Shakespeare’s Trollop

Chapter Ten

I was sickened by the world and the people in it, most of all by myself. I did something I hadn’t done in years. I went home and went to bed without bathing or eating. I just stripped, brushed my teeth, pulled on a nightgown, and slid between my clean sheets.

The next thing I knew, I was peering at the bright numbers on the digital clock next to the bed. It was seven minutes after three. I wondered why I was awake.

Then I knew there was someone in the room with me.

My heart began that terrible pounding, but through its rhythm I heard the sounds of clothing being removed, the zipper of a gym bag, and it came to me that I was not attacking the intruder because on some level I had already recognized who was in my bedroom.

“Jack?”

“Lily,” he said, and slid under the covers with me. “I took an earlier flight.”

My heart slowed down a little, to a rhythm that had more to do with another kind of excitement.

The smell of him, his skin and hair and deodorant and cologne and clothes, the combination of scents that said Jack filled my senses. I’d planned on making him wait to come down to Shakespeare, wait until I’d talked to him, told him I’d been unfaithful to him-sort of-so he could decide without seeing me whether or not to leave me for good. But in the private dark of my room, and because Jack was as necessary to me as water, I reached behind his head, my fingers clumsy with sleep, and worked the elastic band off his ponytail. I ran my fingers through his hair, dark and thick, separating it.

“Jack,” I said, my voice sad to my own ears, “I have some things to tell you.”

“Not now, okay?” he murmured in my ear. “Let me just… just let me… okay?”

His hands moved purposefully. I will say this for us; we put each other under a spell in bed together. Our troubled pasts and our uncertain future had no place in that bed.

Later, in the darkness, my fingers traced the muscles and skin and bones I knew so well. Jack is strong and scarred, like me, but his is visible all the time, a single thin puckered line running from the hairline by his right eye down to his jaw. Jack used to be a policeman; he used to be married; and he used to smoke and drink too much, too often.

I started to ask him how his case, the one that had taken him to California, was going; I thought of asking him how his friends Roy Costimiglia and Elizabeth Fry (also Little Rock private detectives) were doing. But all that really mattered was that Jack was here now.

I drifted off to sleep, Jack’s breathing even and deep by my side. At eight, I woke up to the smell of coffee perking in the kitchen. Across the hall I could see the bathroom door opening, and Jack stepped out in his blue jeans and nothing else. His hair was wet and dragging over his shoulder. He’d just shaved.

I watched him, not thinking of anything, just feeling: glad to see him here in my house, comfortable with the warmth in my heart. His eyes met mine, and he smiled.

“I love you,” I said, without ever meaning to, as if the sound of the words was as natural as breathing. It was something I’d held inside myself like a secret code, refusing to reveal it to anyone, even Jack, who’d devised it.

“We love each other,” he said, not smiling now, but this look was better than a smile. “We have to be together more.”

This was going to be the kind of conversation we needed to be dressed to have. Jack looked so clean and buff that I felt sleazy and crumpled in contrast.

“Let me get a shower. We’ll talk,” I said.

He nodded, and padded down the hall to the kitchen. “You want some pancakes?” he called, as though the earth had not just shifted to another axis entirely.

“I guess,” I said doubtfully.

“Cut loose,” he advised me as I stepped into the bathroom. “It’s not every day we work up enough guts to talk about how we feel.”

I smiled to myself in the bathroom mirror. It was still cloudy from Jack’s shower. In it I saw a softer, gentler version of Lily; and since I’d hung it at just the right height, I couldn’t see most of the scars. I avoided noticing them from long habit, avoided looking at them and thinking of what my body would look like without them. I did not remember exactly what my torso had been like with no white ridges, or my breasts without circles incised around them. As I did from time to time, I caught myself regretting I didn’t have something more beautiful to offer Jack, and as I did every time, I reminded myself that he seemed to find me beautiful enough.

We eyed each other cautiously as we sat down to eat. Jack had opened the kitchen window, and the cool morning air came in with a gust of smells that meant spring. I heard a car start up and glanced at the clock. Carlton was going to the Singles Sunday-school class at First Methodist, and he’d be home at twelve-fifteen, right after church. He’d change and then drive over to his mother’s house for midday Sunday dinner; it would be pot roast and carrots and mashed potatoes, or baked chicken and dressing and sweet potatoes. I knew all that. I’d spent over four years learning this town and these people, making a place for myself here.

Before Jack and I even began our conversation, I knew I wasn’t ready to leave. True, I had no family here in Shakespeare; true, I could clean houses as well in Dubuque (or Little Rock) as I could in Shakespeare. And true, my business had suffered a lot in the past year. But I’d won some kind of battle here in Shakespeare, and I wanted to stay, at least for now. I began to tense in anticipation of a fight.

“I don’t have to live in Little Rock,” Jack said. I deflated as though he’d stuck a pin in me.

“I do a lot of my work by computer anyway,” he continued, looking at me intently. “Of course, I’d still need to be in Little Rock part of the time. I can keep my apartment up there, or find a smaller, cheaper one. That’d be more to the point.”

We were being so careful with each other.

“So you want to live with me here in Shakespeare,” I said, to be absolutely sure I was hearing him right.

“Yes,” he said. “What do you think?”

I thought of what I’d done yesterday. I closed my eyes and wished a lightning bolt would hit me now, to prevent me from ever telling Jack. But that didn’t happen. We’d always been honest with each other.

“I kissed someone else,” I said. “I won’t let you hit me, but if it’ll help you feel better, you can break something.”

“You kissed someone,” he said.

I couldn’t look at his face. “It was an after-funeral thing.”

“You didn’t go to bed with…?”

“No.” Did I really need to elaborate? Hadn’t I been honest enough? Yes, I decided.

I stole a glimpse at Jack. I saw Jack’s face tighten. Instead of hitting something, he looked like he himself had been hit. He was gripping the edge of the table.

“Is this someone… would this happen again?” he asked finally, his voice very hoarse.

“No,” I told him. “Never.”

Gradually, his grip on the table relaxed. Gradually, his face looked human.

“How old are you, Lily?” he asked, out of the blue.

“Thirty-one,” I said. “Thirty-two, soon.”

“I’m thirty-six.” He took a deep breath. “We’ve both been through some times.”

I nodded. Our names still cropped up in the news every now and then. (“After a brutal gang rape mirroring that of Memphis resident Lily Bard’s, a Pine Bluff woman was admitted to University Hospital…” or “Today Undercover Officer Lonny Todd was dismissed from the Memphis police force after charges he had an improper relationship with an informant. Todd is the latest in a string of dismissals in the past four years on similar charges, beginning with the firing of Officer Jack Leeds, whose relationship with the wife of a fellow officer led to her murder.”)

“This is the best I’ve ever had it,” Jack said. He was turning white as a sheet, but he went on. “You had a…” and he floundered there, stuck for a word.

“I had a moment of sheer stupidity.”

“Okay.” He smiled, and it wasn’t a funny smile. “You had a moment of stupidity. But it won’t ever happen again, because you said it wouldn’t and you always keep your word.”

I hadn’t ever thought of myself as the epitome of honor, but it was true that I kept my word. I was trying not to be surprised that Jack was being so calm and level about this.

He seemed to be waiting.

“I said it wouldn’t,” I repeated. “And I always keep my word.”

Jack seemed to relax just a little. He gave himself a little shake, picked up his fork and took a bite of his pancake. “Just don’t ever tell me who,” he said, not looking at me.

“You’re getting so wise.” Jack had a real problem with impulse control.

“It’s taken me long enough.” But his smile this time was a real smile. “So, you never answered me.”

I took a deep breath. “Yes. I want you to move in. Do you think we’ll have enough room here?”

“Could I put an office in the exercise room?”

A little stunned by how easily it had been settled, I nodded silently. I’d hung a punch-and-kick bag in the middle of the second bedroom. I could live without it. I’d use the kicking pads in the aerobics room at Body Time.

Then I tried to imagine Jack sharing my bathroom full-time. It was very small, and counter space was next to none. I wondered what we would do with his furniture. How would we divide the bills?

We had just complicated our lives enormously, and I was scared of the change. There were so many details to work out.

“You don’t look very happy,” Jack said. He was eyeing me from the other side of the table.

“But I am.” I smiled at him, and he got that witless look on his face again. “I’m scared, too,” I admitted. “Are you, a little?”

“Yeah,” He confessed. “It’s been a while.”

“At least one of us has had prior experience. I’ve never done this.”

Jack took a deep breath. “Would you rather just go on and get married?” he asked, every muscle in his body rigid. “That might be good, huh?”

I had to take my own deep breath while I groped for the right words to tell him what I felt. I hate explaining myself, and only the fact that I simply couldn’t hurt Jack impelled me go through the discomfort of it.

“If it wasn’t for other people, I would marry you today,” I said slowly. “You know how happy the papers would be if they found out? You know how people would pat us on the backs and congratulate us? ‘Those two poor wounded souls, they’ve found each other.’ ”

Jack’s face was beginning to collapse, so I hurried on with the rest. “But that’s no reason for us to bypass any happiness we can have. You know what I would really like? I’d like to be married to you with not another soul in the world knowing about it, at least until it was old news.”

Jack didn’t know if I’d said yes or no. He was struggling to understand. I could tell by the way he learned toward me, his eyes focused on my face.

“It would be just for us,” I said, sure I’d failed in what I was trying to convey. I had always been a private person.

“Married is what you would like?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised at myself. “That’s what I would like.”

“To be kept secret?”

“Just for a while. I’d just like to get used to it before we told anyone.”

“Now?”

“No.” I shrugged. “Anytime. But they put the names of people who’ve applied for marriage licenses in the paper. How could we get around that? Providing you…?” I felt very anxious as I waited for him to speak.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’d like that, too.” He looked sort of surprised to discover that he would, though. He put his hand over mine where it was resting on the table. “Soon,” he finished.

I tried to imagine that Jack did not feel about me the way I felt about him. I tried picturing Jack tiring of me in a month or two, opting for some woman in Little Rock who was more convenient and less prickly. I projected myself into that position of pain and rejection.

But I couldn’t imagine it,-

I didn’t count on much in this life, but I counted on Jack’s love. Though he’d just confessed it this morning, I’d known Jack loved me, and I’d known it with certainty.

I wasn’t going to jump up and down and scream and run home to tell my mother we needed to pick out china and reserve the church. The time in my life I might have done that had long since passed by. Now that I had Jack, I had everything I needed. I didn’t need the congratulations and gifts of other people to confirm that.

“Damn,” Jack said, grinning like a maniac. He jumped up and began swinging his arms as if he didn’t quite know what to do. “Damn!”

I felt as radiant as if I’d been painted with light. Without knowing I was standing or moving I found myself glued to Jack from head to foot, our arms wrapped around each other, the smiles on our faces too silly for words.

We’d always had electricity between us, and the high emotion we felt turned us into dynamos.

We celebrated exceptionally well.

Afterward, the kitchen was in an even worse mess. Since he’d cooked, I cleaned while Jack made the bed. Then, with the unusual prospect of a free day stretching ahead of us, we decided to take a walk together.

It was a perfect morning, both in the perimeters of our life together and in the weather outside. The spring morning was just warm enough, and the sky was bright and clear. I hadn’t felt this way in years. I hadn’t even come close. I was so happy it almost hurt, and I was scared to death.

After we’d gone a few blocks, I began telling Jack about Deedra. I told him about the new sheriff, and her brother; about Lacey asking me for help, and the embarrassing items I’d found in Deedra’s apartment; about Becca and Janet and the funeral, and the fire at Joe C’s house; about the will Bobo had read when he was prying in the rolltop desk.

“Joe C’s not leaving Calla anything?” Jack was incredulous. “After she’s taken care of him for the past fifteen years or however long he’s been too frail?”

“At least fifteen,” I said. “According to what she’s told me. He’s leaving the more distant kids, the great-niece and great-nephews-Bobo, Amber Jean, and Howell Three, the Winthrop kids-an item of furniture apiece. Of course, that’s probably not going to happen now, though there may be something worth saving in the house. I don’t know. And the direct descendants are going to split the proceeds from the sale of the house.”

“Who are the direct descendants again?”

“Becca and her brother, Anthony,” I began, trying to remember what Calla had told me weeks before. “They descended from-”

“Just give me the list, not the begats,” Jack warned me. I remembered Jack had gone to church as a child; I remembered that he’d been brought up Baptist. I wondered if we had some other things to talk about.

“Okay. Also there are Sarah, Hardy, and Christian Prader, who live in North Carolina. I’ve never seen them. And Deedra, who’s out of the picture.”

“And you think the house and lot are worth what?”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand was the figure I heard.”

“Seventy thousand apiece isn’t anything to sneer at.”

I thought of what seventy thousand dollars could do for me.

In the newspaper, almost every day, I read about corporations that have millions and billions of dollars. On the television news, I heard about people who are “worth” that much. But for a person like me, seventy thousand dollars was a very serious amount of money.

Seventy thousand. I could buy a new car, a pressing need of mine. I wouldn’t have to scrimp to save enough to pay my property taxes and my gym membership and my insurance payments, both car and health. If I got sick, I could go to the doctor and pay for my medicine all at one time, and I wouldn’t have to clean Carrie’s office for free for months afterward.

I could buy Jack a nice present.

“What would you like me to get you when I get seventy thousand dollars?” I asked him, an unusual piece of whimsy for me.

Jack leaned close and whispered in my ear.

“You can get that for next to nothing,” I told him, trying not to look embarrassed.

We’d walked to the front of Joe C’s house, and I pointed, drawing Jack’s attention to the blackened front windows. Without commenting, Jack strode up the driveway and circled the house. Through the high bushes (the ones that hadn’t been beaten out of shape by the firefighters) I glimpsed him at different points, looking up, looking at the ground, scoping it out. I watched Jack’s face get progressively grimmer.

“You went in there,” Jack commented as he rejoined me. He stood by my side, looking down at me.

I nodded, not quite focusing on him because I was assessing the damage. The upstairs looked all right, at least from the sidewalk. There was debris scattered on the yard, charred bits of this and that. When the breeze shifted direction, I could smell that terrible burned smell.

“You went in there,” Jack said.

“Yes,” I said, more doubtfully.

“Were you out of your fucking mind?” he said in a low, intense voice that gathered all my attention.

“It was on fire.”

“You don’t go in buildings on fire,” Jack told me, and all the anger he’d suppressed this morning erupted. “You walk away.”

“I knew Joe C was in the house!” I said, beginning to get angry myself. I don’t like explaining the obvious. “I couldn’t let him burn.”

“You listen to me, Lily Bard,” Jack said, starting down the sidewalk almost too swiftly for me to keep up. “You listen to me.” He stopped dead, turned to face me, began waving a finger in my face. I stared down at my feet, feeling my mouth begin to purse and my eyes narrow.

“When a house is on fire, you don’t go in,” he informed me, keeping his voice low with a visible effort. “No matter who is in that house… if your mom is in that house, if your dad is in that house, if your sister is in that house. If I am in that house. You. Don’t. Go. In.”

I took a very deep breath, kept focused on my Nikes.

“Yes, my lord,” I said gently.

He threw his hands up in the air. “That’s it!” he told the sky. “That’s it!” Off he strode.

I wasn’t about to pursue him, because I’d have to scramble to keep up, and that just wasn’t going to happen. I took off in the opposite direction.

“Lily!” called a woman’s voice behind me. “Lily, wait up!”

Though I was tempted to start running, I stopped and turned.

Becca Whitley was hurrying down the sidewalk after me, her hand wrapped around the bicep of a huge man with pale curly hair. My first thought was that this man should get together with Deputy Emanuel and form a tag-team to go on the wrestling circuit.

Becca was as decorated as ever, with rhinestone earrings and lips outlined with such a dark pencil she looked positively garish. When she was in full warpaint, it was always a little jarring to remember she was so graceful and precise in karate class, and managed the apartments quite efficiently. I was pretty sure that meant I was guilty of stereotyping, something I had good reason to hate when people applied it to me.

“This is my brother, Anthony,” Becca said proudly.

I looked up at him. He had small, mild blue eyes. I wondered if Becca’s would be that color without her contact lenses. Anthony smiled at me like a benevolent giant. I tried to focus on my manners, but I was still thinking of Jack. I shook hands with Becca’s brother and approved of the effort he made to keep his grip gentle.

“Are you visiting Shakespeare long, Anthony?” I asked.

“Just a week or so,” he said. “Then Becca and I might go on a trip together. We haven’t seen some of my dad’s relations in years.”

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, trying to show a polite interest.

“I’m a counselor at a prison in Texas,” he said, his white teeth showing in a big smile. He knew he’d get a reaction from that statement.

“Tough job,” I said.

“Tough guys,” he said, shaking his head. “But they deserve a second chance after they’ve served their sentence. I’m hoping I can get them back outside in better shape than when they came in.”

“I don’t believe in rehabilitation,” I said bluntly.

“But look at that boy who just got arrested,” he said reasonably. “The boy who vandalized Miss Dean’s car last year. Now he’s back in. Don’t you think an eighteen-year-old needs all the help he can get?”

I looked to Becca for enlightenment.

“That boy who works over at the building supply,” she explained. “The sheriff matched his voice to the one who made those phone calls to Deedra, the nasty ones. Deedra had saved the little tapes from her answering machine. They were in her night-table drawer.”

Then Deedra had taken the calls seriously. And their source was a real nobody of a person, a man everyone seemed to call a boy.

I told Anthony Whitley, “See how much he learned in jail?”

Anthony Whitley seemed to consider trying to persuade me that saving the boy through counseling was worthwhile, but he abandoned the attempt before he began the task. That was wise.

“I wanted to thank you for rescuing Great-grandfather,” he said a little stiffly, after an uneasy pause. “Becca and I owe you a lot.”

I flicked my right hand, palm up; it was nothing. I glanced down the block, wondering how far Jack had gotten.

“Oh, Lily, if you could come by the apartment later, I need to talk to you about something,” Becca said, so I guess I looked liked I was ready to go. I murmured a good-bye, turned in the other direction-maybe I’d follow Jack after all-rendering the two Whitleys out of sight and out of mind.

Jack was coming back. We met in the middle of the next block. We gave each other a curt nod. We wouldn’t repeat the same quarrel. It was a closed subject now.

“Who was that?” he asked, looking past me. I glanced back over my shoulder.

“That’s Becca Whitley, you know her,” I said. “And her brother, Anthony. I just met him. Big guy.”

“Hmm. Brother?”

“Yep. Anthony. Brother.”

Jack put his arm around me and we strolled off as if he’d never been angry.

“They don’t look much alike,” he said after a moment.

“Not much, no,” I agreed, wondering if I’d missed something. “Do you look like your sister?”

“No, not anything,” Jack said. “She’s got lots more pink in her complexion, and she’s got lighter hair than I have.”

We didn’t talk much on our way back to my place. The fact that we loved each other seemed enough to contemplate for the moment. Jack decided he wanted to go work his abs while Body Time was open, but I was awfully sore after wrestling Joe C through his bedroom window.

“I’ll start your laundry if you want to go on,” I said.

“You don’t have to do that,” Jack protested.

“It’s no trouble.” I knew Jack hated doing laundry.

“I’ll make supper,” he offered.

“Okay, as long as it’s not red meat.”

“Chicken fajitas?”

“Okay.”

“Then I’ll go by the Superette on my way home.”

As Jack pulled out of my driveway, I reflected on how domestic that little exchange had been. I didn’t exactly smile, but it hovered around my heart somewhere as I opened Jack’s suitcase, which was really a glorified duffel bag. Jack didn’t look as though he’d be neat, but he was. He had several days’ worth of clothes compactly folded in the bag, and they all needed washing. In the side pockets Jack kept his time-fillers: a crossword puzzle book, a paperback thriller, and a TV Guide.

He always carried his own when he traveled because it saved him some aggravation. This week’s was new and smooth; the one for the week just past was crumpled and dog-eared.

I was about to pitch the older one in the garbage until I realized that this was the same edition as the one missing from Deedra’s coffee table. I flipped through the pages of Jack’s magazine as if it could tell me something. Once more, I almost tossed it into the trash, but I reconsidered and put it on my kitchen table. It would serve as a reminder to tell Jack the odd little story of the only thing missing from Deedra’s apartment.

As I sorted Jack’s laundry, my thoughts drifted from Deedra’s apartment to Becca’s. She’d wanted to talk to me. I glanced down at my watch. Jack wouldn’t be home for another hour, easy. I started a load of his jeans and shirts and put my keys in my pocket, locking my door behind me as I went to the apartments. It was a cooler evening after a cool day, and I wished I had thrown on a jacket. Taking the driveway to the rear of the apartment building, I strolled through the parking lot with its numbered shed-one stall for every apartment. Because it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and because two of the apartments in the building were temporarily vacant, there were only two vehicles parked in the shed, Becca’s blue Dodge and Claude’s new pickup.

Looking at Deedra’s empty stall, I was seized by a sudden idea. I don’t like loose ends. I went into the open wood structure-really a glorified shed-and began examining the items hanging from nails pounded into the unfinished walls. Some long-ago tenant had hung tools there. Deedra had left an umbrella, and on a shelf there was a container of windshield-wiper fluid, a rag for checking the oil, an ice scraper, and some glass cleaner. I unhooked the umbrella from its nail, upended it, and out fell… nothing. Deedra’s spare key was no longer in its usual hiding place.

I found that even more peculiar than her purse being missing from the crime scene. Her killer had known even this about Deedra, the small secret of where she kept her extra key. Now the killer could have in his possession two keys to Deedra’s apartment, the other keys on the big ring in her purse, the other contents of the purse, and Deedra’s TV Guide.

There didn’t seem to be anything to do about this missing key. I’d tell the sheriff when I saw her next. I shrugged, all to myself.

I went to the rear door of the apartment building and stepped in. Becca’s was the rear door to my left; Claude Friedrich lived in the front apartment next to it. Claude and Carrie were due to return from their mini-honeymoon this evening, and I assumed they’d go to Carrie’s house permanently. Three apartments empty, then; I hoped Becca would be too busy to clean them for the next tenants. I could use some extra money.

I rapped on Becca’s door. She answered almost instantly, as if she’d been standing right inside. She looked surprised.

“You said you needed to talk to me,” I prompted her.

“Oh, yes, I did! I just didn’t think… Never mind. It’s good to see you.” Becca stood aside to let me come in.

I tried to remember if I’d ever been in her apartment before. Becca had left it much the same as it had been in her Uncle Pardon’s day. She’d just rearranged the furniture, added a small table or two, and bought a new television (Pardon had had a small, old model).

“Let me get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you.”

Becca urged me to sit down, so I perched on the edge of the couch. I didn’t want to stay long.

“Anthony’s gone to the car wash,” Becca told me. “I was sure it was him when you knocked.”

I waited for her to get to the point.

“If Anthony and I do go on this trip he’s planning,” she began, “would you be interested in being responsible for the apartments while I’m gone?”

“Tell me exactly what that means.”

She talked at me for some time, giving me details, showing me the list of workmen who kept a tab for the apartment-building repairs, and explaining how to deposit the rent checks. Becca was a sensible woman under all that makeup, and she explained things well.

The extra money would be welcome, and I needed the job just for the visibility. Used to be, I cleaned maybe four out of the eight apartments in the building, but that was a couple of years ago. And Pardon had hired me to clean the public parts of the building from time to time. I told Becca I’d do it, and she seemed pleased and relieved.

I stood up to go, and in that moment of silence before Becca began the courtesies of saying good-bye, I heard something upstairs.

From Deedra’s apartment.

Becca said, “Well, Lily…,” and I raised my hand. She stopped speaking immediately, which I liked, and she mouthed, “What?” I pointed at the ceiling.

We stood looking up as if we had X-ray vision and could see what was going on overhead. Again, I heard movement in the apartment of the dead woman. Just for moment, my skin crawled.

“Is Lacey here?” I breathed, trying to catch any sound I could. Becca and I stood together like statues, but statues whose heads were rotating slightly to hear as well as possible.

Becca shook her head, and the ribbon she’d tied around the elastic band holding back her long blond hair rustled on her shoulders.

I jerked my head toward Becca’s door. I looked questioningly.

She nodded and we went quietly across to her apartment door.

“Police?” I asked in the lowest voice that would carry.

She shook her head. “Might be family,” she whispered, with a shrug.

Nothing could creep like Becca and I up those stairs. We were familiar enough with the apartment building to know what creaked and what didn’t, and we were at Deedra’s door before I was ready for it.

We had no gun, no weapon of any kind besides our hands, while the person inside might have an armory. But this was Becca’s property, and she seemed determined to confront the intruder here and now. We both became comfortable with our stance, and I rotated my shoulders to loosen them.

Becca knocked on the door.

All movement inside the apartment stopped. There was a frozen silence as we two, hardly breathing, waited to find out what the intruder’s next move would be.

That silence went on too long for Becca’s taste, and she rapped on the door again, more impatiently.

“We know you’re in there, and there’s no way out but this door.” That was true, and it made the apartments something of a fire hazard. I remember Pardon handing out rope ladders to the tenants of the second floor for a while, but he got discouraged when they all left taking the rope ladders with them, so the second floor people would just have to fend for themselves if there was a fire. I had time to remember the rope ladders while the silence continued.

More silence.

“We’re not going away,” Becca said quite calmly. I had to admire her assurance. “Okay, Lily,” she said more loudly, “call the police.”

The door popped open as if it were on springs.

“Don’t call my sister,” Marlon Schuster begged.

Becca and I looked at each other simultaneously, and if I looked like she did, we looked pretty silly. Becca’s bright blue eyes were about to pop out of her head with astonishment and chagrin. To trap the brother of the sheriff in such a position, in the apartment of a murder victim… We’d cut our own throats with our bravado. No one, but no one, would thank us for this.

“Oh, hell,” Becca said, disgust in her voice. “Come down to my place.”

Like a whipped puppy, Marlon slunk down to the landlady’s apartment, looking smaller than ever. His black hair had been cut very short, I was guessing for the funeral, and now that I could watch him for a minute I realized that the young man was fine-boned and spare. I doubted if he could lift seventy-five pounds. I’d hoped we were catching Deedra’s murderer, but now I didn’t know what to think.

Without being told, Marlon sank onto the single chair that was squeezed in across from the couch. Becca and I faced him, and Becca told him to start talking.

Marlon sat staring at his hands, as if answers would sprout on them. He wasn’t too far from crying.

“How’d you get in?” I asked, to get him rolling.

“Deedra gave me a key,” he said, and he had a trace of pride in his voice.

“She didn’t give out keys.” I waited to see what he’d say next.

“She gave me one.” The pride was unmistakable now.

Becca shifted beside me. “So why didn’t you turn it in?” she asked. “I had to give the cops my key, and I own the place.”

“I kept it because she gave it to me,” Marlon said simply. I scanned his face for the truth. I am no human lie detector, but it looked to me like he believed what he said. I’d noticed before that Marlon was more like his father than his mother, at least as far as looks went. But Sheriff Schuster’s size had been belied by his ferocious reputation as a lawman who swung his nightstick first and asked questions later. If there was a similar ferocity in his son, it was buried mighty deep.

“So, you went in with a key given you by the tenant,” Becca said thoughtfully, as if she was considering the legality of his entry.

Marlon nodded eagerly.

“Why?” I asked.

Marlon flushed a dark and unbecoming shade of red. “I just wanted to…,” and he trailed off, aware that a sentence that began that way wasn’t going to end up sounding convincing.

“You went to get…?” Becca prompted.

Marlon took a deep breath. “The film.”

“You and Deedra made a video?” I kept my voice as neutral as possible, but the young man flushed even deeper. He nodded, and buried his face in his hands.

“Then you’re in luck, because I have all the home videos at my house,” I said. “I’ll go through them, and when I find yours, I’ll give it to you.”

I thought he would collapse from relief. Then he appeared to be screwing up his courage again. “There were other things,” he said hesitantly. “Mrs. Knopp shouldn’t see them, you know?”

“It’s taken care of,” I told him.

Becca’s eyes flicked from me to the boy, absorbing this information.

“You found her, Miz Bard,” Marlon said. He was staring at me longingly, as if he wanted to open my head and see the images there. “What had happened to her? Marta wouldn’t let me go see.”

“Marta was right. If you cared for Deedra, you wouldn’t have wanted to see her like that.”

“How was it?” he asked, pleading.

I felt very uneasy. I tried to keep looking the boy steadily in the eyes, so he’d believe me. “She was naked in the car with no visible wounds,” I said carefully. “She was sitting up.”

“I don’t understand.”

What was to understand? The plainest explanation of the scene was probably the true one, no matter what problems I had accepting it. Deedra had had one man too many. That man had lured her out to the woods, become angry with her or simply decided she was expendable, and killed her.

“Had she been raped?” he asked.

“I don’t do autopsies,” I said, and my voice was too hard and angry. Deedra had been so quick to have consensual sex that it would be hard to even theorize she’d been raped unless there was a lot of damage, I was sure. Maybe the insertion of the bottle covered up damage from another source? Maybe it indicated the man couldn’t perform normally?

And maybe it was just a gesture of contempt.

Becca told him, not unkindly, “You know, Marlon, that Deedra had lots of friends.” Her tone made it clear what kind of friends Deedra had had.

“Yes, I know. But that had changed, she told me it had. Because of me. Because she really loved me and I really loved her.”

I believed that like I believed Becca’s hair was really blond. But everyone should have some illusions… well, maybe other people. I felt about a million years old as I sighed and nodded at Marlon Schuster. “Sure,” I said.

“You have to believe me,” he said, suddenly on fire. He straightened on Becca’s chair, his eyes flashed, and for the first time I could see what Deedra had seen, the passion that made the boy handsome and desirable.

Becca said, “She told me that.”

We both stared at her. Becca looked quite calm and matter-of-fact as she went on. “The last time I talked to Deedra, she told me she’d finally met someone she cared about, someone she thought she could love.”

Marlon’s face became radiant with relief and pride. Seeing a chance to act, I silently extended my hand and he put the key in it without thinking. I slid it out of sight, and he didn’t say a word of protest.

A couple of minutes later, he left the apartment a happier man than he’d entered it. He’d been told not to worry about the video he and Deedra had made, he’d had the key removed so he no longer had that guilt weighing on him, and he’d had the ego-stroking consolation that his latest love had also loved him, enough to change her life for him.

Who wouldn’t feel good?

“Did you make all of that up?” I asked Becca when the door had closed behind Marlon.

“Mostly,” she admitted. “The last time I talked to Deedra, she was still complaining about the rent going up. But when I said something about seeing Marlon real often, she did say that she’d decided to be monogamous for a while.”

“I wouldn’t think she’d know that word,” I said absently.

“Well, maybe she didn’t use the term ‘monogamous,’ but that’s what she meant.”

“When was that, Becca?”

“I know exactly when that was, because the police asked me over and over. It was Saturday afternoon. We were both bringing in groceries at the same time.”

“Who was here that weekend?”

“They asked me that, too. Your friend the chief of police spent the weekend over at his fiancйe's. The Bickels were out of town, too, at their mother’s in Fayetteville.” Daisy and Dawn Bickel were twin sisters who worked at junior management level, Daisy at the local branch of a big chain of clothing stores and Dawn at Goodnight Mattress Manufacturing. “Terry Plowright was gone Saturday, to a monster truck rally somewhere on the other side of Little Rock. He didn’t get in ‘til about one in the morning and as far as I could tell he slept most of Sunday. He lives right across from me. That’s the first floor.”

I nodded.

“The upstairs front apartment by Deedra’s is vacant. The one across the stairwell from her is a woman who works at Wal-Mart, and she was working most of the weekend-at least Sunday, I know, and I think some hours on Saturday. And the other front apartment is Tick Levinson, and you know how he is.”

“How he is” was alcoholic. Tick was still managing to turn up to work at the local paper, where he was a pressman, but if there wasn’t a dramatic intervention, Tick wouldn’t be doing that in a year.

“So out of those, who do you think had anything to do with Deedra?”

“Well, Terry, for sure. He had a lot to do with her, real often. But I don’t think either of them took it to heart,” Becca said slowly. “Terry just isn’t serious about anything besides cars and trucks. He loves being single. I don’t think the Bickel twins even speak-even spoke-to Deedra, besides hello. Claude… well, you know, actually I think Claude might have visited Deedra once or twice, if you get my drift.”

I could not have been more surprised. I was sure my face showed it.

I was disgusted, too.

“You know how men are,” Becca said dryly.

I did, for sure.

“But from what Deedra said, I think it was a long time ago, maybe after he first moved back to Shakespeare from Little Rock. Before he kind of knew what was what. Right after his divorce.”

Still.

“Anyway, nothing recent. And Tick? I don’t think Tick lusts after anything but the next bottle, you know? You ever see him coming down the stairs after the weekend, trying to go to work? It’s grim. If he smoked, I’d worry about being burned up in our beds.”

That was only sensible.

“And before you ask me just like the cops did, I didn’t see any strangers around that weekend, but that’s not to say there weren’t any. Everyone’s got their own key to the outside doors.” Those doors were locked at ten at night, after which the residents used their own keys.

“Speaking of keys,” Becca said suddenly, and went to the desk by the door. She opened the top drawer, pulled out a key. “Here’s the outside door key for when Anthony and I go on our trip.”

I put it in my pocket and stood to leave as Anthony came in. He’d been to Stage, where one of the Bickel twins worked, I could see from his bag. He’d bought a lot of clothes. Getting excited about his trip, I guess.

“Where are you-all going?” I asked. I was trying to be polite.

“Oh, who can tell!” Becca laughed. “We might go to Mexico, we might go to the Dominican Republic! If we really like someplace, we might just stay there.”

“You’d sell up here?”

“I think that’s a possibility,” Becca said, more soberly. “You gotta admit, Lily, I’m a fish out of water here.”

That was true enough.

“Becca needs to see the world,” Anthony said proudly.

They sure were excited. The idea of travel wouldn’t make me happy at all, but I could tell Becca was ready to leave town. She’d never really been at home in Shakespeare.

I went home to find a baffled Jack squatting by the television, two stacks of tapes to his right. “Lily, would you like to tell me where you got these tapes?” he growled, staring at the episode of The Bold and the Beautiful unfolding on the screen. “Some of these are homemade porn, and some of them are Oprah or soaps.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I explained about Deedra and about my desire to help by getting the tapes out of the apartment.

“I think you better tell me the whole story about Deedra from the beginning, all over again,” he said. “Wasn’t she that girl with no chin who lived across the upstairs hall from me?”

The previous fall, Jack had rented an apartment when he was working in Shakespeare undercover, on a job.

“Yep, that was Deedra,” I told him. I sighed. The girl with no chin. What a way to be remembered. I began telling Jack, all over again, about finding Deedra in her car- the call of the bobwhite, the silence of the forest, the gray dead woman in the front seat of the car.

“So, how long had she been dead?” Jack asked practically.

“In the newspaper article, Marta is quoted as saying she’d been dead for somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four hours.”

“Still got the paper?” Jack asked, and I went to rummage through my recycle bin.

Jack stretched out on the floor, pretty much filling my little living room, to read. I recalled with a sudden start that he was moving in with me, and I could look at him as much as I liked, every day. I didn’t have to fill up with looking so I could replay it while he was gone. And he’d be taking up just as much space, much more often. We had a few bumps in the road ahead of us, for sure.

“So, the last one to see her was her mother, when Deedra left church on Sunday to walk home to her apartment.” Jack scanned the article again, his T-shirt stretching over his back, and his muscle pants doing good things for his butt. I felt pretty happy about him being displayed on my floor like that. I felt like taking the paper away from him. Tomorrow morning he had to leave, and I had to work, and we were not making the best use of the time we had.

“I wonder what she was doing,” Jack said. He was thinking things through like the former cop he was. “Did she make it home to her apartment? How’d she leave?”

I told Jack what I knew about the population of the apartment building that Sunday afternoon. “Becca was in town but I don’t know exactly where she was then,” I concluded. “Claude was gone, the Bickels were gone, Terry Plowright was gone. Tick, I guess, was drunk. The woman who works at Wal-Mart, Do’mari Clayton, was at the store, according to Becca.”

“Where was Becca?”

“I don’t know, she didn’t say.” I had no idea what Becca usually did on Sundays. She wasn’t a churchgoer, and though she often made an appearance at Body Time, she didn’t stay long. Maybe on Sunday she just slopped around in her pajamas and read the papers, or a book.

“Had that brother of hers gotten here yet?”

“No, yesterday was the first time I’d seen him.”

“So he never even knew Deedra.” Jack rested his chin on his hands, staring at the wood of the floor. While he thought, I fetched the old TV Guide from my bedroom- our bedroom-and opened it to Saturday. This would have been the one day pertinent to Deedra, since she’d died on Sunday.

I read all the synopses, checked all the sports listings, pored over the evening shows. When Jack snapped out of his reverie long enough to ask me what I was doing, I tried to explain it to him, but it came out sounding fuzzier than it was.

“Maybe the TV Guide had blood on it or something, so the killer took it with him,” he said, uninterested. “Or maybe Deedra spilled ginger ale on it and pitched it in the garbage. It’s the purse that’s more interesting. What could have been in her purse? Did she carry those big bags you could put bricks into?”

“No. Hers were big enough for her billfold, a brush, a compact, a roll of mints, and some Kleenex. Not much else.”

“Her apartment hadn’t been tossed?”

“Not so I could tell.”

“What’s small enough to be carried in a purse?” Jack rolled onto his back, an even more attractive pose. His hazel eyes focused on the ceiling. “She have jewelry?”

“No expensive jewelry. At least nothing worth staging that elaborate death scene for. If she’d been knocked on the head with a brick while she was at an urban mall, that would be one thing. She had some gold chains, her pearls, they would be worth that. But this, this arrangement in the woods… it seemed personal. And her pearls were there, hanging on the tree.”

“Then we’re back to her sex life. Who did she actually have sex with, that you know of?” Jack looked a little uncomfortable as he asked. That was sort of strange.

“Anyone she could,” I said absently, beginning to think suspicious thoughts. “Do you want a list?”

Jack nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Marcus Jefferson, that guy who used to live in the top front-the apartment you had for a while.” I thought a little. “Brian Gruber’s son, Claude, Terry Plowright, Darcy Orchard, Norvel Whitbread, Randy Peevely while he was separated from Heather, plus at least”-I counted on my ringers-“four others. And those are just the ones I saw there, actually saw in her apartment. But I wasn’t about to give Marta Schuster a list.”

“You didn’t tell the police?”

“It wasn’t their business. One of those men may have killed Deedra, but that’s no reason for all of them to go through hell. And I’m not convinced any of them did kill her.”

“Based on?”

“Why?” I asked, leaning forward, my hands on my knees. “Why would they?”

“Fear of exposure,” Jack said, starting out assured but ending up uncertain.

“Who would fear exposure? Everyone in town knew Deedra was… really available. No one took her seriously. That was the tragedy of her life.” I surprised myself, with my intensity and my shaking voice. I had cared more than I knew, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. “Jack, were you lonely enough when you came to Shakespeare?”

Jack turned dark red. It was slow and unlovely.

“No,” he said. “But it was a near thing. It was only because I thought of AIDS that I didn’t. She had condoms, and I was horny, but I’d been tested and I was clean and I… could tell she was…”

“A whore?” I asked, feeling rage building up in me. And I could not understand it.

Jack nodded.

It’s amazing how easily a good afternoon can evaporate.

“Can you tell me why you’re so mad?” Jack asked my back. I was kneeling in the bathroom, scrubbing the floor by hand.

“I don’t think so,” I said curtly. My hands were sweating inside the rubber gloves, and I knew they’d smell like old sweat socks when I peeled the gloves off.

I was trying to figure it out myself. Deedra hadn’t valued herself. That was not the fault of the men who screwed her. And she offered herself to them, no doubt about it. She asked nothing in return except maybe a little attention, a little kindness. She never asked for a long-term relationship, she never asked for money or gifts. She had wanted to be the object of desire, however fleeting, because in her eyes that gave her worth.

So could the men be considered at fault for giving her what she wanted? If something was freely offered, could you grudge the takers?

Well, I could. And I did.

And I was just going to have to swallow it. There were too many of them, among them men I liked and a very few I respected. Men just following their natures, as Deedra had been following hers. But I regretted not giving the sheriff their names. Let them sweat a little. It might be uncomfortable for them, but after all, Deedra was the one who’d suffered.

And yet, in the end, Deedra had finally found Marlon Schuster. He seemed to be a weak reed, but he wanted to be her reed. Would she have been strong enough to turn her back on her way of life and stick with Marlon? Did she even care for him? Just because he offered what she’d always been searching for didn’t mean she was obliged to take it.

Now we’d never know. Two years down the road from now, Deedra might’ve been married to Marlon, a whitewashed woman, maybe even pregnant with their child.

But that option had been taken away from Deedra, and from Marlon.

And that made me angry.

I felt better when the bathroom shone. I had relaxed by the time we went to bed, and as I listened to Jack’s heavy, even breath beside me, I decided that somehow Jack’s near-brush with Deedra absolved me of mine with Bobo. Though Jack hadn’t known me well at the time, he’d known me, and now I felt as though my sin had been canceled by his.

I tossed and turned a little, unable to get to sleep. I thought of having to go to work in the morning, of Jack leaving to go back to Little Rock. I wondered if Birdie Rossiter would need me to bathe poor Durwood; I wondered if Lacey would need more help in Deedra’s apartment.

Finally, it occurred to me that the remedy for my sleeplessness lay right beside me. I snuggled against Jack’s back, reached over him, and began a gentle massage that I knew would wake him up in no time.

I was right.