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It wasn't too hard to read the evidence. Cliff's leg was gashed and bleeding, as they say, profusely. In fact, the medics had cut away his pants leg. I could see that one of the steps going up to the side door of the house, the door nearest the garage, was missing its top. Splintered wood painted the same color as the other step was lying on the ground.
Well, this could have been an accident. Hefty man meets weak board. Cliff's leg could have gone through the step, scraping his shin in the process. However, that wouldn't really fit the facts. The leg was gashed, not scraped; I could see that much, more clearly than I really wanted to. And surely, for that kind of ordinary accident, one wouldn't call an ambulance.
Someone tapped on my window, making me almost jump out of my skin. It was the new policeman, Officer. . . there was his nametag, McClanahan. I lowered the window and waited.
"Ma'am? You need to move on," he said apologetically. He laid his hand on the door. He was wearing a heavy gold ring, and he tapped it against the car door as he stared off at the paramedics' activities.
I looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. He wasn't tall, or fat, or pumped, or handsome. In fact, he was a plain pale man with freckles and red hair, a narrow mouth, and light green eyes that were much the color of a Coke bottle. But there was intelligence there, and assurance, too, and then there was the odd coincidence of his always being at hand whenever I was with Detective Stokes.
"Then you will have to tell Detective Stokes that you told me to go home, since she told me to stay right here," I said.
We took each other's measure.
"Oh, really," he said.
"Really. "
"Lily Bard, isn't it?"
"You know who I am?" People never looked at me in the same way once they knew. There was always some added element there: pity, or horror, or a kind of prurient wonder - sometimes even disgust. Curiosity, too. McClanahan was one of the curious ones.
"Yes. Why did the detective ask you to wait here?"
"I have no idea. " I suspected she'd just plain forgotten she didn't need me any more, but I held the knowledge to myself.
He turned away.
"Where are you from?"
It was his turn to jump. "I haven't lived here long," he said noncommittally. His bottle green eyes were steady and calm.
"You're not. . . " But I had to stop. To say, "You're not an ordinary cop," would be unbearably patronizing, but it was true that Officer McClanahan was out of the general run of small town cop. He wasn't from around here; he wasn't from below the Mason-Dixon Line at all, or I'd lost my ear completely. Granted, the accents I heard every day were far more watered down than the ones I'd heard in my youth; a mobile population and television were taking care of that.
"Yes, ma'am?" He waited, looking faintly amused.
"I'll leave," I said, and started the car. I had lost my taste for sparring with this man. "If Detective Stokes needs me to come back, I'll be at home. "
"Not working today?"
"No. "
"No cleaning jobs?"
"No. "
"Been ill?" He seemed curious, mildly amused.
"I lost a baby," I said. I knew I was trying to erase "Lily Bard, the victim" from his mental pigeonhole, but replacing that version of me with "Lily Bard, grieving Madonna" was not much better. If I'd been fully back to myself, I would've kept my mouth shut.
"I'm very sorry," he said. His words were stiff, but his tone was sincere enough to appease me.
"Good-bye," I said, and I pulled away. I went to Shakespeare's Cinema Video Rental Palace, picked out three old movies, and drove home to watch them all.
Maybe I would take up crocheting.
Chapter Nine
Bobo Winthrop stopped by that night. He knew the whole story about Cliff Eggers.
"There was a stake hidden under the steps," he told me, the relish of the young in his voice. We were sitting on my front steps, which are small and very public. I wanted the public part. There were good reasons I should not be along in a private place with Bobo. I had my arms around my knees, trying to ignore the ache in the pit of my stomach and the unpredictable flares of misery.
"Stake a-k-e, not steak e-a-k?"
He laughed. "A-k-e. Sharpened and planted in the dirt under the steps, so when the step gave way, his leg would go down into the area and be stuck by the stake. " He pushed his blond hair out of his face. He'd come from karate class, and he was now in his gi pants and a white tank top.
"I guess that would've happened to anyone's leg," I suggested.
"Oh. Well, yeah, I guess so. If his wife had come home before he did, she would've gotten hurt instead of him. "
I hadn't thought of that, and I winced as I pictured Tamsin going through the step and being impaled on the stake. "Did he have to stay at the hospital?" I figured if Bobo knew all this, maybe he knew even more.
"Nope, they sent him home. It was really an ugly wound, Mary Frances's aunt told me - she's an emergency room nurse, Mrs. Powell is - and she said it looked worse than it really was. But it's going to be really sore. " Mary Frances was one of Bobo's former girlfriends. He had a talent for remaining on their good side.
Janet Shook came jogging down the street then, her small square face set in its determined mode, and her swinging brown hair darkened with sweat around her ears and temples.
"Stop and visit for a minute," I called, and she glanced at a watch on her left wrist and then cast herself down on the grass. "Want a lawn chair?"
"No, no," she panted. "The grass feels good. I needed to stop anyway. I'm still not a hundred percent after that knock on the head. And I had karate class, tonight. You should have been there, Lily. Bobo and I got to teach two ladies in their sixties how to stand in shiko dachi. But I missed running. I've signed up for a ten K race in Springdale next month. "
Janet and Bobo began a conversation about running - wearing the right shoes, mapping your route, maximizing your running time.
I laid my cheek on my knee and closed my eyes, letting the two familiar voices wash over me. At the end of a day in which I'd done mighty little, I managed to feel quite tired. I was considering Cliff's leg going through the step - what a shock that must have been! - and the hostile visit of Detective Stokes. I mulled over green-eyed Officer McClanahan. I wondered if he'd seen the body of poor Saralynn Kleinhoff, if he'd looked at her with the same cool curiosity with which he'd eyed me.
Surely his face was familiar to me, too? Surely I had seen him before? I had, I was sure, after a moment's further thought. I began to rummage around in my memory. He hadn't been in a police uniform. Something about a dog, surely? A dog, a small dog . . .
"Lily?" Janet was saying.
"What?"
"You were really daydreaming," she said, sounding more than a little worried. "You feeling okay?"
"Oh, yes, fine. I was just trying to remember something, one of those little things that nags at the edges of your mind. "
"What Marshall doesn't realize," Bobo said to Janet, evidently resuming a conversation that my abstraction had interrupted, "is that Shakespeare needs a different kind of sporting goods store. "
I could feel my eyebrows crawl up my forehead. This, from a young man whose father owned a sporting goods store so large there was a plan to start producing a catalog.
"Oh, I agree!" Janet's hands flew up in the air to measure her agreement. "Why should I have to drive over to Montrose to get my workout pants? Why shouldn't the kids taking jazz at Syndi Swayze's be able to get their kneepads here? I mean, there are some things you just can't get at Wal-Mart!"
I'd never seen Janet so animated. And she sounded younger. How old could she be? Wish some astonishment, I realized Janet was at least seven years younger than I was.
"So, are yo
u totally satisfied with your job?" Bobo asked, out of the blue.
"Well. " Janet scrunched up her face. "You know how it is. I've run Safe After School for four years now, and I feel like I've got it down. I'm restless. But I don't want to teach school, which is the only thing I'm trained for. "
"My family, we're all merchants," Bobo said.
It was true, I realized, though I'd never have thought to put it that way. Bobo's family had made their money selling things; the sporting goods store that leaned heavily toward hunting and fishing equipment, the lumber and home supplies store, and the oil company that had supplied the money to build the Winthrop empire.
"So," he resumed, "I guess it's in my blood. See, what I've been thinking lately - now you tell me if you think this is a good idea, Janet, and of course you, too, Lily - I think that the sporting goods store isn't really the kind of place most women and kids want to come into. What they want, I think, is a smaller store where they can come in without going through a lot of crossbows and fishing rods and rifles, a smaller store where they can find their running shorts and athletic bras and those kneepads you mentioned - the ones you need to wear when you take jazz dancing. "
"Tap shoes," said Janet, longing in her voice. "Ballet slippers. "
"I think we really have an idea here. "
"It would be great," she said, philosophically. "But ideas aren't money to underwrite a store start-up. "
"Funny you should mention that," Bobo said. He was grinning. He looked about eighteen, but I knew he was at least twenty-one now. "Because my grandfather's will just got probated, and I happen to have a substantial amount of money. "
Janet gaped at him. "We're talking serious? You weren't just dreaming? You really think there's a possibility of doing this?"
"We need to do a lot of figuring. "
"We?" Janet asked, her voice weak.
"Yeah. You're the one who knows what we need. You're the idea woman. "
"Well. " Janet sounded out of breath. "You actually mean it?"
"Sure I do. Hey Lily, would you mind if we finished Janet's run and went over to her place to talk? What do you think about this idea?"
I felt rueful and old. "I think it's a great idea for both of you. "
Janet's face lit up like a torch. Bobo's was hardly less excited. In a second, they were stretching before they began running. I noticed Bobo's eyes running over Janet's ass when she bent over. He gave a little nod, all to himself. Yep, it was a nice ass.
As they set off down the street, I had to smile to myself. All those hours I'd worried about Bobo's inappropriate affection for me, all the times I'd tried to repulse him, hate him, fight my own shameful physical attraction to him. . . and all it took was Janet Shook's brain, ass, and a dash of mercantile blood.
I went inside, and when I'd locked the door behind me, I laughed out loud.
The next morning - the next boring, boring, morning - I went to the library. I needed to swap my books, and I thought I might do some research on runaways. Jack had discussed printing a small pamphlet on the search for runaways, since so much of his business came from such searches. It would be good to feel I'd accomplished something.
The modest Shakespeare library was in the oldest county building, which was about the rank at which most Shakespeareans placed reading. In the summer, it was hot, and in the winter, the pipes clanked and moaned and the air was warm and close. The ceilings were very high. In fact, I believed the building had been a bank at one point in time. There was a lot of marble.
To humanize the building, the librarians had added curtains and area rugs and posters, and on pretty days the attempt worked. But today was not such a day; it was going to rain, and the uniform sullen gray of the sky was echoed in the marble. I stepped from the damp heat of the morning into the chilly marble interior and shivered. Through the high windows, with the happy yellow curtains pulled back to show the sky, I could see a silver maple tossing in a strong wind. The rain would come soon.
I consulted one of the computers, and began scribbling down a list of books and magazine articles. One article was very recent. In fact, it should still be in the current magazine area, a sort of nook made comfortable by deep chairs and an area rug.
After I'd read the article and made some notes, I picked up a copy of People and flipped through it, amazed all over again that the reading public would be interested in the outsider's view of the life of someone they would never know. Why would a hairdresser in Shakespeare care that Julia Roberts had worn that designer's slacks to the premier of a new movie? Would a bartender in Little Rock ever be the richer by the knowledge that Russell Crowe had turned down a part in that film?
Of course, here I was, reading the same article I was deriding. I held the magazine a little closer to peer at a ring some singer had paid a third-world budget to purchase. A ring . . . a celebrity magazine. Suddenly, some synapsis fired in my head.
The picture I remembered wasn't in this magazine in particular, but I associated the picture with a magazine very like it.
How had I happened to see the picture? These things weren't on my normal reading agenda. I pulled and prodded at my faint memory until I'd teased a thread loose. I'd seen the picture when I'd been at Carrie's office, when I'd been dusting. The magazine had been left open in one of the rooms - which one? I could almost see the cover after I'd automatically flipped the magazine shut and returned it to a pile. The cover had been primarily ivory, with the picture of an actress - maybe Julia Roberts again - dressed in jeans and boots and a handkerchief, looking brilliant against the neutral color. Carrie's office!