book, think of how much women in America will know about being stalked! Think of all the resources they’ll have, if it ever happens to them.”

“You don’t give a tinker’s damn about the resources available to the women of America,” I said. “You care about making money off of someone else’s misery.”

“No,” he said, and for the first time I could tell he was getting angry. “That’s not it. This is a great story. Tamsin is an ordinary woman in an extraordinary situation. The truth about this needs to be told.”

“You don’t know the truth. You don’t know what is really happening.”

He put his hands on the yellow legal pad on his desk and leaned on it as if he were guarding its contents. He focused on me. “But I’m very close. I’m right here; working on the investigation into the murder that took place in Tamsin’s office! The death of a woman who was killed just to make some weird point to Tamsin! How much closer can you get?” He was flushed with excitement, the bottle-green eyes alight with elation.

I thought of many things to say, but not one of them, or even all of them, would have made any impression on this man. He was going to ruin my life. I once again thought of killing him.

“I’ll bet that’s how you looked before you pulled the trigger,” he said, his eyes eating me up. For an interminable moment I felt exposed before this man.

“Listen,” he said. “Keep quiet, let me see this through, and I’ll leave you out.”

I stared at him. Bargaining?

“I’m doing as good a job as any other policeman on this force. I’m really working, not just playing at it. If you let me follow this story to the end… you’re home free.”

“And since you’re so honest, I should believe you?”

He pretended to wince. “Ouch. The truth is, I’ve done more watching out for Tamsin than any cop could ever do. In case you hadn’t realized it, I bought this house because it backs catty-cornered to Tamsin and Cliff’s. I watch. Every moment she’s home and I’m not at work, I watch.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “You’re stalking her, too?”

His face flushed deeply. He’d never put it that way to himself, I was willing to bet. “I’m observing her,” he said.

“No, you’re waiting for someone to get her.”

I got up and left his house.

“Remember!” he called after me. “If I get to keep my job, you get to keep out of the book!”

I went right to Claude. I was in that period of grace, the time between the moment the bullet hits and the moment you begin to feel the pain; in that period of grace, you actually felt numb, but you knew something dreadful was coming. (At least, that was what some gunshot victims had told me.) If I waited, I would consider Gerry McClanahan’s offer. I couldn’t let myself hesitate.

The old house, temporary home of the chief of police’s office, looked especially forlorn in the renewed rain. I was so wet that getting out again hadn’t posed a hardship, and I walked into the station with my hair dripping in streams to the floor, much to the amusement of the desk clerk. She went into Claude’s office after I asked for him and ushered me in after a brief consultation. She also handed me a towel.

It was hard to know what to dry first, but after I rubbed my face and hair, I began to work my way down. Then I folded the towel, put it in the uncomfortable chair that faced Claude’s desk, and sat on it.

Claude was wearing his work face, serious and hard, and I was wearing mine, blank and equally hard. We were just two tough people, there in that little office, and I was about to tell my friend Claude some tough things. Before I opened my mouth to speak, I found myself wishing I were rich enough to hire someone else to come in here and tell Claude all this unpleasant news. And I was still undecided about whether or not to talk about Alicia Stokes.

In the end, I only broke the news about Gerry McClanahan. If Claude had researched a little more he would’ve found out about Stokes’s obsession. Or maybe he did know. Maybe he needed her more than he cared about her quirks.

At least I told myself that was my reasoning; but actually, I suspect I just didn’t want to give Claude so much bad news at one time.

“So,” Claude rumbled, when I’d finished, “My newest officer is a famous writer?”

I nodded.

“He’s a qualified police officer, right? I mean, his references checked out.” These words were mild, giving no hint that Claude was truly and massively angry.

“Yes, he is a qualified police officer.”

“He told me he had taken a few years off to travel on some money he’d inherited.” Claude swiveled his chair to look out at a dripping world. “He didn’t have a record.” Claude kept staring out the damn window for a good while. “And he intends to write about the murder of Saralynn Kleinhoff?”

“He’s writing a book about the stalking of Tamsin Lynd.”

Another shock for Claude, who ran a hand over his seamed face. “So, though she never told us squat and I wouldn’t know about it to this day if Detective Stokes hadn’t remembered it from her former job, Tamsin Lynd has been stalked for a while. Persistently enough to make it a notable case.”

“According to McClanahan, yes. He says she’s moved twice.”

“And whoever this is, just keeps following her.”

“Alicia Stokes has a theory about that.”

“Yeah, Alicia said she thinks Lynd is doing all these things herself. She played me a tape about a similar case that occurred a few years ago, the woman was doing it all herself. Smearing manure on her own door, setting off smoke bombs on her porch, sending herself threatening hate mail.”

I couldn’t help but realize that Tamsin’s stay in the conference room while Saralynn was killed and Janet attacked was much more explainable if it had been Tamsin doing the attacking. I tried to imagine Tamsin pinning the body of Saralynn up on the bulletin board, and I just couldn’t. But I knew better than anyone did what could be inside someone, unsuspected. However… I shook my head. I just couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to see it.

“Lily, what did he threaten you with?”

“What?”

“You told McClanahan you were coming over here?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t try to stop you?”

I didn’t answer.

“I know he did, Lily. Don’t you lie to me. There’s been enough of that.”

The numbness had worn off by then, and Claude’s question drew my attention to the wound. The pain hit me broadside. I realized, fully, that my new life was gone. Possibly Jack’s, as well. We would go through the whole thing again, both of us, and I didn’t know if we were strong enough to withstand it.

“Lily?”

Looking down at my hands folded in my lap, I told him.

After a moment of silence, Claude said, “Damn him to hell.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“What about telling Tamsin?” I asked.

Claude rubbed a finger over the surface of his badge. “Lily, you go home and rest up,” he said finally. “That isn’t your responsibility. I’m sorry it’s mine, but I guess it is. It’s someone I employed who’s watching her.”

“But not illegally,” I said, having thought it over. “He stays on his property. He doesn’t trespass. He’s just… observing Tamsin’s life. From a safe distance.”

“He doesn’t communicate with her or try to scare her?” Claude asked, thinking it through.

“No. He just watches and waits for something else to happen to her.” I couldn’t help it; I shuddered.

“Maybe I should just tell her husband, that Cliff.”

“Cliff Eggers, martial medical transcriptionist? I don’t think that’d do a lot of good.”

“Me, either.” Claude reflected for a moment. “Well, Lily, I’m sure Jack will track me down and beat me up if you don’t go home to rest.”

For whatever reasons, he wanted me to go. There was nothing else I could say or do. I just had to wait, and watch the consequences coming at me. Nothing I could do would stop what was going to happen. I had sworn to myself that I would never again feel helpless in this life; to that end, I had trained myself and remained vigilant. But now, all over again, I was a victim.

I felt very tired. I returned the towel to the receptionist on my way out, and when I got home I was happy to get in a shower, get even wetter, and then put on some dry clothes. I sat in my reclining love seat, began rescreening one of the movies I’d rented, and without a premonitory blink I fell asleep.

Someone had hold of me, and I wrenched my arm away.

“What? Stop!” I mumbled, heavy with sleep.

“Lily! Lily! Wake up!”

“Jack? What are you doing here?” I focused on him with a little difficulty. I wasn’t used to napping, and I found it disagreed with me.

“I got a phone call,” he said, his voice clipped and hard. “Telling me I better get back fast, that you were in trouble.”

“Who would have said that?”

“Someone who didn’t want to leave a name.”

“I’m okay,” I said, a little muddled about all this, but still pretty sure I was basically all right. “I just fell asleep when I left Claude’s office. You won’t… you’re going to be really mad when I tell you what’s happened.”

“It must have been something, to make you sleep through karate class,” Jack said. I peered past him at the clock. It was seven thirty. I’d been asleep about two hours, I realized with a great deal of astonishment. I could count the naps I’d taken as an adult on the fingers of one hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “Let me go clean up a little. My mouth is gummy. I can’t believe I feel asleep.”

When I came back from the bathroom I was sure I was awake, and I knew I felt much better. I’d washed my face, brushed my teeth, and combed my hair. Jack looked calmer, but he was angry now, the false phone call having upset him badly.

“Did you try calling me before you rushed back from Little Rock?” That would have left the puzzle of who had called him, but relieved his anxiety.

Jack looked guilty. “Once.”

“No answer.”

“No.”

“Did you try my cell phone?”

“Yes.”

I took it from the table and looked at it. I’d never turned it on that day. “Okay, let me tell you where I was.” I could hardly upbraid Jack because he had rushed back to Shakespeare under the impression I was in deep trouble, either physically or emotionally. “I was at the police station.”

Jack’s dark brows arched up. “Really?” He was determined not to overreact, now.

“Yes. I was there because of the new patrolman.”

“The red-haired guy?” There wasn’t much Jack didn’t notice.

“The very one. It turns out he’s Gerry McClanahan, all right, but he’s also the true-crime writer Gibson Banks.”

“Oh, no.” Jack had been standing by the window looking out at the darkness of the cloudy night. Now he came and sat beside me on the love seat. He closed his eyes for a second as he assessed the damage this would do us. When he opened them, he looked like he was facing a firing squad. “God, Lily. This is going to be so bad. All over again.”

“He’s not after us. We’re only an interesting sidelight to him, something he just happened on. Serendipity.” I could not stop my voice from being bitter or my face from being grim.

Jack looked at me as though I better not draw this out. So I told him quickly and succinctly what Gerry McClanahan, aka Gibson Banks, had proposed to me. And what I had done.

“I could kill him,” Jack said. I looked at Jack’s face, and believed him. “I can’t believe the son-of-a-bitch made you that offer.” When Jack got mad, he got mad all over; there was no mistaking it. He was furious. “I’m going to go over and talk to him right now.”

“No, please, Jack.” I took his hands. “You can’t go over there mad. Besides, he might be on patrol.” I had a flash of an idea, something about Jack and his temper and impulsive nature, but in the urgency of the moment it went by me too fast for me to register it.

“Then I’ll find him in his car.” Jack shook my hands off. I could see that something about my becoming pregnant had smothered Jack’s sure knowledge that I was a woman who could definitely take care of herself. Or maybe it was because our brief life together was being threatened; that was what had shaken me so badly.

“You can come with me if you’re afraid I’ll kill the bastard,” Jack said, reading me correctly. “But I’m going to talk to him tonight.” Again, I felt as if I ought to be drawing a conclusion, as if somewhere in my brain a chime was ringing, but I couldn’t make the necessary connections.

I didn’t feel as though I had enough energy left to walk to the car, much less trail after Jack over to the writer’s house. But I had to. “Okay. Let’s go,” I said, getting to my feet. I pulled my cheap rain slicker from the little closet in the living room, and Jack got his. I grabbed my cell phone. “We need to take the car,” I said, trying not to sound as shaky as I felt. “I don’t want to walk in the dark.”

That didn’t fool Jack. I could see he knew I was weak. He shot me a sharp look as he fished his car keys from his pocket, and I saw that even concern for my well-being was not about to divert him from his goal of confronting the writer. Jack waited, barely holding his impatience in check, until I climbed in the passenger’s seat, and then we were off. Jack even drove mad.

There were lights on in the small house. Oh, hell, McClanahan was home. No matter how he’d upset me that day, I’d found myself wishing he’d be at the police station, or out on patrol, anything but home alone. I got out of the passenger seat to follow Jack up the sidewalk to the front door. He banged on it like the cop he’d formerly been.

No answer.

The author could have looked out to see who was visiting, and decided to remain silent. But Gerry had struck me as a man who would relish such a confrontation, just so he could write about it afterward.

Jack knocked again.

“Help!” shouted a man’s voice, from behind the house. “Help me!”

I vaulted over the railing around the porch and landed with both feet on the ground, giving my innards a jolt that sent them reeling. Oh, God, it hurt. I doubled over gasping while Jack passed me by. He paused for a second, and I waved my hand onward, urging him to go to the help of whoever was yelling.

I was sure I needed to go home to wash myself and change my pad. I felt I was leaking blood at the seams. But the pain abated, and I walked to the voices I was hearing at the back of the house.

I could barely make out Jack and-was that Cliff Eggers?-bent over something huddled in the darkness by the corner of the hedge that separated the rear of this house from the house behind it. I could see the back of Tamsin’s house to my right, and its rear light was shining benignly over the back door. There was a bag of garbage abandoned on the ground beside Cliff, who was covered with dark splotches. I’d only seen him dressed for work, but I could make out that Cliff was wearing only a formerly white T-shirt and ancient cutoff shorts.

“Don’t come closer, Lily,” Jack called. “This is a crime scene.”

So I squatted in the high grass next to the house, while I eased the cell phone out of my pocket. I tossed it to Jack, who punched in the numbers.

“This is Jack Leeds. I’m at 1404 Mimosa,” he said. “The man living here, Gerry McClanahan, a police officer, has been killed.”

I could hear the squawk of the dispatcher over the phone. I pushed myself up and leaned over the steps at the back porch, which was covered by a roof. There was a light switch. I flipped it up, and the backyard was flooded with a generous amount of light.

Gerry was on his stomach, and underneath his head was a thick pool of blood.

“Yes, I’m sure he’s dead,” Jack said, circling his thumb and forefinger to thank me for turning on the light. “No, I won’t move him.”

Jack pressed “end” on the phone and tossed it back to me. Cliff, big burly Cliff, was crying. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, staring down at the body on the ground beside him, his face contorted with strong emotions. I couldn’t figure out which feeling would get the prize for dominant, but I figured shock was right up there. There was a hole in the hedge to allow passage between the yards, and in that hole lay another white garbage bag cinched at the top.

“I came out to put the garbage in the can,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “I heard a sound back here and I came to look.”

“What’s happened to him?” I felt I should know.

“There’s a knife in him,” Jack answered.

“Oh my God,” Cliff said, his voice no more than a whisper, and the night around us, the pool of light at the back of Cliff’s house, became alien in the blink of an eye, as we all thought about a knife and the person who’d wielded it. I have a particular fear of knives. I found myself crossing my arms across my breasts, huddling to protect my abdomen. I was feeling more vulnerable, more frightened, than I had in years. I thought it was because my hormones were bouncing up and down, perhaps, unbalanced by my lost pregnancy, a word that still gave me a jolt when I thought of it.

I made myself straighten up and walk into the dark front yard. Looking up into the sky, where there was a hole in the clouds through which I could see an array of stars, I realized that I wanted to go home, lock the door, and never come out again. It was a feeling I’d had before. At least now, I wanted Jack locked in with me. That was, I guess, progress. I could hear the sirens growing closer. I slipped back to my previous post.

“Where’s Tamsin?” I heard Jack ask Cliff.

“She’s inside taking a shower,” Cliff said. “Oh God. This is just going to kill her.”

I was horribly tempted to laugh. Tamsin wasn’t the one who was dead, her biographer had died in her place. Instead of writing the last chapter in Tamsin’s story, Gerry McClanahan had become a few paragraphs in it himself! Was that poetic justice? Was that irony? Was that the cosmic balance of the universe or the terrible punishment of a god?

I had no idea.

But I did know taking a shower would be a good idea if, say, you had bloodstains on your hands.

I was glad that I hadn’t exposed Alicia Stokes to Claude, because he certainly needed her that night. One of his other detectives was on vacation and the third was in the hospital with a broken leg, suffered that very afternoon at the home of a man arrested for having a meth lab on his farm. The lab had been set up in an old barn, one with rotten places in the floorboards, as it turned out.

Alicia’s dark face was even harder to read in the dramatic light provided by the dead man’s back porch fixture. I wondered if she would automatically assign guilt to Tamsin Lynd. Her suspicions had well and truly infected me.

When Jack and Cliff had been ordered away from the heap on the ground, I had seen more than I wanted to see of what was left of Gerry McClanahan. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he lay in a heap, a terrible wound in his throat. From it protruded the wooden handle of a knife. He had no wounds on his out-flung hands, or at least none that I could see. There were no weapons in his grip. As we stood there in the tiny backyard, the rain blew in again. The sky was a solid dark mass of clouds. They let go their burden, and soon our hair was again wet and plastered down. So was the red hair of the corpse. It was too bad about the crime scene; though plastic tents were put up as quickly as possible, I was sure if there were any small clues in the hedge and the yard, they were lost. A portable generator powered lights that exposed every blade of grass to a brilliant glare, and people up and down the street began coming out of their back doors to watch, despite the rain.

It was very lucky I’d told Jack I’d come with him, since Jack would have made a dandy murder suspect, given the mood he’d been in after he’d learned Gerry McClanahan’s other identity. Claude had thought of that, too. I could tell from the way his eyes kept returning to Jack. The two men liked each other, and they were well on their way to being as good friends as Carrie and I were-but I’d always known Claude recognized the wild streak that more than once had led to Jack’s downfall.

I said, “I was with Jack every second until we heard Cliff yelling.”

“I believe you, Lily,” Claude said, his voice deceptively mild. “But I know why you were coming over here in the first place. This man could’ve caused you no end of trouble.”

“That’s why Jack got the call,” I said, feeling as if I’d just seen a piece of machinery crank up smoothly.

“What?”

I told Claude-and Alicia Stokes, too, since she drifted up at that moment-about the anonymous call Jack had gotten at his office in Little Rock. It was hard to tell if Detective Stokes believed me or not, but I made myself assume that Claude did. It was a pretty stupid story to tell if it wasn’t true, since Jack’s phone records could be checked.

Stokes seemed more interested in questioning Cliff Eggers. Someone who was spying on Tamsin would naturally be in Cliff’s bad graces, but Cliff gave no sign of realizing that the policeman had been leading a double life. It was a piece of information Claude seemed to be keeping under his hat, at least for the moment. It would have to come out soon. Most often, writers aren’t celebrities the way movie stars are, but Gibson Banks had very nearly attained that status.

Cliff was telling Alicia (for the third time) he’d just come out to put two bags of garbage in the can when he’d heard a moan, or anyway some kind of sound, in the backyard catty-cornered to his. That noise, of course, had prompted him to investigate. If I had been the object of as many vicious attacks as Cliff and Tamsin had, I am not sure I would have been so quick to find out what was making the noise.

Just as Cliff wound up his explanation, Tamsin emerged from the house wrapped in a bathrobe with wet hair. The bathrobe and hair made her look faintly absurd when she crossed the backyard under an umbrella. Predictably, she crumbled when she learned why we were all out in the rain. Stokes showed her the knife, encased in a plastic bag. “I never saw it before,” she said.

“Did you know Officer McClanahan?” Stokes asked, her voice cold and hard. Did Stokes know, yet, about Officer McClanahan’s secret identity? I thought not.

“Yes, we’d talked over the hedge. It made me feel so much safer to have a policeman living so close!” Tamsin said, which struck me as the height of irony. I could feel my lips twitch, and I had to turn my back to the group clustered in the yard, a group at that moment consisting of Alicia, Claude, Cliff, Tamsin, and a deputy I didn’t know.

Stokes sent Tamsin over to stand by me to clear the way for the hearse. Tamsin was shivering. “This is so close to home, Lily. First Saralynn gets killed at my office, and now this Officer McClanahan gets killed right behind my house. I have got to start carrying something to protect myself. But I can’t carry a gun. I hate them.”

“You can get some pepper spray at Sneaky Pete’s up by Little Rock,” I said. “It’s on Fontella Road.” I told her how to get there.

After all the recent rain, the heat of the night made the atmosphere almost intolerable. The longer we stood in the steamy night, the less inclined we were to talk. I could feel the sweat pouring down my face, trickling down the channel between my hips. I longed for air conditioning, for a shower. These small concerns began to outweigh the far more important fact that a man had died a few feet away, a man I’d known. I closed my eyes and leaned against the house, but the aluminum siding still felt hot from the day and I straightened back up. Tamsin seemed to have control of herself and she pulled a comb out of her pocket and began trying to work it through her hair.

She spoke once again before Jack and I were allowed to leave. She said, “I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. This… terrorism… has got to end.”

I nodded, since I could see the strain would be intolerable, but I had no idea what to reply. You couldn’t stop it if you didn’t know the source.

Jack came over to me and held out his hand. Though it was almost too hot for even that contact, I took it, and with a nod to Tamsin, went back to his car with him. We were glad to get home, take a blissful shower, put on clean things, and stretch out in the cool bed, to lie there close to each other with sufficient air conditioning to make that pleasant. I don’t know what Jack was thinking about, but I was acknowledging to myself how glad I was that Gerry McClanahan wouldn’t be writing his book now. Jack and I could lead our lives again, and we would not be exposed. Tamsin, at least for a while, would be spared some scrutiny, though if it were ever discovered who was stalking her, there was sure to be some newspaper articles about her persecution. As of now, she and Cliff had come out of it well, too. Only Gibson Banks and his publisher were permanently inconvenienced.

I could live with that.