Shakespeare's Christmas (8 page)

He’s got lips, he knows how to use ’em, I thought, almost intoxicated by his presence. Only Jack could get me in the mood to paraphrase an old ZZ Top song.

“Let’s go do the right thing, before I try something here in the parking lot,” he suggested.

I stared at him and turned to walk back in the church. Somehow, I expected him to vanish between the door and the altar, but he followed me in and down the aisle, flanking me when we reached the clustered wedding party. Naturally enough, they were all staring our way. I could feel my face harden. I hate explaining myself.

And Jack stepped up beside me, put his arm around me, and said, “You must be Lily’s mother! I’m Jack Leeds, Lily’s . . .”

I waited with some interest while Jack, normally a smooth talker, floundered at the end of the sentence.

“Boyfriend,” he finished, with a certain inaccuracy.

“Frieda Bard,” my mother said, looking a little stunned. “This is my husband, Gerald.”

“Mr. Bard,” Jack said respectfully, “glad to meet you.” My father pumped Jack’s hand, beaming like someone who’s just found Ed McMahon and a camera crew on his doorstep. Even the ponytail and the scar on Jack’s right cheek didn’t diminish my father’s smile. Jack’s suit was expensive, a very muted brown plaid that brought out the color of his hazel eyes. His shoes were polished. He looked prosperous, healthy, clean shaven, and I looked happy. That was enough for my dad, at least for the moment.

“And you must be Varena.” Jack turned to my sister.

When would everyone stop looking like deer caught in headlights? You’d think I was a damn leper, they were so amazed I had a man. Jack actually kissed Varena, a quick light one on the forehead. “Kiss the bride for luck,” he said, with that sudden, brilliant smile that was so winning.

Dill recovered quickest.

“I’m about to join the family,” he told Jack. “I’m Dill Kingery.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The shake again.

And it went on from there, with me not saying a word. Jack glad-handed the men and gave the women a flash of clean, earnest sexuality. Even off-kilter Mrs. Kingery beamed at him in a dazed way. “You’re trouble on the hoof, and I know it,” she said firmly.

Everyone froze in horror, but Jack laughed with genuine amusement. The moment passed, and I saw Dill close his eyes in relief.

“I’ll take off, since you’re in the middle of your special occasion,” Jack told the group generally, with no hint of a hint in his voice. “I just wanted to meet Lily’s folks.”

“Please,” Dill said instantly, “we’d really enjoy your joining us for the rehearsal dinner.”

Jack did the polite thing and declined, mentioning the important family occasion and the fact that he had arrived unannounced.

Dill repeated his invitation. Social Ping-Pong.

When Varena joined in, Jack allowed himself to be persuaded.

He retired to sit at the back of the church. My eyes followed him every inch of the way.

We walked through the ceremony again. I went through my paces on autopilot. Patsy Green reminded me again to smile. This time she sounded a little sharper.

I was thinking hard during the rest of the rehearsal, but I couldn’t come to any conclusion. Could it possibly be true that Jack was here for me? He had admitted he had another reason, but he’d said he was coming here anyway. If that was true . . .

But it was too painful to believe.

Jack had already been here when Dr. LeMay and Binnie Armstrong were done to death. So his arrival couldn’t be connected with the double murder.

“Looks like I’m too late on the scene,” Berry said to me in a pleasant way after Patsy Green and the O’Sheas agreed we had the procedure down pat. We were just outside the church doors.

“That’s so flattering of you,” I said with a genuine smile. For once, I had said the right thing. He smiled back at me.

“Lily!” Jack called. He was holding open the passenger door of his car. I couldn’t imagine why.

“Excuse me,” I told Berry and strolled over. “Since when,” I muttered, conscious of my voice carrying in the cold clear air, “have you found it necessary to hold doors for me?”

Jack looked wounded. “Darlin’, I’m your slave.” He seemed to be imitating Berry’s Delta accent.

“Don’t be an ass,” I whispered. “Seeing you is so good. Don’t ruin it.”

He stared down at me as I swung my legs into his car. The taut muscles around his mouth relaxed. “All right,” he said and shut the door.

We backed up to follow the other cars out of the parking lot.

“You found the doctor today,” he said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I brought my police scanner. Are you OK?”

“Yes.”

“How much do you know about Dill Kingery?” he asked.

I felt as though he’d punched me in the stomach. I had to sit silent to gather breath, my panic was so complete and sudden. “Is something wrong with him?” I asked finally, my voice coming out not so much angry as scared. Varena’s face smiling up at Dill came into my mind, the long engagement, the relationship Varena had worked so hard to build up with Dill’s daughter, Varena’s cheerful acceptance of crazy Mrs. Kingery . . .

“Probably nothing. Just tell me.”

“He’s a pharmacist. He’s a widower. He’s a father. He pays his bills on time. His mother is crazy.”

“That’s the old biddy who said I was trouble?”

“Yes.” She was right.

“The first wife’s been dead how long?”

“Six or seven years. Anna doesn’t remember her.”

“And Jess O’Shea? The preacher?”

I looked over at Jack as we passed a streetlight. His expression was tense, almost angry. That made two of us. “I don’t know anything about him. I’ve met his wife and little girl. They have a boy, too.”

“He coming to the rehearsal dinner?”

“The minister usually does. Yes, I heard them say they’d gotten a sitter.”

I wanted to hit Jack, a not uncommon situation.

We pulled into Sarah May’s Restaurant parking lot. Jack parked a little away from the other cars.

“I can’t believe you’ve upset me this much in five minutes,” I said, hearing my own voice coming out distant and cold. And shaking.

He stared through the windshield at the restaurant windows. They were edged with flickering Christmas lights. The glow flashed across his face.
Damn
blinking lights. After what felt like a very long time, Jack turned to me. He took my left hand with his right.

“Lily, when I explain what I’m working on, you’ll forgive me,” he said, with a kind of painful sincerity I was forced to respect. He sat holding my hand, making no move to open his door, waiting for me to extend him . . . trust? Advance absolution? I felt as if he’d opened a cavity in my chest and turned a spotlight on it.

I nodded sharply, opened my door, and got out. We met in front of the car. He took my hand again, and we went into Sarah May’s.

 

SARAH CAWTHORNE, HALF of the Sarah May of the name, showed us to the private room that Dill had reserved for the party. Of course, all of us but Jack and Mrs. Kingery had been in it many times, since it was one of two places in Bartley you could dine out privately. I saw that it had been recently carpeted and wallpapered in the apparently perpetually popular hunter green and burgundy, and the artificial Christmas tree in the corner had been decorated with burgundy and off-white lace and matching ribbons. This tree was lit, too, of course, draped with the small clear lights, and thank God they didn’t blink.

The tables had Christmas centerpieces in the same colors, and the place mats were cloth and so were the napkins. (This was very swank for Bartley.) The U-shaped banquet arrangement hadn’t changed, though, and as we all drifted to our seats I realized that Jack was maneuvering us toward the O’Sheas. He was steering me unobtrusively with his hand on my back, and I was reminded of a puppet sitting on a ventriloquist’s knee, the controlling hand hidden in a hole in the puppet’s back. Jack caught my look, and his hand dropped away.

Dill was already standing behind a chair with my sister on one side and his mother on the other, so only Jess O’Shea was available as a target.

Jack managed to slot us between the O’Sheas. I was between the two men, and to Jack’s right was Lou. Across the table from us was Patsy Green, squired by one of the ushers, a banker who played golf with Dill, I remembered.

The salads were served almost immediately, and Dill properly asked Jess to say grace. Of course, Jess obliged. Next to me, Jack bowed his head and shut his eyes, but his hand found mine and his fingers wrapped tightly around mine. He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed it—I could feel his warm lips, the hint of teeth—then deposited the hand back in my lap and relaxed his grip. When Jess said, “Amen,” Jack let go and spread his napkin on his lap as though the little moment had been a dream.

I glanced up and down the table to see if anyone had noticed, and the only eyes that met mine were my mother’s. She looked as though she were half embarrassed by the sexuality of the gesture . . . but pleased by the emotional wallop of it.

I had no idea what my own face looked like. A salad was placed in front of me, and I stared down blindly at it. When the waitress asked me what dressing I wanted, I answered her at random, and she dolloped my lettuce and tomato with a bright orange substance.

Jack began gently questioning Lou about her life. He was so good at it that few civilians would have suspected he had a hidden agenda. I tried not to speculate on the nature of that agenda.

I turned to Jess, who was having a little trouble with a jar of bacon bits. After the nicely decorated room, plunking the jar of bits down on the table reminded me firmly we were in Bartley. I held out my hand with a give-me curve of the fingers.

Somewhat surprised, Jess handed me the jar. I gripped it firmly, inhaled. I twisted as I exhaled. The lid came off. I handed the jar to him.

When I looked up in his face, there was a kind of dubious amusement on it.

Dubious was OK. Amusement wasn’t.

“You’re very strong,” he observed.

“Yes,” I said. I took a bite of salad, then remembered that Jack needed to know more about this man.

“Did you grow up in a town bigger than Bartley?” I asked.

“Oh, not bigger at all,” he said genially. “Ocolona, Mississippi. My folks still live there.”

“And your wife, is she from Mississippi also?”

I hated this.

“Yes, but from Pass Christian. We met in college at Ole Miss.”

“And then you went to seminary?”

“Yes, four years at Westminister Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Lou and I just had to put our trust in the Lord. It was a long separation. In fact, after the first two years, I missed being away from her so much, we got married. She held any job she could get in the area while I worked to graduate. She played the organ at churches, she played the piano for parties. She even worked at a fast-food place, God bless her.” Jess’s square, handsome face relaxed and warmed as he talked about his wife. I felt acutely uncomfortable.

The salad dressing was thick as sour cream, and sweet. I shoved the most heavily laden lettuce to one side and tried to eat the rest. I couldn’t just sit there and question him.

“And you,” he began the conversational return, “what’s your occupation?”

Someone who didn’t know my life history?

“I’m a house cleaner, and I run errands for people. I decorate Christmas trees for businesses. I take old ladies grocery shopping.”

“A girl Friday, though I guess ‘girl’ is politically incorrect now.” He gave the strained smile of a conservative paying lip service to liberality.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you live in Arkansas?”

“Yes.” I prodded myself mentally. “Shakespeare.”

“Any bigger than Bartley?”

“Yes.”

He eyed me with a determined smile. “And have you lived there long?”

“Over four years now. I bought a house.” There, that was contributing to the conversation. What did Jack want to know about this man?

“What do you do in your spare time?”

“I work out. Lifting weights. And I take karate.” And now I see Jack. The thought sent a warm rush through my pelvis. I remembered his lips against my hand.

“And your friend Mr. Leeds? Does he live in Shakespeare?”

“No, Jack lives in Little Rock.”

“He works there, too?”

Did Jack want it known what he did?

“His job takes him different places,” I said neutrally. “Did Lou have Luke—isn’t that your little boy’s name?—here in the Shakespeare hospital?” People really like to talk about their childbirth experiences.

“Yes, right here at the hospital. We were a little worried . . . there are some emergencies this hospital can’t handle. But Lou is healthy, and indications were that the baby was healthy, so we decided it would be better to show our faith in the local people. And it was just a great experience.”

Lucky for you and Luke and Lou, I thought. “And Krista?” I asked, thinking this meal would never end. We hadn’t even gotten our entrees. “Did you have her here? No, she’s at least eight, and you’ve been here only three years, I believe?”

“Right. No, we moved here from Philadelphia with Krista.” But something about the way he said it was odd.

“She was born at one of the big hospitals there? That must have been a very different experience from having your little boy here.”

He said, “Are you older than Varena?”

Whoa. Change of subject. And a clumsy one. Anyone could tell I was older than Varena.

“Yes.”

“You must have traveled around some in your life, too,” the minister observed. The strip lights above the table winked off his blond hair, about ten shades darker than mine and certainly more natural. “You’ve been in Shakespeare for about four years . . . did you ever live here, in Bartley, after you got out of college?”