Shakespeare's Counselor

"But we can't do that, because there are trails leading up to and away from any act of sex."



He took a deep breath. "That's right."



"So we won't talk about this again."



"No," he agreed, more slowly, with less conviction.



"I don't want to answer this door when my hair has gone gray, to find you still talking about it."



He laughed a little. "No," he said. "I have to get on with my life."



"And Jack and I have to get on with ours."



"Lily," he said. He reached out and brushed his knuckle down my cheek. "Do you love me just a little?"



"Yes," I said. I owed him that. "Just a little."



I closed the door.



My unremembered dreams must have caused me to toss and turn in the night, because I woke up tired the next day. I took a cup of coffee out onto the tiny back porch and sat listening to the birds. My rosebush, growing up a cheap plastic trellis to one side of the porch, was in bloom. The rose had been chosen for smell, not appearance, and I closed my eyes to enjoy it to the fullest. My neighbor, Carlton Cockroft, waved at me from his back porch, and I raised my hand. We knew it was too early to talk to each other. The slope up to the railroad tracks was covered with flowering weeds that were full of bugs of all sizes and dispositions. I didn't know much about bugs, but I could appreciate their industry and appearance when they weren't in the house. I watched a butterfly, and a small bee, as each made the rounds of the flowers. When I'd had enough of that, I unrolled the small local paper that I'd gotten from the end of the sidewalk.



MAN STABBED BY STRANGER read the lead headline. I began to read what I assumed was going to be an account of Gerry McClanahan's murder, which had occurred too late to be featured in yesterday's paper. Stabbing is rare in Shakespeare, and stabbing by a stranger almost unheard of. Most killings in Shakespeare are male-on-male violence, of the Saturday-night-drinking-binge variety. I was actually shaking my head, anticipating the national news stories about Gerry's double life, when my eyes caught the name in the story.



Cliff Eggers of 1410 Compton was taken to the hospital late yesterday evening after he said he was stabbed by a stranger, local police stated. Eggers, who has been a resident of Shakespeare for about a year, said he was walking out to his car after dark when an assailant rushed from the hedge to the side of his property. The assailant struck Eggers in the back and ran away. Hampered by a bandaged leg, Eggers did not pursue. At first, Eggers said, he didn't realize he'd been stabbed.



A city policeman, Gerry B. McClanahan, was stabbed to death almost to the rear of Eggers's house two nights before. (See related article, page 2)



"We may have a deranged person in the neighborhood, or we may have someone who's targeted the Eggers household," said Claude Friedrich, chief of police. "We have every available officer assigned to the case."



Asked if he had any leads in the case, Friedrich responded, "New information is coming in constantly."



Eggers was treated and discharged from Shakespeare Regional Hospital.



I assumed Claude's comment meant that he didn't have a clue. Carrie had called me the night before to thank me for cleaning her office. "I knew it was you," she'd said, "because you always make the magazine stacks so neat." She'd confessed her regular cleaner had gotten held up, and she was up a creek. But she hadn't said anything about Cliff Eggers.



Of course, she couldn't. I could see that now. She couldn't blab any more about her husband's business than I could about Jack's. I was glad, just the same, to see Carrie's old car parked behind her office. She often came in on Saturday mornings to catch up on paperwork.



"No one in the hospital?" I called as I went in the back door.



"Not a soul, can you believe it?" She came out of her office with a mug in her hand. She was wearing her weekend outfit of cutoffs and T-shirt.



"Not even Cliff Eggers," I said.



"No, he bled like a stuck pig, but it wasn't that deep."



"Where was he cut?" I asked, since Carrie seemed to be in a chatty mood.



"In the back, oddly enough," Carrie said. "It was a funny kind of wound. Started here," and she touched a point just above my waist slightly left of my spine, "and ended here," which turned out to be a spot about midway down my right hip. "It was deeper toward the end."



"Kind of low for a blow from another man," I said, after I'd considered it.



"Yes, isn't it. I don't think I've ever seen a knife wound quite like that."



"Maybe ..." I thought for a minute. "Okay, what if Cliff was walking away, and the knifer was swooshing down." I raised my arm with an imaginary knife in it, and brought the arm down in an arc. "So if Cliff stepped away just then, the end of the knife would slice through the hip, rather than penetrating him higher up by the spine, as it was intended to."



"Could be. Could be," Carrie said, looking at my back doubtfully. "Of course, Cliff's at least six inches taller than you. But still, I would say his assailant had to be shorter than Cliff. Or kneeling, but I can't quite visualize that."



I couldn't either, but it was an interesting idea. "What was Tamsin doing while all this was going on?" I asked, trying to sound casual. I assumed that since Tamsin and Carrie were both in some sense medical professionals, they would know each other, and I was right.



"In the kitchen cooking, she told me," Carrie said, still staring at my back as if it would tell her the answer.



"I guess she came to the hospital with Cliff."



"Oh, yeah, as upset as she could possibly be. I don't know how much longer she's going to be able to do her job, if things like this keep happening around her. She said something about moving again."



I looked at Carrie. "What was she wearing?"



"Oh, I don't know. Ah, a pair of old jeans and an Arkansas Razorbacks T-shirt, seems like."



"No apron?"



"No. Either she's one of these women who cooks without, or she pulled it off before she came. Why?" Carrie seemed to realize that this was an odd question.



"Just wondered." I was relieved when the phone rang, because Carrie once more immersed herself in work. I didn't want to have to explain to Carrie what I didn't even want to admit to myself, that I'd been infected with Alicia Stokes's suspicions. I was wondering if it was my mental health counselor who had stabbed her husband in the back.



As I polished the sink in the women's bathroom, I longed for Jack. It was always easy to talk things over with him. He seemed to enjoy the process, too. Jack understood people a little better than I did. I was repulsed by people who were messy with their emotions; just look at the tangled mess of Bobo and me. It felt good to have encapsulated and pushed away our mutual attraction.



I had a sudden and unprecedented flight of fantasy. I pictured myself telling Beanie Winthrop that Bobo and I were going to be married, and the expression I could just imagine on her face tickled me all morning. Though Beanie had some admirable characteristics, we had never liked each other. It almost seemed worth telling her the lie just to see her face. I wondered if her only daughter, Amber Jean, would turn out to be a good woman. Her teen years were obviously shaky ground. Amber Jean had her picture in the paper this morning, helping with the canned goods drive for the soup kitchen maintained by Shakespeare Combined Church, Calvary Baptist, and First Presbyterian. She'd looked glossy and preppy in the picture; not the kind of girl who would take off her shirt in front of a group of boys, not the kind of girl who would try to subordinate a woman older than herself. "A picture is worth a thousand words" did not apply in Amber Jean's case.



What about my mental picture of Tamsin? Tamsin looked like the average young professional, the kind who didn't care terribly about money, the kind who really, really wanted to help. But she'd been stalked, or so it seemed, through three jobs and two states. Small animals around her died, unpleasant things happened to her everywhere, and people around her were beginning to drop like flies. She was in the center of a circle of destruction; she was the eye of a storm.



I drove to the gym thinking hard about Tamsin and her situation. She was the first person I saw when I stepped into Body Time. She was talking to Marshall, and she was looking haggard and unkempt. Her sweats looked dirty, and her hair was disheveled. Marshall gave her a dismissive pat on the back and glided over to me. Marshall is so fit that you could bounce a dime off his abs, so dangerous as a martial artist that he's made me cry from pain. I was glad to have him for a friend.



I could tell he wanted to ask me if it was true that Jack and I were married, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. He knew I hated personal questions, so he was determined to avoid that most personal one.



"Since Jack's not here, why don't we work out together?" he suggested. I agreed, since it's always nice to have a spotter, and the workout always goes better with a partner to challenge you. It was triceps day for me, though I was so far behind my normal schedule I could start just about anywhere. Triceps were fine with Marshall, so we went over to the heavy weights rack to begin. Assuming the pushup position, my hands on the pair of seventies on the top rack, I began my first set, concentrating on my breathing. Marshall was propped on the hundreds farther down the rack, and his body moved as though he had springs embedded in his arms.



"Tamsin was telling me about Cliff," Marshall said, as we rested between sets. "She came in this morning because he finally fell asleep and she didn't know what to do with herself."



I nodded.



"Yeah." Marshall did some stretches, and then we did our second set of pushups. "I guess you knew she has been followed by this crazy person," he said, when we were through.



"Yeah, I heard about that," I said carefully. "Hard to believe in a town this size, we wouldn't notice someone new."



Marshall turned an inquiring face to me as we assumed the pushup position for the third and last time. "That's true," he said, "but what other explanation is there? I guess you've thought of something."



"What if it's her?" I asked.



Marshall gave a derisive snort. "Yeah, right. She's a nice enough woman but she doesn't have enough grit in her to say boo to a goose. You think she's doing this to herself so she can get a lot of sympathy as Velma Victim? That seems a little far-fetched."



I shrugged as I stood up and shook my arms out to relieve the ache. "Who else could it be?" I really wanted to know what Marshall was thinking.



"I hadn't given it a thought," he said. "Ah ....liff, but he'd hardly want to stab himself in the back, and he's nuts about Tamsin. Okay, not him... well, what about the new police detective? The tall black woman?"



"She worked on Tamsin's case when Tamsin lived in Ohio," I said. "If Stokes stabbed Cliff, believe me, he'd be dead."



I was serious, but Marshall laughed as though I were joking.



"There was the other new cop, the patrolman, but he's dead now, too," Marshall said, thinking out loud. "Oh, there's Jack! He's new in town."



"Ha-ha-ha," I said, my voice showing clearly how unfunny I found this.



"And there's the guy that's started dating my ex."



"I thought Thea was getting married."



"Me, too. But he got to know her a little too well."



"And now she's dating someone else?"



"Sure. You know Thea. She's nothing if not flexible, when it comes to men."



I disliked Thea intensely. She gave women a bad name.



"Who's the guy?"



"The new mortician at the funeral home."



"Oh, that's right up Thea's alley," I said. "I bet she loves that."



Marshall laughed again, but less happily. This time he knew I was serious, and he agreed with me. Thea had a cruel and macabre streak, and making love in a funeral home would suit her sexual playbook, if all I'd heard were true. "But he and Thea were in Branson when Saralynn Kleinhoff was killed," Marshall said.



So I'd developed and eliminated a suspect in the space of five minutes. I was sure all these crimes had been committed by one person. Anything else would have been too much of a coincidence.



Not that I didn't believe in coincidence. I did. But I thought it would be stretching, in this case, to even entertain it as a possibility.



Jack's car was in the driveway when I got home. I was very glad to see it there.



He was cooking something when I went into the kitchen, something that smelled good.



"Bacon sandwiches for lunch. I have tomatoes picked right off the vine," he told me, his voice unmistakably smug.



I don't eat much bacon, since it's not good for you, but a bacon and fresh tomato sandwich was just too good to pass up.



"Where'd you get 'em?" There were at least six tomatoes on the kitchen counter. Two were green.



"From Aunt Betty," he said. "Can we have fried green tomatoes tonight?"



Two fried things in one day was really a lot, but I nodded. I stood behind him, watching him cook.



"Hold still," I said.



"What are you going to do?"



"Pretend to stab you."



"I guess that wasn't the answer I was wanting to hear." But Jack obligingly stood still.



I raised my hand above my head as though it held a knife pointing downward. My hand whizzed through the air, and I mentally marked the point at which the blade would have grazed Jack's back.