Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Two

I slid through the designated door the next night as though I’d come to steal some help, not to get it for free.

There were four cars in the parking lot, which was only partially visible from the street. I recognized two of them.

The side door we were to use was a heavy metal door. It slid shut behind me with a heavy thud, and I walked toward the only two rooms that were well lit. All the other doors up and down the corridor were shut, and I was willing to bet they were probably locked as well.

A woman appeared in the first open doorway and called, “Come on in! We’re ready to get started!” As I got closer I could see she was as dark as I was blond, she was as soft as I am hard, and I was to find she talked twice as much as I’d ever thought about doing. “I’m Tamsin Lynd,” she said, extending her hand.

“Lily Bard,” I said, taking the hand and giving it a good shake.

She winced. “Lily?…”

“Bard,” I supplied, resigned to what was to come.

Her eyes got round behind their glasses, which were wire framed and small. Tamsin Lynd clearly recognized my name, which was a famous one if you read a lot of true crime.

“Before you go in the therapy room, Lily, let me tell you the rules.” She stepped back and gestured, and I went into what was clearly her office. The desk and its chair were arranged facing the door, and there were books and papers everywhere. The room was pretty small, and there wasn’t space for much after the desk and chair and two bookcases and a filing cabinet. The wall behind the desk was covered with what looked like carpeting, dark gray with pink flecks to match the carpet on the floor. I decided it had been designed for use as a bulletin board of sorts. Tamsin Lynd had fixed newspaper and magazine clippings to it with pushpins, and the effect was at least a little cheerful. The therapist didn’t invite me to sit, but stood right in front of me examining me closely. I wondered if she imagined herself a mind reader.

I waited. When she saw I wasn’t going to speak, Tamsin began, “Every woman in this group has been through a lot, and this therapy group is designed to help each and every one get used to being in social situations and work situations and alone situations, without being overwhelmed with fear. So what we say here is confidential, and we have to have your word that the stories you hear in this room stop in your head. That’s the most important rule. Do you agree to this?”

I nodded. I sometimes felt the whole world had heard my story. But if I’d had a chance to prevent it, not a soul would’ve known.

“I’ve never had a group like this here in Shakespeare, but I’ve run them before. Women start coming to this group when they can stand talking about what happened to them-or when they can’t stand their lives as they are. Women leave the group when they feel better about themselves. You can come as long as I run it, if you need to. Now, let’s go to the therapy room and you can meet the others.”

But before we could move, the phone rang.

Tamsin Lynd’s reaction was extraordinary. She jerked and turned to face her desk. Her hand shot out and rested on top of the receiver. When it rang again, her fingers tightened around the phone, but she still didn’t lift it. I decided it would be tactful to step around the desk and look at the clippings on the wall. Predictably, most were about rape, stalking, and the workings of the court system. Some were about brave women. The counselor’s graduate and postgraduate degrees were framed and displayed, and I was duly impressed.

The manifestly intelligent Tamsin had picked up the phone and said, “Hello?” as though she was scared to death.

The next thing I knew, she’d gasped and sunk down into the client chair in front of the desk. I abandoned my attempt to look like I wasn’t there.

“Stop this,” the therapist hissed into the phone. “You have to stop this! No, I won’t listen!” And she smashed the receiver into its cradle as though she was bashing in someone’s head. Tamsin took several deep breaths, almost sobbing. Then she was enough under control to speak to me.

“If you’ll go on next door,” she said, in a voice creditably even, “I’ll be there in a minute. I just need to collect a few things.”

Like her wits and her composure. I hesitated, about to offer help, then realizing that was ludicrous under the circumstances. I eased out from behind Tamsin’s desk and out the door, took two steps to the left, and went into another.

The room next door was probably a lot of things besides the therapy room. There was a large institutional table, surrounded by the usual butt-numbing institutional chairs. The room was windowless and had a couple of insipid landscapes on the walls as a gesture toward decoration. There were women already waiting, some with canned drinks and notepads in front of them.

My almost-friend Janet Shook was there, and a woman whose face was familiar in an unpleasant way. For a moment, I had to think of her name, and then I realized the formally dressed, fortyish big-haired woman was Sandy McCorkindale, wife of the minister of Shakespeare Combined Church, known locally as SCC. Sandy and I had clashed a couple of times when I’d been hired by the church to serve refreshments at board meetings of the SCC preschool, and we’d had a difference of opinion at the Ladies’ Luncheon, an annual church wingding.

Sandy was about as pleased to see me as I was to see her. On the other hand, Janet smiled broadly. Janet, in her mid-twenties, was as fit as I was, which is pretty damn muscular. She has dark brown hair that swings forward to touch her cheeks, and bangs that have a tendency to get in her eyes. Janet and I sometimes exercise together, and we are members of the same karate class. I sat down by her and we said hello to each other, and then Tamsin bustled into the room, a clipboard and a bunch of papers clutched to her big bouncy chest. She had recovered quite well, to my eyes.

“Ladies, have you all met each other?”

“All but the latest entry,” drawled one of the women across the table.

She was one of three women I didn’t recall having met before. Tamsin performed the honors.

“This is Carla, and this is Melanie.” Tamsin indicated the woman who’d spoken up, a short, thin incredibly wrinkled woman with a smoker’s cough. The younger woman beside her, Melanie, was a plump blonde with sharp eyes and an angry cast to her features. The other woman, introduced to me as Firella, was the only African American in the group. She had a haircut that made the top of her head look like the top of a battery, and she wore very serious glasses. She was wearing an African-print sleeveless dress, which looked loose and comfortable.

“Ladies, this is Lily,” Tamsin said with a flourish, completing the introductions.

I got as comfortable as the chair would permit, and crossed my arms over my chest, waiting to see what would happen. Tamsin seemed to be counting us. She looked out the door and down the hall as if she expected someone else to come, frowned, and said, “All right, let’s get started. Everyone got coffee, or whatever you wanted to drink? Okay, good job!” Tamsin Lynd took a deep breath. “Some of you just got raped. Some of you got raped years ago. Sometimes, people just need to know others have been through the same thing. So would each one of you tell us a little about what has happened to you?”

I cringed inside, wishing very strongly that I could evaporate and wake up at my little house, not much over a mile from here.

Somehow I knew Sandy McCorkindale would be the first to speak, and I was right.

“Ladies,” she began, her voice almost as professionally warm and welcoming as her husband’s was from the pulpit, “I’m Sandy McCorkindale, and my husband is the pastor of Shakespeare Combined Church.”

We all nodded. Everyone knew that church.

“Well, I was hurt a long, long time ago,” Sandy said with a social smile. In a galaxy far, far, away? “When I had just started college.”

We waited, but Sandy didn’t say anything else. She kept up the smile. Tamsin didn’t act as though she was going to demand Sandy be any more forthcoming. Instead, she turned to Janet, who was sitting next to her.

“Lily and I are workout buddies,” Janet told Tamsin.

“Oh, really? That’s great!” Tamsin beamed.

“She knows I got raped, but not anything else,” Janet said slowly. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. She appeared to be concerned about the effect her story would have on me. Ridiculous. “I was attacked about three years ago, while I was on a date with a guy I’d known my whole life. We went out parking in the fields, you know how kids do. All of a sudden, he just wouldn’t stop. He just… I never told the police. He said he’d tell them I was willing, and I didn’t have a mark on me. So I never prosecuted.”

“Next, ah, Carla?”

“I was shooting pool at Velvet Tables,” she said hoarsely. I estimated she was approaching fifty, and the years had been hard. “I was winning some money, too. I guess one of them good ole boys didn’t like me beating the pants off of ‘em, put something in my drink. Next thing I know, I’m in my car buck naked without a dime, my keys stuck up my privates. They’d had sex with me while I was out. I know all of ’em.”

“Did you report?” Tamsin asked.

“Nope, I know where they live,” Carla said.

There was a long silence while we chewed that over. “That feeling, the need for vengeance, is something we’ll talk about later,” Tamsin said finally. “Melanie, would you tell us what happened to you?”

I decided that Tamsin didn’t know Melanie that well, just from the timbre of her voice.

“I’m new to anything like this, so please just bear with me.” Melanie gave a nervous and inappropriate giggle that may have agreed with the plump cheeks and pink coloring, but clashed with the anger in her dark eyes. Melanie was even younger than Janet, I figured.

“Why are you here, Melanie?” Tamsin was in full therapist mode now, sitting with her clothes arranged over her round form in the most advantageous way. She crossed her ankles, covered with thick beige stockings, and tried not to fiddle with the pencil in her clipboard.

“You mean, what incident?” Melanie asked.

“Yes,” Tamsin said patiently.

“Well, my brother-in-law done raped me, that’s why! He come to my trailer all liquored up, and he busted in my door, and then he was on me. I didn’t have time to get my.357 Magnum, I didn’t have time to call the cops. It was so fast you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Did the police arrest him?”

“Sure they did. I wouldn’t leave the police station until he was in it, behind bars. The police tried to talk me out of it, said it was a family feud gone wrong, but I knew what I was doing and I know what he was doing, which was nothing I wanted him to do. His wife had told me he made her do it, too, when she was sick and didn’t want to. They was married, so I guess she didn’t feel like she could complain, but I sure could.”

“Good for you, Melanie,” Tamsin said, and I mentally echoed that. “It can be hard to stand up for what you know is right. Firella?”

“Oh. Well… I moved here from New Orleans about a year ago,” Firella said. “I’m an assistant principal at the junior high school here in Shakespeare, and I had a similar job in Louisiana.” I revised my estimate of her age upward. Firella was probably closer to fifty than to the thirty-five I’d originally assumed. “When I lived in New Orleans, I got raped at the school, by a student.” Then Firella’s lips clamped shut on the rest of her story, as if she’d given me enough to think about, and she was right. I remembered the smell of school, chalk and lockers and dirty industrial carpeting, and the silence of the building after the children had gone home. I thought of someone, some predator, moving silently through that building…

“He broke my arm, too,” Firella said. She moved her left arm a little as if testing its usability. “He knocked out some of my teeth. He gave me herpes.”

She said all this quite matter-of-factly.

She shrugged, and was silent.

“And they caught him?”

“Yeah,” the woman said wearily. “They caught him. He told them I’d been having sex with him for months, that it was consensual. It got really ugly. It was in all the papers. But the broken arm and the missing teeth were powerful testimony, yes indeed.”

Tamsin cut a glance toward me to make sure I was absorbing the fact that I wasn’t the only victim in the world who’d gone through an extraordinary ordeal. I’ve never been that egotistical.

“Lily, do you feel able to tell us your story tonight?” the therapist asked.

Fighting a nearly overwhelming impulse to get up and walk out, I forced myself to sit and consider. I thought about Jack’s nose, and I thought about the trust the other women had extended to me. If I had to do this, it might as well be now as any other time.

I focused on the doorknob a few feet past Tamsin’s ear. I wished that some time in the past, I’d made a tape recording of this. “Some years ago, I lived in Memphis,” I said flatly. “On my way home from work one day, my car broke down. I was walking to a gas station when I was abducted at gunpoint by a man. He rented me to a small group of bikers for the weekend. That was what he did for a living. They took me to a-well, it was an old shack out in the fields, somewhere in rural Tennessee.” The fine trembling began, the nearly imperceptible shivering that I could feel all the way to the soles of my feet. “There were about five of them, five men, and one or two women. I was blindfolded, so I never saw them. They chained me to a bed. They raped me, and they cut patterns on my chest and stomach with knives. When they were leaving, one of them gave me a gun. He was mad at the guy who’d rented me to them, I can’t remember why.” That wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to explain further. “So the gun had one bullet. I could have killed myself. I was a real mess by then. It was real hot out there.” My fists were clenched, and I was struggling to keep my breathing even. “But when the man who’d kidnapped me came back-I shot him. And he died.”

It was so quiet in the room that I could hear my own breathing.

I waited for Tamsin to say something. But they were waiting on me. Janet said, “Tell us how it ended.”

“Ah, well, a farmer, it was his land, he came by and found me. So, he called the police, and they took me to the hospital.” The condensed version.

“How long?” Tamsin asked.

“How long did they keep me? Well, let’s see.” The shivering increased in intensity. I knew it must be visible by now. “Friday afternoon and Friday night, and all day Saturday, and part of Sunday? I think.”

“How long before the farmer got there?”

“Oh! Oh, sorry. That was the rest of Sunday, and Monday, and most of Tuesday. Quite a while,” I said. I sat up straighter, made my fists unclench. Tried to force myself to be still.

“I remember that,” Melanie said. “I was just a kid, then. But I remember when it was in all the papers. I remember wishing you had had a chance to shoot them all.”

I flicked a glance at her, surprised.

“I remember thinking that you were asking for it, walking after your car had broken down,” Firella said. We all looked at her. “That was before I found out that women had a right to walk anywhere they wanted, with no one bothering ‘em.”

“That’s right, Firella,” Tamsin said firmly. “What’s the rule, people?”

We all waited.

“Don’t blame the victim for the crime,” she said, almost chanting.

“Don’t blame the victim for the crime,” we chorused raggedly. I thought some of us got the idea better than others, judging by their expressions.

“Baby-sitter accepts a ride home with the father of the kids, he rapes her. Is she at fault?” Tamsin asked us fiercely.

“Don’t blame the victim for the crime!” we said. I have to admit this was an effort for me. I was about to decide Jack owed me big time when I remembered the blood running out of his nose.

“A woman’s walking on a street alone at night, she gets grabbed and raped,” Tamsin said. “Is it her fault?”

“Don’t blame the victim for the crime!” we said firmly.

“A woman’s wearing a tight skirt and no bra, goes to a bar in a bad part of town, gets drunk, takes a ride with a stranger, gets raped. Is it her fault?”

The chorus died out. This required more thought.

“What do you think, Lily?” Tamsin asked me directly.

“I think wanting to look attractive, even provocative, doesn’t mean you deserve to get raped. I think even the stupidity of getting drunk with people you don’t know doesn’t merit the punishment of being raped. At the same time, women should be responsible for their own safety…” I trailed off.

“And what does being responsible for your own safety mean?”

That was something I could answer. “It means learning to fight,” I said with certainty. “It means being cautious. It means taking care of your car so it won’t break down, making sure your doors are locked, and evaluating the scene around you for danger.”

Some of the women looked dubious when I mentioned fighting, but the rest of my measures met with approval.

“How responsible for your own safety were you before you got raped?” the therapist asked. Her dark eyes were fixed on me intently. She leaned forward, and the blouse gaped slightly because she filled it up too much.

I tried to remember. “Not very. I made sure I always had enough money to make a phone call. When I was going on a first date with someone I didn’t know, I made sure a friend or two knew where I was going and who I was with.”

“So wouldn’t you say that most of this wisdom is hindsight?”

“Yes.”

“Can you blame other women for not having the same sense?”

“No.”

The talk went on, and I confined myself to listening for the rest of the hour. The problem of responsibility was a knotty one. Women dress provocatively to attract sexual attention and admiration, because that’s gratifying. I believed that very few women would wear a push-up bra, a low-cut blouse, high heels, tight skirts, if they were going to stay home working on the computer, for example. But sexual attention does not equate with rape. I knew of no woman who would walk out the door for an evening of barhopping with the idea that maybe she would enjoy being forced at knifepoint to give a blow job to a stranger. And very few women walked alone at night hoping a man would offer them a choice between sex and strangulation.

The fact remained that stupidity and/or poor judgment are not punishable by rape. And that was the bottom line, as far as I was concerned, and as far as Tamsin was, I thought, by the way she seemed to be steering the group.

What about the great-grandmothers and children who got raped? They were only sex objects to the eyes of the hopelessly warped. They could hardly be accused of “asking for it.”

This pattern of thought was familiar to me, an old treadmill. Once I’d reconfirmed where we were going, I thought about the therapist herself. By her bearing and presence, Tamsin Lynd was forcing us to think about events and issues we found it hard to face. What a job-having to listen to all this! I wondered if she’d ever been raped herself, decided it was none of my business to ask since she was the natural-and neutral-leader of the group, at least ostensibly. Whether or not Tamsin had survived a rape, she definitely had problems to face now. That phone call had not been from a friend.

When the session was over, Tamsin ushered us out, remaining behind in the empty building to “clear some things up,” she said. Once we were outside in the parking lot, the cocoon of mutual pain dissolved, and Melanie and Sandy scooted off immediately. Carla got in an old boat of a car and lit a cigarette before she turned the key in the ignition. Firella said, to no one in particular, “I live right down the street.” She arranged her keys between her fingers in the approved face-ripping position and strode off into the dark.

Janet gave me a hug. This was not typical of our relationship and almost made me flinch. I held rigidly stiff and pressed my hands against her back in an attempt at reciprocation.

She took a step away and laughed. “There, that better?”

I was embarrassed and showed it.

“You don’t need to pretend with me,” she said.

“What’s the story on Tamsin?” I asked, to get off the subject.

“She’s had this job about a year,” Janet said, willing to go along with my drift. “She and her husband have a little house over on Compton. They’re both Yankees. He has a different last name.” Janet clearly saw that as evidence that the couple had a very untraditional marriage.

“Does that bother you?”

Janet shook her head. “She can screw alligators, for all I care. Coming to this group is the most positive step I’ve taken since I got raped.”

“It doesn’t seem like you, not reporting,” I said carefully.

“It’s not like me now. It was like me then.”

“Do you ever think of reporting it, even now?”

“He’s dead,” Janet said simply. “It was in the paper last year. You may remember. Mart Weekins? He was trying to pass on a yellow line on that big curve outside of town on Route Six. Semi was coming the other way.”

“So,” I said. “He wasn’t taking responsibility for himself, I guess. Would you say his being there was-unwise?”

“I wonder if he was dressed provocatively,” Janet said, and we both laughed like maniacs.

As it happens so many times, once I’d met Tamsin Lynd, I saw and heard of her everywhere. I saw her at the post office, the grocery store, the gas station. Sometimes she was with a burly man with dark hair and a beard and mustache carefully shaved into a pattern. Each time, she gave me a friendly but impersonal nod, so I could acknowledge or ignore her as I chose.

As Jack and I drove to Little Rock the next week, after my second therapy session, I tried to describe her character and found I had no handle on it at all. Usually, I know right away if I like someone or not, but with Tamsin I just couldn’t tell. Maybe it didn’t make any difference, if the person was supposed to be helping you get your head straight. Maybe I had no business liking her or hating her.

“She’s smart,” I said. “She always gets us to talking about different sides to our experience.”

“Is she likable?” Jack smoothed his hair back with one hand while gripping the steering wheel with the other. His wiry black hair was escaping from its band this morning, a sure sign he’d been thinking of something else while he got dressed. I wondered if my job performance was the issue on his mind.

“Not really,” I said. “She’s got a strong character. I just don’t know what it’s made up of.”

“You usually make up your mind about someone faster than that.”

“She puzzles me. Maybe it’s a part of being a counselor, but she doesn’t seem to want to focus right now on how we feel about the attacker, just about the problems we have adjusting to being attacked.”

“Maybe she’s assuming you all hate men?”

“Could be. Or maybe she’s just waiting for us to say it. I guess none of us are in the ‘Men Are Wonderful’ club, and I think one or two in the group really hate all men, to some extent.”

Jack looked uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure how much he wanted to hear about this new experience of mine, and I wasn’t sure how much I was willing to share.

“You sure you’re okay at this new job?” he asked, for maybe the hundredth time.

“Jack,” I said warningly.

“I know, I know, I just… feel responsible.”

“You are responsible. But I’m fine, and I’m even enjoying myself some.” Jack had this idea that I should be a private detective, like him. To achieve this, I had to work with an experienced investigator for two years. This job was my first step, and the experienced investigator was Jack.

We pulled up in the parking lot of a strip mall in the western part of Little Rock. This was the second Marvel Gym to open in the city, and it had taken over about three store widths in the strip mall. Mel Brentwood was risking a chunk of investment money in opening a second gym, especially since Marvel was no back-to-basics weightlifting place. Marvel was a deluxe gym, with different classes all day, a special room for aerobic equipment (treadmills and stair climbers), a sauna and tanning beds, a whirlpool, and lots of free weights for people who actually came to the gym to pump some iron.

I went in the women’s changing room, which also contained the women’s bathroom, and peeled off my shirt and shorts, folding them to stack in my tiny locker. Underneath, I wore what I considered a costume, since I wouldn’t ever wear it otherwise: a Spandex unitard patterned in a leopard print. It came to mid-thigh and was sleeveless. Across the chest, MARVEL was printed in puffy letters, with the word “gym” centered underneath in smaller type. Though this so-called garment was brief and showed every ounce I had on me, it covered the scars left from the knifing I’d taken. I wore heavy black socks and black Nikes to look a little more utilitarian. After a moment’s thought, I left my purse out when I pushed my locker shut, then went out to the main floor to punch in my time clock. My job, the lowest paid as the newest employee, was to check “guests” in, that being the gym’s euphemism for people who’d paid for a year’s membership. The rest of my job consisted of showing new guests how to use the equipment, spotting for someone who’d come without a buddy, pushing the drinks and clothes the gym sold, and answering the phone. There were always two people on duty, always a man and a woman. If the man who shared my shift wanted to go work out, I was supposed to watch the desk. He was supposed to do the same for me.

I had never shown quite so much of myself to so many strangers, on a day-to-day basis. Even before what I labeled my “bad time,” I’d been modest. But I had to blend in with the other employees, most of whom were younger. If any of them had had a body like mine they would have flaunted it much more than I was doing, Jack had assured me.

To minimize my self-consciousness about appearing in this getup, I kept my makeup to a minimum, avoided direct eye contact with the men, and tried to squelch any interest manifested by any of the guests.

Since the front door had been opened already, I knew the manager was there. Sure enough, the light in her office was on. Linda Doan didn’t like me and was determined to get rid of me the first chance she got. But Linda couldn’t fire me, though she didn’t know that yet. She didn’t know why I was really at Marvel.

I was under cover. The very term had a tendency to make me snicker, but it was true. Since its opening seven months before, the gym had been plagued by a thief. Someone was sneaking into the changing rooms and stealing items-cash, jewelry, cell phones-from the guests. It wasn’t impossible that the thief was a guest, but Jack thought the culprit was one of the staff, given the territory the thief had covered.

“The men’s changing room, the ladies’ changing room, the storage cubes outside the sauna,” Mel Brentwood had moaned. “Drinks, watches, chains, cash. Never a lot, never anything awfully expensive, but it’s just a matter of time. And the guests will hear about it and they won’t come. If we don’t find out who’s responsible, I’ll fire everyone working there and replace all of them, I swear I will.”

I was pretty sure such drastic action was illegal, but it wasn’t my business to say so, and I noticed Jack glanced out the window and kept his face blank. Mel couldn’t be the idiot he projected himself to be. He had started this string of gyms with money he’d begged and borrowed from skeptical friends of his parents, and he’d made the gyms prosper by thinking of ever-new ways to get them in the news without actually burning them down.

“Can we install a camera in the changing room?” Jack asked.

“Hell, no! How do you think these people, most of ‘em trying to take off weight, would react to discovering they’d been on camera? There’s no way to put one in there that no one would notice.” But I could tell the idea had caught Mel’s interest. “If I didn’t want to take the thief to court…” he said slowly. “If I just wanted to catch the bastard and fire him…”

“The camera would never come up,” Jack said. “We could take it out, destroy the tape, no one the wiser. I can run by Sneaky Pete’s. I’m not crazy about the idea of filming people who don’t know about it, but it would work.”

“So, do I need Lily?” Mel Brentwood eyed me like I was a gunslinger who might draw on him.

“Sure. There are things cameras won’t catch,” Jack said. “And we have yet to figure out a way to disguise them.”

“Okay, girl,” Mel said, whacking me on the shoulder to get me fired up for the big game. “You start work as soon as you can get your tights on.”

I eyed him balefully. I wasn’t happy about working for Mel, but I’d worked for plenty of people I hadn’t liked. I told myself to ease up. Politically correct he wasn’t, but Mel would pay Jack to do this, Jack would have another client who would call him when he got in a jam, and Jack’s business would prosper.

So there I was, in Marvel Gym, in glorious leopard print Spandex, making sure guests swiped their green plastic cards as they came in so their presence would be recorded on the computer. I handed out small towels to the guests who’d forgotten theirs, I checked the supply of bath-sized towels in the locker rooms, and I sold the expensive “health” drinks displayed in the cooler behind the counter. Those tasks were constants, but every day there was some specific problem to solve. In the first hour I worked today, I unstuck the weight-setting peg on a leg-extension device. Then I discreetly sprayed cleaner on a weightlifting bench after a particularly sweaty guest had used it, and got the vacuum out to suck up clods of dirt tracked in by a guest who’d been running in the mud yesterday.

Mostly, I grew angrier by the second at Byron, the twenty-four-year-old man who shared my shift. I watched Byron loaf his way through his workout, making himself friendly with every female in the place except me. Me, he tried to dodge.

Byron was sculpted. You could tell he thought of himself that way; sculpted as a Greek statue, sensuous, masculine. That is, if Byron knew any of those words. Byron was a waste of space, in my opinion. In my two weeks at Marvel, I couldn’t count the times I had hoped he was the thief. Unless people would pay the high membership fee just to gaze upon Byron, he was a poor employee: pleasant to those people he liked, people he felt could help him, and rude to the guests who couldn’t do anything for him, guests who expected him to actually work. And he’d fondle anything that stood still. Why Linda Doan had hired Byron was a mystery to me.

“I need to go put some more towels in the women’s locker room,” I told him. “Then I’m going to start my own workout.”

“Cool,” said Byron. Mr. Articulate. He began doing another set of ab crunches.

I took the pile of towels into the tiled locker room. Someone was taking a shower when I walked in, which was surprising because it was a little early for the rush we got about ten, ten-thirty. The water cut off as I reached the shelves where I stacked the towels. I was walking lightly because I always do.

I caught a guest red-handed. She was going through my purse, which I’d left temptingly propped against an extra pair of shoes by my locker. It took me a minute to mentally leaf through the pictures I’d tried to commit to memory, and finally I came up with her name: Mandy Easley.

Mandy became aware of me after I’d watched her get a twenty out of my wallet and flip open the credit card compartment. Mandy was only in her twenties, but she looked like a hag when her eyes met mine. Her dark brown hair was still wet from the shower, her narrow face was bare of makeup, and her towel was wound around her modestly, but she still didn’t look innocent. She looked guilty as hell.

“Oh! Ah, Lily, right? I was just getting some change for the Tampax machine,” she said, in a jittery voice. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t have the right change, and your purse was just sitting here.”

“Machine takes twenties now?”

“Ah, I…” The twenty fluttered from her fingers as she stared down at the purse, exactly as if it had just materialized in her hands. “Oh, that fell out! I’m sorry, let me just put it back in…” and she fumbled for the bill. She was one big twitch.

“Ms. Easley,” I said, and by my voice she knew I wasn’t going to smooth it over.

“Oh, shit,” she said, and covered her face with her hands as if she was overwhelmed with shame. “Lily, honestly, I never did anything like this before.” She tried to squeeze out some tears, but couldn’t quite manage. “I just have such bad money problems, please don’t call the cops! My mom would die if I had a record!”

“You already have a record,” I observed.

Her face flashed up from her hands and she glared at me. “What?”

“You have a record. For shoplifting and passing bad checks.” The computer had told us what employees and guests had been present at Marvel during the time the various thefts had occurred, and twenty-three-year-old divorcee Mandy Easley’s name had recurred. Jack had run a check on her.

“We’ll be glad to refund your membership money by mail after you hand us your card,” I said, as I’d been instructed to do. “When I have your card in my hand, you can go.”

“You’re not going to call the police?” she asked, unable to believe her good luck. I felt exactly the same way.

“If you return your card, then you can go.”

“All right, Robocop,” she said furiously, relief shoving her over the edge of caution. “Take the damn card!” She turned to yank it out of the pocket on her shorts, which were draped over the bench behind her. She extricated the plastic card and threw it at me. Mandy didn’t look like a well-groomed young matron any more as she yanked my twenty out of my purse and thrust it into the same pocket. She was sneering in my face.

I had seldom seen anyone look quite so ugly, male or female. I thought Mandy Easley was just as much a waste of space as Byron, and I wished her out the door. I was sick to death of her.

She read something in my face that stopped her manic rant. Yanking off the towel, she let it drop to the floor while she pulled on her shorts and a T-shirt and thrust her feet into sandals. She gathered up her purse, spitefully knocked over the stack of towels as her parting shot, and headed out the door to the hall leading to the main room. She spun on her heel to fire some comment my way, something that could be heard by everyone in the weights room, but I began moving toward her with all my disgust in my face. She hurried out of the gym for the last time.

I had to straighten up the locker room, of course, and though it made me sick to do so, I had to pick up the card Mandy had thrown at me. While I was refolding the towels and placing them in the resurrected rack, I pictured many gratifying ways to make Mandy pick up her own card. By the time I had to take my place beside Byron again, I was in at least an equitable mood.

“What happened to Mandy?” he asked casually, taking a moment away from his absorbed fascination with his own face reflected in the gleaming counter. “She took outta here like a scalded cat.”

I couldn’t tell him she’d been stealing. That would jettison the whole idea. But I could tell him something else. “I had to take her membership card,” I said, even more seriously and quietly than normal.

He goggled with curiosity. “What? Why?”

I was drawing a blank.

“Did she… make a pass at you?” Byron supplied his own scenario. I could practically see the steam coming out of his ears. “Did she actually… was she actually doing something? In the shower?”

I wasn’t supposed to disclose Jack’s business arrangement with Mel Brentwood. I looked away, hoping to indicate embarrassment. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said truthfully. “It was really ugly.”

“Poor Lily,” Byron said, laying his hand on my shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “You poor girl.”

Was he blind?

Biting the inside of my lips to keep from snarling, I managed to indicate to Byron that I wanted to go work out, and he let his hand trail off my shoulder while I went to the leg press. After I’d warmed up and put the first set of forty-fives on, I dropped down into the sleigh-type seat and placed my feet against the large metal plate. Pushing up a little to relieve the pressure, I flipped the prop bars outward, and let the plate push my knees to my chest. I pushed, and felt everything tighten in a surprisingly relaxing way as I exhaled. Legs to chest, inhale. Legs out straight, exhale. Over and over, until the set was done and I could add another pair of forty-fives.

Toward the end of my workout, I realized I should be feeling proud that I had successfully completed my first assignment as a private investigator. Somehow, television and the film industry had not prepared me for the mundane satisfaction of detecting a thief. I hadn’t gotten to run after anyone waving a gun; the police hadn’t threatened me; Mel Brinkman hadn’t tried to sleep with me. Could it be I had been misled by the media?

As I pondered this, I noticed that Byron had been so anxious to start spreading the “news” about Mandy that he’d actually gotten the glass spray out and begun cleaning some of the mirrors that lined the gym walls. This brought him into murmuring distance of some of his cronies and the many sideways glances at me were a clear indication that my brush with Mandy was being mythologized.

At least I’d gotten some good workouts, being on this job. I wondered how long Mel would want me to work after this; this might be the last time I’d have to come to Marvel Gym.

Jack picked me up at the end of my shift. I was so glad to see him it made me feel almost silly. Jack is about five foot ten, his hair is still all black, and his eyes are hazel. He has a scar, a very thin one-a razor scar-running from the hairline close to his right eye down to his jawline. It puckers a very little. He has a narrow, strong nose and straight eyebrows. He’s been a private detective since he got urged to resign from the Memphis Police Department about five years ago.

“I like the outfit,” he said, as we walked to his car.

“In this heat, I feel like one big smell,” I said. “I want to shower and put on something cotton and loose.”

“Yes, ma’am. You just happy to see me, or did something interesting happen at the gym?”

“A little bit of both.”

When we were in the car and on our way back to Shakespeare, the town where I’ve lived for five years, I began to tell Jack about my day. “So it was Mandy Easley all along,” I concluded. “I guess I found myself a little disappointed.”

“You just want to catch Byron doing something,” Jack said. I turned, huffing in exasperation, in time to catch the amused curl of his lips flatten out into a serious expression.

“Being a stupid jerk isn’t a jailable offense,” I admitted.

“Jails wouldn’t be big enough,” Jack agreed.

“What will happen now?”

“I’ll call Mel when we get home.”

While Jack was on the phone, I peeled off the nasty unitard and dropped it in the hamper. The shower, in the privacy of my own bathroom, cramped as it was, was just as wonderful as I had anticipated. Drying off was sheer bliss. I fluffed up the wet blond curls that clung to my head, I checked to make sure I’d gotten my legs very smooth, and I put on a lot of deodorant and skin cream before I came out to join Jack. He was putting steaks in a marinade. We didn’t eat much beef.

“Special occasion?”

“You caught your first thief.”

“And you’re going to congratulate me with dead cow?”

He put down the pan and eyed me with some indignation. “Can you think of a better way?”

“Ah… yes.”

“And that would be?”

“You’re slow on the uptake today,” I said critically, and took off my robe.

He caught on right away.

We’d returned to Shakespeare too late to attend karate class, so later that night we took a walk. Jack had spent most of the day sitting down, and he wanted to stretch before bed.

“Mel says thanks,” Jack told me, after we’d been clipping along for maybe twenty minutes. “I think he’ll call us again if he has any problems. You did a good job.” He sounded proud, and that lit an unexpected glow somewhere in my chest.

“So, what next?” I asked.

“We’ve got a workman’s comp job I’m sure you can handle,” Jack said. “I get a lot of that kind of case.”

“The person is claiming he can’t work any more?”

“Yeah. In this case, it’s a woman. She fell on a slippery floor at work, now she says she can’t bend her back or lift anything. She lives in a small house in Conway. It can be hard watching a house in some neighborhoods, so you may have to be creative.”

That was not the adjective that sprang to my mind when I thought of my abilities, so I felt a little anxious.

“I’ll need a camera, I’m assuming.”

“Yes, and lots of time fillers. A book or two, newspapers, snacks.”

“Okay.”

We paced along for a few more minutes. A familiar car went by, and I said, “Jack, there’s my counselor. And her husband, I think.”

We watched the beige sedan turn the corner onto Compton. That was the way we’d planned to go, too, and when we rounded the same corner, we saw the car had stopped in front of an older home. It was built in a style popular in the thirties and forties, boxy and low with a broad roofed porch supported by squat pillars. Tamsin and the man with her had already left their car, and he was at the front door. She was standing slightly behind him. Under the glare of the porch light, I could see he was partially bald, and big. The clink of keys carried across the small yard.

Tamsin screamed.

Jack was there before I was. He moved to one side as I caught up, and I saw that there was a puddle of blood on the gray-painted concrete of the porch. I cast my gaze from side to side, saw nothing that could have produced it.

“There,” Jack said, still one step ahead of me.

Following his pointing finger, I saw there was a squirrel hanging from a branch of the mimosa tree planted by the porch. The heavy scent of the mimosa twined with the hot-penny smell of blood.

Since I didn’t have a bird feeder or fruit bushes, I happened to like squirrels. When I realized the squirrel’s throat had been cut and the little animal had been hung on the tree like an out-of-season Christmas ornament, I began a slow burn.

I could hear Tamsin sobbing in the background and her husband saying, “Oh, not here, too. Honey, maybe it was just some kids, or someone playing a sick joke…”

“You know it was him. You know that,” Tamsin said, choking and gasping. “I told you about the phone calls. It’s him, again. He followed me.”

Jack said, “Excuse me, I’m Jack Leeds. This is Lily. We were just out walking. Sorry to intrude, but can we help?”

The man with his arm around Tamsin said, “I’m sorry, too. We can’t believe… excuse me, I’m Cliff Eggers, and this is my wife, Tamsin Lynd.”

“Tamsin and I know each other,” I murmured politely, trying not to look at Tamsin’s face while she was in such distress.

“Oh, Lily!” Tamsin took a long, shuddering breath, and she appeared to be trying to pull herself together in the presence of a client. “I’m sorry,” she said, though damned if I could think for what. “This is just very upsetting.”

“Sure it is,” Jack agreed. “Don’t you think we ought to call the police, Ms. Lynd?”

“Oh, we’ll call them. We always do. But they can’t do anything,” her husband said, with sudden violence. He ran a big hand across his face. He had one of those neatly trimmed beards that frames the mouth. “They couldn’t do anything before. They won’t do anything now.” Cliff Eggers’s voice was choked and unsteady. He was fumbling with the keys to the door and he managed to open it.

They stepped in their hall, and Tamsin beckoned me in behind them. I caught a glimpse of a large, friendly room. There were pictures hung over an antique chest to the right of the door. In the framed grouping I saw a wedding picture with Tamsin in full white regalia, and her husband’s business college diploma. There was a big brass bowl of potpourri on the chest, and my nose began to stop up almost instantly.

Tamsin said, “We’ll call them tomorrow morning.” Her husband nodded. Then he turned back to us. “We appreciate your coming to help us. I’m sorry to involve you in something so unpleasant.”

“Excuse us, please,” Tamsin said. She was obviously just barely containing her anguish. I felt she knew she’d made a mistake asking us in, that she was just waiting for us to leave so she could drop that facade, crumble completely.

“Of course,” Jack said instantly. He looked at Cliff. “Would you like us to…” and he nodded toward the squirrel.

“Yes,” Cliff said with great relief. “That would be very kind. The garbage can is at the rear of the backyard, by the hedge.”

We stepped back out on the porch, and Cliff and Tamsin had closed the door before Jack and I chanced looking at each other.

“Huh?” I said, finally.

“Double huh,” Jack said. He fished a pocketknife out of his jeans and leaned over the waist-high railing to cut the string. Holding the little corpse at arm’s length, he went down the steps and around the house to the garbage can. Cliff’s telling Jack that the garbage can was “by the hedge” was unnecessary, since everything in the Eggers-Lynd yard was “by the hedge.” It was an older home, and the original owners had believed in planting. The front yard was open to the street, but the clipped thick growth followed the property line down both sides and across the back of the yard. The surrounding greenery gave the yard a feeling of enclosure. While I waited, I thought I heard voices, so I went around the house to look into the backyard. In the darkness by the hedge at the rear of the property, I saw two figures.

Jack came back after a few more seconds. “Their neighbor was outside, wanted to know what had happened,” he explained. “He’s a town cop, so at least law enforcement will know something about this.” I could tell Jack had suspected Cliff Eggers wouldn’t call about the incident.

I wondered belatedly if I should have tried to deduce something from the state of the squirrel’s body. But I was clueless about squirrel metabolism, especially in this heat, and it would be way beyond me to try to estimate how long the poor critter had been dead. After a last glance at the blood, and a pang of regret that I had nothing with which to swab it up, I joined Jack on the driveway and we resumed our walk.

We didn’t say anything else until we were a block away from the house, and then it wasn’t much. Someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd, and from all the cues in the conversation we’d had with the couple, this persecution had been going on for some time. If Tamsin and her husband were unwilling to ask for help, what could be done?

“Nothing,” I concluded, straightening up after washing my face in the bathroom sink.

Jack picked up on that directly. “I guess not,” he agreed. “And you watch your step around her. I think this therapy group is good for you, but I don’t want you catching some kind of collateral fallout when her situation implodes.”

As I composed myself for sleep thirty minutes later, I found myself thinking that it hardly seemed fair that Tamsin had to listen to the group’s problems, while her own were kept swept under the rug of her marriage. I reminded myself that, after all, Tamsin was getting paid to do her job, and she had been trained to cope with the inevitable depression that must follow hearing so many tales of misery and evil.

Jack wasn’t yet asleep, so I told him what I’d been thinking.

“She listens to a lot of bad stuff, yeah,” he said, his voice quiet, coming out of the darkness. “But look at the courage, look at the toughness. The determination. She hears that, too. Look how brave you all are.”

I couldn’t say anything at all. My throat clogged. I was glad it was dark. At last, I was able to pat Jack’s shoulder; and a minute later, I heard by his breathing that he was asleep. Before it could overcome me, too, I thought, This is why Jack is here beside me. Because he can think of saying something like he just said.

That was a fine reason.