Shakespeare’s Trollop

Chapter Twelve

At karate class that night, I wasn’t concentrating, which called down a scolding from Marshall. I was glad we didn’t spar, because I would’ve lost, and I don’t like to lose. Janet teased me as I tied my shoes, accusing me of being abstracted because I was pining for Jack. I managed to half-smile at her, though my impulse was to lash out. Allowing thoughts of a man to disrupt something so important to me was… I subsided suddenly.

It would be quite natural. It would be normal.

But picturing Jack in the shower wasn’t what had distracted me. I’d been thinking of Deedra-her face in death, her positioning at the wheel of her red car. I didn’t know what I could do to help her. I had done all I could. I finished tying my shoes and sat up, staring across the empty room at Becca, who was laughingly instructing her brother in the correct position of his hands for the sanchin dachi posture. She motioned me to come over and help, but I shook my head and gathered the handles of my gym bag in my fist. I was ready to be by myself.

After I got home I resumed the task of scanning Deedra’s tapes, since I had promised Marlon that if I found the one that featured him I would give it to him. I found myself feeling a little sick at the idea of him keeping a video of him having sex with a woman now dead, but it was none of my business what he did with it. I disliked Marlon Schuster, though that was maybe stating my feeling for him too strongly. It was more accurate to say I had no respect for him, which was quite usual for me. I had found nothing in him to like except his tenderness for Deedra. But that was something, and I had made him a promise.

I almost dozed off as I looked at the videos. I found myself looking at things I’d never seen before: talk shows, soap operas, and “reality” shows about ambulance drivers, policemen, wanted criminals, and missing children. After viewing a few tapes I could predict what was coming next, her pattern. It was like an up-ended time capsule for the past couple of weeks in television land. When I’d transferred the videotapes into a box, the most recent ones had ended up on the bottom.

Most of the videos weren’t labeled-the ones she’d already watched, I guessed. The labeled ones had abbreviations on them that only gradually began to make sense to me. I discovered that “OLTL” meant One Life to Live and that “C” meant Cops, while “AMW” was America’s Most Wanted, and “Op” was Oprah.

After I’d scanned maybe ten of the tapes, I found the one of Marlon and Deedra. I only watched a second of it, enough to confirm the identity of the couple. (That was all Marlon needed, to get a tape of Deedra with another man.) I put the tape aside with a discreet Post-It.

Since I’d started the job, I kept on with it out of sheer doggedness. I was able to weed out one more home movie-Deedra and our mailman, in partial uniform. Disgusting. All the other videos seemed to contain innocuous television programming. When I got to the bottom, I realized that I could match these shows with the synopses in Jack’s old magazine. These were things Deedra had taped during the week before she died. There was even an old movie Deedra had taped on Saturday morning at the end of one tape.

Deedra had had at least two tapes with previous Saturday night shows on them in her film library. She’d taped the same pattern of shows each weekend. So where was the tape from last Saturday night? She hadn’t died until Sunday; she’d been alive when Marlon had left her Sunday morning, he’d said. Even if I didn’t want to believe Marlon, she’d talked to her mother at church, right? So where was the Saturday night tape?

It was probably an unimportant detail, but unimportant details are what make up housecleaning. Those details add up. A shiny sink, a neatly folded towel, a dustless television screen; this is the visible proof that your house has been labored over.

I was beginning to get a rare headache. None of this made sense. I could only be glad I wasn’t on the police force. I’d be obliged to listen to men tell me day after day about their little flings with Deedra, their moments of weakness, their infidelities. Surely watching a few seconds of homemade porn was better than that, if I was still obliged to clean up after Deedra in some moral way.

It was a relief when the phone rang.

“Lily!” Carrie said happily.

“Mrs. Dr. Friedrich,” I answered.

There was a long pause over the line. “Wow,” she breathed. “I just can’t get used to it. You think it’ll take people a long time to start calling me Dr. Friedrich?”

“Maybe a week.”

“Oh boy,” she said happily, sounding all of eighteen. “Oh, boy. Hey, how are you? Anything big happen while we were gone?”

“Not too much. How was Hot Springs?”

“Oh… beautiful,” she said, sighing. “I can’t believe we have to go to work tomorrow.”

I heard a rumble in the background.

“Claude says thanks for standing up for us at the courthouse,” Carrie relayed.

“I was glad to do it. Are you at your house?”

“Yes. We’ll have to get Claude’s things moved soon. I told my parents about an hour ago! They’d given up hope on me, and they just went nuts.”

“What do you and Claude need for your wedding present?” I asked.

“Lily, we don’t need a thing. We’re so old, and we’ve been set up on our own for so long. There’s not a thing we need.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can see that. What about me cleaning Claude’s apartment after he gets his stuff out?”

“Oh, Lily, that would be great! One less thing we have to do.”

“Then consider it done.”

Carrie was telling Claude what I proposed, and he was objecting.

“Claude says that’s too much on you since you clean for a living,” Carrie reported.

“Tell Claude to put a sock in it. It’s a gift,” I said, and Carrie giggled and gave him the message.

“Lily, I’ll see you soon,” she said. “Oh, Lily, I’m so happy!”

“I’m glad for both of you,” I said. Sooner or later, someone would tell Carrie about the fire, and she’d chide me for not telling her myself. But she didn’t need to come down from her cloud of happiness and be retroactively worried about me. Tomorrow she’d be back at work and so would Claude. The lives of a doctor and a chief of police are not giddy and irresponsible.

The next morning I found myself wondering why I hadn’t heard from Lacey. She’d wanted me to work some more in the apartment. Her marriage crisis must have changed her agenda, and I wasn’t surprised. I worked that morning after all. The gap caused by losing Joe C as a client was filled when Mrs. Jepperson’s sitter called to ask me to come over.

Mrs. Jepperson was having a lucid day, Laquanda Titchnor told me all too loudly as she let me in. Laquanda, whom I held in low regard, was the woman Mrs. Jepperson’s daughter had had to settle for when better aides had all been employed.

Laquanda’s greatest virtues were that she showed up on time, stayed as long as she was supposed to, and knew how to dial 911. And she talked to Mrs. Jepperson, rather than just staring at the television silently all day, as I’d seen other babysitters (of both the young and the elderly) do. Laquanda and Birdie Rossiter were sisters under the skin, at least as far as their need to provide commentary every moment of every day.

Today Laquanda had a problem. Her daughter had called from the high school to tell her mother she was throwing up and running a fever.

“I just need you to watch Mrs. Jepperson while I run to get my girl and take her to the doctor,” Laquanda told me. She didn’t sound very pleased I was there. It was clear to both of us we weren’t exactly a mutual admiration society.

“So go,” I said. Laquanda waited for me to say something else. When I didn’t, she pointed out the list of emergency numbers, grabbed her purse, and hightailed it out the kitchen door. The house was still clean from my last visit, I noticed, after I cast a glance in the master bedroom at the sleeping lady. For something to do, I gave a cursory scrub to the bathroom and kitchen surfaces. Laquanda always did the laundry and dishes (what little there was to do) in between monologues, and Mrs. Jepperson was bedridden and didn’t have much occasion to litter the house. Her family visited every day, either her daughter, her son, their spouses, or any of the eight grandchildren. There were great-grandchildren, too, maybe three or four.

After I’d written a brief list of needed supplies and stuck it to the refrigerator (the granddaughter would pick it up and take it to the store) I perched on the edge of Laquanda’s chair set close to the bed. She’d carefully angled it so she could see the front door, the television, and Mrs. Jepperson, all in a single sweeping glance.

I’d thought Mrs. Jepperson was still asleep, but after a minute she opened her eyes. Narrowed by drooping, wrinkled lids, her eyes were dark brown and cloudy, and since her eyebrows and eyelashes were almost invisible she looked like some old reptile in the sun.

“She’s really not so bad,” Mrs. Jepperson told me, in a dry, rustling voice that increased her resemblance to a reptile. “She just talks to keep her spirits up. Her job is so boring.” And the old woman gave a faint smile that had the traces of a formidable charm lingering around the edges.

I couldn’t think of any response.

Mrs. Jepperson looked at me with greater attention.

“You’re the housecleaner,” she said, as if she’d just slapped a label on my forehead.

“Yes.”

“Your name is…?”

“Lily Bard.”

“Are you married, Lily?” Mrs. Jepperson seemed to feel obliged to be social.

“No.”

My employer seemed to ponder that. “I was married for forty-five years,” she said after a pause.

“A long time.”

“Yep. I couldn’t stand him for the last thirty-five of them.”

I made a strangled noise that was actually an attempt to stifle a snort of laughter.

“You all right, young woman?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m fine.”

“My children and grandchildren hate me talking like this,” Mrs. Jepperson said in her leisurely way. Her narrow brown eyes coasted my way to give me a close examination. “But that’s the luxury of outliving your husband. You get to talk about him all you want.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Here I am, talking,” she said undeniably. “He had an eye for other women. I’m not saying he ever actually did anything about it, but he looked aplenty. He liked stupid women.”

“Then he made a mistake.”

She laughed herself, after a second of thinking that through. Even her laughter had a dry and rustling sound. “Yes, he did,” she said, still amused. “He did right well in the lumber business, left me enough to last out my lifetime without me having to go teach school or do some other fool thing I wasn’t meant to do. ‘Course, I had to run the business after he died. But I already knew a lot, and I learned more right smart.”

“I guess you know who owns all the land hereabouts, since you were in lumber.” It occurred to me I had a valuable source of information right here in front of me.

She looked at me, a little surprised. “I did. I used to.”

“You know Birdie Rossiter, widow of M. T. Rossiter?”

“Audie Rossiter’s daughter-in-law?”

“Right. Know where she lives?”

“Audie gave them that land. They built right off of Farm Hill Road.”

“That’s right.”

“What about it?”

“There’s a few acres of woods right outside the city limits sign, just south of the road.”

“Hasn’t been built on yet?” Mrs. Jepperson said. “That’s a surprise. Less than half a mile past the city limits, yes?”

I nodded. Then, afraid she couldn’t make that out, I said, “Yes.”

“You want to know who that belongs to?”

“Yes, ma’am. If you know.”

“You could go the county clerk’s office, look it up.”

“It’s easier to ask you.”

“Hmm.” She looked at me, thinking. “I believe that land belongs to the Prader family,” she said finally. “Least, it did up until maybe five years ago.”

“You were working up till then?” I figured Mrs. Jepperson was in her late eighties.

“Didn’t have nothing else to do. I’d make those men I hired ride me around. Let ‘em know I was checking on what they were doing. You can believe I kept them on their toes. They need to keep on earning money for those worthless great-grandchildren of mine.” She smiled, and if I needed another clue that she didn’t really think her great-grandchildren were worthless, I got it then.

“Joe C Prader owns that land?”

“Sure does, if I remember correctly. He lets his family and friends hunt on it. Joe C’s even older’n me, so he may not have any friends left. He didn’t have a whole lot to start with.”

Mrs. Jepperson fell asleep without any warning. It was so alarming that I checked her breathing, but she was fine as far as I could tell. Laquanda came in soon afterward and checked on the old lady too. She’d dropped her daughter off at home with instructions to take some Emetrol and ginger ale and go to bed.

“She okay while I was gone?” Laquanda asked.

“Fine. We had a conversation,” I reported.

“You? And Miz Jepperson? I wish I coulda heard that,” Laquanda said skeptically. “This lady knows everything, and I mean everything, about Shakespeare. At least about the white folks, and a lot of the blacks, too. But she doesn’t share it, no sir. She keeps her mouth shut.”

I shrugged and gathered my things together. If I’d asked her about old scandals and personalities, I wouldn’t have gotten the same cooperation I’d gotten in asking about land. Land was business. People weren’t.

When I got back to my house to eat lunch, I had a message on my answering machine from Becca. She’d thought of a couple of bills that would come due while she was gone, and wanted to leave checks with me to cover them. After I’d eaten a tuna sandwich, brushed my teeth, and checked my makeup, I still had thirty minutes until my next appointment, so I decided to oblige.

There was a pickup truck backed in toward the rear door of the apartment building. It was half-full of boxes. Separated from Lacey or not, Jerrell was helping to empty the apartment. He wasn’t anywhere in sight, so I assumed he was up in Deedra’s place.

Anthony answered Becca’s door. He looked as though he’d just stepped out of the shower and pulled on his clothes.

“Becca here?” I asked.

“Sure, come on in. Pretty day, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“She’ll be right out. She’s in the shower. We’ve been running,” he explained.

I finally sat down to wait when a moment or two didn’t produce Becca. I thought I heard the bathroom door open at one point, but if she’d peeked out she’d gone right back in. Becca was a high-maintenance woman. Her brother kept up his end of the small-talk convention with considerable determination, but I was glad when Becca showed and we could both give up. Anthony didn’t seem to want to talk about anything but his experiences with the prisoners he counseled. He was on the verge of sounding obsessed, I thought.

Becca emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a robe. Even fresh from the shower, she was groomed.

“Lily,” she said, surprised to see me. “When did you get here?”

“About ten minutes ago,” I said.

“You should have called me,” Becca told Anthony, punching him in the shoulder. “I could have hurried.”

I waited for her to work her way around to the reason she’d wanted me to come over. She had arranged for the bank to send me a check for the building maintenance, and she assured me the checks would keep arriving until she returned to town and rescinded the order. She’d arranged for the utilities to be paid by automatic withdrawal, and she’d included extra in my check to pay for unexpected repairs.

Then I noticed that Anthony Whitley was looking at me a little too long, making more of a response to everything I said than it was worth. Could Becca have asked me to come over because her brother had an attraction to me? Could that have been the reason for her prolonged stay in the bathroom? The idea made me very uneasy. Some women enjoy all the male attention shown them. I am not one of those women.

I gradually worked my way out of the conversation and closer to the door. I had it half-open when Becca asked me if I had the tapes from Deedra’s apartment. I nodded, and kept right on inching out of the apartment.

“If you come across a tape I’m in, would you please let me know?” Becca asked.

I stared at her, thinking of the kind of home movies Deedra had made. “Sure,” I said. “But I’ve almost finished looking at them, and you weren’t in a one. Remember, I had to go through them for Marlon?”

Becca looked puzzled. “That’s funny. I borrowed Deedra’s camera to tape myself doing the first five katas so I could see what I was doing wrong. When I returned it, I’m afraid I left the tape in the camera. I wondered if it was up there.”

She looked so sincere. I was perplexed. Was she covering up in front of her brother, not wanting to say that she and Deedra had engaged in some girl-girl activities? Or was she serious about filming her katas so she could improve her form?

“The sheriff opened the camera and it was empty. If I come across a tape featuring you, I’ll bring it over,” I told her, covering all the bases. That made a good closing line, so I shut the door and turned to leave the building. I glanced down at my watch. I would be late for my next appointment if I didn’t hurry.

When I looked up, there was a large, angry man standing in my way.

Jerrell Knopp looked twice as big and three times as mean when he was angry, and he was very, very upset.

“Lily, why you stickin‘ your nose in somebody’s business?” he asked furiously.

I shook my head. This was my day for confusion. What could I have done to Jerrell?

“You gone and told the police about that day I fought with Deedra, that day the boy wrote on her car.”

“I did no such thing,” I said promptly.

Jerrell didn’t expect that. He looked at me suspiciously.

“You shittin‘ me, girl?” He’d certainly taken off the polite face he wore around his wife.

“I would never,” I told him.

“Someone told the police that I fought with Deedra. Would you consider that morning as fighting? I told her a few home truths that she needed to hear from someone, sure enough, but as far as fighting… hell, no!”

That was true enough. He’d told his stepdaughter quite bluntly that she needed to keep her pants on, and she especially needed to be discreet if she was sleeping with a man of another color. He’d also, if I was remembering correctly, told her she was nothing but a whore who didn’t get paid.

“I didn’t tell anyone about that morning,” I repeated.

“Then how come the police know about it? And why the hell did Lacey just pack my bag and tell me to go to a motel?” Jerrell’s face, rugged and aging and handsome, crinkled in baffled anger.

The sheriff’s department could only have found out from someone else who’d been in the apartment building at the time the quarrel had occurred. My money would be on Becca. Voices had been raised, and she lived right below Deedra. But I had my own idea about why Lacey had told Jerrell to move out. “Maybe Lacey’d heard that you slept with Deedra before you started dating her,” I suggested. This was strictly a stab in the dark, but it looked like I’d hit an artery. Jerrell went white. I saw him sway as if I’d struck him. If he got any shakier, I’d have to grab hold of him so he wouldn’t fall, and I didn’t want to do that. I just plain didn’t like Jerrell Knopp, any more than he liked me.

“Who’s been saying that?” he asked me, in a choked voice that made me more worried about him than I wanted to be.

I shrugged. While he was thinking of more words, I was walking away.

I was sure he wouldn’t follow me, and I was right.

There was a message on my answering machine when I returned home about five o’clock. Jump Farraclough, Claude’s second-in-command, wanted me to come to the police station to sign my statement about the night I’d pulled Joe C from his house, and he wanted to ask me a few more questions. I’d forgotten all about signing the statement; too much had happened. I replayed the message, trying to read Jump’s voice. Did he sound hostile? Did he sound suspicious?

I was reluctant to go to the police station. I wanted to erase the traces of Deedra Dean from my life, I wanted to think about Jack coming to live with me, I wanted to read or work out-anything, rather than answer questions. I performed a series of unnecessary little tasks to postpone answering Jump’s summons.

But you don’t ignore something you’re told to do by the police, at least if you want to keep living and working in a small town.

Shakespeare’s police station was housed in a renovated ranch-style house right off Main Street. The old police station, a squat redbrick building right in front of the jail, had been condemned. While Shakespeareans balked over raising the money to build a new station, the town police were stuck in this clumsily converted house about a block from the courthouse. This particular house had formerly been the perquisite of the jailer, since it backed onto the jail.

I came in quietly and peered over the counter to the left. The door to Claude’s office was closed and the window in it was dark, so Claude hadn’t yet come back to work, or maybe he’d left early. I didn’t like that at all.

An officer I didn’t know was on desk duty. She was a narrow-faced blonde with crooked teeth and down-slanting, tobacco-colored eyes. After taking my name, she sauntered to the partitioned rear of the big central room. Then she sauntered back, waving a hand to tell me I should come behind the counter.

Jump Farraclough was waiting in his own cubbyhole, marked out with gray carpeted panels, and the fire chief was with him. Frank Parrish looked better than he had the last time I’d seen him in his working clothes, sweating in their heat and streaked with smoke from Joe C’s fire, but he didn’t seem any happier. In fact, he looked downright uncomfortable.

I reminded myself there were other people in the building, while at the same time I made fun of myself for the sense of relief that gave me. Did I seriously fear harm from the assistant police chief and the fire chief? I told myself that was ridiculous.

And it might be. But I’d never feel comfortable in any kind of isolated situation with men. A glance out the window told me the sun was setting.

Jump indicated an uncomfortable straight-back chair opposite his desk. Frank Parrish was sitting to Jump’s left.

“Here’s your statement,” Jump said brusquely. He handed me a sheet of paper. It seemed like years since the fire; I barely remembered giving this statement. There hadn’t been much to include. I’d been walking, I’d seen the person in the yard, I’d checked it out, I’d found the fire going, I’d extricated Joe C.

I read the statement carefully. You don’t want to just scan something like that. You don’t want to trust that it’s really what you said. But this did seem to be in my words. I thought hard, trying to figure if I’d left anything out, trying to remember any other detail that might be important to the investigators.

No. This was an accurate account. I took a pen from the cup on the desk and signed it. I returned the pen and stood to leave.

“Miss Bard.”

I sighed. Somehow I’d had a feeling this wasn’t going to be that easy.

“Yes.”

“Please sit down. We want to ask you a few more questions.”

“This is everything.” I pointed at the sheet of paper on the lieutenant’s desk.

“Just humor us, okay? We just want to go over the same thing again, see if you remember anything new.”

I felt wary all of a sudden. I felt my hair stand up on my neck. This wasn’t just routine suspicion. They should have asked me this before I signed my statement.

“Any special reason?” I asked.

“Just… let’s us go over this thing again.”

I sat down slowly, wondering if I should be calling a lawyer.

“Now,” Jump began, stretching out his legs under the small desk, “you say that when you went to the back door at the Prader house, you used your key to get in.”

“No. The door was unlocked.”

“Did you ever know Joe C to leave the door unlocked at night?”

“I’d never been there at night before.”

For some reason, Jump flushed, as if I’d been making fun of him.

“Right,” he said sarcastically. “So, since the back door was unlocked, you didn’t need to use your key. Did you have it with you?”

“I’ve never had a key to the Prader house.” I blessed all the times Joe C had so slowly come to let me in. I blessed him for his suspicion, his crotchety nature.

Jump permitted himself to look skeptical. Frank Parrish looked off into the distance as if he were willing himself to be elsewhere.

“Your employer didn’t give you a key to the property? Isn’t that unusual?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re still sure that’s what happened?”

“Ask Calla.”

“Miss Prader would know?”

“She would.”

For the first time, Jump looked uncertain. I pressed my advantage. “You can ask any member of his family. He always makes me wait while he comes to the door as slowly as he can manage. He really enjoys that.”

Parrish turned his head to look at Jump with surprise. I began to worry even more.

“Are you planning to charge me with anything?” I asked abruptly.

“Why, no, Miss Bard.”

The fire chief hadn’t said anything since I’d come in. Parrish still looked uncomfortable, still sat with arms crossed over his chest. But he didn’t look as though he was going to gainsay Jump Farraclough, either.

“Just tell us everything from the beginning… if you don’t mind.” The last phrase was obviously thrown in for padding, as Southern and soft as cotton.

“It’s all in my statement.” I was getting a feeling I couldn’t ignore. “I have nothing new to add.”

“Just in case you missed something.”

“I didn’t.”

“So if someone says they saw you elsewhere, doing something else, they’re mistaken?”

“Yes.”

“If someone says they saw you behind the house with a gas can in your hand, instead of in front of it seeing this mysterious vanishing figure, that someone would be wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you dislike Joe C?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Answer the question.”

“No. I don’t think I have to. I’ve made my statement. I’m leaving.”

And while they were still thinking about it, I did.

I would call Carlton’s cousin Tabitha if they followed me and arrested me, I decided, keeping my pace steady as I headed toward the door in the police station. Tabitha, whom I’d met once or twice when she was visiting Carlton, was an attorney based in Montrose.

Gardner McClanahan, one of the night patrol officers, was fixing a cup of coffee at the big pot next to the dispatcher’s desk. He nodded to me as I went by, and I nodded back. I’d seen Gardner the night I’d been walking, the night of the fire. I was sure that Farraclough knew that. Gardner’s seeing me didn’t prove anything either way except that I hadn’t been trying to hide myself, but knowing he’d seen me and could vouch for at least that little fact made me feel better.

I crossed the floor, keeping my eyes ahead. Now I was almost at the front door. I tried to recall if Tabitha Cockroft’s Montrose phone number was in my address book. I wondered with every step if a voice would come from behind, a voice telling me to stop, ordering Gardner to arrest me.

I pushed the door open, and no one grabbed me, and no one called after me. I was free. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been until I relaxed. I stood by my car fumbling with my keys, taking big gulps of air. If they’d put handcuffs on me… I shuddered when I thought of it.

Logically, there was no reason for the assistant police chief, or the sheriff, to suspect me of anything. I’d reported Deedra’s death, and I’d saved Joe C’s life. I’d called 911, twice, as a good citizen. But something in me persisted in being frightened, no matter how firmly my good sense told me Jump Farraclough had just been on a fishing expedition.

“Hey, Lily.”

My head snapped up, and my fingers clenched into fists.

“Did you hear the news?”

Gardner was standing on the front porch, blowing on his hot coffee.

“What?”

“Old Joe C Prader died.”

“He… died?” So that had been the reason for the requestioning. Now that the arson was murder-despite Joe C’s age, surely the fire had caused his death-the investigation would have to intensify.

“Yep, he just passed away between one breath and the next while he was in the hospital.”

As I’d anticipated, I’d lost another client. Shit.

I shook my head regretfully, and Gardner shook his right along with me. He thought we were both deprecating these terrible times we lived in, when an old man could have his house burned around him. Actually, I thought, if Joe C had lived in any other age, someone would have done him to death long before this.

Gardner strolled down the steps and stood beside me, looking around at the silent street, the night sky, anything but me.

“You know, they ain’t got nothing on you,” he said, so quietly someone a foot away from me would not have heard. “Jump just took against you, I don’t know why. No one said they saw you in any backyard with any gas can. You saved that old man’s life, and it ain’t your fault he died of the fire. Nothing wrong with you, Lily Bard.”

I took an uneven breath. “Thank you, Gardner,” I said. I didn’t look into his face, but out into the night, as he was doing. If we looked at each other, this would be too personal. “Thank you,” I said again, and got into my car.

On my way home, I debated over calling Claude. I hated to intrude on his time with Carrie. On the other hand, they’d be married for years, and a few minutes’ conversation now might save me some unpleasant encounters with Jump Farraclough. He wouldn’t have tried to scare me into saying something foolish if Claude had been aware of his purpose.

Now that Joe C was dead, his estate would be divided up. I found myself speculating that the half-burned house would just be bulldozed. It was the lot that was worth so much, not the house. The arsonist had just taken a shortcut to eliminating the factor of the house and its stubborn inhabitant. Possibly he hadn’t intended Joe C to die? No, leaving a very elderly man in a burning house certainly argued that the fire-starter was absolutely indifferent to Joe C’s fate.

Once home, I hovered around the telephone. Finally, I decided not to call Claude. It seemed too much like tattling on the kids to Dad, somehow; a whiney appeal.

Just as I withdrew my fingers from the receiver, the phone rang.

Calla Prader said, “Well, he’s dead.” She sounded oddly surprised.

“I heard.”

“You’re not going to believe this, but I’ll miss him.”

Joe C would’ve cackled with delight to hear that. “When is the funeral?” I asked after a short pause.

“He’s already in Little Rock having his autopsy done,” Calla said chattily, as if Joe C had been clever to get there that fast. “Somehow things are slow up there, so they’ll get him back tomorrow, they say. The autopsy has to be done to determine exact cause of death in case we catch whoever set the fire. They could be charged with murder if Joe C died as a result of the fire.”

“That might be hard to determine.”

“All I know is what I read in Patricia Cornwell’s books,” Calk said. “I bet she could figure it out.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked, to get Calla to come to the point.

“Oh, yes, forgot why I called you.”

For the first time, I realized that Calla had had a few drinks.

“Listen, Lily, we’re planning on having the funeral Thursday at eleven.”

I wasn’t going. I knew that.

“We wondered if you could help us out afterward. We’re expecting the great-grandchildren from out of town, and lots of other family members, so we’re having a light luncheon at the Winthrops’ house after the service. They’ve got the biggest place of us all.”

Little touch of bitterness, there. “What would you like me to do?”

“We’re having Mrs. Bladen make the food, and she’ll get her nephew to deliver it to the house on Thursday morning. We’ll need you to arrange the food on Beanie’s silver trays, keep replenishing them, wash the dishes as they come into the kitchen, things like that.”

“I’d have to rearrange my Thursday appointments.” The Drinkwaters came first on Thursday; Helen Drinkwater was not flexible. She’d be the only problem, I figured as I quickly ran down my Thursday list in my head. “What kind of pay are we talking about?” Before I put myself out, it was best to know.

Calla was ready for the question. The figure was enough to compensate me for the amount of trouble I’d have to go to. And I needed the money. But I had one last question.

“The Winthrops are okay with this?” I asked, my voice carefully neutral. I hadn’t set foot in the Winthrop house for five months, maybe longer.

“You working there? Honey, it was Beanie who suggested it.”

I’d been the means of sending Beanie’s father-in-law to jail, and she’d taken it harder than her husband, Howell Winthrop’s only son. Now, it seemed, Beanie was going to sweep the whole incident under her mental rug.

For a dazzling moment, I visualized Beanie hiring me again, her friends picking me back up, the much easier financial state I’d enjoyed when she’d been my best client.

I hated needing anything that much, anything I had to depend on another person to supply.

Ruthlessly, I clamped the cord of that happiness off and told Calla that I’d call her back when I’d seen if I could arrange my Thursday schedule.

I’d be needed from around eight o’clock (receive the food, arrange the trays, wash the breakfast dishes, maybe set up the table in the Winthrop dining room) to at least three in the afternoon, I estimated. Service at eleven, out to the cemetery, back to town… the mourners should arrive at the Winthrop house around twelve-fifteen. They’d finish eating about-oh, one-thirty. Then I’d have dishes to do, sweeping and vacuuming…

When Helen Drinkwater found that by releasing me from Thursday morning, she’d be obliging the Winthrops, she agreed to my doing her house on Wednesday morning instead of Thursday. “Just this once,” she reminded me sharply. The travel agent I usually got to late on Thursday I should be able to do with no change, and the widower for whom I did the deep work-kitchen and bathroom, dusting and vacuuming-said Wednesday would be fine with him, maybe even better than Thursday.

I called Calla back and told her I accepted.

The prospect of money coming in made me feel so much more optimistic that I didn’t think again about my problem with Jump Farraclough. When Jack called, just as I was getting ready for bed, I was able to sound positive, and he picked up some of that glow from me. He told me he was looking into getting a smaller apartment, maybe just a room in someone’s house, in Little Rock, giving up his two-bedroom apartment. “If you’re still sure,” he said carefully.

“Yes.” I thought that might not be enough, so I tried again. “It’s what I really want,” I told him.

As I was falling asleep that night I had the odd thought that Joe C had already given me more happy moments in his death than he had ever given me in his life.

As if in punishment for that pleasure, that night I dreamed.

I didn’t have my usual bad dreams, which are about the knife drawing designs in my flesh, about the sound of men grunting like pigs.

I dreamed about Deedra Dean.

In my dream, I was next door, in the apartment building. It was dark. I was standing in the hall downstairs, looking up. There was a glow on the landing, and I knew somehow that it came from the open door of Deedra’s apartment.

I didn’t want to go up those stairs, but I knew I must. In my dream, I was light on my feet, moving soundlessly and without effort. I was up those stairs almost before I knew I was moving. There was no one in the building except whatever lay before me.

I was standing in the doorway of Deedra’s apartment, looking in. She was sitting on the couch, and she was lit up with blue light from the flickering television screen. She was dressed, she was intact, she could move and talk. But she was not alive.

She made sure I was meeting her eyes. Then she held out the remote control, the one I’d seen her hold many, many times, a big one that operated both television and VCR. While I looked at her fingers on the remote control, she pressed the play button. I turned my head to the screen, but from where I stood I could only see an indistinct moving radiance. I looked back to Deedra. She patted the couch beside her with her free hand.

As I moved toward her, I knew that Deedra was dead and I should not get any closer to her. I knew that looking at the screen would cause something horrible to happen to me. Only dead people could watch this movie, in my dream. Live people would not be able to stand the viewing. And yet, such is the way of the subconscious; I had to walk around the coffee table and sit by Deedra. When I was close to her, I was not aware of any smell; but her skin was colorless and her eyes had no irises. She pointed again at the screen of the television. Knowing I couldn’t, and yet having to, I looked at the screen.

It was so awful I woke up.

Gasping and straining for breath, I knew what I’d seen in a deathly X-ray vision. I’d seen Deedra’s view. I’d seen the lid of a coffin, from the inside, and above that, the dirt of my grave.

Chapter Thirteen

I felt sullen and angry the next morning. I tried to trace the source of these unjustifiable feelings and discovered I was angry with Deedra. I didn’t want to dream about her, didn’t want to see her body again in any manifestation, dead visionary or live victim. Why was she bothering me so much?

Instead of going in to Body Time, I kicked and punched my own bag, hanging from its sturdy chain in the small room that was meant to be a second bedroom. The chain creaked and groaned as I worked out my own fears.

There’d been no semen in Deedra’s body, no contusions or bruises in the genital area, only indications that she had sex at some time before she died. But in a way she’d been raped. I took a deep breath and pummeled the bag. Right, left, right, left. Then I kicked: one to the crotch, one to the head, with my right leg. One to the crotch, one to the head, with my left leg.

Okay. That was the reason, the source, of the burrowing misery that spread through me when I thought of Deedra. Whoever had jammed that bottle into her had treated her like a piece of offal, like flesh in a particular conformation with no personality attached, no soul involved.

“She wasn’t much,” I said to the empty room. “She wasn’t much.” I back-fisted the bag. I was getting tired. It hardly moved.

An empty-headed girlish woman whose sole talents had been an encyclopedic knowledge of makeup and an ability to deal efficiently with a video camera and related items, that was the sum of Deedra Dean.

I marched back to my tiny washing area and stuffed clothes in my washer. I felt something hard through the pocket of a pair of blue jeans. Still in a rotten mood, I thrust my hand into the pocket and pulled out two objects. I unfolded my fingers and stared. Keys. I labeled all keys, instantly; where’d this come from?

I shut my eyes and thought back through the week. I opened them and peered at the keys a little more. Well, one was to the apartment building doors; Becca had given it to me yesterday. The other? Then I saw another hand dropping the key into my palm, my own hand closing around it and sliding it into my pocket. Of course! This was the key to Deedra’s apartment, the one she’d given to Marlon Schuster. Becca and I had made him give it up. Becca hadn’t asked for it; that was unlike her. She was so careful about details. I would take it over to her.

Then I remembered I was supposed to go to the Drinkwaters’ this morning instead of the next day, and I glanced at the clock. No time to stop by Becca’s now. I thrust the key into the pocket of my clean blue jeans, the ones I’d pulled on for today, and I started the washer. I had to get moving if I was going to clear all my hurdles this morning.

As if to punish me for asking for a different day, Helen had left the house a particular mess. Normally, the Drinkwaters were clean and neat. The only disorder was caused by their grandchildren, who lived a few doors down and visited two or three times a week. But today, Helen hadn’t had a chance (she explained in a note) to clean up the debris from the potted plant she’d dropped. And she’d left clean sheets on the bed so I’d change them, a job she usually performed since she was very particular about how her sheets were tucked. I gritted my teeth and dug into the job, reminding myself several times how important the Drinkwaters were to my financial existence.

I gave them extra time, since I didn’t want Helen to be able to say I’d skimped in any way. I drove from the Drinkwaters’ home directly to Albert Tanner’s smaller house in a humbler part of Shakespeare.

Albert Tanner had retired on the day he turned sixty-five, and one month later his wife had dropped dead in Wal-Mart as the Tanners stood in the checkout line. He’d hired me within three weeks, and I’d watched him mourn deeply for perhaps five months. After that, his naturally sunny nature had struggled to rise to the surface of his life. Gradually, the wastebaskets had been less full of Kleenex, and he’d commented on how his phone bills had dropped when he called his out-of-town children once a week, rather than once a day. In time, the church women had stopped crowding his refrigerator with casseroles and Albert’s freezer filled up with Healthy Choice microwave dinners and fish and deer he’d killed himself. Albert’s laundry basket had gotten fuller as he showered and changed more often in response to his crowded social calendar. And I’d noticed that his bed didn’t always need making.

As I let myself in that morning, Albert was getting ready to take his wife’s best friend to an AARP luncheon.

“How does this look, Lily?” he asked me. He held out his arms and unselfconsciously offered himself up for inspection. Albert was very shaky on color coordination, a sartorial problem he’d left to his late wife, so I was often asked to give advice.

Today he’d worn a dark green golf shirt tucked into pleated khakis and dark green socks with cordovan loafers, so it was easy to nod approval. He needed a haircut, but I figured he knew that. I was only willing to give him so much monitoring. Carry it too far, it amounted to mothering. Or wifing.

In a few minutes he was gone, and I was going about my business in my usual way. I knew Albert was actually pleased I would be here when he had a solid reason to go out; he didn’t like to see me work, felt uncomfortable with me moving about his house. It made him feel like a poor host.

As I was dusting the family room, where Albert spent most of his time when he was at home, I automatically began the familiar task of boxing his videos. Albert Tanner was a polite and pleasant man, and seldom made truly big messes, but he had never put a video back in its box in the months I’d worked for him. Like Deedra, he taped a lot of daytime television to watch at night. He rented movies, and he bought movies. It wasn’t too hard to figure that if Albert was home, he was in front of the television.

When I finished, I had a leftover video box. A quick scan of the entertainment center came up empty; no extra tape. I turned on the VCR, and the little symbol that lit up informed me that Albert had left the tape in the machine, something he did quite often. I pushed the EJECT button, and out it slid to be popped into its container after I checked that it had been rewound. If it hadn’t been, I would have left it in the machine on the off chance Albert hadn’t finished watching it.

As I opened the cabinet door in the entertainment center to shelve the movies, I had a thought so interesting that I put the movies away with no conscious effort. Maybe that was where the missing tape was-the tape of Becca that she’d left in Deedra’s apartment. Maybe it was in Deedra’s VCR. As far as I knew, no one had turned the machine on since Deedra had been found dead.

That would be the last tape Deedra had watched. I am not superstitious, especially not about modern machinery, but something about that thought-maybe the mere fact that I’d had it-gave me the creeps. I remembered my dream all too vividly.

What it probably was, I figured as I folded Albert Tanner’s laundry with precision, was the tape of Deedra’s regular Saturday-night shows. She’d had company (Marlon) for Saturday night and Sunday morning, and after she’d come home from church Sunday and after she’d talked to her mother on the phone, she’d be anxious to catch up on her television viewing. She’d play her tape. Or maybe she’d had time to watch all she’d recorded and put in the tape of Becca for some reason.

I wondered if Lacey would want me back anytime soon to finish packing Deedra’s things. I could check then.

The key was in my pocket.

I could check now.

I’d been so virtuous and self-protective in turning in my copy of Deedra’s key to the police, but here was another key that had almost literally dropped into my hands.

Would it be wrong to use it? Lacey had given me the videos, so there should be no problem with me taking one out of the machine, presumably. The problem lay in using this set of keys to enter.

It would be better to have a witness.

I went home to eat a late-ish lunch and observed through my kitchen window that Claude was stopping in at his apartment. I watched his car turn in to the back of the building. That solved my problem, I figured; what more respectable witness could there be than the chief of police?

Claude was opening his door as I raised my hand to knock fifteen minutes later.

He jumped a little, startled, and I apologized.

“How was the trip?” I asked.

Claude smiled. “It was great to get away for a few days, and we tried a different restaurant every meal. Unfortunately, my stomach’s been upset ever since.” He grimaced as he spoke.

After we’d talked about Hot Springs and the hotel where he and Carrie had stayed, and about how much of his stuff he had left to pack up to move into her house, I explained my errand while Claude absently rubbed his stomach. He listened with half his usual attention.

“So,” Claude rumbled in his slow, deep voice, “you think this tape is the one Becca is missing?”

“Might be. And she and her brother are leaving on vacation tomorrow, I guess after the funeral. Would you mind just going in the apartment with me to see?”

Claude pondered that, then shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay. All you’re doing is getting the one tape. If there isn’t anything in the machine?”

“Then I’ll shut the door behind me and take these keys to the sheriff.”

Claude glanced at his watch. “I told Jump I’d be in sometime this afternoon, but I wasn’t real specific. Let’s go.”

As we went to the stairs, through the narrow glass panes on either side of the back door, I saw the Whitleys getting out of Becca’s car. They’d been to the gym, I figured from their clothes. Becca’s hair was braided. The brother and sister were talking earnestly.

By the time I heard them coming in the back door, we had unlocked Deedra’s apartment and stepped in.

Half-dismantled, dusty and disordered, the apartment was silent and dim.

While Claude fidgeted behind me, I turned on the television and the VCR. The voice of the man on the Weather Channel sounded obscenely normal in the dreary living room, where a few boxes remained stacked against the wall and every piece of furniture subtly askew.

The tiny icon lit up. There was a tape in the machine. I pressed the REWIND button. Within a second or two, the reverse arrow went dark, and I pushed PLAY.

John Walsh, host of America’s Most Wanted, filled the screen. I nodded to myself. This was one of the shows Deadra always taped. In his painfully earnest way, Walsh was talking about the evening’s roundup of criminals wanted and criminals caught, of the things he would show us that would make us mad.

Well. I was already mad. I started to pop the cassette out and give up on my search for Becca’s tape, but instead I thought I’d fast-forward through the commercials and see if there was something else on the recording.

Ads went by at top speed. Then we were back into America’s Most Wanted, and John Walsh was standing in front of mug shots of a man and a woman. Walsh shook his head darkly and jerkily, and the film of a crime reenactment began to play. I hit another button to watch this segment.

“… arson,” Walsh said with finality. In the reenactment clip, an attractive brunette woman with hawklike features, who somewhat resembled one of the mug shots, rang a doorbell. An elderly man answered, and the young reenactment actress said, “I’m from TexasTech Car Insurance. Your car was named by one of our insurers as being involved in an accident that dented his car. Could you tell me about that?”

The elderly man, looking confused, gestured the young woman into his living room. He had a nice home, big and formal.

The actor playing the older man began to protest that his car hadn’t been involved in any accident, and when the young woman asked him if she could have an associate examine the car, he readily handed over his keys.

He was a fool, I thought.

So was I.

On the screen, the young woman tossed the keys out to her “associate,” a large, blond young man with impressive shoulders. He strode off, presumably in the direction of the homeowner’s garage, but the camera stayed inside the house while the owner continued expostulating with the woman. To show us how shifty this woman was, the camera dwelled on her eyes flicking around the attractive room while the homeowner rattled on. She drifted closer and closer, and when the man announced his intention of calling his own insurance agent, the young brunette dropped into a classic fighting stance, drew back her left fist into the chamber position, and struck the man in the spot where the bottom ribs come together. He stared at her, stunned, for a second or two before collapsing to the floor.

I was barely conscious of a shuffling of feet behind me.

“Excuse me, Lily,” Claude said abruptly. “I’ll be in the bathroom.”

I didn’t respond. I was too shocked.

Now the camera showed the man lying limp. He was probably meant to be dead.

“While their victim lay on his own living-room floor, breathing his last, Sherry Crumpler and David Messinger systematically looted his house. They didn’t leave until they had it all: money, jewelry, and car. They even took Harvey Jenkins’s rare-coin collection.”

Show the mug shots again.

As John Walsh went on to detail the couple’s string of similar crimes, and urged viewers to bring these two murderers to justice, their heads filled the screen once more.

I peered at the face of the woman. I paused the picture. I put my hands on either side of her face. In my imagination I painted all the colors in brightly.

“I thought I heard someone up here,” Becca Whitley said from the doorway.

I hit the OFF button immediately. “Yeah, Lacey asked me to work up here some more. I shouldn’t have been watching television,” I said, trying to smile.

“Watching television? You? On the job? I don’t believe it for a second,” Becca said blithely. “I’ll bet you found another tape.”

She turned and spoke into the hall behind her. “Honey, she knows.”

Her brother came in. He was the other mug shot. He was much more recognizable.

“Where is the real Becca Whitley?” I asked, glad they couldn’t hear how loudly my heart was pounding. My knees bent slightly, and I shifted my feet for better balance. “And the real Anthony Whitley?”

“Anthony got into a little trouble in Mexico,” David Messinger said. “Becca is a pile of bones in some gulch in Texas hill country.”

“Why did you do this?” I asked. I waved my hand to indicate the apartment building. “This isn’t riches.”

“It just dropped from heaven,” the woman I still though of as Becca said. “David had been romancing Becca for months when he had to leave the country for a month or two. Things were getting too hot for us to stay together. David talked Anthony into going with him. Becca was a real straight arrow, but Anthony was a bad boy. You ever wonder why the apartment building was left to just Becca? Because Anthony was in jail. In fact, that’s where Dave and Anthony met. While they were down in Me-hee-co, the guys went boating together, and when the boat came back in, why, there was only one man on it. And that man had all Anthony’s papers.” Becca smiled at me, her hard, bright smile that I’d grown nearly fond of. “I’d remade myself, as you can see. The best wig I could buy, and a lot of makeup. While I was hanging around with Becca in Dallas, being her best friend since I was gonna be her sister-in-law, she thought, her uncle died here in Shakespeare. She’d told me about him, about his apartment building and his little pile of cash. And she told me about the great-grandfather, too. I needed a place to be, a quiet place where no one would bother me. So after she’d quit her job and given up her apartment to move here, Becca and I took a little drive together.”

Her smile was genuine and bright.

Sherry Crumpler and David Messinger were between me and the only door, and as I watched, David shut the door behind him. He was really big. She was really good at combat.

They were wary.

“What about the keys, did you take the keys?” How long would Claude’s stomach be upset?

“I knew I’d have to give mine up to the sheriff, at least temporarily, and I couldn’t be sure Deedra hadn’t left some kind of message. So I stole the whole purse, and I took her extra key from the umbrella in the car stall. I came up here right when I got back from the woods, and took the TV Guide, because it was marked. But people started coming back from the weekend then, and I had to stay in my apartment. After that, I had a chance to come up here twice trying to find any trace she’d left about us, but I decided she hadn’t left anything. Until I saw you carry out all the tapes. Then I realized she’d probably taped the show. I was watching AMW that night. You can imagine how I felt. But I was sure no one would recognize me. Then I saw Deedra on the stairs the next morning when she left for church. I was shocked when I could tell she knew who I was.”

“It’s incredible how much difference the makeup makes,” I said, as they split up and began to approach me from both sides.

“You know, I hate the stuff,” Sherry said frankly. “And I hate this damn wig. At least I could take it off to sleep, but during the day I have to wear it every minute. That time you dropped in and I was in the shower-if I hadn’t trained myself to put it on perfectly the second I could, I would’ve strolled out of the bathroom in my bare head. But I’ve got discipline, and I had my hair on and my makeup in place.”

She’d gradually been easing into a fighting position, her side turned toward me, her knees bent, her fists held ready. Now she struck.

But I wasn’t there.

I’d stepped to the side and kicked her right knee.

She made a gagging noise, but she recovered and regained her stance. David decided to slip up behind me and circle me with his arms from behind, and I threw my head back and caught him on the nose. He staggered back and Sherry attacked again. This time her strike hit me in the ribs, and through the pain I grabbed her fist and twisted.

I was just prolonging the inevitable, but I had my pride.

I lost it when David clouted me upside my head.

“Claude!” I yelled through the ringing in my ears. “Claude!”

Becca-Sherry-was in the act of starting her kick when Claude came out of the hall bathroom with his gun drawn. She had her back to him, but David saw him, and I was at least vaguely aware Claude was there as I shook my head to clear it. Claude managed to knock Sherry off target by shoving her shoulder, and she sprawled onto Deedra’s couch while Claude kept the gun steady on David. I scrambled, minus any dignity, from between Claude and the man and woman, taking care to keep low so Claude could shoot them if he wanted to.

He spoke into his shoulder radio, got back a lot of surprise, and repeated his orders in the calm, steady, Claude way that kept him in office.

“I can’t even leave the room, much less the town, you get in trouble,” he said to me when he figured I’d gotten my breath back. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”

“She killed Deedra,” I said. I opened the door David Messinger had closed, so the cops could come in. I could hear sirens coming nearer.

“Becca killed Deedra? Why?”

“She’s not Becca. Deedra found that out.”

The woman didn’t say anything. She just glared and clutched her knee. I hoped I’d put it out on her. I hoped she was in tremendous pain. David had blood streaming from his nose, but Claude wouldn’t let him reach for a handkerchief. David wasn’t talking, either. Far too experienced a criminal for that.

“Well, while we chat with them about Deedra, we can book them for assault on you,” Claude said thoughtfully.

“You need to watch this video.” I gestured toward the VCR. “After your backup arrives,” I added hastily, because I wanted Claude to stay focused on the moment.

He smiled in a grim, unamused kind of way. “Ain’t a nasty video, is it?” he asked, his gaze never leaving David.

And Becca, Sherry, whatever-her-name-was launched herself from the couch. She would’ve flown right over the spot close to the door where I crouched if I hadn’t caught desperate hold of her calf. My hands weren’t large enough to get a good grip, but I slowed her down and managed to get a better one on her left ankle, the ankle of her uninjured leg. She went down half on top of me and I gathered myself and rolled. I put my forearm across her throat and she began gagging, her hands clawing at my shoulders and head. I kept my eyes shut and my head tucked, as much as was possible, and I pinned her legs with my own. I knew I had to do this myself; Claude couldn’t take the gun off the bigger man.

“I’ll kill you!” she said weakly.

I didn’t believe she would. I believed she wanted to.

But she had tricks left. She concentrated her strength: Instead of fighting like a windmill, she fought like a trained fighter. She gripped my ears and twisted, trying to force me to roll over. I was wearing out, and wasn’t as desperate as this woman, and I was going to go over any second. But I summoned the last bit of resolve I had and fisted my left hand, struggling to draw it back as far as possible. She was so intent on getting on top that she never saw what I meant to do.

I hit her in the head as hard as I could.

She made a funny noise, her grip relaxed, and her eyes went blank.

Then two men lifted me off.

It took a minute or two for things to straighten out about who the bad woman was and who the good woman was. Once Jump Farraclough and Tiny Dalton realized I was on the side of law and order (though it took some telling to convince them) they abandoned their intention of handcuffing me and instead cuffed the groggy Becca. Sherry. Whoever. Her wig had gone askew in the struggle, even as securely pinned as she’d had it. Underneath, her hair (dyed the same blond in case it happened to show, I assumed) was about an inch long. I wondered if her outstanding chest was her own, and what she would look like when the makeup was cleaned from her face; all the outlining, highlights, shadowing, and bright colors had recon-toured her features until only an expert in makeup could tell what she really looked like. An expert like Deedra Dean. Deedra had seen beyond the blue contacts, the push-up bra, the paint, the wig.

“Why didn’t Deedra tell someone?” Claude asked me later that day. We were sitting in his office at the police department.

“Maybe she just couldn’t believe the evidence of her own eyes. She must have been still unsure about what she’d seen; maybe she wanted to look at Sherry Crumpler again, real carefully, to make absolutely sure that what she suspected was true.”

“Sherry is real clever, and she doesn’t seem to have any problem with killing people if half of what she told you pans out,” Claude said. “I guess she figured she better kill Deedra before her partner came into town, because David is much more like he looked on TV than Sherry is. Seeing David would have clenched all Deedra’s suspicions.”

“Maybe they’ll tell on each other,” I said, my voice as tired as the rest of me was.

“Oh, they already are. They each got a lawyer from the phone book, both of whom want to make a name for themselves so they can be in the update on television. I expect to hear from America’s Most Wanted tomorrow at the latest.”

“Can you tell me what they’re saying?” I wanted to be as far away from the jail and the police station and Claude as it was possible to get when the media showed up.

“David’s saying they would’ve been out of here a week ago if Joe C had died when he was supposed to. She set the fire, of course-Sherry did. She wanted to get that $70,000 inheritance. Then she figured if David showed up claiming to be her brother, instead of her boyfriend, he’d get another share of the money. Once she’d killed Deedra, she knew she better accelerate their plan to get the money and then she better get out of town. She’d planned, he says, to sell the apartment building once they were safely away, hire someone to handle the legal work. Just send her the paper for her signature. Then she could vanish. No one would think much of it.”

I examined this idea for holes, finding only a few. “She could forge the real Becca’s signature?”

“Just beautiful, apparently.”

“And since no one from here, including family, had seen Becca or Anthony since they were little, no one ever imagined that she wasn’t Becca? It never crossed anyone’s mind to question her?”

“Seems to me,” Claude rumbled, “that the real Becca must have been a lonely sort of girl. I guess Sherry, in disguise, matched a superficial description of the real Becca; blond, athletic, blue-eyed. But David says the original Becca had some emotional problems, had real trouble making friends. I guess she thought David was a godsend, and when his ‘sister’ was willing to pal around with her, and David was already buddies with Becca’s bad-ass brother, she thought her lonely days were over.”

“Why did David pick a fictional job as a prison counselor?”

“Well, he’d know all about it, wouldn’t he? If you’d been able to concentrate on the AMW story, you would’ve heard that David’s been in and out of prison all his life. For that matter, Sherry too.”

“She sure had a lot of nerve, living here as Becca for so long.”

“It took nerve, but it was great cover. And if she could wait it out until David felt it was safe to join her, they stood to make a bunch of money-a combined $140,000 from the sale of Joe C’s lot, plus what they got eventually from the sale of the apartment building. Until the story on television, which broke only days before David was due to arrive. He says she should’ve gotten in touch with him and made him stay away; she says she tried but he wasn’t at the prearranged phone spot. So he came. On the whole, I think they felt pretty safe, pretty anonymous. Sherry’s attempt to burn Joe C’s house was only partly successful, but he ended up dying, and they thought it’d look funny if they left town before the funeral. But then you interfered.”

“I just wanted to know what had happened to Deedra.”

“According to David… do you really want to hear this, Lily? It’s strictly what David says Sherry told him.”

I nodded. I looked down at my hands so I wouldn’t have to watch his face.

“Sherry drew a gun on Deedra that Sunday afternoon, a couple of hours after Deedra came home from church and encountered her on the stairs. Sherry’d done a lot of planning in those two hours, when she saw Deedra wasn’t going to call the police right away. The apartment building was empty, and though she couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t show up any moment, it was a risk she had to take. She had to get Deedra away from the building; if Deedra died in her apartment, the investigation might focus more on the only person around that afternoon-the landlady. Sherry got Deedra to drive out to the trail off Farm Hill Road, which Sherry knew would put them right out of the city limits, so Marta Schuster would be heading the investigation. That would complicate things real nice, since Marlon had been hanging around Deedra so much lately. Once down the track in the woods, Sherry made her stop the car and get out and strip.”

I could feel my face twisting. “Made her throw her clothes.”

“Yep.” Claude was silent for a long time. I knew Claude was trying, and failing, as I was, to imagine how Deedra must have felt. “Then, Sherry had made Deedra strip, she backed her up against the car, and when Deedra was in place, she struck her. One blow to the solar plexus. With all she had.”

I drew in a long, slow breath. I let it out.

“While Deedra was dying, Sherry forced in the bottle and positioned her in the car. It took a lot of doing, but Sherry’s a martial-arts expert and a right strong woman. As you know.”

I breathed in. I breathed out. “Then what?”

“Then… she walked home.”

After all the talk about switching cars or having an accomplice, it was that simple. She walked home. If she’d stuck to the edge of the woods, she would’ve been all the way in town before she had to show herself. In fact… I tried to look at Shakespeare in my head, from an aerial view. By some careful planning, she could’ve come out in the fields beyond Winthrop Sporting Goods, and then it would be a stroll back to the apartments.

“Thanks to you,” Claude continued after a long pause, “my wife is sitting in the house by herself, wondering when her brand-new husband is going to make it home.”

I managed a smile. “Thanks to me, you’re going to have your fifteen minutes of fame,” I reminded him. “You caught two of ‘America’s Most Wanted.’ ”

“Because I had the trots,” he said, shaking his head ruefully.

“Maybe you could leave that part out.”

“I’d like to figure out a way.”

“Let’s say you were suspicious when we heard footsteps coming up the stairs and you concealed yourself in the bathroom so you could take them by surprise.”

“That sounds better than telling them I ate some bad fish.”

“True.”

“Think that’s the line to take.”

“You got it.”

“Now what, for you, Lily?”

“I have to work tomorrow.” I sighed heavily, and heaved myself out of the extra chair in Claude’s office. “I have to receive food and serve at Joe C’s funeral.”

“No, I mean… longer-term.”

I was surprised. Claude had never asked me a question about my life.

“You know Jack is the one.” I said it plainly and quietly.

“I know. He’s a lucky guy.”

“Well, I just see that going on.”

“Think you two’ll get married?”

“Maybe.”

Claude brightened. “I never would have thought it. I’m glad for you, Lily.”

I wondered briefly why that idea cheered Claude. Well, they say newlyweds want everyone else to get married.

“ ‘Cause my wife”-and he said that phrase so proudly-“called him when she found out you were involved in this showdown, and he’s sitting outside in the waiting room.”

“Carrie… called Jack?”

“She sure did. Just when you think she’s a shy woman, she pulls something like that on you.”

“He’s here,” I said, relieved beyond measure, and happier than I’d been in days.

“If you just open the door,” Claude said astringently, “I wouldn’t have to be telling you, you could see for yourself.”

And I did.

Later that night, when the only light in my house was moonlight, I sat up in bed. Next to me, Jack lay only on his side, his hair tangling around him and his chest moving silently with his breath. His face, asleep, was peaceful and relaxed, but remote. Unknowable. I could only know the man he tried to be when he was awake. Who knew where his dreams took him, how far into his mind and heart? Farther than I could ever penetrate.

I stood, parted my curtains, and looked out the window. The lights in the upstairs apartment that had been Deedra’s were still on; I guess the police had left them that way. It was a strange feeling, seeing those lights on again. On occasions I’d noticed them before, I’d always had a contemptuous reaction; she’s entertaining again, I’d thought, and reviewed once again the host of risks she’d run in her promiscuity.

But it was not her weakness that had caused her death; it was one of her strengths that had killed her.

I wondered what that meant, what lesson could be drawn from Deedra’s death. I considered for a moment, but it was either meaningless, or its moral beyond me. I remembered Deedra as she’d appeared in my dream, the remote control in her hand. Looking at a film of the inside of her coffin.

I let the curtains fall together and turned back to the bed.