Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Twelve

I woke the next morning feeling very clearheaded and relaxed. After Jack had left for a meeting with a client in Benton, I decided stretching and mild calisthenics would do me a world of good. When that was done, and I felt much better overall, I changed the sheets, taking pleasure in the order of clean smooth percale.

The phone rang just when I was wondering what to do next.

“This is Dani Weingarten,” announced the caller. There was a silence.

“Yes?” I said finally.

“Dani Weingarten, the mystery writer,” said the voice, less firmly.

“Yes?” I read very little fiction, so her identity was not an exciting fact, which the caller soon seemed to realize.

“I’m the fiancйe of Gerry McClanahan,” she said, by way of redefinition.

“Okay.” Sooner or later, she’d get to the point.

“I’m flying in from Florida tomorrow to take charge of the arrangements for having Gerry’s body flown back to Corinth, Ohio… his hometown.” So far, Dani Weingarten had not given me one bit of information that interested me. There was a long pause. “Did you hear me?” she asked, in a testy way.

“I didn’t realize that required a response.”

Another long pause. “Okay,” she said, “Let’s try this. I have talked to the police department there in Shakespeare, and the chief of police there recommended you as the best house-cleaner in town. Whatever that means. So, if you have time, I’d like you go to over to Gerry’s little rental house and start packing up his things. I’ll ship them to my house to go through them.”

I almost turned her down. I’d spent enough time sorting through the detritus of the dead. But I thought of the hospital bills coming soon, and of my improved health, and I said I would do it. “Key?” I asked.

“You can pick one up at the police station,” Dani Weingarten told me. Her voice sounded softer now, as if she’d used up all her forcefulness. “I told them it was okay. Did you know Gerry?”

“Yes,” I said. “I knew him a little.”

“He told me Shakespeare was a fascinating little town.” She sounded on the verge of tears.

“He talk about his work much?” I asked cautiously.

“Never,” Dani Weingarten told me. “He only discussed it when his first draft was ready.”

So she didn’t know I was one of the fascinating things in Shakespeare. Good. “Will you be staying at the house?” I couldn’t pack up all the bed linens, if so.

“No, I couldn’t stand it.” Her voice was getting heavier and heavier with unshed tears. “I’ll check into a motel. If you have motels in Shakespeare.”

“We have one. It’s a Best Western. Do you want me to make a reservation for you?”

“That would be great.” She sounded surprised, and I didn’t blame her. “I’m going to rent a car at the airport. I should get there about three thirty.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“You know,” she said suddenly, “I don’t believe any of this.” And she thunked the receiver down.

She would believe it by tomorrow. I called the motel, and went over to the police department yet again. Claude had left the key with the dispatcher, along with a verbal message that the police department would finish its search of the house by eleven. I could have the house to myself once they were out.

I felt energized at the idea of money coming in, and I had time to kill, so I drove to the Winthrops’ house. Bobo’s car was there, but no one else’s. I let myself in, calling for him, but got no answer. The pool was empty. Maybe he’d gone somewhere with a friend.

After glancing around at the mess in sheer disbelief, I got to work. There was so much to do I hardly knew where to start. Just in case Bobo was asleep upstairs, I decided to concentrate on the ground level.

Living room, kitchen, game room, wash room, pantry. Master bedroom and master closets, master bath, smaller hall bath. In due time, they were gleaming and dustless. A couple of times, I thought I heard a voice; maybe Beanie had left the radio on? But I checked, and found nothing.

As I closed Beanie’s walk-in closet door (with its newly polished mirror) I was beginning to feel a little tired. Well, pretty tired. But it went against my grain to stop without finishing. I wondered if I could just do a little straightening upstairs? Just as I started up, I heard a sound above me, and I looked up to see a very startled Janet, followed by an equally surprised Bobo, coming down the carpeted steps.

Since Janet was buttoning her blouse, it was impossible for her to pretend they’d been up there planning their sporting goods store. They had certainly been engaged in another joint venture.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Hey, Lily,” Janet said, squeezing the words out as though they were toothpaste. She looked anywhere but my face, which I was struggling to keep neutral.

“Lily,” Bobo said. “Ah, we didn’t hear you come in.” His face was scarlet from the awkwardness of it; if he’d been observed by anyone in the world but me, this would be easier for him. Janet, not knowing that Bobo had harbored feelings for me once, was free of worry. She was suppressing laughter; her eyes swung over to mine and she made a little face.

“No, I guess you didn’t.” I was really glad I hadn’t decided to do the upstairs first. I nodded gently, trying very hard not to smile, and began to make my way up the stairs. Bobo seemed to wake up from his shock, then followed Janet across the living room. They made it to the kitchen in silence, then I heard Janet begin to giggle, and Bobo join in.

I laughed myself, once I was safely up the stairs. It would be tacky of me, I decided, to go in Bobo’s room and make the bed or change the sheets. So I cleaned the upstairs bathroom, leaving all three bedrooms as they were. Beanie would be glad I’d come at all. I didn’t think she’d be overly upset about the kids’ bedrooms. A little order is better than none at all.

A little later, after lunch and some rest, I let myself into Gerry McClanahan’s house on Mimosa. It is never a pleasure to deal with the belongings of the dead. But the dealing would be nominal in this case: as I’d noticed on my previous visit, the furniture was very sparse. I wondered if it was rented like the house. The dispatcher at the police department had told me the dachshunds had gone home with Officer Stuckey, who had two small boys, so I knew they were okay; but somehow their abandoned toys seemed more desolate than Gerry McClanahan’s abandoned computer.

I walked through the quiet house. All the rooms were empty except for the front room, with its big desk and couch and television, and the larger bedroom, which had the usual furnishings. In a kitchen drawer was the rental agreement for the furniture, so I left that out for Dani Weingarten to see. A quick examination told me there’d be precious little to pack. I called the older couple who’d rented the house to Gerry McClanahan. They hadn’t turned on their radio that morning, so they hadn’t heard the news. I had to hear lots of exclamations and lamentations before I was able to ask the pertinent questions about to whom the linens and pots and pans belonged. Those items, I found, were Gerry’s. I wondered a little about the cage I found just inside the back door; it didn’t seem large enough for one of the dogs, though it had definitely been used. I might ask Dani Weingarten if she recognized it. Now that I had an idea about the scope of the job, I went to the garage that was the local outlet for a big moving company and bought some boxes, keeping the receipt so Ms. Weingarten could reimburse me.

I turned on a radio at the rental house, just so I could have some company while I packed up the dead man’s clothes. Normally, I don’t like distractions. But this house was sad. Though it had been years since I had a pet, I almost wished the little dogs were there.

Folding McClanahan’s clothes didn’t take long. I packed his uniform carefully, wondering if he’d be buried in it. What had this man been, in his core: a policeman or a writer? He had certainly been a researcher. There were at least three shelves of non-fiction books, like Gavin de Becker’s Gift of Fear, and David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. I looked at de Becker’s book, repressing a snort. McClanahan hadn’t read that carefully enough: he hadn’t known to be scared, when he should’ve been. The only thing I was sure of about his death was that he had seen it coming and not recognized it.

A trio of books actually piled on the desk were more disquieting. They were thinner and had a scholarly look, like books you wouldn’t get in a regular store unless you ordered them. The one on top was titled, The Psychology of Two; the Selection of a Mate by Lauren Munger, and the thinner black and blue one underneath it was by Steve Coben and called Pathological Pairs: Duos with Bad History.

I felt a flash of rage so intense I had to sit down. Despite everything he’d said, it was evident that Gerry McClanahan had planned to write about Jack and me. He had been studying us. Maybe his interest had begun as a sidelight to the stalking drama of Tamsin Lynd, but that interest had evolved. I took some deep breaths, told myself over and over that nothing could be done about it now, and packed those books along with the rest.

I found a biography sheet, I guess one that his publicist was preparing; Gerry had made little corrections here and there. He’d won prizes and awards, and his books had been translated into twenty different languages. I’d had other things on my mind when I’d scanned the People story. Reading the biography sheet, I understood for the first time what a furor there would be when it was discovered that Patrolman Gerry McClanahan was also Gibson Banks. I wondered how much time we had before that connection was made; not much, I was sure. There was an accordion file, full of notes for other projects. Gerry was tentatively planning a book on a serial killer in Minnesota. That would have been a change of climate, for sure.

The house had been gone over by the police, and I knew I wouldn’t find anything remarkable they hadn’t already seen. Plus, they would’ve taken anything interesting with them. But as I picked up a pen that had rolled onto the floor, I saw the edge of a sheet of yellow paper torn from a legal pad, protruding very slightly from under the desk. I remembered that Gerry had had a legal pad in front of him while we talked. A legal pad and a computer; that had seemed like overkill to me at the time. Why both?

Now, I pinned the paper to the floor with the point of the pen, and raked it out. It was a sheet covered with tiny black handwriting.

I peered at it and switched on the desk lamp to see it better. It was a log of the comings and goings at Tamsin’s house. Nothing much, it seemed, had happened at Tamsin’s that particular day. The Lynd-Egger couple had gone to work, come back home. Various lights had gone off and on. Tamsin had swept the back porch, and Cliff had spent five minutes in the little tool closet by the back porch some time after that. The date was the night before Jack and I had heard Tamsin yell on her front porch.

I was sure the rest of this log, which was a terrible document in and of itself, had been taken by the police. Perhaps Gerry had ripped this day’s observations out to discard because nothing much had happened, and I hoped that the other notes he’d made proved of more value. The person stalking the counselor-it was hard not to think of this person as some kind of evil entity, since he was so invisible-hadn’t liked anyone else stalking them, I was willing to bet. Gerry’s obsession with the stalker’s obsession had led to his own death.

As I locked the door behind me, my job completed, I suddenly realized that Gerry must have found out, there at the end, who the stalker was. I hoped, after all he’d sacrificed for the knowledge, he’d had a moment’s satisfaction. Had he been dreadfully surprised… or had the killer’s face been well known to him?

I was glad to lie down when I got home, but it was a good, tired feeling; not exhaustion. I watched a few shows on television: a biography of an actor I’d only heard of in passing, a documentary on the CIA. It was embarrassing to realize that the phone ringing actually woke me up.

“Yes?”

“Lily.” Jack.

“Hi.”

“I won’t be home tonight. I’m going to start this job right away. If the CEO likes the job I do, there’ll be more business from this firm.”

“What does he want you to do?”

“She.” I felt embarrassed. “She wants me to do very thorough background checks on the applicants for this very sensitive job.” He was telling me the essence without the particulars, but that was all right with me. “Have you been taking it easy?” Jack asked, suspicion evident in his voice.

“Well, I did do a little work today.”

“You know what Carrie said, Lily!”

“I just couldn’t stand it any more. I had to do something or die of boredom.”

“Lily, you have to mind the doctor.”

“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice gentle.

“I love you.”

“I know. I love you, too. I got to go, Jack. Someone’s at the door.”

“Answer it while I’m on the phone.”

I went to the door and looked through the peephole Jack had installed for me. “It’s Bobo, looks like.”

“Oh, okay,” Jack said, relieved. I cocked my head as I opened the door. Jack, who was sometimes jealous, had never gotten the fact that there was actually something to be jealous of with Bobo. I was grateful for his lack of acuity where this particular Winthrop was concerned. I sometimes felt very guilty when I caught an unexpected glimpse of Bobo and experienced a definite physical reaction to the sight of him.

“Bye, Jack,” I said, and he told me he would see me the next day.

I waved Bobo inside, feeling unusually curious about what he would have to say. This time, sure I was safe from- well, safe-I let him in and shut the door behind him.

“Are you okay with…?” he tried just waving his hands a little, not wanting to come right out and say it.

“With you having sex with a friend of mine?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Of course, Bobo. You’re over eighteen and so is Janet.” Not for anything in the world would I have explained my more complicated feelings. I would hardly admit them to myself.

But, as he often did, Bobo surprised me. And this was why I never quite lost a link to this unusual golden boy, this was why despite the difference in our ages and our lives there was a relationship between us. “It’s not just that, and you know it,” he said, his anger evident in the way he was standing, the tension in his arms.

I held up my hands in front of me, palms outward. I meant him to stop; we were not going to get serious, here. I’d had enough of that the night before. My long talk with Tamsin Lynd still griped me.

“You have to tell me if it’s true.”

Suddenly, everything grew clear. “You heard I was married.”

“Yes. Is it true?”

“Tell me you didn’t take Janet to bed out of spite.”

“Is it true?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“How long?”

“A month.”

“Why were you keeping it a secret?”

“It isn’t anyone’s business,” I said, not caring if I sounded harsh.

“But it is,” he said. “It is. You should have told me.”

I lost my temper. “Why? Were you going to marry me?”

“No! But a married woman, you shouldn’t even think about her!”

“So, if I’m married, I’m sacred to you, you can’t lust after me.”

“That’s right! That’s exactly right!”

“Then end this, right here and now. I am married.”

“Can you give up thinking of me? Has being married made any difference to you? Because I know you. I know you think of me.”

“Bobo, this is too weird. Neither of us has any business thinking of the other. This is all wrong.”

“And now you’re married.”

“Yes.”

“You love him?”

“Of course. More than anything.”

“But-”

“But nothing. This-we have to seal this off. This is over.”

“We’ve said this before. Or you have.”

“Are you saying I’m encouraging you in this idea you have, that we should go to bed together?”

“No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, I can tell in your eyes that you know that if we did it would be great, that you want to fuck me as much as I want to fuck you.”

“But we can’t do that, because there are trails leading up to and away from any act of sex.”

He took a deep breath. “That’s right.”

“So we won’t talk about this again.”

“No,” he agreed, more slowly, with less conviction.

“I don’t want to answer this door when my hair has gone gray, to find you still talking about it.”

He laughed a little. “No,” he said. “I have to get on with my life.”

“And Jack and I have to get on with ours.”

“Lily,” he said. He reached out and brushed his knuckle down my cheek. “Do you love me just a little?”

“Yes,” I said. I owed him that. “Just a little.”

I closed the door.

My unremembered dreams must have caused me to toss and turn in the night, because I woke up tired the next day. I took a cup of coffee out onto the tiny back porch and sat listening to the birds. My rosebush, growing up a cheap plastic trellis to one side of the porch, was in bloom. The rose had been chosen for smell, not appearance, and I closed my eyes to enjoy it to the fullest. My neighbor, Carlton Cockroft, waved at me from his back porch, and I raised my hand. We knew it was too early to talk to each other. The slope up to the railroad tracks was covered with flowering weeds that were full of bugs of all sizes and dispositions. I didn’t know much about bugs, but I could appreciate their industry and appearance when they weren’t in the house. I watched a butterfly, and a small bee, as each made the rounds of the flowers. When I’d had enough of that, I unrolled the small local paper that I’d gotten from the end of the sidewalk.

MAN STABBED BY STRANGER read the lead headline. I began to read what I assumed was going to be an account of Gerry McClanahan’s murder, which had occurred too late to be featured in yesterday’s paper. Stabbing is rare in Shakespeare, and stabbing by a stranger almost unheard of. Most killings in Shakespeare are male-on-male violence, of the Saturday-night-drinking-binge variety. I was actually shaking my head, anticipating the national news stories about Gerry’s double life, when my eyes caught the name in the story.

Cliff Eggers of 1410 Compton was taken to the hospital late yesterday evening after he said he was stabbed by a stranger, local police stated. Eggers, who has been a resident of Shakespeare for about a year, said he was walking out to his car after dark when an assailant rushed from the hedge to the side of his property. The assailant struck Eggers in the back and ran away. Hampered by a bandaged leg, Eggers did not pursue. At first, Eggers said, he didn’t realize he’d been stabbed. “It just felt like he hit me,” Eggers said. “I called my wife, and she called the police.” A city policeman, Gerry B. McClanahan, was stabbed to death almost to the rear of Eggers’s house two nights before. (See related article, page 2) “We may have a deranged person in the neighborhood, or we may have someone who’s targeted the Eggers household,” said Claude Friedrich, chief of police. “We have every available officer assigned to the case.” Asked if he had any leads in the case, Friedrich responded, “New information is coming in constantly.” Eggers was treated and discharged from Shakespeare Regional Hospital.

I assumed Claude’s comment meant that he didn’t have a clue. Carrie had called me the night before to thank me for cleaning her office. “I knew it was you,” she’d said, “because you always make the magazine stacks so neat.” She’d confessed her regular cleaner had gotten held up, and she was up a creek. But she hadn’t said anything about Cliff Eggers.

Of course, she couldn’t. I could see that now. She couldn’t blab any more about her husband’s business than I could about Jack’s. I was glad, just the same, to see Carrie’s old car parked behind her office. She often came in on Saturday mornings to catch up on paperwork.

“No one in the hospital?” I called as I went in the back door.

“Not a soul, can you believe it?” She came out of her office with a mug in her hand. She was wearing her weekend outfit of cutoffs and T-shirt.

“Not even Cliff Eggers,” I said.

“No, he bled like a stuck pig, but it wasn’t that deep.”

“Where was he cut?” I asked, since Carrie seemed to be in a chatty mood.

“In the back, oddly enough,” Carrie said. “It was a funny kind of wound. Started here,” and she touched a point just above my waist slightly left of my spine, “and ended here,” which turned out to be a spot about midway down my right hip. “It was deeper toward the end.”

“Kind of low for a blow from another man,” I said, after I’d considered it.

“Yes, isn’t it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a knife wound quite like that.”

“Maybe…” I thought for a minute. “Okay, what if Cliff was walking away, and the knifer was swooshing down.” I raised my arm with an imaginary knife in it, and brought the arm down in an arc. “So if Cliff stepped away just then, the end of the knife would slice through the hip, rather than penetrating him higher up by the spine, as it was intended to.”

“Could be. Could be,” Carrie said, looking at my back doubtfully. “Of course, Cliff’s at least six inches taller than you. But still, I would say his assailant had to be shorter than Cliff. Or kneeling, but I can’t quite visualize that.”

I couldn’t either, but it was an interesting idea. “What was Tamsin doing while all this was going on?” I asked, trying to sound casual. I assumed that since Tamsin and Carrie were both in some sense medical professionals, they would know each other, and I was right.

“In the kitchen cooking, she told me,” Carrie said, still staring at my back as if it would tell her the answer.

“I guess she came to the hospital with Cliff.”

“Oh, yeah, as upset as she could possibly be. I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be able to do her job, if things like this keep happening around her. She said something about moving again.”

I looked at Carrie. “What was she wearing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Ah, a pair of old jeans and an Arkansas Razorbacks T-shirt, seems like.”

“No apron?”

“No. Either she’s one of these women who cooks without, or she pulled it off before she came. Why?” Carrie seemed to realize that this was an odd question.

“Just wondered.” I was relieved when the phone rang, because Carrie once more immersed herself in work. I didn’t want to have to explain to Carrie what I didn’t even want to admit to myself, that I’d been infected with Alicia Stokes’s suspicions. I was wondering if it was my mental health counselor who had stabbed her husband in the back.

As I polished the sink in the women’s bathroom, I longed for Jack. It was always easy to talk things over with him. He seemed to enjoy the process, too. Jack understood people a little better than I did. I was repulsed by people who were messy with their emotions; just look at the tangled mess of Bobo and me. It felt good to have encapsulated and pushed away our mutual attraction.

I had a sudden and unprecedented flight of fantasy. I pictured myself telling Beanie Winthrop that Bobo and I were going to be married, and the expression I could just imagine on her face tickled me all morning. Though Beanie had some admirable characteristics, we had never liked each other. It almost seemed worth telling her the lie just to see her face. I wondered if her only daughter, Amber Jean, would turn out to be a good woman. Her teen years were obviously shaky ground. Amber Jean had her picture in the paper this morning, helping with the canned goods drive for the soup kitchen maintained by Shakespeare Combined Church, Calvary Baptist, and First Presbyterian. She’d looked glossy and preppy in the picture; not the kind of girl who would take off her shirt in front of a group of boys, not the kind of girl who would try to subordinate a woman older than herself. “A picture is worth a thousand words” did not apply in Amber Jean’s case.

What about my mental picture of Tamsin? Tamsin looked like the average young professional, the kind who didn’t care terribly about money, the kind who really, really wanted to help. But she’d been stalked, or so it seemed, through three jobs and two states. Small animals around her died, unpleasant things happened to her everywhere, and people around her were beginning to drop like flies. She was in the center of a circle of destruction; she was the eye of a storm.

I drove to the gym thinking hard about Tamsin and her situation. She was the first person I saw when I stepped into Body Time. She was talking to Marshall, and she was looking haggard and unkempt. Her sweats looked dirty, and her hair was disheveled. Marshall gave her a dismissive pat on the back and glided over to me. Marshall is so fit that you could bounce a dime off his abs, so dangerous as a martial artist that he’s made me cry from pain. I was glad to have him for a friend.

I could tell he wanted to ask me if it was true that Jack and I were married, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He knew I hated personal questions, so he was determined to avoid that most personal one.

“Since Jack’s not here, why don’t we work out together?” he suggested. I agreed, since it’s always nice to have a spotter, and the workout always goes better with a partner to challenge you. It was triceps day for me, though I was so far behind my normal schedule I could start just about anywhere. Triceps were fine with Marshall, so we went over to the heavy weights rack to begin. Assuming the pushup position, my hands on the pair of seventies on the top rack, I began my first set, concentrating on my breathing. Marshall was propped on the hundreds farther down the rack, and his body moved as though he had springs embedded in his arms.

“Tamsin was telling me about Cliff,” Marshall said, as we rested between sets. “She came in this morning because he finally fell asleep and she didn’t know what to do with herself.”

I nodded.

“Yeah.” Marshall did some stretches, and then we did our second set of pushups. “I guess you knew she has been followed by this crazy person,” he said, when we were through.

“Yeah, I heard about that,” I said carefully. “Hard to believe in a town this size, we wouldn’t notice someone new.”

Marshall turned an inquiring face to me as we assumed the pushup position for the third and last time. “That’s true,” he said, “but what other explanation is there? I guess you’ve thought of something.”

“What if it’s her?” I asked.

Marshall gave a derisive snort. “Yeah, right. She’s a nice enough woman but she doesn’t have enough grit in her to say boo to a goose. You think she’s doing this to herself so she can get a lot of sympathy as Velma Victim? That seems a little far-fetched.”

I shrugged as I stood up and shook my arms out to relieve the ache. “Who else could it be?” I really wanted to know what Marshall was thinking.

“I hadn’t given it a thought,” he said. “Ah… Cliff, but he’d hardly want to stab himself in the back, and he’s nuts about Tamsin. Okay, not him… well, what about the new police detective? The tall black woman?”

“She worked on Tamsin’s case when Tamsin lived in Ohio,” I said. “If Stokes stabbed Cliff, believe me, he’d be dead.”

I was serious, but Marshall laughed as though I were joking.

“There was the other new cop, the patrolman, but he’s dead now, too,” Marshall said, thinking out loud. “Oh, there’s Jack! He’s new in town.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” I said, my voice showing clearly how unfunny I found this.

“And there’s the guy that’s started dating my ex.”

“I thought Thea was getting married.”

“Me, too. But he got to know her a little too well.”

“And now she’s dating someone else?”

“Sure. You know Thea. She’s nothing if not flexible, when it comes to men.”

I disliked Thea intensely. She gave women a bad name.

“Who’s the guy?”

“The new mortician at the funeral home.”

“Oh, that’s right up Thea’s alley,” I said. “I bet she loves that.”

Marshall laughed again, but less happily. This time he knew I was serious, and he agreed with me. Thea had a cruel and macabre streak, and making love in a funeral home would suit her sexual playbook, if all I’d heard were true. “But he and Thea were in Branson when Saralynn Kleinhoff was killed,” Marshall said.

So I’d developed and eliminated a suspect in the space of five minutes. I was sure all these crimes had been committed by one person. Anything else would have been too much of a coincidence.

Not that I didn’t believe in coincidence. I did. But I thought it would be stretching, in this case, to even entertain it as a possibility.

Jack’s car was in the driveway when I got home. I was very glad to see it there.

He was cooking something when I went into the kitchen, something that smelled good.

“Bacon sandwiches for lunch. I have tomatoes picked right off the vine,” he told me, his voice unmistakably smug.

I don’t eat much bacon, since it’s not good for you, but a bacon and fresh tomato sandwich was just too good to pass up.

“Where’d you get ‘em?” There were at least six tomatoes on the kitchen counter. Two were green.

“From Aunt Betty,” he said. “Can we have fried green tomatoes tonight?”

Two fried things in one day was really a lot, but I nodded. I stood behind him, watching him cook.

“Hold still,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Pretend to stab you.”

“I guess that wasn’t the answer I was wanting to hear.” But Jack obligingly stood still.

I raised my hand above my head as though it held a knife pointing downward. My hand whizzed through the air, and I mentally marked the point at which the blade would have grazed Jack’s back.

“Hmmm.”

“Can I help?” Jack asked. He picked some of the bacon out of the skillet with some small tongs, and put the bacon to drain on a pad of paper towels. I got out the small cutting board and a knife, and began to slice a tomato.

“Let me stab you again,” I said, and this time, with the knife in hand, I held it straight out in front of me. The wound Carrie had described simply couldn’t be made, if the knife was held like this.

While Jack put ice in two glasses, I explained what I was doing.

“Okay, let me try.” He turned me around, and taking the precaution of using a dull table knife, he began to experiment. “A graze at the top, a true stab at the bottom, going from the left side of the back to the right.” he said. “So I think you’re right, it would have to be an overhand blow.”

“An overhand blow from someone much shorter, right?” I put our plates on the table and folded a paper napkin beside each plate. Jack got out the bread and mayonnaise, my mother’s homemade. “Cliff’s a little taller than you, huh?” Jack nodded, as he used a fork to put tomato slices on his bread. “Maybe six feet?”

Jack said, “Just barely.”

I could think of no one involved in the episodes who was short, besides a couple of the women in the group, and Tamsin herself. “Maybe Tamsin did it by accident? And they were too embarrassed to say it?”

Jack even looked good to me when he chewed, which is one of the more unattractive activities for a human being. He swallowed. “She could have mistaken Cliff for someone else, I guess, but there’s a streetlight practically in front of their house. He was attacked in the driveway, right? So how, in good light and in a place where she would expect him to be, could she knife him by accident?”

“There’s only one other new person in town,” I said, not able to think of any rebuttal. I told Jack about my conversation with Marshall, about Thea’s new lover. Jack said, “I’ve met him. He runs in the evening.”

“Joel McCorkindale does, too.” I tried to make something of that. Joel ran, Talbot ran, Joel’s wife was in the support group, and she was short. That didn’t add up to anything. This made as little sense as one of those logic problems the first time you read it through. “If Mary has a poodle, and Mary is taller than Sarah and Brenda, and Brenda’s dog is brown, read the following statements to figure out who has the dachshund.” Besides, Sandy McCorkindale might be half nuts, but I simply could not picture her catching a squirrel and hanging it in a tree. It was actually easier to imagine Sandy stabbing someone.

We ate in silence, enjoying our first summer BLT. While we washed the dishes, I asked Jack what would happen next.

“I don’t know. Stalking’s just not that common a crime, and I have no big backlog of experience with it. When I first started my apprenticeship, Roy was handling a case a little like this. The woman couldn’t get the police to take her seriously, because the intruder wasn’t doing anything to her.”

“Intruder?”

“Yeah, he was actually coming into her apartment while she was gone, sifting through her stuff. Leaving her presents.”

I made a face. Disgusting and scary.

“I agree.” Jack looked grim as he scrubbed the skillet. “Finally, she scratched up enough money to pay for around-the-clock surveillance. The spot-checking we were doing just wasn’t effective. But it didn’t take long after that. We caught him jacking off on her underwear the second day. It was her apartment manager. It was a tough case to take to court, because he had a legal key.”

“Did you win?”

“Yes. But of course she had to move, and she found she couldn’t stay in the city even after she’d moved. So he got a slap on the wrist, and her life was changed dramatically.”

Gee, that sounded familiar. I had only heard stories like that about a million times. I sighed, and asked Jack what he planned for that afternoon.

“First, I’m hitting the computer to see what background Alicia Stokes has. Then, we’re going over to Tamsin’s house and look at their driveway. Then, at some point, I plan on us having a serious session in the bedroom, there.”

I got caught between a smile and a frown. “Why are you looking into this?” I asked.

“Because it’s got you going crazy, and I can’t have that. I like you happy. We started this whole thing so you wouldn’t have nightmares any more, and I hate it that this has turned into something that makes you feel even more angry.”

It surprised me that Jack saw me as perpetually angry.

It was true, but I hadn’t wanted him to know that.

So I was being a deceiver, something I despised.

“It’s not you,” I said.

“I know that.”

“I love you.”

“I know that.”

“Does it really bother you?”

“It worries me, sometimes. If it keeps on eating at you, some day it might include me.”

“I can’t see that happening.”

“I wish I couldn’t.”

I looked down, unable to meet his eyes. Maybe he was right. He’d taken a big chance. “Thanks for helping, Jack.”

“We’ll get this solved,” he said.

“Do we have to do those things in the order listed?”

“Why, no, I guess not.”

“Could we reverse the order?”

“I bet we could.” He grinned. The scar crinkled, and his hazel eyes narrowed, the crow’s feet at their corners spreading until the smile affected his whole face.

I took a deep breath. “I’ll beat you to the bed,” I said, and got a head start.

It ended up being a tie.

Later that afternoon, Jack had to confess he was coming up empty. Alicia had no previous record. She had good credit and paid her taxes on time. Her income was not great, but adequate for the time and place. She had once been married, was now divorced. She had never been named as the mother of a child. She had never served in the armed forces.

I decided to mow the lawn that afternoon, while Jack was busy on the computer. It was easy to think while I was mowing, and I liked the look of the small yard when it was even and trim. I even used the weedeater and then swept away the clipped grass from my sidewalk. During all this work, I thought and thought, and I could not come up with any clearer understanding of the vicious cycle surrounding Tamsin Lynd. I must have been looking at it wrong, but I couldn’t seem to find a new perspective.

Jack came outside when the sun was making deep shadows. I lay on the newly cut grass, disregarding the likelihood of fire ant bites and the certainty of grass stains, and stared up into the vast blueness. My backyard is very small and runs into the slope up to the railroad tracks, and it’s overlooked by the second-floor windows of the apartment building next door and by Carlton’s rear window, but it does give the illusion of privacy. Carlton was gone, anyway, because I’d seen him pull out in his car, and the apartment on the end closest to me was vacant at the moment. So maybe we really were unobserved.

Jack stretched in the grass beside me. His hair was loose, had been since our session in the bedroom, and I knew we’d have to pick the grass bits out of it before we went to bed. But there was nothing I would rather do.

It was hot, and quiet, and the smell of the grass was sharp in our noses.

“Let’s review,” Jack said, his voice slow and sleepy.

“Okay.” I sounded just about as peppy as he did.

“Tamsin moves to Shakespeare because she’s been stalked at her previous home in Cleveland.”

“Right.”

“A detective on that case, not the primary, but one assigned to do some of the legwork, is a young detective named Alicia Stokes.”

“Check.” I closed my eyes against the relentless blue.

“Alicia Stokes becomes so fascinated by the case, so obsessed, that when Tamsin Lynd and her husband, Cliff Eggers, move to Shakespeare, eventually Alicia finds herself compelled to follow.”

“ ‘Compelled to follow.’ I like that.” I turned on my side and raised myself up on my right elbow. “Also, within a matter of months, a true crime writer whose real name is Gerry McClanahan signs on with the city police in Shakespeare. He’s a real policeman, so this doesn’t seem fraudulent to him. His secret life as a writer isn’t known to anyone… anyone we’re aware of.”

“Gerry, aka Gibson Banks, knows not only about Tamsin and Cliff, but also about the obsessed policewoman. He’s come to watch the showdown.”

I nodded.

“And, once again, things start happening to Tamsin Lynd… and tangentially, to Cliff.”

“Tangentially. I love it when you use big words.” I bent over to kiss Jack’s forehead. He wiggled closer to me.

“Expeditious. Arraignment. Consequence. Territorial…” Jack smiled, his eyes closed against the glow of the sky, and I leaned over to kiss him again, this time not on the forehead.

“So, she gets phone calls,” he resumed. “We happen by when they find the dead squirrel.”

“Then Saralynn Kleinhoff is killed-and put on display- and put in Tamsin’s office. While Tamsin is still in the building. But Janet, who interrupts the killer, is not murdered, but rendered unconscious.”

“Then, the writer who is planning to do a book on both the stalking and the detective who can’t stop stalking the stalker, so to speak, is murdered while he watches the stalkee.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Then Tamsin’s husband, her last stronghold, falls into a boobytrap. Shortly thereafter, he’s attacked in their own driveway.”

“And that’s where we are now.” I lay down with my head on Jack’s chest, my arm thrown over him. I closed my eyes, too, and felt the sun kiss my cheek. I knew in a minute I’d be uncomfortable and itchy, but this moment was idyllic.

“And though we figure the stalker also has to be someone who’s new in town, the only other new person is a strange, possibly perverted, but apparently guiltless mortician.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

“And we’re nowhere.”

“Well, it’s not you and it’s not me.”

“Oh, good, just about ten thousand more people to go.” Sure enough, I was beginning to get itchy. I sat up and started to brush off the cut grass. I thought about packing up Gerry McClanahan’s house, the life he’d left behind him. His awards and accomplishments, his ties with people in small worlds and big worlds, his notes of projects yet to come, projects that now would never be completed unless his estate hired someone to finish the work he’d started.

The notes. All those notes. I wished now I’d had a chance to read them before the police gathered them up. Gerry McClanahan, after all, had been a trained detective with lots of experience. What had he concluded about the stalking of Tamsin Lynd? All I could remember was that he’d called it a fascinating case. That wasn’t a help.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Jack asked. He was propped up on his elbows.

I explained my line of thought to him.

“Fascinating,” he said, “he called it fascinating?”

“Yeah. And he said, ‘This is a case turned upside down. No one will forget this one.’ ”

“Turned upside down.”

I nodded. “So let’s see,” I said, mostly to myself. “If a case is upside down… the victim is the perpetrator? That would mean Tamsin has been responsible for the whole thing.”

“Or it could mean that whoever is guilty looks innocent.”

“Whoever loves Tamsin actually hates her.”

That gave us both a jolt. We looked at each other. “Who loves Tamsin?” Jack asked, almost in a whisper.

“Cliff loves Tamsin.”

After a wide-eyed moment, we both shook our heads in disbelief.

“Nah,” I said. “Did you see how he cried when he picked her up in the parking lot after Saralynn was murdered? And the gash on his leg after he fell through the step?”

“Let’s go look at their driveway,” Jack said.

We walked, because it was beautiful, and because it might make the visit look less rehearsed. But we need not have been concerned about that; no one was home at the house on Compton Street.

Up the driveway we went, as though we’d been invited. We gave a perfunctory knock to the front door, and then turned away to enact the attack of the night before.

“You be Cliff,” I told Jack. “Remember, your leg is still sore from going through the steps.” Jack pretended to emerge from the house. He limped down the front steps, and walked slowly over to where the couple parked their cars. Jack got his keys out, as someone naturally would if they expected to drive off. Then he stopped. I came up behind him as quietly as possible, but the driveway was loose gravel. Even the grass strip running between the driveway and the hedge was full of the stuff.

“I can hear you coming a mile away,” he said over his shoulder. “No way anyone snuck up on Cliff.”

Of course, if you heard someone coming up behind you when you were outside, you’d turn around to look. Anyone would. You wouldn’t just keep on with what you were doing.

But I raised my hand, again pantomiming the knifing. This time, I crouched a little until I approximated Tamsin’s height. I made an awkward swing, and was very close to the wound area as Carrie had described it to me. But the angle was all wrong, straight down instead of left-to-right. “That didn’t work,” I told Jack, almost cheerfully.

“You know, and I know, that when someone’s coming up behind you, you’re going to turn around to see what they want.” Jack’s face was getting grimmer and grimmer as he spoke. “And if the stabber was really determined he’d stick around and try again.”

Jack turned his back to me again. He bent his hand up behind his back as far as he could bend it. He had a pocketknife clenched in his right fist, with the end pointing down. Jack made a chopping, downward motion. The point of the knife grazed his rump in an arc from left to right. If he hadn’t been careful, it would’ve gouged the flesh of his right hip.

It was exactly as Carrie had described the wound.

“Oh, no, Jack.” I felt almost as though I was going to cry, and I couldn’t say why.

“It might not be that way,” Jack said. “But it looks like it to me.”

“So what’d he do with it?” I asked. “Put it in his pocket?”

“They’d find it at the hospital,” Jack said. He pantomimed the self-mutilation again, he put out a hand to rest on an imaginary car, and with the other he pitched his pocketknife into the depths of the hedge. Then we both got down on our hands and knees and searched, very carefully.

Jack found a splotch of dried blood in the bed of old leaves below the hedge, right after I’d retrieved his knife.

“Of course, his attacker could’ve thrown it in here and retrieved it later. It didn’t have to be Cliff that did the tossing and retrieving,” Jack said.

I nodded. I felt about twenty years older, all in a flash. This was betrayal on a grand scale. And on an incredibly mean scale, too.

“Do you think Claude has figured this out?” Jack and I strode down the sidewalk. Jack had thrust his hands in his pockets and he was scowling. “Or do you think he’s been too distracted by the upheaval in his department?”

We stopped at the next corner. Tamsin was at the stop sign facing us, and through the windshield of her car I could tell she was looking haggard. The plump and assured woman I’d met a few weeks earlier had simply vanished.

We’d finished our little experiment just in time. She waved us through the intersection, and tried to summon up a smile for us, but it failed. We nodded and kept on walking. I felt like a traitor to her. First I thought she’d been persecuting herself, and now I suspected her husband was her tormentor.

“We have to go talk to Claude,” I said.

Jack nodded unenthusiastically. Neither of us is happy in a police station. Since my ordeal, I’d become shy of the police, who were first to initiate me into the range of human reactions to my victimization that I now knew so well. And Jack is still ostracized by some cops for his involvement in the scandal that led to his leaving the force in Memphis.

Claude was in and willing to see us. I had half hoped he’d be out fighting crime or swamped in paperwork.

We went into his office. Claude looked puzzled, but glad to see us, a reaction so far off base that I came pretty close to turning around and leaving. But conscience demanded that we take the wooden chairs in front of Claude’s old desk and state our business.

I glanced at Jack, took a deep breath, and launched in to our theory.

Claude said, when he was sure I’d finished, “That’s pretty interesting stuff, there. What do you have to prove it?”

My heart sank. “You haven’t found any evidence to point to Cliff, or Tamsin… or anyone else?”

“You mean, in general? Or in the death of Saralynn Kleinhoff? In the murder of my police officer? Let’s just take Saralynn’s murder. Let’s see,” Claude rumbled, scooting lower in his chair and crossing his ankles. “Got to be someone that had a key to the health center. That’s forty present and past employees, plus their families.”

I hadn’t even thought of that.

“Got to be someone who doesn’t mind getting their hands messy. Well, who knows? My grandmother, the most finicky woman on God’s green earth, could butcher a chicken as fast as you can say Jack Robinson,” Claude continued. “Got to be someone with a personal dislike of Tamsin Lynd. Mental health workers get all kinds of enemies, right? And as for thinking it has to be the same person here as was stalking her in Illinois-well, why? Could be a copycat. Doesn’t have to be someone who followed her down here. As far as hanging the squirrel, anyone could’ve done that at any time. You could tie up the squirrel ahead of time and take it over there, get it strung on the branch in a minute or less.”

This wasn’t going the way I’d hoped. Jack was looking pretty bleak, too.

“Then, Gerry. Now that I know about Gerry, I can understand a lot of things about him better. But that doesn’t stop me from being mad at him for deceiving me, and I’ll bet a lot of other people were mad at him, too. Just because he told you that he was watching Tamsin’s house doesn’t mean that was why he was killed. And Cliff is the only one giving Tamsin an alibi for that one; he says she was in the shower. Well, maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t.”

I closed my eyes and wished I were somewhere else.

“About this scenario you two have worked out-you may be right. May be. But if Cliff did stab himself, that doesn’t necessarily mean he killed Saralynn and Gerry. That doesn’t mean he’s been terrorizing his own wife. We have no proof either way.”

“No forensic evidence?” Jack was leaning forward in his chair.

“There were fibers on Saralynn that came from a pair of slacks a lot like the ones Cliff was wearing that day. Khaki Dockers. Everyone’s got a pair of those. And Cliff readily told us that he’d been in there earlier in the day, when he’d brought Tamsin her lunch. Fibers could’ve been left there then.”

“Say we’re right,” Jack said. “Say that the one behind everything is Cliff. What do you think he’ll do next?”

My eyes flicked to Claude, who was thinking the matter over.

“If he follows his pattern, he’ll quit. They’ll move. It’ll start all over again.”

Jack nodded.

Claude continued, his face looking as seamed and careworn as that of a man ten years older. “But he’s escalated and escalated. From nasty pranks, to small deaths like the squirrel, to human deaths like Saralynn’s and Gerry’s. What could be left? Next time, I reckon he’ll try to kill her.”

With regret, I agreed.

Chapter Thirteen

“We might as well not have gone to Claude,” I said to Jack.

We were on our way home from Body Time the next morning when I reopened the subject.

“Yeah.” He stared straight ahead, his face like a thundercloud and his posture just as aggressive as mine. “We can’t just wait for her to be killed.”

“What else can we do? We can’t stay outside her house for days or weeks. We can’t follow her everywhere she goes, or kill Cliff before he kills her.”

Jack looked at me sidelong, and I could see the idea of taking Cliff out appealed to him. “We can’t,” I said, in the voice my fifth grade teacher had used when she recited the Golden Rule to us every morning. “We are not going to get in trouble with the law again.”

When we got home, at least part of our problem was solved. There was a message on the answering machine from Tamsin. Even her voice sounded quavery. “Lily, this is Tamsin. I just can’t get up the energy to do any housework, and the place is a wreck. If you’re feeling better-only if you’re well enough-I would really appreciate hearing from you.”

I called her back right away. “This is Lily,” I said.

“Oh. Oh, Lily! Can you come to help me clean house today? I don’t know if I can go in to work this week… and I’m definitely staying home today. I’m so shaken up.”

“I think I can come over,” I told her. After all, it was Sunday morning, when I never scheduled anything so I could have a break from work. But I’d definitely had enough down time this week.

“Oh, thank God!”

We talked a little more-well, she did-and I hung up. Jack, standing beside me for the whole conversation, was sunk in thought. We looked at each other for a second or two.

“Do you have to go over there?” He ran a hand through his hair to push it over his shoulders.

“Yes. I owe her.”

“Do you think Cliff’s there?”

“She didn’t say.”

“I don’t know about this, Lily. I hate for you to be anywhere close to the woman. I feel sorry for her, but she’s a human lightning rod.”

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about Tamsin’s request myself. “Maybe she really wants me over there to clean. But I’m thinking maybe she needs company, and doesn’t know anyone well enough to just ask for it.”

“So, you’re going to go?” Jack was still reluctant.

“Yes, but I’ll call you when I get there. If you don’t hear from me, come over to see how everything’s going. I don’t know if I could take a lot of weeping.” At odd moments, the loss of the baby still struck me with a peculiar pain.

“You won’t forget to call?” Jack touched my hair.

“No, I won’t forget.”

I showered and changed, so it was about ten when I left my house, ten o’clock on a hot and peaceful Sunday morning. Shakespeare was at its best. The church parking lots were full. A little towheaded boy was in his driveway operating a remote-control car. Everything looked absolutely normal on Tamsin’s street. Both the cars were parked in the drive, and I wedged in behind them.

I wasn’t too pleased that Cliff was home, but I had only suspicion, after all. Lugging my cleaning-material caddy, I went up the front steps and knocked. With professional eyes I examined the porch; it needed to be swept, if not hosed down.

Tamsin came to the door immediately. She looked as awful as she had the day before. Her hair was straggly and dirty, her cutoff jeans and truncated sweatshirt were anything but pristine, and she was free of makeup and jewelry.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, in a limp voice. “I just can’t stand for everything to be so dirty, with people dropping by all the time. I can’t ever tell who’ll be seeing my house, with the police coming in all the time.”

“Cliff home?” The litter of the big edition of the paper and a couple of stained coffee mugs in the living room were like a tableau called “Sunday morning.”

“Yes, he’s in the small den back there where we keep the TV.” This living room, decorated in inexpensive American comfortable, did not contain a television or music system. Shelves hung on the wall held little china statues of wide-eyed children.

“Aren’t they darling? I love those things,” Tamsin said, following my gaze. “My folks started giving me one a year when I was little. Then, Cliff took over.”

Despite her dishevelment, Tamsin seemed calm and in control. I felt encouraged. Maybe this wouldn’t be too bad. As soon as she explained the program, I’d call Jack. “Where do you want me to start?” I stood before her with raised eyebrows, just waiting for her word.

“How about in there?” Tamsin pointed to the hall leading to the back of the house, and I preceded her down the dark corridor.

“In here?” I asked, and turned the knob of the door at the end.

“Yep,” she said, and I just had time to turn the knob and push the door open, all the while thinking she was sounding so cheerful. I was met with a burst of sunlight, and the sight of Cliff Eggers bound and gagged with duct tape and lying on the floor.

Then she did something horrible to me, something that made every atom in my body surge, and I fell down beside him.

I had some seconds of complete disorientation. Or maybe I lost minutes. My legs had no bones in them. Talking was simply impossible, even if I’d been able to formulate a sentence. My mouth was open and I was drooling. I felt wet at my crotch; I had wet my pants. When I became aware that I was still thinking, that my thoughts could form patterns and make sense, my first clear concept was that I should avoid having that-whatever it was-done to me again, no matter what the cost. My wandering gaze happened to meet Cliff’s desperate brown eyes, and I slowly became anchored in the here and now, as unpleasant as that was.

I was still alive. That was the important thing. And I hadn’t called Jack, so I figured he’d be coming sooner or later-unless Tamsin had done something while I was mentally out of the room, something to fool Jack, too.

Of course, I felt like the biggest idiot.

Cliff’s eyes stared into mine. He was scared shitless. I didn’t blame him. But I was just as glad the duct tape across his mouth made talking impossible. I didn’t need anyone else’s fear. I had plenty of my own.

“What you gonna do?” I asked Tamsin, after tremendous effort. It was the first sentence that managed to make it out of my lips. She was holding something in her right hand, a black narrow shape, and I finally recognized it as a stun gun. I took a deep breath of sheer bitterness. Oh, gosh, who had told her where to buy one? Could it have been me? It would have been hard for me to be more angry with myself than I was at this moment, or more sickened by the human race.

“If you’re not outraged by what he’s done to me, I’m going to have to do it myself,” Tamsin said. “Then, I don’t know what I’ll do about you.”

“Why?” Though that was probably a pointless question.

Oddly, she looked like she was thinking of answering me.

“I just realized the past few days. At first, it just didn’t seem possible. That someone living with me, someone sleeping with me, someone who took my dresses to the cleaners, was trying to drive me crazy. The first stuff, the stuff in Cleveland, even that was Cliff.” Instead of looking at me, she was staring off into space, and I swear she had the most disillusioned, heartbroken expression. I would have felt sorry for her, if she hadn’t just disabled and humiliated me. “I figured out just this week that after I lost our baby, Cliff was out to kill me. He thought I did things to kill the baby. And he knew I had a lot of insurance-one big policy through work and another on my own. He thought, in my profession, getting killed wouldn’t be so strange. He was doing my transcripts for me, then. In fact, that’s where we met, at that clinic.” The narrow black device swung in her hand like a television remote control. “So Cliff transcribed my sessions with a patient who had potential for great violence, one who actually might think of killing me. I think Cliff planned to beat me to death.” She got right in my face to confide this. If I’d had the energy, the hair would have been lifting on my neck. “He could count on the investigators going through my patients, finding-this man-and arresting him.”

“And?” If I didn’t try to say too much, it came out okay. My legs were slowly feeling a little more functional. Cliff was moving a little more. She’d bound his hands in front, which wasn’t too competent. He was picking at the duct tape across his mouth.

“We moved once, in the Cleveland area, after I found a snake nailed to the door. Moving didn’t help. Then, as I’ve come to realize these past few days, Cliff stretched his fun out a little too long. Charles, my patient, died in a bar fight. Cliff had to stop. Of course, I didn’t put two and two together then.” Her face became blank, her eyes opaque. “I really thought Cliff suggested this move to Shakespeare because he was concerned about me. He gave up his business and everything to move south with me, and I believed we would be happy here. I didn’t put Charles’s death together with the end of the persecution, the end of the horrible messages on the answering machine. But Cliff told me just a few minutes ago that the police up there did make the connection, did mention-to Cliff-the possibility of my stalker being Charles. They would’ve wondered if the calls had kept coming. So here we are, and we get settled, and I think everything is going so good, and I start getting the calls again. The house is entered. There’s… poop… smeared on the door.”

Cliff had succeeded in ungagging himself. “Lily,” he said in a weak voice, “don’t let her kill me.”

I didn’t even glance at him. “Yeah?” I said to Tamsin, to encourage her to talk. The longer she talked, the more time I had to recover.

“So we decided the police had been wrong. That someone else had followed me down here. It still didn’t occur to me to suspect the most obvious person.” She shook her head at her own naivetй. “We figured-that is, I figured, and Cliff pretended to-that since the calls only came when Cliff was gone, that meant the guy was watching me, knew when I was alone. That made it more scary. Notes slid under the door, notes in my clothes-oh, God!” She shuddered and wept.

My sympathy would have been deeper if I hadn’t been sitting there in wet pants.

“Lily,” Cliff said, “I didn’t do those things. I love my wife… even though she planted the stake in the step for me to get hurt on. If you’ll just let me go, we can work this out.” He was plucking awkwardly at the duct tape around his wrists, but that was going to be much harder.

I said, “Tamsin, why’d you call me here?”

“Because you can kill him.”

I shook my head.

“You can kill him,” she repeated persuasively. “You killed a man before. This one deserves it, too. Think of what he’s done to me. He shouldn’t live!” Her face grew crafty. “What if he gets off and does this to someone else? I know from our therapy group that you have a sense of justice.”

Unhampered by the rules of law, she meant.

“You could kill him for me. We’d all be safer.”

She had condensed Cliff into every man who’d hurt a woman.

“Please do this for me! My mind is too fragile, too delicate, to sustain killing him.” She made it sound like her mind was made out of old lace. “I just don’t have the guts, the determination. I need you to do this favor for another woman.” The empty hand touched her chest. “Help your sister out.”

“You-stunned me.”

“I was afraid you’d run away before I could talk to you if I didn’t do something,” she told me, and her voice was so reasonable that I winced. “I know you, from the group. You wouldn’t sit and listen to me unless I made you. Would you? Just think about it, Lily. You have to understand this. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. He took everything away from me. I think he did something to make me lose the baby. I don’t believe in anything any more.”

And she should have made him unconscious, because he was eyeing me frantically, shaking his head to deny what she was telling me. “Lily, Tamsin has just lost her mind. Don’t cater to her when she’s clearly off her rocker. I love my wife, and I’ve done everything I can to help her through this. Please don’t let her do something worse than this.” I noticed he was making progress on loosening the duct tape binding his wrists. It was difficult, but he was managing. The next time I wanted to secure someone, I wouldn’t call Tamsin to do the securing.

Tamsin went on enumerating her wrongs. Since I was still too weak to move, I had plenty of time to think. I thought it was pretty lucky their baby hadn’t been born, whatever had caused the miscarriage. What if what Tamsin was telling me wasn’t true? She was deeply disturbed. She might be mistaken, and she might just be a liar. What if she just wanted an excuse to kill Cliff, with a reasonable chance of an acquittal, or at the most a light sentence? Pretending he’d confessed his long persecution of her, pretending he’d told her he’d killed Saralynn and Gerry McClanahan, would provide an excellent story to tell a jury.

Especially with a witness like me.

She could have no serious hope that I would take the bait and do Cliff in, but she could provide a good case for herself if I was there to witness her frenzy and her anguish, even if she had to immobilize me to make me watch it. I was pretty sure Tamsin was not quite as crazy as she was making out; I was pretty sure she was making a case for temporary insanity.

But I wasn’t completely sure.

The only certainty I had was that I hated Tamsin, my counselor, who was twisting what she’d extracted from our therapy sessions to serve her own ends: my disregard for the letter of the law, my strong sense of justice. She’d ignored other things about me that were just as important, like my absolute and total hatred of people who made me feel helpless, my loathing of being physically unclean, and my dislike of being bested.

“What happened in your office when Saralynn was killed?” I asked. My speech was better, too.

“I swear to God, exactly what I told the police,” Tamsin said.

“You knew I was there,” Cliff said, his voice ragged. “You knew someone was killing Saralynn. And you hid. I wondered the whole time, does she even care enough to come out? If she’ll come out, if she’ll be brave, I won’t finish… and she yelled for you, Tamsin. You heard her. And you stayed shut in that conference room, doing nothing.”

“Lily, he’s trying to take you in just like he took me!” She was all but wailing, rocking back and forth, the stun gun still in her hand.

“You knew she was being killed,” Cliff repeated, “and you knew it was me.”

Tamsin was breathing like she’d been running, and she was pale and sweating.

“I hear what you’re saying,” I said, unable to stop myself from registering that Tamsin wasn’t the only one who had had a sad disillusionment here.

I was feeling stronger by the minute. I was going to take that stun gun away from her if I had to beat her senseless to do it. In fact, that was starting to sound very appealing.

“I’ll help you out, Tamsin,” I said, staring into Cliff’s eyes. I noticed, as I pulled myself up to my knees, that Cliff had made great progress unwrapping his wrists. In a minute, he would be much more of a factor than he was right now. I gripped the arm of a couch, and pushed myself up. I thought my muscles would all work. Upright had never felt so good.

Cliff began rolling around on the open floor like a giant bowling pin. He had given up plucking subtly at his wrist bindings. His fingers were tearing at the last wraparound of the silver tape, yanking so hard they sometimes broke his skin.

Tamsin, standing in the open doorway, looked absolutely crazed. “Kill him, Lily!” she shrieked. “Kill him kill him kill him!”

They were both using up valuable oxygen, as far as I was concerned. While Tamsin had been enumerating her woes earlier, I’d been learning the room. A sofa and an armchair divided by a small table, a television on an oak stand, and my cleaning caddy; and in it, my cell phone. It was awfully close to Tamsin, too close, I’d decided. I wouldn’t willingly get within range of that stun gun again. Somewhat closer, there was a telephone on the table between the couch and the chair.

I snatched up the phone and hit nine one one before Cliff crashed into me from behind. I went sprawling on the couch, rapping my nose sharply on the edge of the wooden arm. Suddenly there was blood everywhere, and a blinding pain.

I scrambled up as quickly as the pain permitted. Tamsin was shrieking and darting at Cliff with the stun gun, only to dodge away when he got near enough to kick at her. Seeing Cliff still rolling on the floor, his hands still bound, I realized that he was looking for something to roll up against, to provide stability so he might be able to struggle upright. I brought back my foot and kicked him as hard as I could, just as he ripped his bonds apart. I didn’t have time to choose, but my foot connected with his lower back. The jolt ran all the way up to my face and made my nose hurt even more. He bellowed in pain, and I very nearly joined him.

“That’s it, Lily! Kick the son of a bitch!” yelled Tamsin, delighted. She actually had her arms up in the air in a cheerleader gesture. No way she could get the stun gun down in time. I hoped fervently that I’d recovered enough strength to finish this. I took two strides, drew back my fist and hit her in the pit of her stomach as hard as I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. To my intense pleasure, Tamsin finally shut up. I stood swaying on my feet, watching her gag.

The moment of silence was as refreshing as a cool shower, but it ended when Jack dashed in. He stood in the doorway panting, his face dripping with sweat. “You didn’t call. How are you? Your nose is broken.” I nodded. He surveyed the floor, and looked at me. “Well, which one of them did it?”

“Hell if I know,” I said, and called the police.

Because he is a good and merciful man, Claude let Alicia Stokes interview Tamsin. “If you’re smart,” he told Alicia in his deep, rumbly voice, “you’ll learn more about being a cop in the next two hours than you have in the last year.” Jack and I were sitting in the designated waiting chairs as they came through on their way to the interview rooms. Alicia gave me a long, thoughtful look as she went into one interview room.

Claude was in charge of Cliff, whom the hospital had treated and released.

The only part I had left to play was that of incidental victim. My misery and my trembling muscles were the byproduct of the secret war between Tamsin and Cliff. They were victims of each other; at least, that’s how I figured it. How a man and a woman who both set out to do good, at least by their choices of professions, could have gone so far into the red zone of human torment is not something I care to understand.

I had gone to the hospital to have a nose X ray, and then home to shower, before I was due at the police station. I was still shaky and felt very much like some other person who bore only a distant relationship to Lily Bard. Jack made it clear I wasn’t going anywhere without him. I gave him no argument when he said he was going to drive me to the police station.

I was feeling much more like myself by the time Alicia and Claude sat down with me to go over what Tamsin had said before Jack came in like the cavalry. From the direction their questions took, I pieced together the public line they would take in their prosecution.

Claude believed that most of what Tamsin had said was true. But he thought that Tamsin must have realized Cliff’s intentions earlier than she alleged. In fact, he thought the move to Shakespeare had been conceived by Tamsin, who believed a small town’s less experienced and sophisticated police department would not be able to solve any crimes committed on its turf, provided the criminal was clever. Well, as Claude put it, the hell with her.

On one level, their marriage had proceeded at a predictable pace. They made love, worked, fought sometimes, and each made their own plans. On another level, they were engaged in a life-and-death struggle.

“I don’t know what happened in their early marriage, but Cliff’s deep problems with his wife seem to have started because of the miscarriage. Tamsin seemed to enjoy the sympathy it earned her, to a real suspicious extent,” Claude said, recrossing his ankles. His feet were propped up on the edge of his desk in his favorite pose.

“Tamsin said she thought he wanted to collect on her insurance money, too,” I said.

Claude shook his head. “I just don’t see money as an important part of this, and I guess it’s the first time I ever said that.”

I shrugged.

“But somehow, at some point, he decided to make a game out of retaliation. Tamsin was fun to scare. She had more education than Cliff, more pretensions; he enjoyed getting the edge back.”

“Cliff upped the ante when he killed Saralynn,” Alicia Stokes said. She’d been sweating. Her skin gleamed like highly polished mahogany. “Tamsin admitted to herself, then, that she suspected her husband. Maybe his footsteps in the hall were too familiar for her to block the knowledge from herself.”

“She told you that?” I asked.

Stokes nodded, slowly and deliberately. “Yes, she figured Cliff had access to her keys to the building, knew its layout and her routine, and also knew she was meeting a new group member early.”

“Janet’s appearance was a real shock.” The chief of police resumed his part of the narrative. After all these months of silent struggle, talking must have been a relief to both Tamsin and Cliff. I would have called a lawyer, myself, and clammed up, but that was not as much a stretch for me as for most people. “And the fact that Tamsin stayed in the conference room. I think he’d looked forward to her reaction to finding the body; he’d planned on at least listening to the sound effects from out in the lobby. But she stayed low, and he had to leave. He knew the members of the group would be arriving soon. He went out the front door and to his car, which he’d parked at Shakespeare Pharmacy about half a block away. He didn’t think anyone would particularly remember his car at the pharmacy, and he was right. Then he showed up at the health center. He expected his wife to completely collapse. But she bore up under it pretty well. Cliff’s reaction, in the parking lot, you remember how upset he seemed? He really was.”

“What about Gerry McClanahan?” Jack took another drink from his plastic foam cup of station-house coffee. He’d be up all night. I would be too, unless the pills Carrie had given me packed a true wallop. I had had many painful things happen to me, but the broken nose ranked right up there in the top three. I had tomorrow to look forward to, when Jack said my face would be even more arresting. But at least I was clean and dry, and the soiled clothes were in the washer back at the house.

I was putting my money on Gerry having pegged Cliff as the stalker, but as it turned out I was half wrong.

Claude had just finished reading Gerry McClanahan’s notes about the odd behavior of his neighbors. In fact, when Jack’s call had come into the station, Claude and Alicia had been discussing what they could prove, and who would be charged with what. Tamsin’s mental collapse had settled some of their questions.

As the surveillance log showed, Gerry had noticed Cliff going to the toolshed at what Gerry considered odd times. The writer had thought it was strange that Cliff always emerged empty-handed. Gerry had sneaked over to check out the shed once or twice when Cliff and Tamsin were both gone. He’d seen an animal cage, but didn’t question its presence until the dead squirrel was found hanging from the tree. After reading the police report on the incident, Gerry had retrieved the squirrel corpse from the garbage where Jack had put it. Then he’d stolen the cage (I’d later seen it in Gerry’s house after his death), which contained plenty of squirrel hairs. Gerry planned to get a lab to test the creature’s DNA.

Claude didn’t know if such a test was possible, or if it was, if the results would be admissible in court. But from Claude’s voice I could tell he admired Gerry’s tenacity and his willingness to put his money where his mouth was.

The page of Gerry’s log I’d found had noted that Cliff went to the toolshed the night before we’d found the poor squirrel murdered.

Gerry had planned to return the cage so Cliff wouldn’t get suspicious. But before he could act, he witnessed something even stranger. He’d seen Tamsin sabotaging her own back steps. The worm had turned.

Gerry had been completely gripped in the drama he saw unfolding before him. He’d acted like a writer instead of a cop, and when Cliff had noticed the missing cage and followed the faint traces of footsteps in the damp yard, he’d come across Gerry. Maybe Gerry had already been out in his backyard, filling out his log; maybe Cliff had knocked on Gerry’s back door and demanded an explanation or created some excuse to get Gerry outside. And he’d killed him. Later, reasoning that two stabbings would throw the police off even more than one, he’d staged the clumsy attempt on himself. A hastily arranged mistake, that self-stabbing; Tamsin could not have had any doubt after that, no matter how much she had blinded herself to the truth.

“But she backed Cliff up,” Jack said incredulously. “When he said he’d never seen the knife before, the one in Gerry’s throat. Surely she recognized it? And Cliff had called me, to have me back in Shakespeare so maybe I’d get blamed for Gerry’s death.”

“The world would’ve been a better place if those two had never met,” Claude said.

“Uh-huh, you got that right,” Alicia said, trying to cover her yawn with her hand.

“As for you, Detective Stokes, we need to have a private conference. Cliff Eggers has told me he recognized you from Cleveland. I have reason to believe you’ve been far more aware and involved in this case than you saw fit to tell me. According to you, Tamsin’s case was one you’d heard about while you were on the Cleveland force, not one you’d worked on.”

Alicia suddenly looked wide awake.

“Well, Lily and I will be going home now,” Jack said. He held out his hand, and I took it gratefully. He gave me a gentle pull to help me up. Having help was such a luxury. I hoped I never would grow to take it for granted. At least I could be sure that Jack and I would never become like Cliff and Tamsin. Our hard times and aggressive impulses had been flashed to the world. Everyone knew what we were capable of. We didn’t have to prove ourselves in any secret way.

Claude clapped Jack on the shoulder, just when Jack was almost out of the room. Claude said, “By the way, a little bird told me you married this woman.” He was not smiling and he did not look happy. Something pretty old-fashioned and definitely paternalistic had surfaced in Claude. “You better treat her right.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jack said.

“He hasn’t done too bad the first three months,” I said.

Claude began smiling at us. Behind him, I saw Stokes was sitting in the old office chair with her mouth hanging open. “When are you planning on letting the rest of the world in on this?” Claude asked.

“It’s seeping out gradually,” I said. “We just wanted to get used to the fact ourselves, first.”

“Was my wife the first to know?” Claude still sounded proud saying “my wife.”

“Yes, my wife told your wife,” Jack said, grinning like an idiot.

As the door began to close behind us, we heard Claude open a conversation with his detective. “You want to tell me who you’re really working for, Stokes?” he began, and then the door thudded into place.

Though the next day was Monday, Jack and I lay in bed late. My face was swollen and bruised and I looked like hell. I still felt a bit weak from the stun gun, which the police had regarded with great respect. They’d charged Tamsin with use of a prohibited weapon, in addition to all the other charges. I wondered if Sneaky Pete would get into trouble, but I couldn’t summon up enough energy to get really worked up about it.

“How could two people who are supposed to love each other get so crossed up?” Jack asked. “They could have just gotten a divorce, like other couples.”

“They must have enjoyed their little war, somehow. Perfectly matching pathologies.” I’d been thinking of getting up and changing our sheets, but it was so nice to have a reason to lie in bed, so pleasant to have Jack beside me. I was sure I would get used to that pleasure, in time; waking up beside Jack would become routine. I’d begin to notice the little things that irritate any spouse. But because of the tenor of my life, I appreciated the simple fact of love. So did Jack.

I couldn’t help but feel convinced that if Tamsin and Cliff had deserved each other, so did Jack and I. Gazing up at my white ceiling in my clean bedroom, I pictured a panorama of centuries of mating: of men and women looking for the perfect match, and finding pairings that were at best convenient-at worst, the product of one twisted psyche calling to another equally perverse.

I had been a child of love. My parents were lucky in their marriage, and I had been the beneficiary of that luck. After I’d been forced into a different kind of mating, I’d changed irrevocably into someone my former self would hardly have recognized. It seemed to me that now I had a chance to change back. I wondered if that was really possible.

But I am not a woman who can sit and think theoretically for long stretches of time, and I am not a woman who can change philosophy easily. In fact, I floated away from that vista of pairings and sank back into myself on the bed with a distinct feeling of relief.

“Today,” I said, “we’re going to clean the gutters.”