Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Five

Alicia Stokes had her own little cubicle at the Shakespeare Police Department, which for the past three years had been “temporarily” housed in an older home after the jail and the police station had been declared substandard and put on notice to meet the state requirements. The city had responded sluggishly, as Shakespeare always did when money was involved. After a couple of years, the new jail was completed. Prisoners could march extra yards and be incarcerated in a decent facility. To no one’s surprise, the police station in front of it had run into work delays.

It was sort of nice to walk up onto a front porch to go in to see the police, but the old house really wasn’t suited to the purpose, and it would be abandoned within the next two months. Alicia’s cubicle was at the back of the former living room, and she’d already hung pictures of some of her heroes there. All her heroes were black and female. Alicia Stokes, obviously, had the courage to be different. And she was dedicated. She’d told me to come on in when I’d called, even though it was getting dark.

She stood to shake my hand, which I liked, and she gestured me into a chair that wasn’t too uncomfortable. Unlike Joel McCorkindale, Stokes seated herself firmly on the power side of the desk. Then we both had to pretend that no one else could hear us, which wasn’t easy, since the partitions were about as high as the detective’s head.

“I’d like to review what happened last night,” the detective said to open the interview. “And then, we’ll get a statement typed up for you to sign before you leave.”

So I’d be here a while. I nodded, resigned.

Detective Stokes had a legal pad in front of her. She opened it to a fresh page, wrote my name at the top of it, and asked, “How long have you been attending this survivors’ therapy group?”

“This would have been my third session. My third week.”

“And all the members of the group have been raped and are in the process of recovery?”

“That’s the idea.” The air conditioning, probably as old as the house, could barely keep up with the heat.

“How were you contacted to join this group? Were you already a patient at the center?”

“No.” I told her about the flyer at the grocery store and described coming to the first meeting.

“Who was there?”

“The same people that were there last night.” I went through the list.

“Did Ms. Lynd say anything about others who were supposed to come?”

“No, but that wouldn’t be surprising.” I remembered my own reluctance. “I’d expect someone to have second thoughts, or back out entirely.” I remembered Tamsin looking out into the hall that first night, as though she were waiting to hear someone knocking on the door at the end of the hall.

“I guess whoever killed that woman wore a lab coat,” I said. I hadn’t been able to stop speculating about that lab coat, the one used to prop the rolling chair in place. “Was it the nurse’s?” There was a staff nurse who did drug testing.

She appeared not to hear me. “Did you pass around any kind of sign-up sheet?” Her glasses magnified her dark eyes, which were large and almond shaped. Right now, they were fixed on me in a take-no-prisoners stare.

“No, we were supposed to have the illusion of confidentiality.”

“Illusion?”

“How could we remain secret from each other in this own?”

“True enough. Has Ms. Lynd ever said anything to you about her own history?”

I shook my head. “Well, not directly.” My inner thermostat seemed to have gone haywire. I took a tissue from the box on the desk and patted my face with it.

“What do you mean?”

“We saw the squirrel that was killed at her place. And I was there in the office when she got a phone call that seemed to upset her pretty badly.”

Of course I had to go over both incidents with the detective, but I’d expected that.

“So you had already formed the idea that Ms. Lynd was being stalked?”

“Yes.”

“Did you report that to the police?”

“No.”

Detective Stokes looked at me almost archly, which was an unnerving sight. “Why not? Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing to do?”

“No.”

“Why not? You don’t trust the police to help citizens?”

I was baffled by her manner. “It would have been logical for Tamsin or her husband to call the police themselves. It was their business.” I shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable.

“Did you ever think that if you had called us, that woman might not be dead?”

I was in imminent danger of losing my temper. That would be very, very bad in this situation. “If I had called here yesterday, and said that someone had killed a squirrel and hung it in a tree, what would you have done? Realistically?”

“I would have checked it out,” Alicia Stokes said, leaning forward to make sure I got her point. “I would have warned Ms. Lynd not to go anywhere by herself. I would have begun asking questions.”

I was figuring out things myself. “You already knew, too,” I said, thinking it through as I went. “You knew someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd. What did you do about it?”

For a long moment, I thought Stokes was going to lean across the desk and whop me. Then she collected herself and lied. “How could we possibly know anything like that?” she asked.

“Huh,” I said, putting a lot of disgust into it. If Alicia Stokes was playing some kind of hide-and-seek, she could do it on her own damn time.

“She did look like Tamsin, didn’t she?”

Detective Stokes laid her pen down on top of her yellow tablet. “Just what do you mean, Miss Bard?”

“You know what I mean. The dead woman. She looked like Tamsin.”

“Who mentioned that to you?” Her interest was keen now.

“No one. I’m not blind. She was pale, she was plump, she was brunette. She looked like Tamsin.”

I had no idea what the detective was thinking as she regarded me.

“But as you know, I was told by…” she checked a note on the tablet, “Melanie Kleinhoff that the dead woman was her sister-in-law, that is, the wife of her husband’s brother.”

“Melanie did say that,” I admitted. “Saralynn, wasn’t that her name?”

“And yet you told me last night you didn’t know the name of the dead woman.”

“No, I told you I hadn’t known her. You asked me if the others had recognized her, and I told you to ask them.” Splitting hairs, but I had technically told her the truth. “I don’t like repeating what other people tell me, when I don’t know it for myself.”

Detective Stokes’s face told me what she thought of that, and for once I wondered if I wasn’t just being balky, like a stubborn mule.

“So where is Saralynn’s husband, the one who raped Melanie?” I asked. “I guess he raped Saralynn, too, since she was going to join our group?”

“Tom Kleinhoff’s in jail,” Detective Stokes said, not confirming and not denying my assumption. “He didn’t make bail on the rape charge, because he already had other charges pending.”

It would have been good if he had been the guilty one. That would have been simple, direct, and over.

“Too bad it wasn’t him, isn’t it?” said Stokes, echoing my thoughts. I guess that wasn’t too great a leap to take.

I nodded.

“So let me just ask you, Miss Bard. Since your boyfriend, I understand, is a private eye.” The distaste in her voice told me she knew all about the circumstances of Jack’s becoming a private eye; he’d left the police force in Memphis under a black cloud. “If you think the dead woman was killed in mistake for Tamsin Lynd… why? Was that supposed to send a message to Tamsin Lynd herself, that a woman resembling her was killed in her office? Was it a genuine mistake-the killer finds a dark-haired fat woman in the right place so he’s sure he has the right victim? Or was the message for your group?”

I hadn’t speculated that far, wasn’t sure if that was a conclusion I’d have reached.

“Hadn’t thought about that? Well, maybe you’d better.” Alicia Stokes’s expression was definitely on the cold and hard side. “Someone thinks they’ve killed the woman supposed to be helping five rape victims, you’ve got to ask yourself why.”

She was so far ahead of me all I could do was gape at her.

“How does your boyfriend feel about you being in this group?” she asked, pounding on down the track.

“He was the one who wanted me to go to it.”

“You sure he doesn’t resent you giving such a big part of your time to a group of women? Maybe he doesn’t like some of the advice Tamsin gave you? Maybe Tamsin told you to stand up to him? How long has he lived here?”

Scrabbling for the most recent question, I said, “He’s lived here in Shakespeare for only a few weeks. He lived in Little Rock for a few years.”

Angry with myself for babbling, I realized just how battered I felt.

Then I began feeling angry.

Even as I tried to remember all the other questions she’d asked so I could begin to respond, I thought, Why bother? I got up.

“You sit your butt back down in that chair,” Alicia Stokes told me.

I fixed my eyes on her face.

“Before I make you,” she added.

Rage hit me like fireball. “You can’t make me do shit,” I said, slow and low. “I came in to give a statement. I gave it. Unless you arrest me, I don’t have to sit here and answer any questions.”

Stokes loomed over me, leaning across her desk, her knuckles resting on its surface. A patrolman I’d never met, a wiry freckled man, peered in the entrance to the cubicle, went wide eyed, and backed away.

“This looks like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” Claude’s voice said behind me.

I let out my breath in a long gust. I speculated on what could’ve happened if the new patrolman hadn’t fetched him- would Stokes have launched herself across her desk at me? Would I have hit a police officer?

“I was just leaving,” I told Claude. I edged past him and strode out the front door, picking my way through the desks and chairs and a few assorted people with my eyes fixed on the floor. The freckled patrolman held open the front door for me. His nametag read “G. McClanahan.” I made a mental note that I owed G. McClanahan a free house cleaning. Right now, getting in the car and driving away appeared to be my best move.

I wondered if Claude would have a talk with Stokes now, and what that talk would be like. I knew she would have no cause to like me any better afterward, that was for sure, and I didn’t know if I’d care or not. What was more certain was the fact that as fast as I could think, the detective could think faster, and I added that to the list of her sins, as I was sure her fellow officers would. Stokes was northern, black, a woman, aggressive, very tall (and I’d bet strong), and smart as hell. She would have to perform like a one-woman band to be popular, or even tolerated.

How would she live in Shakespeare? Why had she taken the job?

To my mind, that was as much a puzzle as the woman pinned to the wall in the health center. Maybe the city paid better than I’d assumed, or maybe Stokes had a master plan that included some time in a small force-a very small force. Maybe Stokes had family in the area.

But it hadn’t escaped my attention that a puzzling and bizarre murder had occurred in Shakespeare (where the norm was a Saturday night knifing) just when a puzzling and mysterious detective had turned up to solve it.

Some might think that suspicious, too.

I felt groggy when I woke up. I had to force myself to obey the clock. This was one of my days in Shakespeare, and I had to clean Carrie’s office in addition to putting in a stint at the Winthrops’ house. Forcing myself every step of the way, I got dressed and ate; though my head was aching and the rest of me felt exhausted already, as if I’d already put in a hard day. I wondered if I had dreamed a lot-dreams that were best forgotten-and had therefore slept restlessly. I caught no echoes of it as I cleaned my teeth and fluffed my hair. I expected my new sneakers to make me perk up; I don’t often get new things, and these black high-tops had been on extreme sale. But after they were laced and tied I stared down at them as if I’d never seen them before; or my feet, either, for that matter.

I saw a car already parked in the lot to the rear of Carrie’s office, and I had a feeling I’d seen it before. I just couldn’t place where and when. It was an hour earlier than any of the staff should appear. When I tried the back door, it was already unlocked.

“Hello?” I said cautiously, not wanting to scare anyone.

“Good morning!” called a horribly happy voice. Cliff Eggers stuck his head out of one of the doors on the left. “Carrie left a message you’d be coming in.”

I brought in my cleaning caddy and a few other things. I didn’t know what Carrie’s new cleaner kept here, so I’d piled my car with stuff. I had to do a great job for Carrie.

“And you’re here so early to do medical transcriptions?” I said in a voice that would carry down the hall as I deposited my burdens.

“That’s right.” Cliff appeared in the doorway again, beaming at me as though I’d said something very clever. “It works out better for me this way. I can do the rest of my doctors at home.”

“And you like your job,” I prodded.

“It’s fascinating. I learn something every day. Well, I’d better get back to it.” Cliff retreated to his desk, and I started with the waiting room. Dust, straighten, polish, vacuum, mop. In short order, the magazines were lined up on the square table in the middle of the room; the chairs were sitting in neat rows against the wall. The large mat in front of the door where most of the dirt from patients’ shoes was supposed to fall had been shaken out the front door and replaced, exactly square with the door.

Cliff squeaked down the hall in rubber shoes, and I cleaned the glass barrier between the patient sitting room and the clerks’ office. I saw with disapproval that Carrie’s new maid had been slacking off there. And the counter in the reception clerk’s area was just nasty.

“Want a cup of coffee?” he called to me after a few minutes had passed.

“No, thank you,” I said politely.

I was able to get on with the other rooms and the hall, and cleaned as fast as a dervish whirls until I reached the room in which Cliff was working.

The burly man was sitting at a desk, a headset on, and his fingers flying across the keys of a computer. His leg was moving slightly, and as I mopped behind him, I saw that he was operating a pedal. He wasn’t listening to music on a CD player, as I’d at first believed. He was listening to Carrie’s voice. I could barely hear it while I dusted. Carrie was saying, “temperature of one hundred and one. Mr. Danby said he’d had episodes of fever for the past two days, and his stomach had become very sore and tender to the touch. Upon examination, when the lower left quadrant of his abdomen was palpated…”

“You know anything about medicine?” Cliff said out loud, as I wiped the picture frames.

“No, not much,” I confessed.

“It’s like listening to a soap opera every day,” he said, as if I’d asked.

“Ummm,” I said, lifting an open magazine to wipe underneath, ready to set it down exactly the same way.

“How’s Tamsin doing?” I asked, just to stop him from asking me any more questions. I had seen his lips begin to form a phrase.

“She’s doing well, considering what a shock she got,”

Cliff said, his heavy face grim. He hesitated for a second, then said, “And considering this has ruined our new life here.”

That seemed a strange way to put it. Here I was thinking it was Saralynn’s life that had been ruined.

“It’s awful about the woman who was killed,” Cliff went on, echoing my thoughts. “But I’m Tamsin’s husband, so I can’t help worrying about her more than anyone. For someone whose joy is to help others, her life has been full of trouble this past couple of years.”

From what I’d seen, that was certainly true.

“You moved here from the Midwest?” I asked, trying to confirm the accent. I realigned a stack of insurance forms and put a stapler in the drawer below.

“I’m originally from northern Kentucky,” he said. “But we’ve moved a lot these past few years since we both got out of school. It’s been hard to find a place where we both can have the jobs we like and a good lifestyle.”

Jack and I were facing the same sort of problem right now. “So you’ve been here in Shakespeare for how long?”

“A little over a year, I guess. We really like it here, and Tamsin’s finally making friends.”

I wondered how long Detective Stokes had lived here. Quite a Yankee invasion we were having, here in little Shakespeare. And there was the new freckled officer G. McClanahan at the police department. I had no idea where he’d come from.

As I cleaned around Cliff Eggers’s bulk, as I bundled all my things back into the car, I deliberated over asking Tamsin about her allusions to problems in the past. Cliff seemed more than willing to talk, but I knew I’d feel uncomfortable discussing Tamsin’s secrets without her permission or presence.

The silent Winthrop house was just what I needed after the unexpected and aggravating presence of Cliff Eggers at Carrie’s office. Since school was out, I was a little surprised to find no one at home, and quite pleased. I was able to do things exactly in the order I wanted, up to the point when Amber Jean came in the back door escorted by about six of her friends.

Amber Jean was a whole different shooting match from her oldest brother, Bobo. She cast me a casual hello, as did two of her buddies, while the rest of them behaved as though I were invisible. Actually, I didn’t mind that so much. I’d rather be ignored than the center of attention.

The three boys in the group were around fifteen or sixteen, and they were going through the goofy, pimply awkward phase where they could be adults one moment and silly children the next. I’d met Bobo when he’d been around that age.

The girls were more mysterious to me. Since I’d been one, and I had a sister, I should have understood these teenagers better. But with these particular girls, maybe it was the money their parents gave them, maybe it was the “freedom” they had (which was really lack of supervision), maybe it was their mobility… they all had their own cars… Any or all of these factors made their lives different from any experience of mine.

I was relieved when the whole group trooped out to the pool. The boys pulled off their shirts and sandals and the girls took off various things. I supposed the shorts the boys were wearing could double as swimsuits, and the girls were already suited up under their clothing. They had small swimsuits on. Really, really small.

Amber Jean’s two-piece was screaming pink with a pattern of green leaves. She looked very attractive in it. She stuck her head in the sliding glass door and called, “Lily, could you bring us some lemonade and some snacks out to the pool?”

“No.”

She gaped at me. “No?” she repeated, and the closest of the boys began sniggering.

“No. I clean. I don’t serve.” I finished mopping the floor and squeezed out the mop.

Amber scrambled to catch hold of some superiority. “Okay, no problem,” she said in a clipped, cold voice. “Come on, guys!” she called over her shoulder. “We got to get the food ourselves!”

I invented something for myself to do in the master bedroom to get out of their way, and when I heard the sliding glass door shut again, I ventured out. The floor had still been damp, and they’d tracked all over it. I’d have to mop again. Well, that was my payoff for not serving. Taking a deep breath, I took care of the floor for the second time. I thought it possible Amber Jean would invent a second reason to come in, and I waited for a few minutes just in case. When she and her friends stayed out, I scrubbed the sink and polished it in uninterrupted industry.

Just as I’d cleaned the counters, Howell Three came in. This second son was Howell Winthrop the Third, but he’d been called Howell Three since birth thanks to his mother, who thought the nickname was cute. Reedy, slender, plain, and an honor-roll student, Howell was the bridge between Bobo (beautiful and moderately book smart) to Amber Jean (fairly pretty and book dumb).

“Hi, Lily,” Howell Three said. “Oops, sorry, the floor.” He took huge steps to get across the linoleum as quickly as possible.

“Quite all right,” I said. “It’s almost dry.” Now that he was on the carpet in the living room area, Howell Three heard the noise from the pool and looked out. A look of disgust crossed his face. “Amber Jean,” he said angrily, as though she was right by him. “She’s sunning with her top off,” Howell Three told me, sounding about ten years younger than his age, which I realized with some surprise was seventeen. “Lily, she shouldn’t do that.”

“Will she listen to you?” I asked, after some hesitation. I felt a little responsible in a roundabout way. If I had brought her drinks and chips, Amber Jean would not be exposing her breasts now. That made no sense, but it was a fact.

“No. I’m gonna call Mom,” he said, reaching a resolution. “I hate to rat on her, but this is embarrassing. She thinks she’s being cool, that they won’t talk about her, but that’s not true. Those girls and those guys, they’ll tell everyone.” He looked at me with some appeal in his face, but I had no authority to assume the role of Amber Jean’s mother. I doubted if Amber Jean would listen to me, even if I did speak; she’d probably just strip off her bikini bottom, too, to spite me.

So while Howell Three called his mother (she was at one of the family businesses meeting with an accountant) and got her promise that she was on her way home instantly, I gathered up my stuff and got out of there. The last thing I wanted was to witness a Winthrop family blowup.

And to think, I’d been so happy a month or two before when Beanie had called me to come back to work for the family. I’d missed the income the Winthrops had given me, and in a weird way, I’d missed them. What had I been thinking? Was I falling victim to the Mammy syndrome?

Shaking my head at myself, I went home for lunch.

The afternoon was supposed to be free, but I had messages on my answering machine.

“Lily, hey, we’re going to try to have our meeting tonight, since Tuesday didn’t work out. I hate to lose our momentum,” Tamsin said. “Oh, this is Tamsin Lynd calling. I hope I see you tonight, same time as usual.”

Tuesday didn’t work out? That was one way to put it.

I trudged unwillingly into the building that night. It was still light, of course, but the day was lying on my shoulders like a heavy coat. I craved sleep, and the aching of my back and breasts reminded me that my cycle was coming full circle.

I saw Janet getting out of her car when I entered the parking lot.

“How are you?” I called.

“Lots better,” she said, trying to smile normally and failing. “I still have a headache, but there wasn’t any fracture and everything looks normal in the X rays.”

“What does the doctor think happened to you?” I fell into step beside her and tried to slow my steps to match hers.

Janet heaved a deep sigh. “He thinks that someone hit me with something hard on the back of the head, that my head bounced forward and hit another hard surface, and that was all she wrote. I was completely out for maybe five minutes, total. I could kind of hear you and Firella when you were waiting with me. So I wasn’t really out of it that long.”

“It felt like a long time to us,” I told her. “We were pretty worried about you.”

“I’m glad you all came in. The detective told me what happened. I don’t remember seeing the dead woman, so I guess I should thank the person who bopped me. That’s not a memory I want.”

“So you don’t remember seeing anyone in the building?”

“Nope. I just barely remember getting here Tuesday evening. It seems to me I sort of recall walking down the hall, but even that’s not exactly clear.”

The rest of the group trickled into the therapy room in near silence. Janet and I were sitting on the left side of the table, Melanie and Carla on the other. Firella came in and pulled out a chair on my other side, and Sandy scooted in the room with her gaze cast on the floor. She worked her way down to the end of the table without meeting anyone’s gaze. Tamsin came in last and sat at the end closest to the door.

“We needed to meet tonight to find out how everyone’s handling what happened. As you all know by now, the woman you found dead was Melanie’s sister-in-law, Saralynn. She used to be married to the man who raped Melanie. They’d just gotten divorced.”

Firella shook her head. “Sunday dinners must be hell in that family.”

Melanie nodded. Her plump, doughy face looked pinched and her eyes were definitely red. Her hair was frizzy as though she’d tried a home permanent that didn’t work. But the same determination that had led her to prosecute her attacker when no one else in the world wanted to seemed to be getting her through this latest crisis.

“How are you getting along with your husband after all this?”

“We’re fine,” Melanie said. “He loves me and I love him, more than anything in the world, and he’s not going to let me down. His brother is a no good piece of trash and Deke’s always known it. Ain’t Deke’s fault his mom and dad turned out a bad ‘un.”

“That’s wonderful, Melanie,” Tamsin said. She didn’t sound convinced, though. I leaned forward a little to get a good look at our counselor. “Do you think your brother-in-law could be responsible for the death of his wife?”

“No, seeing as how he’s in jail,” Melanie responded tartly.

I noticed that the ones who hadn’t known this looked disappointed. Everyone, it seemed, would have been glad to have Tom Kleinhoff to blame for this murder.

“Why aren’t you telling us how you feel about this?” Firella asked. She leaned forward so she could look right into Tamsin’s face. “Why aren’t you telling us what happened in here Tuesday night?”

This sudden aggression surprised almost everyone except me.

Tamsin flushed a deep plum color. “I’ve admitted I was hiding in the therapy room when Saralynn Kleinhoff was killed,” she said in a low voice. I saw Sandy lean across the table to hear. “I’ve admitted to being scared when I knew there was a killer in the building. I don’t think that’s too surprising.”

“But…” I began before I thought. I had leaned forward to focus on her myself. I stopped before I voiced my doubts.

“What, Lily?” Tamsin asked. But only because she had to; you could tell she was scared about what I was going to say. We were supposed to bare all to Tamsin; what about her being honest with us?

“Tell us exactly what happened,” I said, with careful emphasis. “As far as we can tell, it could have been any one of us pinned to that wall in your office. How come Melanie’s sister-in-law and Janet got attacked, and you didn’t?”

“Are you blaming Tamsin for not getting hurt, Lily?” Firella asked. “Are you blaming the victim for the crime, so to speak?”

“Yeah, where are you going with this, Lily?” Carla croaked.

Good question.

“I just want to know exactly what happened. We come here every week.” I simmered for a minute. “We’re supposed to feel safe here. How did this person who killed Saralynn get in? How’d he get out without us seeing him?”

Everyone around the table looked thoughtful after hearing my questions. I wasn’t sure why I was maneuvering our therapist into telling us something that would surely upset her, but I was determined to do just that.

“As I told you the night of the incident, Lily,” Tamsin said with reluctance, “Saralynn was supposed to come early so I could give her the little talk I give everyone before she joins the group. I’d asked her to come in at seven fifteen, a little earlier than I’d asked you to come. You were the last one to get the lecture the first night you all came, and I remembered I’d had to rush through.

“I was a little worried about Saralynn having such a close relationship with Melanie, how that would impact the group, and we talked about that a little bit.”

“You didn’t hear anyone else in the building?” Firella asked.

“I may have. Now, I think I did. But it could have been someone staying late, or coming back in after something he’d left… anything.”

“The end door was locked?” Sandy wanted to be sure.

“No, the end door wasn’t locked.” Tamsin flushed red. “I knew you guys would be coming in. So I didn’t lock it behind her.”

“Did you hear the door while you talked?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

When I looked skeptical, she said, “That’s the most normal noise in the world, to me. I’m not sure I would have noticed!” She was getting angry.

“So there was a reason you had to leave Saralynn in your office?…” Melanie said, to get Tamsin back on the track.

“Yes, I’d left the group list on the table in here, and I had to get it to enter Saralynn’s name-just her first name-and phone number. You remember, I took that information from all of you in case we had to cancel sometime.”

“So while you were in the therapy room…?” Melanie prompted.

“Okay, while I was in there I dropped everything. I spilled all my papers from my notebook and knocked my pop over.”

After a brief vision of Tamsin pushing down an old man with white hair, I realized she meant she’d spilled a soft drink. Maybe it was a northern or midwestern thing? We all waited, watching her. Janet’s mouth was pulled tight against her teeth. Anger? Skepticism?

“I started picking everything up, and while I was doing that I heard someone going into my office.”

“Did you hear this person pass the door of the therapy room, or come from the direction of the end door?”

“I don’t remember either way,” she admitted. “I’ve tried and tried, but I don’t remember.”

Sandy interrupted. “What difference would that make, Lily?”

I shrugged. “The difference between someone hiding in this building until he was able to catch a woman alone, and someone coming in from the parking lot-maybe after Saralynn-on purpose.”

An interesting difference, their faces said, and they turned to Tamsin again. She shook her head. “No use, I just can’t recall it. After I heard someone go into my office, I heard Saralynn say something, but I couldn’t make it out. She sounded surprised but not scared. But after that, she said, ”What?“ and she made an awful sound. Then there was a lot of scuffling and grunting, and I knew what was happening. I was so scared. I know I should have gone to help her, but I was so scared. I crawled over to the door to the therapy room. It was shut, you know how it falls shut? So as quietly as I could, I locked it.”

She got a chorus of sympathy from everyone in the room except me. Her eyes traveled around the group of women, coming to stop at my face.

“Lily, I think we have to get this out in the open. Are you blaming me for not going to Saralynn’s aid?”

“No,” I said. “I think that was good sense.”

“Then are you angry I let Janet come in without warning her?”

“No. If you don’t go help one, why go help another?” She winced, and I knew that had sounded as if I thought her callous. “I mean, if you expected to be killed when he killed Saralynn, you would still have been killed if you’d tried to help Janet, I guess.”

“Then what issue do you have with me?”

I thought for a minute. “You seem… already scared,” I said, picking my way slowly. “Don’t you think you should tell us the rest?” I could see the fear in her face, read it in the tightly drawn line of her mouth and the way her shoulders were set. I know a lot about fear.

“That don’t make a lick of sense, Lily,” Carla said.

“Well, yeah, it does,” Janet said in her unnaturally husky voice. “Like Tamsin’s already been a victim and she’s anticipating being a victim again.”

“The therapist isn’t supposed to talk about her own problems,” Tamsin reminded us. “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”

“And why wouldn’t you want to? We share our big problems with you,” Carla said illogically.

“This is where you come to get help,” Tamsin began.

“Oh, yeah, like the help we got Tuesday night?” Sandy’s voice was bitter and shrill. The rest of us tried to look at her without actually turning our heads to stare, because Sandy was the least forthcoming of the group by far. We didn’t want to startle her, or she’d run; it was like having a wounded deer in your backyard, a deer you felt obliged to examine. “Seeing that dead woman in your office was the scariest thing that’s happened to me in a long time, and if you know anything about it or if it happened because of you, I think we have a right to know that. Because what if it’s connected to one of us?” I exchanged glances with Janet, not quite following Sandy.

“Sure,” said Carla, who evidently hadn’t had the same problem. “Think about it!” I was hopelessly confused.

“You’re saying,” Firella clarified, “that maybe if Saralynn’s murder ties up with something in Tamsin’s past, it hasn’t got anything to do with us. Maybe we’d all been scared it did? Like maybe one of the bikers who raped Lily following Lily here and killing Saralynn as a lesson to Lily?”

“Right. Like that.” Carla sounded relieved that someone understood her.

“Or like whoever raped Sandy, not that Sandy has chosen to reveal that to the rest of her sisters in the group, which every one of the rest of us has,” said Melanie, and I thought through that sentence for a moment.

Sandy flushed a deep red. “Well, then, missy, I’ll just tell you that it couldn’t be connected to me because the man who raped me was my grandfather, and I’ll tell you what I did about it. I put rat poison in his coffee and that son of a bitch died.”

We all gazed at her with our mouths hanging open. In a million years, not one of us could have predicted what had come out of Sandy’s mouth.

Firella said, “Way to go, Sandy.”

So I had a sister under the skin. Another killer. I felt myself smile, and I was sure it was a very unpleasant smile to see. “Good for you,” I told her.

Tamsin’s face was a sight. A professional excitement that Sandy had spoken up was mingled with subdued dismay at Sandy’s revelation, and concern over Tamsin’s own situation.

“Didn’t expect that, did you?” Carla jeered.

“No,” Tamsin admitted readily, “I never suspected Sandy would share with us, especially to this extent. Sandy, do you feel good now that you’ve told us what happened to you?”

I observed that attention had turned away from Tamsin, which was undoubtedly what Tamsin had wanted.

Sandy looked as though she was rummaging around inside herself to discover what was there. Her gaze was inward, intensely blue, blind to all around her.

“Yes, I feel pretty good,” she said. Surprise was evident in her voice. “I feel pretty damn good.” She looked happily shocked at herself. “I hated that old man. I hated him. I was eighteen when it happened. You’d think an eighteen year old could fight off a grandfather, wouldn’t you? But he was only fifty-eight himself, and he’d been doing manual labor all his life. He was strong and he was mean and he had a knife.”

“What happened afterward?” Tamsin asked. She kept her voice very even and low, so Sandy’s flow would continue.

“I told my mother. She didn’t believe me until she saw the blood on the bed and helped me clean up. He’d been living with us since my grandmother died. After my mom and dad talked, they took Grandpa to a hospital. They told him he had to stay in the mental hospital till he died, or else they’d tell what he’d done to me and he’d have to go to regular jail.”

“Did he believe them?”

“He must have, because he agreed. Oh, he tried to say no one would believe me. That was what I was afraid of, but then I turned up pregnant and of course,” and Sandy’s face was too awful to look at, “I would have had the baby to prove the paternity with.”

I felt nauseated. “What happened with the baby?” I asked.

“I lost the baby, but only after Granddaddy was committed. And I thank God for that every day. Two days after I lost the baby, I visited Granddaddy in the hospital and I took him some coffee. It was spiked, so to speak. I was scared he’d talk his way out if he knew I wasn’t pregnant any more.”

Telling the bare and horrible truth takes its toll, and I could read that in the woman’s face.

“You weren’t prosecuted?” Firella, too, was keeping her voice very even and low.

“It’s funny,” Sandy said, in an almost detached way. “But though I wasn’t trying to sneak in, no one saw me. Like I was invisible. If I’d sat and planned it a week, it couldn’t‘ve gone like that. No one at the front desk.” She shook her head, seeing the past more clearly than she could see the present. “No one at the wing he was in. I pushed the button that opened the door myself. I went in. He was in his room alone. I handed him the cup. I had a plain one. We drank coffee. I told him I’d forgiven him.” She shook her head again. “He believed that. And when the coffee was all gone-the tranquilizers had pretty much destroyed his sense of taste-I got up and left. I took the cups with me. And no one saw me, except one nurse. She never said a word. I just didn’t register.” Sandy was lost in a dreamlike memory, a memory both horrible and gratifying.

“Have you ever told your husband?” Tamsin asked, and her more recent world came crashing back to Sandy McCorkindale.

“No,” she said. “No, I have not.”

“I think it’s time, don’t you?” Tamsin’s voice was gentle and insinuating.

“Maybe,” Sandy admitted. “Maybe it is. But he may not want someone who’s been through something so… sordid… my sons… the church…” And Sandy began crying, her back arching with huge, heaving sobs.

“He really loves you,” I said.

Her head snapped up and she gave me an angry look. “How would you know about that, Lily Bard?”

“Because he called me into his office yesterday to ask me if I could tell him what was wrong with you. He doesn’t know why you’re in therapy, and he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to help you.”

She stared at me, stunned. “My husband is worried about how to help me? My husband wonders why I need therapy?”

I nodded.

Sandy looked intensely thoughtful.

Tamsin glanced down at her watch and said, “This has already been a big night. And our time is up. Why don’t we save the rest of this discussion until next Tuesday night?” She’d escaped from any further questioning, and her whole body relaxed as I watched.

With some grumbling, the rest of the group agreed. Sandy hardly seemed to be in the same room with us any more, her thoughts were so distant. As we left the building, I saw Sandy go to the end of the parking lot and slide into the car, where Joel sat in the front seat, waiting for her. I saw him lean over to give her a kiss on the cheek, and when he did, she gripped his arm and started talking.