Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Three

By my third therapy session, Tuesday night was no longer a time I dreaded.

I’d had hours sitting in a car, standing in a convenience store, and drifting around a mall-all in pursuit of the Worker’s Comp. claimant-to analyze our counseling sessions. I had to admit I couldn’t tell if Tamsin Lynd was following some kind of master plan in directing us along the path to recovery. It seemed to me that often we just talked at random; though from time to time I could discern Tamsin’s fine hand directing us.

Not one of the women in the group was someone I would’ve picked for a friend, with the exception of Janet Shook. Sandy McCorkindale made me particularly edgy. She tried very hard to be the unflawed preacher’s wife, and she very nearly succeeded. Her veneer of good modest clothes and good modest makeup, backed by an almost frenzied determination to keep the smooth surface intact, was maintained at a tremendous, secret cost. I had lived too close to the edge of despair and mental illness not to recognize it in others, and Sandy McCorkindale was a walking volcano. I was willing to bet her family was used to living on tiptoe, perhaps even quite unaware they were doing so.

The other women were OK. I’d gradually learned their personal histories. In a town the size of Shakespeare, keeping identities a secret was impossible. For example, not only did I know that Carla (of the croaking voice) was Carla Preston, I knew that her dad had retired from Shakespeare Drilling and Exploration, and her mom took the lunch money at the elementary school cafeteria. I knew Carla smoked like a chimney when she went out the back door of the Health Center, she’d been married three times, and she said everything she thought. She’d become a grandmother when she was thirty-five.

Melanie Kleinhoff no longer looked quite as sullen, and despite her youth and pale doughy looks, she set herself goals and met them (no matter how difficult) to the point of idiocy. She had never graduated from high school and she was still married to the man whose brother had raped her. Firella Bale, probably the most educated of all of us-with the exception of our counselor-seemed baffled sometimes by how to fit in; she was black, she was smart and deliberate, she had taught others, and she worked in a position of authority. She was a single mother and her son was in the army.

Sandy, Janet, and I had never doubted that we could share our problems with a woman of another race. Tamsin seemed a little more careful of Carla and Melanie. We would all have known right away if Carla was uncomfortable with Firella, since Carla had few thoughts she didn’t set right out in front of us. Luckily, she seemed to have passed that particular rock in the road. Melanie hadn’t, and we could watch her prejudice struggle with her good sense and her own kindness. Our common fate transcended our color or economic status or education, but that was easier for some of us to acknowledge than others.

I had neither witnessed any more incidents nor heard any rumors about Tamsin and her husband. I had not spoken a word about what Jack and I had seen that evening while we were out walking. As far as I could tell, no one in Shakespeare knew that someone was stalking our counselor.

Sandy McCorkindale was waiting outside when I arrived for our third evening together. While I knew more about Sandy’s life than I knew about almost any of the others-I’d met her husband, seen her sons, worked in her church, walked by her home-I realized I understood her less than any member of our little group. Waiting in the heat with her was not a happy prospect.

In the two weeks since our first meeting, the season had ripened to full-blown summer. It was hotter than the six shades of hell standing on the asphalt, maybe the temperature was down to ninety-four from the hundred and four it had been that afternoon. At eight o’clock, the parking lot wasn’t dark; there was still a glow from the nearly vanished sun. The bugs had started their intense nightly serenade. If I drove out of town right now and parked by the road in an isolated place and tried to talk to a companion, the volume of bug and frog noise would put a serious crimp in the conversation. Anyone expecting nature to be silent-especially in the South-was plain old nuts.

I got out of my car reluctantly. It had been a fruitless day on stakeout in Little Rock, and Jack was out of town on a missing-persons job, so I wasn’t having the mild glow of accomplishment I usually enjoyed after a long day. When I went home after the therapy hour, I promised myself, I would take a cool shower and I would read. After a day spent dealing with others, television was just one more batch of voices to listen to; I’d rather have a book in my hands than the remote control.

“Evening, Sandy,” I called. At that moment, the pole-mounted security lights came on. With the residual daylight creating long shadows from behind the trees, I was walking across a visual chessboard to reach the woman standing by the side door we always used. As I drew closer, I could see the preacher’s wife had sweat beaded on her forehead. She was wearing the current young matron uniform, a white T-shirt under a long sleeveless, shapeless khaki dress. Sandy’s streaked hair was still in its slightly teased-with-bangs Junior League coiffure, and her makeup was all in place, but there was definitely something happening in her head. Her brown eyes, dark and discreetly made up, darted from my face to the cars to the bushes and back.

“Tamsin didn’t leave the door open,” Sandy said furiously. She was carrying her straw shoulder bag in the usual way, but with an abrupt gesture she let the strap slide down her arm and she swung the bag, hard, against the side of her car. That made me jump, and I had to repress a snarl.

I wondered, for maybe the fifth or sixth time, why Sandy kept coming. She’d never talked in any more detail, or with any more feeling, about what had happened to her, but she kept showing up. She was making a real effort to keep herself separated from the common emotional ground. But every Tuesday night, there she was in her chair, listening.

I leaned against the wall to wait for Tamsin to unlock the door. I didn’t feel up to any more emotional outbursts from Sandy McCorkindale.

Melanie and Carla arrived together. I had decided they’d known each other before coming to the therapy group. In conversation, I’d heard them refer to common acquaintances.

“Good! I got time for a cigarette,” Carla said in her harsh voice. She had one lit and puffing in a flash. “My car done broke down today in front of Piggly Wiggly, and I had to call Melanie here to give me a ride.”

Normally I would have expected Sandy to pick up the conversational ball, but not tonight.

“What’s wrong with the car?” I asked, after a beat.

“My boyfriend says it might be the alternator,” Carla said. “I sure hope it’s something cheaper. Tamsin not here yet?”

“Her car is over there,” Sandy said resentfully, pointing to Tamsin’s modest Honda Civic. “But she won’t open the door!”

Melanie and Carla gave Sandy the same kind of careful sideways look I’d found myself delivering.

Firella came walking from the darkness at the other end of the small parking lot, pepper spray in one hand and keys in the other.

“Hey, y’all!” she called. “We meeting out here in the parking lot tonight?” Carla laughed, and Melanie smiled. As Firella drew closer, she counted us and observed, “One of us hasn’t made it here yet.”

“Oh, Janet’s car’s here, too,” Sandy snapped. “See?”

We all looked over to note that Janet’s dark Camaro was half concealed by Tamsin’s Honda.

“So where’s Janet, and why won’t the back door open? You think Tamsin and Janet are in there doin‘ it?” asked Carla. She didn’t sound angry about the possibility-only ready for them to finish and unlock the back door, so she could get in the air conditioning.

Sandy was almost shocked out of her odd mood. “Oh, my gosh,” she said, rattled to the core. “I just never believed I could know anyone that… oh, my Lord.”

Though I was pretty sure Carla had just been blabbing- for the pleasure of hearing her own voice, and to shock Sandy-I didn’t comment. I got a phone book from the front seat of my car, pulled my cell phone from the pocket of the drawstring sheeting pants I was wearing because they were cool, and dialed the health center number.

Inside the building, we could hear the phone ring, very faintly. That would be the one at the main reception desk, inside the front door.

A voice came on the line. “You have reached the Hartsfield County Health Unit. Our office hours are nine to five, Monday through Friday. If you know the extension of the person you’re calling, please press it now.” I did.

From inside the building, we heard another phone begin to ring, this time closer. We counted the rings. After four, the female voice came back on the line, to tell me that the party I wanted to contact was away from her desk and to ask me to call back during office hours. She also told me what to do in case of emergency.

“This seem like an emergency?” I asked, not sure I’d said it out loud until Firella said, “It’s getting to be.”

I stood back and looked at the door. Made of a heavy metal and painted brown, it was intended for staff use, so therapists wouldn’t have to enter and exit through the reception area. It was kept locked every evening but Tuesday, as far as I knew, though there might be other kinds of therapy groups that met using the same arrangement. Tamsin always locked the door when the six of us were assembled inside, and something she’d said once had made me think she only unlocked it about ten minutes before group time.

The light wisn’t crystal clear in the area around the door, but I could tell when I aimed my tiny key-ring flashlight at the crack that the deadbolt was not actually engaged.

So the door wasn’t locked, after all. I tugged on it again, baffled. It didn’t budge.

While the other women watched, I again punched the “on” button of my tiny flashlight. My insurance agent would be glad to hear I’d found his giveaway so useful. This time, I shone the light all the way around the edges of the door, trying to spy something that would give me a clue as to why the door was being so stubborn. I was rewarded maybe the second or third time around, when I realized a chip of wood was protruding from the bottom.

“There,” I said, and squatted. I heard Melanie explaining to the others and many exclamations, but I ignored them. I tried to grip the sliver of wood in a pincer formed by my thumb and middle finger, but I didn’t have much success. Tonight was the first time I’d ever wished I had long fingernails. I checked out the hands around me. “Firella,” I said, “your nails are the longest. See if you can grip this little piece of wood, here. That’s what’s got the door wedged shut.”

Sandy was suggesting in an increasingly nervous voice that we call the police right now, or at least her husband, but Carla put a hand on Sandy’s arm and said, “Hush, woman.” I noticed, while Firella crouched and tried to wriggle the strip of wood from its lodging, that Carla had put out her cigarette before it was smoked down to the filter. She was worried, too.

After a lot of shaking of her head and several little whispers of “No, not quite… almost… damn thing!” Firella said, “Got it!” and held up the thin strip of wood. About four inches long and two wide, it could have been no more than two millimeters thick, if that. It was just the right size to slip in the crack in the door, just thick enough to get wedged there when the first person tried to open the door to go to Tamsin’s office.

I reached out to turn the knob, hesitated.

“What you waiting for?” Carla asked, her voice raspier than ever. “Now we’re late.”

I was waiting because I’d thought of fingerprints, but then shrugged. By her own account, Sandy had already touched the door. “Remember, she didn’t answer the phone,” I said, my voice as quiet and calm as I could make it. I opened the door. The other women clustered around me.

The hall light was on, and Tamsin’s office door was open, but not the door to the therapy room.

“Tamsin!” called Carla. “You and Janet in there? You two stop messing around, you hear! The rest of us’ll get jealous!”

Carla was trying to sound jaunty, but the atmosphere in the hall was too thick with anxiety for that.

Melanie said, “I’m scared.” It was an admission, but it didn’t signal that she was going to run away. She’d planted her feet and had that bulldog look on her face that meant she wouldn’t back down.

“We’re all scared,” Sandy said. Oddly, she’d gotten calmer. “Do you think we had better just stay out here in the parking lot and call the police?”

“No,” I said.

They all turned to look at me.

“You can all stay outside,” I said, amending my words. In fact, I would’ve preferred they all stay out. “But I have to see if they’re… okay.”

Even slow Melanie read between the lines on that one. To my surprise she said, “No. You go, we all go.”

“We all go,” Firella said, in a voice even more certain. Sandy didn’t say anything, but she didn’t walk away, either.

Oh, wonderful, I thought. The five musketeerettes.

We shuffled down the hall in a clump. I couldn’t control my anxiety any longer and stepped out ahead of them, pivoted on my left foot and faced into Tamsin’s office, my hands already floating up into the striking position. I was ready for something, but not for what I saw.

Behind Tamsin’s desk, on the fuzzy wall where all the clippings had been stuck up with pins…

“Oh, dear God,” said Sandy, miserably.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Carla’s blackbird voice, hushed with shock… was a body, and the whiteness of it was the first thing I noticed, the whiteness of the chest and arms and face. Then the blackness of her hair.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Firella said, her voice more steady than I would have believed. “Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.”

But then there was the redness of it; that was startling, and considerable. The glistening redness mostly issued from the- stake? Was that really a metal stake? Yes, driven through the heart of…

“Who is that woman?” Carla said, more struck by this shock than by any of the others, apparently.

That naked woman, I amplified her statement.

“The naked and the dead,” I said, drawing from somewhere in the attic of my mind.

“So,” Firella said. Her voice was unsteady, and I heard her gulp back nausea. “She’s actually pinned to the wall?”

There was a groan practically under my feet, and I was shocked enough to lurch back, knocking everyone else into confusion.

Janet was lying on the floor in front of the desk. We’d been so transfixed by the dead woman that we hadn’t even seen her. Janet rolled, with great effort, from her back to her front, and I saw a darkening bruise on her forehead. But her hand went to the back of her head, moving slowly and painfully.

In a moment, Firella was on her other side, and we tried to raise her. Though we believed we were the only ones in the building (at least I did) I wanted to get Janet out of there as fast as possible, as if the woman’s deadness was contagious.

Janet began mumbling something, but I couldn’t make it out. She moaned, though, as we tried to pull her to her feet. Without discussion, we lowered her back to the carpet.

“We gotta get out of here,” Carla said urgently, and I agreed. But we couldn’t all go. I handed my cell phone to Melanie, who was silent and shocked.

“Go outside and call the police,” I said.

“Can’t we just leave and call it in later?” Carla asked.

We all stared at her. She shrugged.

“I mean, take Janet to the hospital ourselves. Just so we won’t be connected to the police side of this. I mean, someone offed this gal, someone really, really seriously sick. Right?”

Sandy said, “That’s true.”

“Look,” I said, and they did all look at me. I was feeling Janet’s pulse, trying to decide if her pupils were even. I stopped and collected myself. “We’re listed on some schedule as coming here tonight, you know. All of us. Our names are written down somewhere, no matter how confidential Tamsin promised us this would be. I don’t think we can opt out of this.”

“Do you think whoever killed this woman put her there for us to see?” Sandy asked in a quavering voice. “Or for Tamsin?”

It was a funny question if you weren’t there. If you were there, you could see the intention of display that had gone into arranging the body. To see the poor woman pinned up there, among the articles about rape and the empowerment of women, the accuracy of DNA testing and the heavier sentences being handed down to men who raped… we were meant to know we were powerless, after all.

We tried to look anywhere but at the body. “White as a sheet” was a phrase that came to mind when I looked at my therapy group… except Firella, and she had turned an ashen color.

“So we can’t dodge this,” Carla admitted. “But… no, I guess, we just have to face the music.”

“After all, we didn’t kill her,” Sandy said briskly-as if that cleared up the whole thing, and assured smooth sailing ahead.

When there was a long, thick pause, she said, “Well, I didn’t.”

“Enough of this, we have to get help for Janet.” I looked at Melanie. “You and Carla and Sandy go out the door we came in,” I said. “Call nine one one. Firella and I will stay here with Janet. Be sure to tell them we need an ambulance.”

“We haven’t found Tamsin,” Sandy said.

The rest of us had forgotten all about Tamsin in the turmoil of finding the naked impaled woman and the unconscious Janet.

“She might be in here somewhere,” Sandy whispered.

“She might be the one who did this.” We stared at Sandy as though she’d sprouted another head.

“Or she might have been killed, too,” Carla reminded her.

“I don’t think we better wander around here looking for her,” Firella said sensibly. “I think we better call the cops, like Lily said. Janet needs an ambulance bad.”

Carla, Melanie, and Sandy turned to go, when Firella said, “Just for the hell of it, any of you know this woman?”

“I do,” Melanie said. She started out, not looking back. “That’s my sister-in-law, who was married to the man who raped me.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Carla and Sandy hurried after her, down the hall and out into the parking lot. They stood holding open the door so we wouldn’t be shut off from them, a piece of thoughtfulness I appreciated. I could hear Carla placing the phone call, having to repeat herself a few times. Firella and I stared at each other, sideswiped by the identification of the dead woman and uncertain how to react to it.

I turned my attention from what I couldn’t understand to what I could, the fact that my friend had been attacked. But there didn’t seem to be much I could do for her. Janet made little movements from time to time, but she didn’t appear to be exactly conscious.

“She’s not really stuck up there, is she? Like the newspaper clippings?” Firella said after a moment. Of course, the white-and-red display on the wall was what we were really thinking about.

“I don’t see how the wall could be soft enough to drive the stake in far enough to actually hold her up.” Janet’s color was awful, a sort of muddy green.

“I see what you’re saying. I’m looking behind the desk.” Firella, proving she was tougher than I-I guess years of the school system will do it-stood and peered over the top of the desk.

She abruptly sat down on the floor again.

“I think she’s kind of propped up,” she reported, “with string around her arms in loops, attached to nails that have been driven into the wall. Her bottom half’s kind of sitting on the back of Tamsin’s rolling chair. There’s a wadded-up doctor coat stuck under the wheels to keep the chair from moving.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“I wonder if one person could fix her that way. Seems like it would take two,” Firella said thoughtfully.

“I guess if one person had enough time it could be done,” I said, so she wouldn’t think I was shucking her off. “That’s a lot of preparation. The wedge to keep us out until the scene was set, and the coat to keep the chair from moving.”

“I’m worried about Tamsin,” Firella said next.

“Me, too.” That was easy to agree with. I was wondering if Tamsin was in the therapy room. I was wondering if she was alive.

“Janet, help is coming,” I told her, not at all sure she could hear me or understand. “You hang on one minute more.” It was true that I could hear sirens. I didn’t think I’d ever been happier to know they were coming.

I hadn’t talked to my friend Claude Friedrich in a while, and I’d just as soon not have talked to him that night. But since he’s the chief of police, and since it was a murder scene in the city limits, there wasn’t any way around it.

“Lily,” he greeted me. He was using his police voice; heavy, grim, a little threatening.

“Claude.” I probably sounded the same way.

“What’s happened here tonight?” he rumbled.

“You’ll have to tell us,” I said. “We got here for our therapy group-”

“You’re in therapy?” Claude’s eyebrows almost met his graying hair.

“Yes,” I said shortly.

“Accepting help,” he said, amazement written all over him. “This must be some doing of Jack’s.”

“Yes.”

“And where is he, tonight?”

“On the road.”

“Ah. Okay, so you were here for your therapy group. You and these women?”

“Yes.”

“A group for…?”

A very tall African American woman appeared at Claude’s shoulder. Her hair was cut close to her scalp. She was truly almost black, and she was wearing a practical khaki pantsuit with a badge pinned to the lapel. A pale yellow tank top under the jacket shone radiantly against her skin. She had broad features and wore huge blue-framed glasses.

“Alicia, listen to the account of this witness. I know her, she’s observant,” Claude said.

“Yes, sir.” The magnified eyes focused on me.

“Lily, this is Detective Stokes. She’s just come to us from the Cleveland force.”

“Cleveland, Ohio?” Cleveland, Mississippi wouldn’t have been surprising.

“Yep.”

Alicia Stokes would have to be classified as a mystery.

Focusing on the more pertinent problem, I explained to Claude and Detective Stokes that we were a group composed of rape survivors, that we met every Tuesday night at the health center, that we were led by a woman who was missing and might be somewhere in the building.

“Tamsin Lynd,” said Stokes unexpectedly.

I stared at her. “Yes,” I said slowly. “Tamsin Lynd.”

“I knew it,” the detective said to herself, so swiftly and in such a low voice that I wasn’t sure I’d understood her correctly.

Stokes turned to a man in uniform and gave him some quick orders. He stared back at her, resentment all over his face and in his posture, but then he turned to obey. I shook my head. Stokes had her work cut out for her.

She caught the headshake and glared at me. I don’t know how she interpreted my reaction, but she definitely didn’t want sympathy.

Claude made a “go-on” gesture, so I went on to explain how we hadn’t been able to get in, had finally managed to do so, what we had found. I was glad to see the ambulance team taking Janet out, before I’d finished my account.

Stokes, who was at least four inches taller than my five foot six, said, “Do you know the victim?”

“No.”

“Did any of you know her?”

“Ask them.”

Stokes clearly was about to come down on me like a ton of bricks when I caught sight of something that made me weak-kneed with relief. The officer Stokes had sent into the building was leading Tamsin Lynd out, his arm around her, and Tamsin appeared to be in good physical shape. She was walking on her own. She was crying and shaking, but she seemed to be unhurt. Not a drop of blood on her.

Following my gaze, Stokes and Claude saw her, too.

“She’s your missing counselor?” Claude asked.

“Yes,” I said, relief making me almost giddy. I strode over to her and didn’t even think about the other two, right on my heels.

“Lily, are all of you okay?” Tamsin called, pulling away from the officer to grip my arms.

“Except Janet,” I said. I told her Janet had gone in the ambulance.

“What on earth happened here?”

I became aware that the audience had grown quite large around us, listening to this exchange. One glare from Stokes sent them scattering, but she and Claude flanked me.

And at that moment, looking into Tamsin Lynd’s eyes, I remembered the phone calls and the slit throat of the squirrel, and the fear she lived with. I had been very upset, deeply upset, but in that second I drew myself under control. “There was a dead woman in your office,” I said, after a little pause to let the two cops stop me, if they would. “Where were you?”

Only someone who’d witnessed at least part of Tamsin’s problem would have understood her reaction.

“Oh, my God,” she moaned. “Not again!”

“Again?” I repeated, because that hadn’t been quite what I expected. Then, I said more harshly, “Again? You’ve found women killed in your office more than once?”

“No, no. I just mean… the whole cycle. You know, I called you about the squirrel being left hanging on my front porch,” she said tremulously, her shaking hand pointing to Claude.

“I know about your past problems,” Detective Stokes said curtly. Claude rumbled, “I’d gotten a sort of outline picture.” Tamsin nodded. She made an effort to control her ragged breathing and tears.

After a moment, she went on. “I was hiding in the therapy room,” she confessed. She looked at my face as if it were up to me to absolve her of this piece of self-preservation.

“Saralynn got there early so I could give her my little orientation speech. I said hi to her and then I remembered I’d left some papers in the therapy room, so I went in there to fetch them, and while I was in there, I heard… I heard…”

“You heard the woman being killed?”

Tamsin nodded. “And I shut the door,” she said, and shuddered and gasped. “As quiet as I could, I shut the door and then I locked it.”

That was hard to swallow. We had ventured into a building we thought contained danger, to help Tamsin. But from her own account, Tamsin wouldn’t open the door to try to save a woman’s life. I made myself choke this knowledge down, shove it aside. Fear could make you do almost anything: I had known fear before, and I was willing to bet this wasn’t Tamsin’s first experience of it. “Didn’t you hear Janet come in?” My voice was as even as I could make it.

“That room’s pretty soundproof,” she said, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes. “I thought I heard someone calling down the hall, but for all I knew it was the same person who’d killed poor Saralynn, so I was too scared to answer. That was Janet, I guess. Then, later, I heard other sounds, other people.”

I’d have said we’d made enough noise to establish our identities, but it wasn’t my business. Now that I knew the situation was more or less under control, I would be glad to leave, if Claude would give me a green light. I was finding that the idea of Tamsin cowering in a safe, locked room-while one woman was killed and another popped over the head- was not agreeing with me.

I had opened my mouth to ask Claude if I could go when another car pulled into the parking lot, toward the back where the police cars weren’t as thick. Cliff Eggers sprang out as though he’d been ejected. He hurried to his wife.

“Tamsin!” he cried. “Are you all right?”

“Cliff!” Our therapist hurled herself into the big man’s arms and sobbed against his chest. “I can’t stand this again, Cliff!”

“What’s happened?” he said gently, while Stokes, Claude, and I stood and listened.

“Somebody killed a woman and left her in my office!”

Cliff’s dark eyes bored into Claude, another large white male.

“Is this true?” he asked, as though Tamsin often made up fantasies of this nature. Or as though he wished she had.

“I’m afraid so. I’m the police chief, Claude Friedrich. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?” Claude extended his hand, and Cliff disengaged from Tamsin to shake it.

“Cliff Eggers,” he responded. “I’m Tamsin’s husband.”

“What do you do, Mr. Eggers?” Claude asked in a social way, though I could practically see Detective Stokes twitch.

“I’m a medical transcriptionist,” he said, making an obvious effort to relax. “I believe your wife is one of my clients. Mostly I work out of our home, my wife’s and mine.”

We must all have looked blank.

“Doctors record what they find when they examine a patient, and what they’re going to do about it. I take the recordings and enter the information into a computerized record. That’s paring my job down to the bare bones.”

I had no idea Carrie employed a medical whatever, and from his face Claude had either been ignorant of it, too, or had forgotten; he wasn’t happy with himself. I was probably the only one present who knew him well enough to tell, though.

“You live here in Shakespeare?” Claude said.

“Right over on Compton.” Cliff Eggers’s big hand smoothed Tamsin’s hair in a cherishing gesture.

I was about to ask Tamsin if she’d heard anyone leave the building before our group had broken in, when I heard a voice calling, “Lily! Lily!”

I peered around the parking lot, trying to find its source. Full dark had fallen now, and the lights of the parking lot were busy with insects. The people buzzed around below them, looking as patternless as the bugs. I was hoping all the police were more purposeful than they appeared. Claude was no fool, and he’d sent everyone in his department through as much training as he could afford. No wonder he was so quick to snap up a detective from a big force, one who was sure to have more experience than anyone he could hire locally. And though he’d never spoken to me of it, I was aware that Claude had quotas he had to meet, and his force was probably always trying to catch up on the minority percentage, especially since Shakespeare had had some racial troubles about eighteen months ago.

“Lily!”

And there he was; the most handsome young man in Shakespeare, prom king, and thorn in my side, Bobo Winthrop. My heart sank, while another part of me reacted in a far different way.

I turned a hose on myself mentally.

“Bobo,” I said formally.

He disregarded my tone and put his arm around me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Claude’s bushy eyebrows escalate toward his hairline.

“You okay?” Bobo asked tenderly.

“Yes, thank you,” I said, my voice as stiff as I could make it.

“Is this your friend, Lily?” Tamsin asked. She’d recovered enough to try to slip back into her therapist role, and the neutral word friend suddenly seemed to have many implications.

“This is Bobo Winthrop,” I told her. “Bobo: Tamsin Lynd, Cliff Eggers.” I had done my duty.

“What happened here?” Bobo asked, giving Tamsin and Cliff a distracted nod. I was glad to see that Detective Stokes had drawn Claude away to huddle with him on real police business.

I wanted to be somewhere else. I started walking to my car, wondering if anyone would stop me. No one did. Bobo trailed after me, if a six-foot-tall blond can be said to trail.

“A woman got killed in there tonight,” I said to my large shadow when we reached my car. “She was stabbed, or stuck through somehow.”

“Who was she?” Bobo loomed over me while I pulled my keys out of my pocket. I wondered where the rest of my therapy group had gone. The police station? Home? If Melanie didn’t tell the police the identity of the corpse herself, they’d find it out pretty quick. She’d look bad.

“I didn’t know her,” I said accurately, if not exactly honestly. Bobo touched my face, a stroke of his palm against my cheek.

“I’m going home,” I said.

“Jack there tonight?”

“No, he’s on the road.”

“You need me to be there? I’ll be glad-”

“No.” Clipped and final, it was as definite as it was possible to be. Dammit, when would Bobo find a girlfriend or stop coming home during the summer and the holidays? There must be a special word for someone you were fond of, someone who aroused a deep-rooted lust, someone you would never love. There was nothing as idiotic, as inexplicable, as the chemistry between two people who had almost nothing in common and had no business even being in the same room together. I loved Jack, loved him more than anything, and reacting to Bobo this way was a constant irritant.

“I’ll see you around,” he said, abandoning his hope that I would prolong our encounter. He took a step back, watched me get into my car and turn the key. When I looked out my window again, he was gone.