Shakespeare's Christmas

"Why don't you find your last school memory book and show me who your friends are?" I suggested, as I got her clean sheets out of her little closet and began to remake her single bed.



"Oh, sure!" Eve said enthusiastically. She began to rummage through the low bookcase that was filled with children's books and knickknacks. Nothing in the bookcase seemed to be in any particular order, and I wasn't too surprised when Eve told me she couldn't come up with her most recent memory book. She fetched one from two years ago instead and had an excellent time telling me the name of every child in every picture. I was required only to smile and nod, and every now and then I said, "Really?" As casually as I could manage it, I went through the books in the bookcase myself. The past year's memory book wasn't there.



Eve relaxed perceptibly as she looked at the pictures of her friends and acquaintances.



"Did you go to the doctor last week, Eve?" I asked casually.



"Why do you want to know that?" she asked.



I was floored. It hadn't occurred to me that a child would ask me why I wanted to know.



"I just wondered what doctor you went to."



"Doctor LeMay." Her brown eyes looked huge as she thought about her answer. "He's dead, too," she said wearily, as if the whole world was dying around her. To Eve, it must have felt so.



I could not think of a natural, painless way to ask again, and I just couldn't put the girl through any more grief. To my surprise, Eve volunteered, "Mama went with me."



"She did?" I tried to keep my voice as noncommittal as possible.



"Yep. She liked Dr. LeMay, Miss Binnie, too."



I nodded, lifting a stack of coloring books and shaking them into an orderly rectangle.



"It hurt, but it was over before too long," Eve said, obviously quoting someone.



"What was over?" I asked.



"They took my blood," Eve said importantly.



"Yuck."



"Yeah, it hurt," said the girl, shaking her head just like a middle-aged woman, philosophically. "But some things hurt, and you just gotta handle it."



I nodded. This was a lot of stoical philosophy from a third grader.



"I was losing weight, and my mama thought something might be wrong," Eve explained.



"So, what was wrong?"



"I don't know." Eve looked down at her feet. "She never said."



I nodded as if that were quite usual. But what Eve had told me worried me, worried me badly. What if something really was wrong physically with the child? Surely her father knew about it, about the visit and the blood test? What if Eve were anemic or had some worse disease?



She looked healthy enough to me, but I was certainly willing to concede that I was hardly a competent judge. Eve was thin and pale, yes, but not abnormally so. Her hair shone and her teeth looked sound and clean, she smelled good and she stood like she was comfortable, and she was able to meet my eyes: The absence of any of these conditions is reason to worry, their presence reassuring. So why wasn't I relaxing?



We moved on to the baby's room, Eve shadowing my every step. From time to time the doorbell rang, and I would hear Emory drift through the house to answer it, but the callers never stayed long. Faced with Emory's naked grief, it would be hard to stand and chat.



After I'd finished the baby's room and the bathroom, I entered the kitchen to find that food was accumulating faster than Emory could store it. He was standing there with a plastic bowl in his hands, a bowl wrapped in the rose-colored plastic wrap that was so popular locally. I opened the refrigerator and evaluated the situation.



"Hmmm," I said. I began removing everything. Emory put the bowl down and helped. All the little odds and ends of leftovers went into the garbage, the dishes they'd been in went in the sink, and I wiped down the bottom shelf where there'd been a little spillage.



"Do you have a list?" I asked Emory.



He seemed to come out of his trance. "A list?" he asked, as if he'd never heard the word.



"You need to keep a list of who brings what food in what dish. Do you have a piece of paper handy?" That sister of Emory's needed to get here fast.



"Daddy, I've got notebook paper in my room!" Eve said and ran off to fetch it.



"I guess I knew that, but I forgot," Emory said. He blinked his red eyes, seemed to wake up a little. When Eve dashed into the kitchen with several sheets of paper, he hugged her. She wriggled in his grasp.



"We have to start the list, Daddy!" She looked up at him sternly.



I thought that Eve had probably been hugged and patted enough for two lifetimes in the day just past.



She began the list herself, in shaky and idiosyncratic writing. I told her how to do it, and she perched on a stool at the counter, laboriously entering the food gifts on one side, the bringer on the other, and a star when there was a dish that had to be returned.



Galvanized by our activity, Emory began making calls from the telephone on the kitchen counter. I gathered from the snatches of conversation I overheard that he was calling the police department to find out when they thought Meredith's body could come back from its autopsy in Little Rock, making arrangements for the music at the funeral service, checking in at work, trying to start his life back into motion. He began writing his own list, in tiny, illegible writing. It was a list of things to do before the funeral, he told me in his quiet voice. I was glad to see him shake off his torpor.



It was getting late so I accelerated my work rate, sweeping and mopping and wiping down the kitchen counters with dispatch. I selected a few dishes for Emory and Eve's supper, leaving them on the counter with heating instructions. Emory was still talking on the phone, so I just drifted out of the room with Eve behind me. I pulled on my coat, pulled up the strap of the purse.



"Can you come back, Lily?" Eve asked. "You know how to do everything."



I looked down at her. I was betraying this child and her father, abusing their trust. Eve's admiration for me was painful.



"I can't come back tomorrow, no," I said as gently as I was capable of. "Varena's getting married the day after, and I still have a lot to do for that. But I'll try to see you again."



"OK." She took that in a soldierlike way, which I was beginning to understand was typical of Eve Osborn. "And thank you for helping today," Eve said, after a couple of gulps. Very much woman of the house.



"I figured cleaning would be more use than more food."



"You were right," she said soberly. "The house looks so much nicer."



"See ya," I said. I bent to give her a little hug. I felt awkward. "Take care of yourself." What a stupid thing to tell a child, I castigated myself, but I had no idea what else to say.



Emory was standing by the front door. I felt like snarling. I had almost made it out without talking to him. "I can't thank you enough for this," he said, his sincerity painful and unwelcome.



"It was nothing."



"No, no," he insisted. "It meant so much to us." He was going to cry again.



Oh, hell. "Good-bye," I told him firmly and was out the door.



Glancing down at my watch again as I walked out to my car, I realized there was no way to get out of explaining to my folks where I'd been and what I'd been doing.



To compound my guilt, my parents thought I'd done a wonderful Christian thing, helping out Emory Osborn in his hour of travail. I had to let them think the best of me when I least deserved it.



I tried hard to pack my guilt into a smaller space in my heart. Reduced to the most basic terms, the Osborns now had a clean house in which to receive visitors. And I had a negative report for Jack. I hadn't discovered anything of note, except for Eve's trip to the doctor. Though I had stolen the brush.



When Varena emerged from her room, looking almost as weepy as Emory, I put the second part of my plan into effect.



"I'm in the cleaning mood," I told her. "How about me cleaning Dill's house, so it'll be nice for your first Christmas together?" Varena and Dill weren't leaving for their honeymoon until after Christmas, so they'd be together at home with Anna.



Somehow, since my mission was to save Varena grief, I didn't feel quite as guilty as I had when I'd told Emory I was going to clean his house. But I had a sour taste in my mouth, and I figured it was self-disgust.



"Thanks," Varena said, surprise evident in her voice. "That would really be a load off my mind. You're sure?"



"You know I need something to do," I told her truthfully.



"Bless your heart," Varena said with compassion, giving me a hug. Somehow, my sister's unwanted sympathy stiffened my resolve.



Then the doorbell rang, and it was some friends of my parents', just back from a trip to see the Christmas decorations at Pigeon Forge. They were full of their trip and had brought a present for Dill and Varena. It was easy for me to slip off to my room after a proper greeting. I took a hot, hot shower and waited for Jack to call me.



He didn't. The phone rang off the wall that evening, the callers ranging from friends wanting to check on wedding plans, Dill asking for Varena, credit card companies wanting to extend new cards to my parents, and church members trying to arrange a meal for the Osborn family after the relatives had arrived for Meredith's funeral.



But no Jack.



Something was niggling at me, and I wanted to look at the pictures of Summer Dawn at eight. I wanted to ask Jack some questions. I wanted to look at his briefcase. That was the closest I could get to figuring out what was bothering me.



About eight-thirty, I called Chandler McAdoo. "Let's go riding," I said.



Chandler pulled into my parents' drive in his own vehicle, a Jeep. He was wearing a heavy red-and-white-plaid flannel shirt, a camo jacket, jeans, and Nikes.



My mother answered the door before I could get there.



"Chandler," she said, sounding a little at sea. "Did you need to ask us something about the other day?"



"No, ma'am. I'm here to pick up Lily." He was wearing an Arkansas Travellers gimme cap, and the bill of it tilted as he nodded at me. I was pulling on my coat.



"This brings back old times," my mother said with a smile.



"See you in a while, Mom," I said, zipping up my old red Squall jacket.



"Okay, sweetie. You two have a good time."



I liked the Jeep. Chandler kept it spick-and-span, and I approved. Jack tended to distribute paperwork all over his car.



"So, where we going?" Chandler asked.



"It's too cold and we're too old for Frankel's Pond," I said. "What about the Heart of the Delta?"



"The Heart it is," he said.



By the time we scooted into a booth at the home-owned diner we'd patronized all through high school, I was in the midst of being updated about Chandler's two stabs at marriage, the little boy he was so proud of (by Cindy, wife number two), and the current woman in his life - Tootsie Monahan, my least favorite of Varena's bridesmaids.



When we had glanced at the menu - which seemed almost eerily the same as it had been when I was sixteen, except for the prices - and had given the waitress our order (a hamburger with everything and fries for Chandler, a butterscotch milkshake for me), Chandler gave me a sharp, let's-get-down-to-it look.



"So what's the deal with this guy you've hooked up with?"



"Jack."



"I know his damn name. What's his business here?"



Chandler and I stared at each other for a moment. I took a deep breath.



"He's tracing an ..." I stopped dead. How could I do this? Where did my loyalty lie?



Chandler made a rotary movement with his hand, wanting me to spill it out.



Chandler had already told Jack several things, operating on his affection for me. But the actual physical effort of opening my mouth, telling him Jack's business, was almost impossible. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath. "A missing person," I said.



He absorbed that.



"Okay, tell me."



I hesitated. "It's not my call."



"What do you want from me, Lily?"



Chandler's face was infinitely older.



Oh, Jesus, I hated this.



"Tell me what people were doing when Meredith Osborn was killed. I don't know if that has anything to do with Jack's job, Chandler, and that's the truth. I was in that house, just a few feet away from her, and if there's anything I know it's how to fight." I hadn't known how that bothered me until I said it. "I didn't have a chance to lift a finger to help her. Just tell me about that evening."



He could do that without violating any laws, I figured.



"What people were doing. What happened to Meredith." Chandler appeared to be thinking, his eyes focused on the saltshaker with its grains of rice showing yellower than the stark white of the salt.



I didn't know I'd been holding my breath until Chandler began talking. He folded his small hands in front of him, and his face took on a faintly stern, stiff set that I realized must be his professional demeanor.



"Mrs. Osborn died, as far as I could tell by a visual exam, from multiple stab wounds to the chest," he began. "She'd been hit in the face, maybe to knock her on the ground so the stabbing would be easier. The attack took place in the backyard. It would have required only a minute or two. She wasn't able to move more than a yard after she was stabbed. Her wounds were very severe. Plus, the temperature was below freezing, and she didn't have a coat on."



"But she did move that one yard."



"Yes."



"Toward Varena's little house."