(LB1) Shakespeare's Champion (21 page)

As I locked Deedra’s apartment—scorning to even cross the landing and listen at Jack’s door—and descended the stairs to drive to Mookie Preston’s modest rental, I thought about the unexpected, normally concealed aspects of the people around me, the part I was seeing the past few days. It was like seeing their skeleton beneath their outer flesh.

Bluff, hearty good ole boy Darcy Orchard, for example: I’d worked out with Darcy for years, and seen only the good-natured sportsman. But last night I’d seen him tracking a man, at the head of a pack of hunters. Beneath his yard-dog exterior, Darcy was a wolf.

I’d always known that about Tom David Meicklejohn. He was naturally cruel and sly, naturally an able and remorseless hunter. He was reliable in what he undertook, whether good or bad. But Darcy had kept this facet of his character buried, and something or someone had unearthed it and used it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine what would have happened if the pack had caught Jack.

And I found myself almost sure they would have killed him.

I began work at Mookie’s house in a grim mood. Of course her place couldn’t be as dirty as it had been the first time I’d cleaned it, but every week she did a grand job of retrashing it. I scrubbed the bathroom in silence, trying to ignore the little questions and comments she tossed to me as she passed by the open door.

Mookie showed me her cuts from the bombing. They’d been caused by flying splinters, and they were healing well. She inquired after my leg. Would the woman never shut up and settle down to her work?

Once I got the bathroom decent again, I moved into the bedroom. This old house had big rooms and high ceilings, and Mookie’s low modern bed and chest of drawers looked out of place. The bare wooden floors made a bit of an echo, footsteps clacking unnaturally loud. Maybe she liked the noise, maybe it kept her company.

“You know,” Mookie said, making one of her abrupt appearances, “they haven’t got a clue who planted that bomb.” She’d been reading the papers. I hadn’t.

“Is that right?” I asked. I really didn’t want to talk.

“The device that started the explosion was a wristwatch, like the one you’ve got on,” Mookie said. She was very angry, very intense. I’d had enough angry and intense already today. “All the chemicals in the bomb were things you could order from any chemical supply house. All you’d have to do is not order everything from one place, so they won’t get suspicious.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said pointedly.

“It’s in books you can check out of the library here!” she said, her hands flying up in a gesture of complete exasperation. “It’s in books you can buy at the bookstore in Montrose!”

“So it’s probably almost as easy to make a bomb as it is to buy a rifle,” I said, my voice calm and even.

The rifle was not under her bed any longer.

“A rifle’s legal.”

“Sure.” I was careful not to turn and look her in the eyes. I didn’t want any kind of confrontation. That, too, I’d had enough of already today.

After I changed the sheets and dusted the bedroom, I looked around for an empty bag to dump the contents of the plastic garbage pail, which was full of soiled tissues, balls of hair, and gum wrappers. There, next to a Reebok shoe box, was a dark red plastic bag, and it bore the distinctive logo of Winthrop Sporting Goods.

I tried to persuade myself that there was nothing odd about this. People did mostly buy their sports shoes at Winthrop’s, because the store carried a great selection and would special-order what they didn’t have in stock.

But I’d seen another red plastic bag the week before. And I remembered seeing yet another crammed into the kitchen garbage. Mookie was going to Winthrop’s very frequently.

Slowly I dumped the garbage pail into the bag and went to the bathroom to empty another one. Mookie barely glanced at me as I cleared the one by her desk. Her coarse reddish hair was braided today, and she was wearing windsuit pants and a turtle-neck. She was tapping computer keys with great energy. The same charts were taped to the wall behind her. There was a pile of library books on the desk, studded with slips of paper marking pages she wanted to refer to.

“How does a genealogist work?” I asked.

For once, she’d been engrossed in what she was doing, and she took a minute to focus on my question.

“Mostly by computer these days,” she answered. “Which is great for me. I do work for a company that advertises in small specialty magazines, or regional mags, like
Southern Living
. We trace your ancestry for you if you give us some basic information. The Mormons, oddly enough, have the best records; I think they believe they can baptize their ancestors and get them into heaven that way, or something. Then there are country records, and so on.

“Did you want your folks traced?” she asked me now, a hint of amusement in the set of her mouth.

“I know who my family is,” I said, and spoke the truth, for my mother’s idea of a great Christmas present was a family tree ready-framed for my wall. For all I knew, she’d hired Mookie Preston’s company to do the research.

“Then you’re lucky. Most Americans can only name as far back as their great-grandparents. They’re shaky after that.”

I tried to think of myself as lucky.

I failed.

I wanted to sit in the battered armchair in front of her desk and ask her what I really needed to know. Why was she here? What trouble was she getting into? Would I come to work next week and find her dead, for sticking her nose into a hornet’s nest and getting stung?

Mookie laughed uneasily. “You’re looking at me funny, Lily.”

Bits of information slid around in my head and rearranged into a pattern. Lanette had come looking for Mookie secretly one night. Mookie had moved to town right after Darnell Glass had been killed. Mookie had an Illinois license plate. Lanette had returned to Shakespeare after living in Chicago for a time. I studied the round line of Mookie’s cheeks and the strong column of her neck, and then I knew why she seemed familiar.

I gave Mookie a brisk nod and went back to work on the kitchen. Mookie was Darnell’s half-sister. But there seemed no point in talking to Mookie about it: Strictly speaking, it wasn’t my business, and Mookie knew better than anyone who she was and what she had to mourn. I wondered whose idea it had been to keep silent. Had Mookie wanted to do some kind of undercover work on the murder of her brother, or had Lanette been unwilling to admit to the town that she’d had a liaison with a white man?

I wondered if Lanette had left for Chicago pregnant.

I wondered if the father was still alive, still here in Shakespeare. I wondered if he and Mookie had talked.

The rifle, black and brown and deadly, had spooked me. I hadn’t seen loose firearms in anyone’s house since I began cleaning. I’d polished my share of gun cabinets, but I’d never found one unsecured and its contents easily available; which didn’t mean the guns hadn’t been there, in night tables and closets, just that they hadn’t been quite so…accessible. I felt I hadn’t been meant to see the rifle, that Mookie’s carelessness had been a mistake. I had no idea what Arkansas gun laws were, since I’d never wanted to carry a gun myself. Maybe the rifle was locked in Mookie’s car trunk.

I remembered the targets. If they were typical of Mookie’s marksmanship, she was a good shot.

I thought of the pack of men who’d been after Jack. Darcy knew Mookie’s name and address. I thought of him thinking the same thoughts about Mookie that I’d been thinking.

I gathered up my things and told Mookie I was leaving. She was coming outside to check her mailbox at the same time, and after she’d paid me we walked down the driveway together. I thought hard about what to say, if to speak at all.

Almost too late, I made up my mind. “You should go,” I said. Her back was to me. I already had one foot in the car.

She twisted halfway around, paused for a moment. “Would you?” She asked.

I considered it. “No,” I said finally.

“There, then.” She collected her mail and passed me again on her way back into that half-empty echoing house. She acted as though I wasn’t there.

WHEN I GOT
home that night, all the sleeplessness of the night before and the emotional strain of the day hit me in the face. It would have done me good to go to karate, blow off some tension. But I was so miserable I couldn’t bring myself to dress for it. Waves of black depression rolled over me as I sat at my bare kitchen table. I thought I’d left death behind me when I’d found this little town, picked it off the map because it was called Shakespeare and my name was Bard—as good a reason as any to settle somewhere, I’d figured at the time. I’d tried so many places after I’d gotten out of the hospital: from my parents’ home to Jackson, Mississippi, to Waverly, Tennessee…waitressed, cleaned, washed hair in a salon, anything I could leave behind me when I walked out the door at the end of the workday.

Then I’d found Shakespeare, and Shakespeare needed a maid.

When Pardon Albee had died, it had been a small thing, an individual thing. But this that was happening now, this craziness…it was generated by a pack mentality, something particularly terrifying and enraging to me. I’d experienced men in packs.

I thought of Jack Leeds, who would never be part of any pack. He’d get over being mad at me…or he wouldn’t. It was out of my hands. I would not go to him, no matter how many grieved girlfriends and widows passed through my mind. Sometimes I hated chemistry, which could play such tricks with your good sense, your promises to yourself.

When the knock came at the front door, I glanced at the clock on the wall. I’d been sitting and staring for an hour. My injured hip hurt when I rose, having been in the same position for so long.

I looked through the peephole. Bobo was on my doorstep, and he looked anxious. I let him in. He was wearing a brown coat over his gi.

“Hey, how are you?” he asked. “I missed you at karate. Marshall did, too.” He added that hastily, as though I would accuse him of hogging all the missing that was going around.

If it had been anyone but Bobo, I wouldn’t have opened the door. I’d known him since he was just beginning to shave; he’d sometimes been arrogant, sometimes too big for his britches, but he had always been sweet. I wondered how this boy had gotten to be my friend.

“Have you been crying, Lily?” he asked now.

I reached up to touch my cheek. Yes, I had been.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, wanting him to not notice, to drop it.

“Yes, it does,” he said. “You’re always beating yourself up, Lily. It does matter.” Amazingly, Bobo pulled a clean handkerchief from his coat pocket, and wiped my cheeks with gentle fingers.

This was not the way conversations with Bobo usually went. Usually he told me how his classes were going, or we talked about a new throw Marshall had taught us, or the boy Amber Jean was dating.

“Bobo,” I began uneasily, puzzled. I was trying to think how to proceed when Bobo acted instead, decisively. He gathered me up and kissed me hard, with an unnerving degree of expertise. For a few shocked seconds I stood quietly accepting this intimacy, feeling the warmth of his mouth against mine, the hard pressure of his body, before my internal alarm system went off. I slid my hands up and pressed gently against his chest. He instantly released me. I looked into his face, and saw a man who desired me.

“I’m so sorry, Bobo,” I said. “I hope I’m always your friend.” It was a dreary thing to say, but I meant it.

Not that pushing him away was effortless: It was all too easy to envision welcoming Bobo—young, vigorous, strong, handsome, endearing—into my bed. I’d been hoping to wipe out bad memories with good ones; Bobo and I could certainly give each other a few. Even now I felt the pull of temptation, as I saw his face close around the pain.

“I—have someone else,” I told him. And I hated the fact that what I said was true.

“Marshall?” he breathed.

“No. It’s not important who it is, Bobo.” I made another effort. “You have no idea how tempted and flattered I am.” The unevenness of my voice gave witness to that. I saw the pride return to his face as he heard the truth in what I was saying.

“I’ve cared about you for a long time,” he said.

“Thank you.” I never meant anything as much. “That makes me proud.”

Amazingly, after he’d opened the door to leave, he turned and lifted my hand and kissed it.

I watched his Jeep pull away.

“Touching scene,” Jack Leeds said acerbically.

He stepped out of the shadows in the carport and walked across the little patch of lawn to my front door. He stood inches away, his arms crossed over his chest, a sneer on his face.

I could truly almost feel my heart sinking. I thought of closing the door and locking it in his face. I wasn’t up to another scene.

“Did you give him the time of his life, Lily? Golden boy, no past to slow him down?”

I felt something snap in me. I’d been pushed beyond some limit. He could read it in my eyes, and I saw him start to uncross his arms in sudden alarm, but I struck him as hard as I could in the solar plexus. He made a sound and began to double over. I folded my arm, aimed the point of my elbow at the base of his skull. I pulled it at the very last instant, because it was a killing blow. But I had pulled the blow too soon, because he could launch himself at me. He knocked me back inside my front door onto the carpet. He kicked the door shut behind him.

This was the second time Jack had had me pinned. I wasn’t going to have it. I struck his hurt shoulder, and over he went, and then I was on top. I had his jacket gripped with one hand while my other twisted his knit shirt, tightening the neck band, my knuckles digging into his throat while he made a gagging noise.

“Oh yes, Jack, this is love, all right,” I said in a trembling voice that I hardly recognized. I rolled off him and sat with my back to him, my hands over my face, waiting for him to hit me or leave.

After a long time I risked a look at him. He was still lying on his back, his eyes fixed on me. He was visibly shaken, and I was glad to see it. He beckoned me with an inward curl of his fingers. I shook my head violently.