Shakespeare's Counselor (21 page)

“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.

“Hmmm.”

“Can I help?” Jack asked. He picked some of the bacon out of the skillet with some small tongs, and put the bacon to drain on a pad of paper towels. I got out the small cutting board and a knife, and began to slice a tomato.

“Let me stab you again,” I said, and this time, with the knife in hand, I held it straight out in front of me. The wound Carrie had described simply couldn't be made, if the knife was held like this.

While Jack put ice in two glasses, I explained what I was doing.

“Okay, let me try.” He turned me around, and taking the precaution of using a dull table knife, he began to experiment. “A graze at the top, a true stab at the bottom, going from the left side of the back to the right.” he said. “So I think you're right, it would have to be an overhand blow.”

“An overhand blow from someone much shorter, right?” I put our plates on the table and folded a paper napkin beside each plate. Jack got out the bread and mayonnaise, my mother's homemade. “Cliff's a little taller than you, huh?” Jack nodded, as he used a fork to put tomato slices on his bread. “Maybe six feet?”

Jack said, “Just barely.”

I could think of no one involved in the episodes who was short, besides a couple of the women in the group, and Tamsin herself. “Maybe Tamsin did it by accident? And they were too embarrassed to say it?”

Jack even looked good to me when he chewed, which is one of the more unattractive activities for a human being. He swallowed. “She could have mistaken Cliff for someone else, I guess, but there's a streetlight practically in front of their house. He was attacked in the driveway, right? So how, in good light and in a place where she would expect him to be, could she knife him by accident?”

“There's only one other new person in town,” I said, not able to think of any rebuttal. I told Jack about my conversation with Marshall, about Thea's new lover. Jack said, “I've met him. He runs in the evening.”

“Joel McCorkindale does, too.” I tried to make something of that. Joel ran, Talbot ran, Joel's wife was in the support group, and she was short. That didn't add up to anything. This made as little sense as one of those logic problems the first time you read it through. “If Mary has a poodle, and Mary is taller than Sarah and Brenda, and Brenda's dog is brown, read the following statements to figure out who has the dachshund.” Besides, Sandy McCorkindale might be half nuts, but I simply could not picture her catching a squirrel and hanging it in a tree. It was actually easier to imagine Sandy stabbing someone.

We ate in silence, enjoying our first summer BLT. While we washed the dishes, I asked Jack what would happen next.

“I don't know. Stalking's just not that common a crime, and I have no big backlog of experience with it. When I first started my apprenticeship, Roy was handling a case a little like this. The woman couldn't get the police to take her seriously, because the intruder wasn't doing anything to her.”

“Intruder?”

“Yeah, he was actually coming into her apartment while she was gone, sifting through her stuff. Leaving her presents.”

I made a face. Disgusting and scary.

“I agree.” Jack looked grim as he scrubbed the skillet. “Finally, she scratched up enough money to pay for around-the-clock surveillance. The spot-checking we were doing just wasn't effective. But it didn't take long after that. We caught him jacking off on her underwear the second day. It was her apartment manager. It was a tough case to take to court, because he had a legal key.”

“Did you win?”

“Yes. But of course she had to move, and she found she couldn't stay in the city even after she'd moved. So he got a slap on the wrist, and her life was changed dramatically.”

Gee, that sounded familiar. I had only heard stories like that about a million times. I sighed, and asked Jack what he planned for that afternoon.

“First, I'm hitting the computer to see what background Alicia Stokes has. Then, we're going over to Tamsin's house and look at their driveway. Then, at some point, I plan on us having a serious session in the bedroom, there.”

I got caught between a smile and a frown. “Why are you looking into this?” I asked.

“Because it's got you going crazy, and I can't have that. I like you happy. We started this whole thing so you wouldn't have nightmares any more, and I hate it that this has turned into something that makes you feel even more angry.”

It surprised me that Jack saw me as perpetually angry.

It was true, but I hadn't wanted him to know that.

So I was being a deceiver, something I despised.

“It's not you,” I said.

“I know that.”

“I love you.”

“I know that.”

“Does it really bother you?”

“It worries me, sometimes. If it keeps on eating at you, some day it might include me.”

“I can't see that happening.”

“I wish I couldn't.”

I looked down, unable to meet his eyes. Maybe he was right. He'd taken a big chance. “Thanks for helping, Jack.”

“We'll get this solved,” he said.

“Do we have to do those things in the order listed?”

“Why, no, I guess not.”

“Could we reverse the order?”

“I bet we could.” He grinned. The scar crinkled, and his hazel eyes narrowed, the crow's feet at their corners spreading until the smile affected his whole face.

I took a deep breath. “I'll beat you to the bed,” I said, and got a head start.

It ended up being a tie.

 

Later that afternoon, Jack had to confess he was coming up empty. Alicia had no previous record. She had good credit and paid her taxes on time. Her income was not great, but adequate for the time and place. She had once been married, was now divorced. She had never been named as the mother of a child. She had never served in the armed forces.

I decided to mow the lawn that afternoon, while Jack was busy on the computer. It was easy to think while I was mowing, and I liked the look of the small yard when it was even and trim. I even used the weedeater and then swept away the clipped grass from my sidewalk. During all this work, I thought and thought, and I could not come up with any clearer understanding of the vicious cycle surrounding Tamsin Lynd. I must have been looking at it wrong, but I couldn't seem to find a new perspective.

Jack came outside when the sun was making deep shadows. I lay on the newly cut grass, disregarding the likelihood of fire ant bites and the certainty of grass stains, and stared up into the vast blueness. My backyard is very small and runs into the slope up to the railroad tracks, and it's overlooked by the second-floor windows of the apartment building next door and by Carlton's rear window, but it does give the illusion of privacy. Carlton was gone, anyway, because I'd seen him pull out in his car, and the apartment on the end closest to me was vacant at the moment. So maybe we really were unobserved.

Jack stretched in the grass beside me. His hair was loose, had been since our session in the bedroom, and I knew we'd have to pick the grass bits out of it before we went to bed. But there was nothing I would rather do.

It was hot, and quiet, and the smell of the grass was sharp in our noses.

“Let's review,” Jack said, his voice slow and sleepy.

“Okay.” I sounded just about as peppy as he did.

“Tamsin moves to Shakespeare because she's been stalked at her previous home in Cleveland.”

“Right.”

“A detective on that case, not the primary, but one assigned to do some of the legwork, is a young detective named Alicia Stokes.”

“Check.” I closed my eyes against the relentless blue.

“Alicia Stokes becomes so fascinated by the case, so obsessed, that when Tamsin Lynd and her husband, Cliff Eggers, move to Shakespeare, eventually Alicia finds herself compelled to follow.”

“‘Compelled to follow.' I like that.” I turned on my side and raised myself up on my right elbow. “Also, within a matter of months, a true crime writer whose real name is Gerry McClanahan signs on with the city police in Shakespeare. He's a real policeman, so this doesn't seem fraudulent to him. His secret life as a writer isn't known to anyone…anyone we're aware of.”

“Gerry, aka Gibson Banks, knows not only about Tamsin and Cliff, but also about the obsessed policewoman. He's come to watch the showdown.”

I nodded.

“And, once again, things start happening to Tamsin Lynd…and tangentially, to Cliff.”

“Tangentially. I love it when you use big words.” I bent over to kiss Jack's forehead. He wiggled closer to me.

“Expeditious. Arraignment. Consequence. Territorial…” Jack smiled, his eyes closed against the glow of the sky, and I leaned over to kiss him again, this time not on the forehead.

“So, she gets phone calls,” he resumed. “We happen by when they find the dead squirrel.”

“Then Saralynn Kleinhoff is killed—and put on display—and put in Tamsin's office. While Tamsin is still in the building. But Janet, who interrupts the killer, is not murdered, but rendered unconscious.”

“Then, the writer who is planning to do a book on both the stalking and the detective who can't stop stalking the stalker, so to speak, is murdered while he watches the stalkee.”

“That's one way to put it.”

“Then Tamsin's husband, her last stronghold, falls into a boobytrap. Shortly thereafter, he's attacked in their own driveway.”

“And that's where we are now.” I lay down with my head on Jack's chest, my arm thrown over him. I closed my eyes, too, and felt the sun kiss my cheek. I knew in a minute I'd be uncomfortable and itchy, but this moment was idyllic.

“And though we figure the stalker also has to be someone who's new in town, the only other new person is a strange, possibly perverted, but apparently guiltless mortician.”

“That's it in a nutshell.”

“And we're nowhere.”

“Well, it's not you and it's not me.”

“Oh, good, just about ten thousand more people to go.” Sure enough, I was beginning to get itchy. I sat up and started to brush off the cut grass. I thought about packing up Gerry McClanahan's house, the life he'd left behind him. His awards and accomplishments, his ties with people in small worlds and big worlds, his notes of projects yet to come, projects that now would never be completed unless his estate hired someone to finish the work he'd started.

The notes. All those notes. I wished now I'd had a chance to read them before the police gathered them up. Gerry McClanahan, after all, had been a trained detective with lots of experience. What had he concluded about the stalking of Tamsin Lynd? All I could remember was that he'd called it a fascinating case. That wasn't a help.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Jack asked. He was propped up on his elbows.

I explained my line of thought to him.

“Fascinating,” he said, “he called it fascinating?”

“Yeah. And he said, ‘This is a case turned upside down. No one will forget this one.'”

“Turned upside down.”

I nodded. “So let's see,” I said, mostly to myself. “If a case is upside down…the victim is the perpetrator? That would mean Tamsin has been responsible for the whole thing.”

“Or it could mean that whoever is guilty looks innocent.”

“Whoever loves Tamsin actually hates her.”

That gave us both a jolt. We looked at each other. “Who loves Tamsin?” Jack asked, almost in a whisper.

“Cliff loves Tamsin.”

After a wide-eyed moment, we both shook our heads in disbelief.