Shakespeare's Christmas (24 page)

“I know,” Chandler said. “Eve called nine-one-one.”

“Miss Lily?” called a tiny, shaky voice.

I made myself plod into the master bedroom. Eve’s head popped up from behind the chair. I sat on the end of the bed.

“You can bring Jane out now,” I said. “Thank you for calling the police. That was so smart, so brave.” Eve pushed the chair out and picked up the infant seat, though now it was almost too heavy for her thin arms.

Chandler shut the door.

It promptly came open again and Jack came in.

He paused and looked me over. “Anything broken?” he asked.

“No.” I shook my head and wondered for a second if I would be able to stop. It felt like pendulum set in motion. I rubbed my throat absently.

“Bruise,” said Jack. I watched him try to decide how to approach me and Eve.

With great effort, I lifted my hand and patted Eve on the head. Then I folded her in my arms as she began to cry.

 

I SAT WITH Eve in my lap that night as she told the police what had been happening in the yellow house on Fulbright Street. Chandler was there, and Jack—and Lou O’Shea, since Jess had passionately wanted to be there as Eve’s pastor, but Eve had shown a definite preference for Lou.

Daddy, it seemed, had started getting funny when it became apparent that the bills from Meredith’s pregnancy and delivery were going to be substantial. He began to enjoy playing with his eight-year-old daughter.

“He always liked me to wear lipstick and makeup,” Eve said. “He liked me to play dress up all the time.”

“What did your mom have to say about that, Eve?” Chandler asked in a neutral voice.

“She thought it was funny, at first.”

“When did things change?”

“About Thanksgiving, I guess.”

It was just after Thanksgiving that the article about unsolved crimes had appeared in the Little Rock paper. With the picture of the baby in the giraffe sleeper. The same baby sleeper that Meredith had kept all these years in a box on the closet shelf, as a memento of her baby’s first days.

“Mama wasn’t happy. She’d walk around the house and cry. She had a hard time taking care of Jane. She . . .” Eve’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “She asked me funny questions.”

“About . . . ?” Chandler again.

“About did Daddy touch me funny.”

“Oh. What did you tell her?” Chandler sounded quiet and respectful of Eve, as if this was a very ordinary conversation. I had not known my old friend could be this way.

“No, he never touched me . . . there. But he liked to play Come Here Little Girl.”

My stomach heaved.

I won’t go through it all, but the gist of it was that Emory liked to deck Eve in lipstick and rouge and call her over to him as if they were strangers and induce her to touch him through his pants.

“So what else happened?” Chandler asked after a moment.

“He and Mama had a fight. Mama said they had to talk about when I was born, and Daddy said he wouldn’t, and Mama said . . . oh, I don’t remember.”

Had Meredith asked him if Eve was their baby? Had she asked him if he was molesting the child?

“Then Mama or Daddy got my memory book and took a page out of it. I didn’t see them do it, but when I got home one day, the page was missing, my favorite picture of me and Anna and Krista. It had been cut out real neat, so I think Mama did it. So the next time I spent the night with Anna, I took it over there with me, so Mama couldn’t cut out any more pages.”

Jack and I met each other’s eyes.

“Then Mama said I needed a blood test. So I went to Dr. LeMay, and he and Miss Binnie took some blood and said they were going to test it, and I had sure been a good girl, and he gave me a piece of candy.

“Mama told me not to tell anyone, but Daddy saw the needle mark when he bathed me that night! But I didn’t tell, I didn’t!” Big tears rolled down Eve’s cheeks.

“No one thinks you did anything wrong,” I said.

I hadn’t realized how tense she was until she relaxed.

“So Daddy found out. I think he went looking and found the paper Mama got from the doctor.”

The lab results? A receipt for whatever Meredith had paid for the blood test?

“So the next night he said Mama needed a break and he was going to take us out.”

“And you got in the car, right?” Chandler asked.

“Yep, me and Jane. I was buckling her car seat when Daddy said he’d left his gloves. He opened the trunk and got something out and put it on, and he went in the house. After a few minutes he came back out with something under his arm, and he put it in the trunk and we went out to eat. When we got home . . .” Eve began to cry in earnest then.

Chandler slipped out with Emory’s keys to open Emory’s trunk. He came back in five minutes.

“I got some people looking and taking pictures,” he said quietly. “Come on, sweetie, let’s put you on a bed for a little while, so you can lie still.”

Lou, who had tears running down her face, held out her arms to Eve, and Eve allowed Lou to pick her up and carry her off.

“What was in the trunk?” Jack asked.

“A clear plastic raincoat with lots of stains and a single-edge kitchen knife.”

I shuddered.

Jack and Chandler began to have a very important talk.

Chandler called over to the men searching the house on Fulbright Street. In about thirty minutes, thin Detective Brainerd brought a familiar shoe box into the bedroom at the manse.

Jack put on gloves, opened the box, and began to smile.

Dill and Varena had taken Anna home long before, and I could assume they’d made a report to my parents about where I was.

Jack dropped me at his motel room while he went to the jail to have a conversation with Emory Osborn.

When he returned, I was still lying on the bed staring at the ceiling. I still had my coat on. My throat hurt.

Without speaking, Jack consulted an address book he fished out of his briefcase. Then he picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and began dialing.

“Roy? How you doing? Yeah, I know what time it is. But I thought you should be the one to call Teresa and Simon. Tell them we got the little girl . . . of course I wouldn’t kid about something like that. No, I don’t want to call them, it’s your case.” Jack held the phone away from his ear, and I could hear Roy Costimiglia shouting on the other end. When the sound had abated a little, Jack started talking, telling Roy as much as he could in a few sentences.

“No, I don’t know . . . they better call their lawyer, have her come down before they come down. I think there’s a lot of steps to go through, but Osborn actually admitted it. Yeah.” Jack eased back on the bed until he was lying beside me, his body snug against mine. “He delivered his own baby at home, and the baby died. I think there’s something kinda hinky about that, it was a baby boy . . . and he definitely likes little girls. Anyway, he felt guilty and he couldn’t tell his wife. He gave her a strong painkiller he’d been taking for a back injury, she conked out, he began riding around trying to think of how to tell her the baby didn’t make it. He lived right close to Conway, and he found himself just cruising through Conway at random, he says. Yeah, I don’t know whether to buy that, either, especially in view . . . wait, let me finish.” Jack pulled off his shoes. “He says he rode through the Macklesbys’ neighborhood, recognized the house because he’d delivered a couch there about four months before. He liked Teresa, thought she was pretty. Suddenly he remembered that Teresa had been pregnant, wondered if she’d had the baby . . . he watched the house for a while, says he was too distraught to go home and face his wife. Suddenly, he got his chance to make everything better. He saw Teresa come out onto the porch with the baby in her carrier, stop, put her down, and go back in the house. She was such a bad mother she didn’t deserve a baby, he decided, and she already had two, anyway. His wife didn’t have one. He took Summer Dawn home with him.”

Roy must have been talking again. I could feel my eyes grow heavy now that Jack’s warmth relaxed me. I turned on my side facing him, my eyes closing just for a minute since he had the bedside lamp on and the glare was unpleasant.

“He took Meredith to the doctor the next day, told the doctor that he’d taken the baby to a pediatrician already. He couldn’t have their doctor examine the baby, because he figured that the umbilical thingy was more healed than it would be on a one-day-old baby.”

Roy talked for a minute. It was a distant buzz. I kept my eyes shut.

“Yeah, he’s confessed all the way. Says it was all his wife’s fault for having a baby that died and it being a boy, for interrupting his fun with the little girl he’d so thoughtfully gotten for her, for beginning to wonder where that little girl had come from when she saw the photo in the paper . . . evidently, Meredith took the little girl in for a blood test, found out she couldn’t be her daughter. But she loved her so much, she couldn’t make up her mind what to do. Emory found out about the blood test, decided Meredith was a traitor, and killed her. He broke into my hotel room, found the pages she’d mailed me . . . it made him feel justified.”

Some more talk.

Then Jack asked, “You gonna call them now or wait till the morning?”

Sometime after that, I lost track of what Jack was saying.

“Baby?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Baby, it’s morning.”

“What?”

“You got to go home and get ready for the wedding, Lily.”

My eyes flew open. It was definitely daytime. In a panic, I glanced at the bedside clock. I exhaled a long sigh of relief when I saw it was only eight o’clock.

Jack was standing by the bed. He’d just gotten out of the shower.

Normally in the morning I jump out of bed and get moving, but I felt so groggy. Then I remembered the night before, and I knew where I was.

“Oh, I do have to get home, I hope they’re not worried,” I said. “I’ve been so good this whole visit, I’ve done everything right! I hate to blow it the last day.”

Jack laughed. It was a good sound.

I sat up. He’d taken my coat off some time during the night. I’d slept in my clothes, with no shower, and I needed to brush my teeth in the worst possible way. When Jack bent down to hug me, I backed off.

“No no no,” I said firmly. “Not now. I’m disgusting.”

When Jack saw I meant it, he perched in one of the vinyl chairs. “Want me to go get us some coffee?” he asked.

“Oh, bless you for thinking of it, but I better get to my folks’ and let them see me.”

“Then I’ll see you at the wedding.”

“Sure.” I reached out, stroked his arm. “What were you doing last night?”

“While you were confronting the real kidnapper?” Jack looked at me darkly. “Well, sweetheart, I was rear-ending your soon-to-be brother-in-law.”

“What?”

“I decided the only way to look inside the car trunks—which, if you’ll remember, was your suggestion—was to have a little accident with the cars involved. It would be reasonable to look in the trunk after that. I figured if I hit them just right, the trunk would open anyway.”

“Did you hit Jess?”

“Yep.”

“And Dill, too?”

“I was about to. But I was thinking I’d get whiplash, so I’d decided just to out-and-out break into Emory’s. Then I got your call. I got to the O’Sheas’ house just as your ex-boyfriend was pulling up. He cuffed me.”

“He
what
?”

“I didn’t want him going in ahead of me, so he cuffed me.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was trying not to smile.

“I better go get cleaned up,” I told him. “You’ll be there?”

“I brought my suit,” he reminded me.

 

THE ONLY DAY it was possible for my parents not to cast me disapproving looks was Varena’s wedding day. They were not excited that Jack had dropped me off in front of the house in broad daylight, with me wearing yesterday’s clothes.

But in the melee of the wedding day—and the day before—it could be legitimately ignored.

I took a very long shower and brushed my teeth twice. To regain control of myself, I shaved my legs and armpits, plucked my eyebrows, spent ten or fifteen minutes putting on lotions and makeup.

It was only after I came into the kitchen in my bathrobe to drink some coffee that my mother spotted the bruise.

She put her own mug down with a clunk.

“Your neck, Lily.”

I looked in a little mirror in the hall outside the kitchen. My neck had a spectacular dark bruise.

“Emory,” I explained, for the first time noticing how hoarse my voice was. I touched the dark splotch. Sore. Very sore.

“It’s OK,” I said, “really. Just need to drink something hot.”

And that’s all we said about the night before.

It was the best luck I ever had, that day being Varena’s wedding day.

 

AND THE NEXT morning, Christmas Day, I drove home to Shakespeare.

I thought during the drive: I thought what would become of the baby, Jane, whom Eve (I had to think of her as Eve Osborn) regarded as her sister. I wondered what would happen in the days to come, when the Macklesbys would finally get to put their arms around their daughter. I wondered when I’d have to go back to testify at Emory’s trial. It gave me the cold shakes, thinking of going back to Bartley again, but I would feel more amenable when the time was closer, I hoped.

I didn’t have to talk to anyone or listen to anyone for four whole hours.

The tatty outskirts of Shakespeare were so welcome to my eyes that I almost cried.

The decorations, the smoke coming out of the chimneys, the empty lawns and streets: Today was Christmas.

If my friend Dr. Carrie Thrush had remembered, the turkey would be thawed and waiting to be put in the oven.

And Jack, having detoured to Little Rock to pick up some more clothes, was on his way.