Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Eleven

I went to Little Rock with Jack the next morning. I couldn’t stand another day in the small house doing nothing.

I had to promise Jack I wouldn’t do anything too vigorous. I was absolutely all right, and I was chafing a little more each day under the weight of his protectiveness. Since I was just going back to surveillance on Beth Crider, it was easy to swear I’d limit my exertions.

I was beginning to hate Beth Crider.

Jack dug in at his office to begin clearing up backlogged paperwork and returning calls. I organized my campaign and drove to Crider’s neighborhood yet again. Maybe we should just buy a house close to her. Maybe when Jack was pushing my wheelchair down the street she might slip up and discard her walker.

Today I’d come prepared. I’d brought a hand vacuum, a load of cleaning materials, and a bucket, plus some Sneaky Pete paraphernalia. I parked in front of a house with a For Sale sign in the yard, about three doors west of Beth Crider’s, and I got out.

After I got everything set up, I began to work. In no time at all, sweat was trickling down my face and I was fighting an urge to pull off my socks and shoes. Jack’s car had never been cleaned more slowly and thoroughly. When I needed water, I got it at the outside faucet. I was lucky they hadn’t had the water turned off, since I had to go back and forth several times refilling the bucket.

I received my reward when Crider came out of her front door, with envelopes in her hand. It didn’t take a genius to figure out she was going to put some outgoing letters in her mailbox. In this neighborhood, they were on posts by the ends of the driveways. With my back to her, I watched her progress in the passenger-side rearview mirror, while I polished it with a rag and glass cleaner. I reached inside the car to turn on the movie camera I had set up, loaded and ready. It came inside a stuffed panda. I had the panda propped and positioned to cover just that area, since Beth normally mailed her letters at about this time.

She slid her letters into the box, shut it, and raised her red flag. Then she hesitated, and I could see she was looking at the ground.

“Come on, bitch,” I whispered, polishing the rearview mirror yet again. “Fall for it.”

She looked back and forth, up and down the street. I was the only person out, and I had my back to her.

Down she squatted, supple as you please, to pick up the ten-dollar bill I’d torn and stuck to a tattered Arkla bill next to the curb. I’d tossed this out the window on my way down the street. I’d hoped it would seem as though the stiff morning breeze had picked up some of the trash from the car, and lodged it in front of her home on the ground.

Beth Crider straightened and walked back to her house, only remembering to resume her halting gait when she was about five feet from the steps. I knew the camera would catch the transition from robust to rehabilitative. Inside, I laughed my ass off.

And Jack’s car was clean, too.

He looked up when I came in the office, having his own little transition from businessman and detective to my lover. I had the panda tucked under my arm.

“I did it,” I said, knowing I sounded proud but unable to keep it out of my voice.

“Yes!” He was up like a shot and hugged me. “Let’s see!”

Together we watched the film of the temptation of Beth Crider.

“So what will happen now?” I asked.

“Now, United Warehouse will approach Beth and ask her to drop her suit. She’ll probably accept. United will give her some cash, she’ll sign some papers, and that’ll be it.”

“She won’t be prosecuted?”

“Staying out of court saves money and time and publicity.”

“But she cheated.”

“Saving time and money is more important than vindication, in business. Except in very special circumstances, when public punishment will ward off more troublemakers.”

I wasn’t as happy any more. “That’s not right,” I said, not caring if I sounded sullen.

“Don’t pout, Lily. You did a good job.”

“Pout?”

“Your bottom lip is stuck out and your eyes are squinted. Your hands are in fists and you’re swinging your legs. You look like I’d just told you about Santa Claus. That’s what I call pouting.”

“So, United Warehouse will pay you lots of money?” I said, reforming my mouth and unclenching my fists. I opened my eyes wide.

“They’ll pay. You’ll get a percentage, like any trainee.”

I felt deep relief. Now, I could feel better about having quit my cleaning jobs.

“Let’s go eat lunch,” Jack said. He turned off his computer after saving what he’d been working on. “We’re meeting Roy and Aunt Betty.”

I tried to be pleased about having lunch with Jack’s friends, but I just didn’t know the two older detectives well enough to take a personal pleasure in their company. I’d met them both before, and talked to them on the telephone several times.

As we were led to their table in the Cracker Barrel (a favorite of Roy’s) I spied Aunt Betty first. With her fading brown hair, nice business suit, and sensible shoes, Elizabeth Fry certainly did look like everyone’s favorite aunt. She had the kind of slightly wrinkled, well-bred, kindly face that inspires universal trust. Betty was one of the best private detectives in the Southeast, Jack had told me.

At the moment, Betty was telling Roy some story that had him smiling. Roy doesn’t smile a lot, especially since his heart attack. Though he has a sense of humor, it leans toward the macabre.

When I sat across from him, I could look Roy right in the eyes. He’s not tall.

“Hey,” I said.

Betty leaned over to pat my hand, and Roy looked stricken. “Hey, baby, you feelin‘ okay?” He reached over with one of his stubby hands and patted the same place Betty had. “Thelma and me, we’re sorry.” Thelma was Roy’s wife, to whom he was devoted.

Of course, Jack had told them about the miscarriage. I should have expected that.

“I’m feeling much better,” I said, trying very hard not to sound cold and stiff. I failed, I could see, by the glances Roy and Aunt Betty exchanged. Personal exchanges with near strangers in public places are just not my thing, even though I knew I was being a pill. I made a tremendous effort. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to talk about.” That was truer than I’d realized, because I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I grabbed up a menu and began trying to focus on it. It persisted in being blurry.

“Lily caught Beth Crider this morning,” Jack said. I knew he was diverting them, and from their hasty exclamations I could tell they were glad to be diverted. I recovered, after a minute or two, and was able to look pleasant, if nothing else.

I had my back to the entry, so I couldn’t see what made Roy stiffen and look angry a moment or two after we’d ordered. “Crap,” he said under his breath, and his eyes flicked to my face, then back over to Jack. “Trouble coming,” he said, a little more audibly.

“Who is it?” Jack asked, sounding as though he were afraid he already knew the answer.

“Her,” Aunt Betty said, her voice loaded down with significance.

“Why, it’s the private detective table, isn’t it?” said a voice behind me, a youngish woman’s voice with a Southern accent so heavy you could have used it to butter rolls. “My goodness me, and I wasn’t invited along. But who have we here, in my old place?” A navy-and-beige pantsuit, well packed, twitched by me, and I looked up to see a pretty woman, maybe a couple of years my senior, standing by the table. She was looking down at me with false delight. The perfect makeup and honey-colored shoulder-length tousled hair were designed to distract attention from a nose that was a little too long and a mouth that was a little too small.

“You are just too precious,” said this sleek newcomer. I don’t believe anyone had called me “precious” in my life, even my parents. “Let me introduce myself, since Jack seems to have lost his tongue. His wonderful tongue.” She gave me a roguish wink.

Well, well, well. I didn’t dare to look at Jack. I wavered between amusement and anger.

Roy said, “Lindsey, this is Lily. Lily, Lindsey Wilkerson.”

I nodded, not extending my hand. If I shook with her, some of my fingers might come up missing. You don’t often meet people who will lay an unattractive emotion out on the table like that. Showing your hand so clearly is a big mistake.

“Dear old Betty, how you been doing?” Lindsey asked.

“Fine, thank you,” said ‘dear old Betty,’ her voice as weathered as old paint. “And I hear you’re flourishing on your own.”

“I’m paying the rent,” Lindsey said casually. She was carrying a leather handbag that had cost more than two of my outfits, which mostly come from Wal-Mart. Her beautiful shoes had two-inch heels, and I wondered how she walked in them. “Lily, how do you like working under Jack?”

I shrugged. She was about as subtle as a rattlesnake.

“You watch out, Lily, Jack’s got himself a reputation for fooling around with his co-workers,” Lindsey warned me with mock concern. “Then he just leaves ‘em high and dry.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said, my voice mild. I could feel Jack relax prematurely.

“Where’d he find you?” she said. Her southern Arkansas accent was beginning to grate on my nerves. “You” comes out “yew,” and “where’d” was awful close to “whar’d.”

Not under the same rock he found you, was my first, discarded answer. I exercised my option of not speaking at all. I looked into her eyes, instead. She began to shift from pump to pump, and her nasty smile faded.

But she rallied, as I’d been willing to bet she would.

“Jack,” she said, leaning over the table right in front of me, “I need to come by your place and pick up some clothes I left there.”

Her throat was exposed, right in front of me. I felt my fingers stiffen into Knife Hand. At the same time, the part of my brain that hadn’t lost its temper was telling me that it’s not right to hurt someone just because she’s a bitch.

“I don’t believe I have anything of yours,” Jack said. From the corner of my eyes I could see his hands clenching the edge of the table. “And I don’t live in that apartment any more.”

She hadn’t known that. “Where’d you move to?”

“Are you a detective, too?” I asked.

“Why, yes, honey, I sure am.” She straightened up, now that she knew I’d had a good time to look at her impressive cup size.

“Then you can find out.” She would also find out we were married.

“Listen, bitch…” she leaned back down toward me, extending a pointing finger. People around us were beginning to stop eating in order to listen.

My hand darted up, quick as an arrow, and I seized her hand and dug my thumb into the pit between her thumb and first finger. She gasped in pain. “Let go of me!” she hissed. After a second’s more pressure, I did. Tears had come into her eyes and she stood there nursing her hand until she understood that she had become ridiculous, and then she did what she had to do-she walked away.

Aunt Betty and Roy began talking about something else right away, and the other diners went back to their own concerns, leaving Jack and me in a sort of cocoon. I picked up a long-handled spoon and stirred my iced tea. It was too weak. I like tea that’s something more than colored water.

“Uh, Lily,” Jack began, “listen, I…”

I made a chopping motion with my hand. “Over and done.”

“But she never meant-”

“Over and done.”

Later, when Aunt Betty and I were discussing a recent court verdict, I heard Roy ask Jack if I’d really meant it when I’d said we’d never talk about Lindsey again.

“Absolutely,” Jack’s voice somewhere between amused and grim.

“That’s a woman in a million,” Roy said, “not wanting to hash over every little thing.”

“You said it.” Jack didn’t sound totally delighted.

Later, when we’d eaten, paid, and gone back to Jack’s car, we found a long scratch down the paint. I looked at Jack and raised my eyebrows.

“Yeah, I figure it was her,” he said. “Vindictive is her middle name. Lindsey Vindictive Wilkerson.”

“Will this be the end of it?”

“No.” He finally looked me in the eyes. “If Betty and Roy hadn’t been there, maybe. But she got beat, and in front of witnesses she cares about.”

“If she keeps this up,” I told him, “she’ll be sorry.”

Jack gave me a look. But at length, his troubled face gave way to a smile. “I have no doubt of that,” he said, and we went back to the office for the afternoon. He filed, and I cleaned. He gave me another lesson on the computer, and a lecture on billing procedures. As a kind of treat for Jack, on our way back to Shakespeare we stopped at Sneaky Pete’s, one of Jack’s favorite businesses. Jack wanted to report to Pete on the success of the panda-bear camera.

As was often the case, Pete’s was empty of customers but crammed with goods. Most of the store’s income came from a stock of high-end cameras and home security systems, but Pete Blanchard had founded the shop with the idea that you could buy any sort of expensive electronic surveillance device there.

Pete Blanchard hadn’t made up his mind about me yet, and I wasn’t sure what to think of him, so our conversations tended to be tentative and oblique. Mostly, I was content to watch Jack prowl around and have fun, but Pete seemed to feel it was his duty to entertain me while Jack shopped. The fact that Jack seldom bought anything didn’t seem to bother Pete. He’d known Jack for several years, and he liked him.

Every time I’d seen him, Pete had been wearing the same sort of clothing. He wore a golf shirt and khakis and Adidas. He seemed to have several versions of this outfit, but he liked it and that was what he wore. I could respect that. A former cop, Pete had probably had trouble fitting into a patrol car; he had to be six foot four or five. His mustache and hair were graying, but his toffee-colored skin had few wrinkles, and I couldn’t begin to guess his age.

This particular afternoon, Pete’s son was working in the store. A college student who picked up some money wherever he could, Washington Blanchard considered himself much smarter than his father and vastly more sophisticated. Jack had told me he just hoped Wash, as the young man was called, would learn better before too long. Otherwise, in Jack’s opinion, someone was likely to sock Wash in the mouth. Jack had had a gleam in his eye that had said the sight wouldn’t be unwelcome.

Though I hadn’t noted it on my calendar that morning, today had apparently been designated as Pick a Fight with Lily Day. Most men are put off by me. I just don’t seem, I don’t know, womanly or something. Especially if they know what happened to me. A small sampling of men, the ones that are sick, are turned on by that very same thing. Wash Blanchard was a member of that small group.

While Pete showed Jack a pair of glasses that took pictures, Wash asked me questions about the woman who’d been murdered in Tamsin Lynd’s office. That death had made the Little Rock paper mostly due to its bizarre circumstances. Little Rock as a whole seems to try to forget there’s anything south of it in the state.

I hadn’t checked this morning to see if Gerry McClanahan’s death had made the paper, but I figured it hadn’t, since it had occurred so late. At any rate, Wash didn’t bring it up, so neither did I.

Wash wanted to know if I’d known the health center murder victim.

“No.”

“There can’t be that many women in Shakespeare, Lily.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“What was she doing in that building, I wonder. The paper didn’t make that clear.”

“She was coming to attend an evening self-help group.”

Wash was astonished. He said, “How do you know that?”

I shrugged, sorry I’d said anything at all.

“Did you see her?” he said. Wash had the usual prurient desire to hear secondhand about blood and death. If he’d ever happen to see it close up, he’d lose that in a jiffy.

“Yes.”

“What did she look like? Was she really impaled?”

I looked longingly at the door.

“Don’t talk to me any more,” I said. I began to look at a rack of cameras, the kind that did everything but snap their own buttons. That was my kind of camera. I liked photographs, as aids to memory and as art, but I was not interested in taking them myself.

“Because I’m black? Huh?” And there he was, right in front of me again, determined to bother me. It’s like people don’t understand English, sometimes.

“It doesn’t have a thing to do with your skin. It has to do with your obnoxious character,” I said, my voice still under control but inevitably rising.

Big Pete interposed. I felt the presence of Jack behind me.

“Something wrong, here?” Pete was trying to sound calm.

“She’s treating me like trash, ignoring me and calling me names,” Wash said, though his voice was not as full of righteous wrath as it might have been.

“I can’t imagine Lily doing that,” Pete said.

Explaining. People always want you to explain. I yearned to walk out speechlessly, but this was one of Jack’s favorite places.

“I don’t care to discuss crime scenes and how this woman died. The woman who was killed in Shakespeare.”

Pete stared at his son. “Wash, you want to talk about dead bodies, remind me to show you some pictures of things I saw in Viet Nam.”

“You got pictures, Dad?” Wash sounded stunned and happy.

“ ‘Scuse us, Jack, Lily. Wash and I got some talking to do.”

Jack and I left in a hurry.

I tried to figure out if I needed to apologize to Jack, but no matter how I looked at it, this little run-in was not my fault. However, Jack wasn’t talking, and I wondered if he was angry.

“It’s really weird, isn’t it,” he said suddenly. “You’d think nice people like Pete and Marietta, his wife, would have such great genes their kids couldn’t turn out bad. And then, look at Wash. He has to learn every lesson over and over, lessons he shouldn’t even have to be taught. Things he should know by… instinct.”

Where had that come from? I followed the trail of that thought for a moment. Genetics. Kids turning out differently from their parents. Okay.

“Do you want a baby, Jack?” We’d been dodging this conversation ever since I’d lost the baby.

“For the life of me, Lily, I don’t know.” It was clear he’d only been waiting for me to open the subject. “If you had kept the baby, if everything had gone okay, I would have been proud to have a baby with you. When the baby…” He hesitated.

“Miscarried,” I supplied.

“When the baby miscarried, I guess you could tell how sad I was. But the next day, I maybe felt a little relief, too. What changes that would have made in our lives, huh?”

I nodded when he glanced over to check my reaction.

“Can you tell me how you feel?” he said.

“Like you.”

“No elaboration on that?”

“It surprised me when you cried. It made me love you more.” If we were going to say things, we might as well say everything.

“I hated to see you bleeding and weak. It scared me to death. And I would have loved to have been the father of our baby.”

“Didn’t ever want to be the dad of Lindsey Wilkerson’s baby?” I asked, keeping my face poker-straight. I was able to dodge Jack’s hand when it slapped in my direction, because I was waiting for it.

“The world’s best argument for birth control,” he said.

I didn’t laugh out loud, but I smiled. His sideways glance caught it, and he grinned at me, that wicked look I loved.

Tamsin and Cliff came over that night. They called first, and I said it was all right, but I shouldn’t have. I really didn’t want to see them, didn’t want to hear about Tamsin’s multiple problems. But she had helped me, so I was obliged to her, a yoke I found nearly intolerable. I reminded myself not to ask for help again.

I should have been ashamed of my grudging attitude. And maybe I was, a little. But being close to Tamsin now seemed a risky thing.

“How are you feeling?” Tamsin’s question seemed on the perfunctory side, especially since she didn’t meet my eyes to hear my answer.

“I’m all right. You and Cliff?” I motioned them to chairs and offered them drinks, as I was obligated to do. Jack got Cliff a Coke, but Tamsin waved the query off.

“You can imagine how strange it is to find out that this policeman was really a famous writer,” Tamsin told me.

I nodded. I could imagine that.

“And then I finally recognized that woman last night. Detective Stokes.”

Jack reached over my shoulder to hand Cliff his drink.

“And, Lily, what I want to know is, why me?”

I couldn’t believe I’d heard her correctly. Tamsin Lynd, of all people, was asking the unanswerable. Was this something some victims were just bound to go through, no matter how smart or clearly victimized they were?

That couldn’t be true. And why had she decided to talk to me about it? Because I was Supervictim?

I thought for a minute, but I decided there was no way to get around this but to talk to Tamsin about it.

“Why are you different?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Would you let us ask that question in counseling group?”

She flushed red. “I see what you mean.”

“Do you think you’re better than us, because you’re being stalked instead of being raped?”

Cliff looked horrified and upset, and his hand moved as if he were going to get my attention to signal to me, but I gave him a quelling look. Tamsin had dragged him along, and Jack was in the room, but this conversation was between me and her.

“Oh, Lily, I hate to see that in myself!” Tamsin was really upset, now. But upset in a more intelligent way.

“Why not you, Tamsin? What makes you superior or invulnerable?”

“I’ve got it, now,” she breathed. “I see that. But I guess what I was thinking, was not that I should be spared because I was superior, but because I’m not. I’m an overweight, nearly middle-aged woman in a crowded and poorly paid profession. There’s nothing remarkable about me. How did I attract the attention of someone so determined?”

“There is plenty special about you, honey,” Cliff said, his voice desperately earnest. “You are the most sweet-natured, kindest-”

“Oh, Cliff.” Tamsin’s face was radiant with pleasure, but deprecating. “You’re the only one who believes that,” she added with a little laugh.

I wasn’t going to sit here and bathe Tamsin in compliments. She was quite right. I liked her-a little-and I appreciated her, but there was nothing exceptional about Tamsin Lynd in my eyes… except her victimization.

“You just got picked by the Claw.” That was as good an explanation as I could come up with.

“The Claw?”

“You know that game they have out in the Wal-Mart entry way? The one where you put in some quarters and the metal claw swings down over a bin of stuffed animals and swoops down at random, and maybe picks one up, maybe not? That’s the Claw.”

“Lily!” Tamsin looked at me with the oddest quizzical, expression. “That’s the most depressing philosophy I’ve ever heard.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t in the Pollyanna business. “The Claw picked you up, Tamsin. So you have a stalker, and Janet doesn’t. I got raped, you didn’t. Saralynn was murdered, Carla wasn’t. The claw passed her over.”

“So you don’t believe a divine plan runs the universe?”

I just laughed. Some plan.

“Don’t you believe that most people are innately good?”

“No.” In fact, I found the fact that some people did believe that to be absolutely incomprehensible.

Tamsin looked really horrified. “You don’t believe that we’re only given the burdens we can handle?”

“Obviously not.”

She tried again. “Do you believe in the eventual punishment of evildoers?”

I shrugged.

“Then how do you go on living?” Tamsin was tearful, but not as personally tearful, as she had been before.

“How do I go on living? A day at a time, like everyone else. A few years ago, it was an hour at a time. For a while, it was minute by minute.”

“What for?”

Cliff looked like he wished he was anywhere but here. But Jack, I saw, was leaning forward to hear what I was saying.

“At first, I just wanted to beat the… ones that attacked me.” I picked my words carefully. I was being as honest as I knew how. “Then, I couldn’t add to my parents’ miseries any more by dying. Though I did think about suicide, often. No more fear, no more scars, no more remembering.

“But after a while, I began to get more involved in trying to make living work. Trying to find a way to make my days, if not my nights, productive and make a pattern to stick to.” I took a drink from my glass of water.

“Is that what you think I should do?”

“I don’t know what you should do,” I said, amazed anyone would ask advice of me. “That’s for you to figure out. You’re a professional at helping people figure out what they should do. I guess that doesn’t really help you right now.”

“No,” she said, her voice soft and weary. “It’s not helping, right now.”

I gave her the only piece of advice, the only philosophy, that I cherished. “You have to live well to defeat whoever’s doing this to you,” I said. “You can’t let them win.”

“Is that the point of living, to not let him win? What about me? When I do I get to live for myself?”

“That is entirely up to you,” I told her. I stood up, so she’d go.

“I thought you, of all people, would have the answers, would have more sympathy.”

“The point is, that doesn’t make any difference.” I looked Tamsin straight in the eyes. “No matter how much sympathy I have for you, it won’t heal you faster or slower. You’re not a victim of cosmic proportions. There are millions of us. That doesn’t make your personal struggle less. That just increases your knowledge of pain in this world.”

“I think,” said Tamsin, as she and Cliff went through the door, “that I should have stayed at home.”

“That depends on what you wanted.” I shut the door behind them. I could see Jack’s face. “What?” I asked, sharp and quick.

“Lily, don’t you think you could have been a little more…”

“Touchy-feely? Warm?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I told her exactly how it is, Jack. I’ve had years to think about this. I don’t know why everyone feels like they’re supposed to be safe all the time.”

Jack raised an eyebrow in a questioning way.

“Think about it,” I said. “No one expected to be safe until this century, if you read a little history. Think of the thousands of years before-years with no law, when the sword ruled. No widespread system of justice; no immunizations against disease. The local lord free to kill the husbands, husbands free to rape and kill their wives. Childbirth often fatal. No antibiotics. It’s only here and now that women are raised believing they’ll be safe. And it serves us false. It’s not true. It dulls our sense of fear, which is what saves our lives.”

Jack looked stunned. “Why have you never told me you feel this way?”

“We’ve just never gotten around to talking about it.”

“How can you even share a bed with me, if you hate men that much?”

“I don’t hate men, Jack.” Just some of them. I despise the rest. “I just don’t believe-no, let me turn that around. I do believe that women should be more self-sufficient and cautious.” That was probably the mildest way I could put it.

Jack opened his mouth to say something else, and I held up my hand. “I know this isn’t fair, but I’ve talked as much as I can for one evening. I feel like I pulled my guts out for inspection. Can we be quiet from now on? We can talk more tomorrow if you want to.”

“Yes, that would be okay,” Jack said. He looked a little dazed. “You sure you want me sharing the bed tonight?”

“I want you in the bed every night,” I said, forcing myself to reveal one more bit of truth.

And for the first time since the miscarriage, that night I gave him proof of that truth. After a long, sweet time, we slept that night back to back, me feeling the comfort of his warm skin through the thin material of my nightgown. I never felt he was turning away from me when our backs touched; we were just attached in a different way.

I lay awake, thinking, longer than I liked. Since I was on a roll with the truth, I had to think of what I hadn’t told Tamsin, what I couldn’t tell anyone else in the world. My healing had accelerated when I began to love Jack. Love weakens, too, makes you vulnerable; but the strength, the power of it… it still amazed me when I considered it. I would die for him, be hurt for him, give anything I owned for his happiness; but there were parts of me that could not change for him. There were traits and attitudes I required for my hard-won survival. Knowing this left me with an uneasy feeling that some day I would have to face this fully and in more detail, an idea that I detested.

Jack gave a little gasp in his sleep, much like the one he often gave when I surprised him in lovemaking. It was a sound I found infinitely comforting, and hearing it, I fell asleep.