Shakespeare's Counselor (16 page)

“No. He just watches and waits for something else to happen to her.” I couldn't help it; I shuddered.

“Maybe I should just tell her husband, that Cliff.”

“Cliff Eggers, martial medical transcriptionist? I don't think that'd do a lot of good.”

“Me, either.” Claude reflected for a moment. “Well, Lily, I'm sure Jack will track me down and beat me up if you don't go home to rest.”

For whatever reasons, he wanted me to go. There was nothing else I could say or do. I just had to wait, and watch the consequences coming at me. Nothing I could do would stop what was going to happen. I had sworn to myself that I would never again feel helpless in this life; to that end, I had trained myself and remained vigilant. But now, all over again, I was a victim.

I felt very tired. I returned the towel to the receptionist on my way out, and when I got home I was happy to get in a shower, get even wetter, and then put on some dry clothes. I sat in my reclining love seat, began rescreening one of the movies I'd rented, and without a premonitory blink I fell asleep.

 

Someone had hold of me, and I wrenched my arm away.

“What? Stop!” I mumbled, heavy with sleep.

“Lily! Lily! Wake up!”

“Jack? What are you doing here?” I focused on him with a little difficulty. I wasn't used to napping, and I found it disagreed with me.

“I got a phone call,” he said, his voice clipped and hard. “Telling me I better get back fast, that you were in trouble.”

“Who would have said that?”

“Someone who didn't want to leave a name.”

“I'm okay,” I said, a little muddled about all this, but still pretty sure I was basically all right. “I just fell asleep when I left Claude's office. You won't…you're going to be really mad when I tell you what's happened.”

“It must have been something, to make you sleep through karate class,” Jack said. I peered past him at the clock. It was seven thirty. I'd been asleep about two hours, I realized with a great deal of astonishment. I could count the naps I'd taken as an adult on the fingers of one hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “Let me go clean up a little. My mouth is gummy. I can't believe I feel asleep.”

When I came back from the bathroom I was sure I was awake, and I knew I felt much better. I'd washed my face, brushed my teeth, and combed my hair. Jack looked calmer, but he was angry now, the false phone call having upset him badly.

“Did you try calling me before you rushed back from Little Rock?” That would have left the puzzle of who had called him, but relieved his anxiety.

Jack looked guilty. “Once.”

“No answer.”

“No.”

“Did you try my cell phone?”

“Yes.”

I took it from the table and looked at it. I'd never turned it on that day. “Okay, let me tell you where I was.” I could hardly upbraid Jack because he had rushed back to Shakespeare under the impression I was in deep trouble, either physically or emotionally. “I was at the police station.”

Jack's dark brows arched up. “Really?” He was determined not to overreact, now.

“Yes. I was there because of the new patrolman.”

“The red-haired guy?” There wasn't much Jack didn't notice.

“The very one. It turns out he's Gerry McClanahan, all right, but he's also the true-crime writer Gibson Banks.”

“Oh, no.” Jack had been standing by the window looking out at the darkness of the cloudy night. Now he came and sat beside me on the love seat. He closed his eyes for a second as he assessed the damage this would do us. When he opened them, he looked like he was facing a firing squad. “God, Lily. This is going to be so bad. All over again.”

“He's not after us. We're only an interesting sidelight to him, something he just happened on. Serendipity.” I could not stop my voice from being bitter or my face from being grim.

Jack looked at me as though I better not draw this out. So I told him quickly and succinctly what Gerry McClanahan, aka Gibson Banks, had proposed to me. And what I had done.

“I could kill him,” Jack said. I looked at Jack's face, and believed him. “I can't believe the son-of-a-bitch made you that offer.” When Jack got mad, he got mad all over; there was no mistaking it. He was furious. “I'm going to go over and talk to him right now.”

“No, please, Jack.” I took his hands. “You can't go over there mad. Besides, he might be on patrol.” I had a flash of an idea, something about Jack and his temper and impulsive nature, but in the urgency of the moment it went by me too fast for me to register it.

“Then I'll find him in his car.” Jack shook my hands off. I could see that something about my becoming pregnant had smothered Jack's sure knowledge that I was a woman who could definitely take care of herself. Or maybe it was because our brief life together was being threatened; that was what had shaken me so badly.

“You can come with me if you're afraid I'll kill the bastard,” Jack said, reading me correctly. “But I'm going to talk to him tonight.” Again, I felt as if I ought to be drawing a conclusion, as if somewhere in my brain a chime was ringing, but I couldn't make the necessary connections.

I didn't feel as though I had enough energy left to walk to the car, much less trail after Jack over to the writer's house. But I had to. “Okay. Let's go,” I said, getting to my feet. I pulled my cheap rain slicker from the little closet in the living room, and Jack got his. I grabbed my cell phone. “We need to take the car,” I said, trying not to sound as shaky as I felt. “I don't want to walk in the dark.”

That didn't fool Jack. I could see he knew I was weak. He shot me a sharp look as he fished his car keys from his pocket, and I saw that even concern for my well-being was not about to divert him from his goal of confronting the writer. Jack waited, barely holding his impatience in check, until I climbed in the passenger's seat, and then we were off. Jack even
drove
mad.

There were lights on in the small house. Oh, hell, McClanahan was home. No matter how he'd upset me that day, I'd found myself wishing he'd be at the police station, or out on patrol, anything but home alone. I got out of the passenger seat to follow Jack up the sidewalk to the front door. He banged on it like the cop he'd formerly been.

No answer.

The author could have looked out to see who was visiting, and decided to remain silent. But Gerry had struck me as a man who would relish such a confrontation, just so he could write about it afterward.

Jack knocked again.

“Help!” shouted a man's voice, from behind the house. “Help me!”

I vaulted over the railing around the porch and landed with both feet on the ground, giving my innards a jolt that sent them reeling. Oh, God, it hurt. I doubled over gasping while Jack passed me by. He paused for a second, and I waved my hand onward, urging him to go to the help of whoever was yelling.

I was sure I needed to go home to wash myself and change my pad. I felt I was leaking blood at the seams. But the pain abated, and I walked to the voices I was hearing at the back of the house.

I could barely make out Jack and—was that Cliff Eggers?—bent over something huddled in the darkness by the corner of the hedge that separated the rear of this house from the house behind it. I could see the back of Tamsin's house to my right, and its rear light was shining benignly over the back door. There was a bag of garbage abandoned on the ground beside Cliff, who was covered with dark splotches. I'd only seen him dressed for work, but I could make out that Cliff was wearing only a formerly white T-shirt and ancient cutoff shorts.

“Don't come closer, Lily,” Jack called. “This is a crime scene.”

So I squatted in the high grass next to the house, while I eased the cell phone out of my pocket. I tossed it to Jack, who punched in the numbers.

“This is Jack Leeds. I'm at 1404 Mimosa,” he said. “The man living here, Gerry McClanahan, a police officer, has been killed.”

I could hear the squawk of the dispatcher over the phone. I pushed myself up and leaned over the steps at the back porch, which was covered by a roof. There was a light switch. I flipped it up, and the backyard was flooded with a generous amount of light.

Gerry was on his stomach, and underneath his head was a thick pool of blood.

“Yes, I'm sure he's dead,” Jack said, circling his thumb and forefinger to thank me for turning on the light. “No, I won't move him.”

Jack pressed “end” on the phone and tossed it back to me. Cliff, big burly Cliff, was crying. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, staring down at the body on the ground beside him, his face contorted with strong emotions. I couldn't figure out which feeling would get the prize for dominant, but I figured shock was right up there. There was a hole in the hedge to allow passage between the yards, and in that hole lay another white garbage bag cinched at the top.

“I came out to put the garbage in the can,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “I heard a sound back here and I came to look.”

“What's happened to him?” I felt I should know.

“There's a knife in him,” Jack answered.

“Oh my God,” Cliff said, his voice no more than a whisper, and the night around us, the pool of light at the back of Cliff's house, became alien in the blink of an eye, as we all thought about a knife and the person who'd wielded it. I have a particular fear of knives. I found myself crossing my arms across my breasts, huddling to protect my abdomen. I was feeling more vulnerable, more frightened, than I had in years. I thought it was because my hormones were bouncing up and down, perhaps, unbalanced by my lost
pregnancy
, a word that still gave me a jolt when I thought of it.

I made myself straighten up and walk into the dark front yard. Looking up into the sky, where there was a hole in the clouds through which I could see an array of stars, I realized that I wanted to go home, lock the door, and never come out again. It was a feeling I'd had before. At least now, I wanted Jack locked in with me. That was, I guess, progress. I could hear the sirens growing closer. I slipped back to my previous post.

“Where's Tamsin?” I heard Jack ask Cliff.

“She's inside taking a shower,” Cliff said. “Oh God. This is just going to kill her.”

I was horribly tempted to laugh. Tamsin wasn't the one who was dead, her biographer had died in her place. Instead of writing the last chapter in Tamsin's story, Gerry McClanahan had become a few paragraphs in it himself! Was that poetic justice? Was that irony? Was that the cosmic balance of the universe or the terrible punishment of a god?

I had no idea.

But I did know taking a shower would be a good idea if, say, you had bloodstains on your hands.

 

I was glad that I hadn't exposed Alicia Stokes to Claude, because he certainly needed her that night. One of his other detectives was on vacation and the third was in the hospital with a broken leg, suffered that very afternoon at the home of a man arrested for having a meth lab on his farm. The lab had been set up in an old barn, one with rotten places in the floorboards, as it turned out.

Alicia's dark face was even harder to read in the dramatic light provided by the dead man's back porch fixture. I wondered if she would automatically assign guilt to Tamsin Lynd. Her suspicions had well and truly infected me.

When Jack and Cliff had been ordered away from the heap on the ground, I had seen more than I wanted to see of what was left of Gerry McClanahan. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he lay in a heap, a terrible wound in his throat. From it protruded the wooden handle of a knife. He had no wounds on his out-flung hands, or at least none that I could see. There were no weapons in his grip. As we stood there in the tiny backyard, the rain blew in again. The sky was a solid dark mass of clouds. They let go their burden, and soon our hair was again wet and plastered down. So was the red hair of the corpse. It was too bad about the crime scene; though plastic tents were put up as quickly as possible, I was sure if there were any small clues in the hedge and the yard, they were lost. A portable generator powered lights that exposed every blade of grass to a brilliant glare, and people up and down the street began coming out of their back doors to watch, despite the rain.

It was very lucky I'd told Jack I'd come with him, since Jack would have made a dandy murder suspect, given the mood he'd been in after he'd learned Gerry McClanahan's other identity. Claude had thought of that, too. I could tell from the way his eyes kept returning to Jack. The two men liked each other, and they were well on their way to being as good friends as Carrie and I were—but I'd always known Claude recognized the wild streak that more than once had led to Jack's downfall.

I said, “I was with Jack every second until we heard Cliff yelling.”

“I believe you, Lily,” Claude said, his voice deceptively mild. “But I know why you were coming over here in the first place. This man could've caused you no end of trouble.”

“That's why Jack got the call,” I said, feeling as if I'd just seen a piece of machinery crank up smoothly.

“What?”

I told Claude—and Alicia Stokes, too, since she drifted up at that moment—about the anonymous call Jack had gotten at his office in Little Rock. It was hard to tell if Detective Stokes believed me or not, but I made myself assume that Claude did. It was a pretty stupid story to tell if it wasn't true, since Jack's phone records could be checked.

Stokes seemed more interested in questioning Cliff Eggers. Someone who was spying on Tamsin would naturally be in Cliff's bad graces, but Cliff gave no sign of realizing that the policeman had been leading a double life. It was a piece of information Claude seemed to be keeping under his hat, at least for the moment. It would have to come out soon. Most often, writers aren't celebrities the way movie stars are, but Gibson Banks had very nearly attained that status.