Shakespeare's Counselor (8 page)

I plodded up, gripping the handrail, feeling more and more exhausted as I mounted. I didn't think I'd ever felt as washed-out in my life. I managed to get to the reverend's office and knock on the door without stopping to rest, but I had to push myself. And it was karate night, too, I groaned to myself. I'd just have to miss.

Joel came to the door to open it and usher me in. It was one of those little courtesies that endeared him to so many of his congregation, especially women.

I sat down in the comfortable chair he indicated, and I was happy to do it. Joel sat in a matching chair a careful distance away—no desk between us for this conversation, another signal—and steepled his hands in front of him, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair.

“Lily, I don't know if you feel you're getting anything out of this therapy group, but I'm concerned about Sandy.”

“You should probably talk to the counselor about this.”

“I don't think she would be objective. She'll maintain Sandy needs her services, no matter what.”

“Now you've lost me,” I said, after a pause during which I tried to make sense of his words. I wondered if my mind were going through some sort of trough the way my body seemed to be.

“I have heard, not through idle gossip but through the concerns of members of my flock, that Tamsin Lynd has strong views about the relationships between men, women, and the church. Views that don't coincide with our interpretation of the Scriptures.”

I would have left then if I hadn't been too tired to get up.

“And this is my problem…how?”

“I come to you for your…advice.”

“I'm just not understanding you.”

“I understand that y'all know each other.”

I stared at Joel's smoothly shaved face, his carefully trimmed mustache, and his razor-cut hair. He wore a very good suit, not so expensive that the people of the church would whisper, but nice enough for sure.

“Joel.” He didn't like me using his first name. I'd always found him distasteful, but fair, and I didn't want to be as ugly as my first inclination led me to be.

“Joel,” I said again, trying to pick my words carefully. “I don't think I've ever heard Tamsin say one word about any religion in our therapy group.” I took a deep breath. “It seems to me you should be more concerned about your wife's mental health than about the possible theological opinions of her counselor.”

“Of course, Sandy's well-being is my primary concern,” Joel said. “I'm just—why does she feel the need to go to this group at all?” he burst out, seeming genuinely puzzled. Suddenly, Joel looked like a real man, not like a little impervious god. “We've prayed about it and asked for her healing and her forgiveness of the one who did such a terrible thing to her. Why does she need to talk about it?”

“Because your wife was raped,” I said, as if I was telling him this for the first time. “She needs to talk to other women who've lived through the experience. She needs to be able to express her own true feelings about what happened to her, away from people who expect so many different things from her.”

He tilted back in his chair for a moment. At that second, he looked more vulnerable than I'd ever seen him. I didn't doubt that Joel McCorkindale loved his wife. I did doubt that he knew what a burden his public persona was on his wife's shoulders and what a struggle it was for her to preserve the image of the kind of wife she thought he deserved.

“My wife was accosted in college, over twenty years ago, from what little she's told me,” he said. “Why would she need help now?”

Accosted? He made it sound as unthreatening as a panhandler asking you for spare change—though under some circumstances, that could be pretty damn scary. And I noticed that even Joel didn't seem to know exactly what had happened to his wife. “Don't you ever counsel members of your congregation who've been raped?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I'd be glad to help if someone came to me with that problem, but it hasn't happened.”

“Then you're not doing your job,” I said, “in some sense. Because believe me, Reverend, your congregation contains rape victims.”

Joel looked unhappy at the idea, though what caused that unhappiness I couldn't guess. “How many women are in your group?” he asked, staring at his fingers so evenly matched together in front of him.

“More than me and your wife, I can tell you that,” I said sadly. “And we're just a fraction. How many women in yours?”

He blinked. Considered. “Two hundred fifty, more or less.”

“Then you have about twenty-five victims,” I told him. “Depending on whose estimates you use.”

He was shocked, no question.

“Now, Joel, I have to leave. I don't think I was any help to you. But I hope you can be to Sandy, because she definitely has some heavy problems.” I pushed myself to my feet, thinking this had been a waste of time and energy, and I left.

He was still sitting in the chair when I shut the door behind me, and unless I was completely wrong, Joel McCorkindale was deep in thought. Maybe he was praying.

 

I had more phone calls to return, so I ate a salad and some crackers to get supper out of the way. I was hungrier than I thought I'd be, and it was a little later than I'd planned by the time I called Carrie.

Claude answered the phone and bellowed Carrie's name. I could hear her telling him she'd be there in a minute, then the sound of water being shut off.

“It's my night to do the dishes,” she explained. “Listen, the reason I called you, the woman who's been coming in to clean every day—Kate Henderson—has taken a little sabbatical because her daughter had a baby. So I was wondering…I hate to mix friendship and business, but is there any way you can come in for a few minutes a day until Kate gets back from Ashdown?”

I'd cleaned Carrie's office until about eighteen months ago, when she'd found her increased patient load called for a daily cleaning, an obligation I couldn't schedule in at the time. “I'm working in Little Rock this week,” I told her. “But I can come Thursday and Saturday for sure. The other days, I'll have to see. I may finish up my job in Little Rock pretty soon.” That was probably optimistic thinking, but it was possible.

“I appreciate any time you can give me,” Carrie said. “So, I'll see you tomorrow?”

“Sure. I'll get there first thing tomorrow morning before you start seeing patients, then I have to go to the Winthrops. But I can come back after you close.”

“So it'll be clean for Thursday morning and Friday morning, and you'll come in on Saturday so it'll be looking good on Monday. Great.” Relief was running high in Carrie's voice. I heard a rumbling in the background at her house.

“Claude wants to know if Alicia Stokes called you,” Carrie relayed.

“Tell him yes, and I'm just about to call her back.”

“She did,” Carrie called to Claude. “Lily's returning her call after we hang up.”

“He says good.” Carrie listened to some more rumbling. “He says to tell you Alicia Stokes might be almost as tough as you.”

I could hear from her voice she was smiling. “Tell him, from me, that in that case I'll be extra careful,” I said.

Alicia Stokes had her own little cubicle at the Shakespeare Police Department, which for the past three years had been “temporarily” housed in an older home after the jail and the police station had been declared substandard and put on notice to meet the state requirements. The city had responded sluggishly, as Shakespeare always did when money was involved. After a couple of years, the new jail was completed. Prisoners could march extra yards and be incarcerated in a decent facility. To no one's surprise, the police station in front of it had run into work delays.

It was sort of nice to walk up onto a front porch to go in to see the police, but the old house really wasn't suited to the purpose, and it would be abandoned within the next two months. Alicia's cubicle was at the back of the former living room, and she'd already hung pictures of some of her heroes there. All her heroes were black and female. Alicia Stokes, obviously, had the courage to be different. And she was dedicated. She'd told me to come on in when I'd called, even though it was getting dark.

She stood to shake my hand, which I liked, and she gestured me into a chair that wasn't too uncomfortable. Unlike Joel McCorkindale, Stokes seated herself firmly on the power side of the desk. Then we both had to pretend that no one else could hear us, which wasn't easy, since the partitions were about as high as the detective's head.

“I'd like to review what happened last night,” the detective said to open the interview. “And then, we'll get a statement typed up for you to sign before you leave.”

So I'd be here a while. I nodded, resigned.

Detective Stokes had a legal pad in front of her. She opened it to a fresh page, wrote my name at the top of it, and asked, “How long have you been attending this survivors' therapy group?”

“This would have been my third session. My third week.”

“And all the members of the group have been raped and are in the process of recovery?”

“That's the idea.” The air conditioning, probably as old as the house, could barely keep up with the heat.

“How were you contacted to join this group? Were you already a patient at the center?”

“No.” I told her about the flyer at the grocery store and described coming to the first meeting.

“Who was there?”

“The same people that were there last night.” I went through the list.

“Did Ms. Lynd say anything about others who were supposed to come?”

“No, but that wouldn't be surprising.” I remembered my own reluctance. “I'd expect someone to have second thoughts, or back out entirely.” I remembered Tamsin looking out into the hall that first night, as though she were waiting to hear someone knocking on the door at the end of the hall.

“I guess whoever killed that woman wore a lab coat,” I said. I hadn't been able to stop speculating about that lab coat, the one used to prop the rolling chair in place. “Was it the nurse's?” There was a staff nurse who did drug testing.

She appeared not to hear me. “Did you pass around any kind of sign-up sheet?” Her glasses magnified her dark eyes, which were large and almond shaped. Right now, they were fixed on me in a take-no-prisoners stare.

“No, we were supposed to have the illusion of confidentiality.”

“Illusion?”

“How could we remain secret from each other in this town?”

“True enough. Has Ms. Lynd ever said anything to you about her own history?”

I shook my head. “Well, not directly.” My inner thermostat seemed to have gone haywire. I took a tissue from the box on the desk and patted my face with it.

“What do you mean?”

“We saw the squirrel that was killed at her place. And I was there in the office when she got a phone call that seemed to upset her pretty badly.”

Of course I had to go over both incidents with the detective, but I'd expected that.

“So you had already formed the idea that Ms. Lynd was being stalked?”

“Yes.”

“Did you report that to the police?”

“No.”

Detective Stokes looked at me almost archly, which was an unnerving sight. “Why not? Wouldn't that have been the logical thing to do?”

“No.”

“Why not? You don't trust the police to help citizens?”

I was baffled by her manner. “It would have been
logical
for Tamsin or her husband to call the police themselves. It was their business.” I shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable.

“Did you ever think that if you had called us, that woman might not be dead?”

I was in imminent danger of losing my temper. That would be very, very bad in this situation. “If I had called here yesterday, and said that someone had killed a squirrel and hung it in a tree, what would you have done? Realistically?”

“I would have checked it out,” Alicia Stokes said, leaning forward to make sure I got her point. “I would have warned Ms. Lynd not to go anywhere by herself. I would have begun asking questions.”

I was figuring out things myself. “You already knew, too,” I said, thinking it through as I went. “You knew someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd. What did
you
do about it?”

For a long moment, I thought Stokes was going to lean across the desk and whop me. Then she collected herself and lied. “How could we possibly know anything like that?” she asked.

“Huh,” I said, putting a lot of disgust into it. If Alicia Stokes was playing some kind of hide-and-seek, she could do it on her own damn time.

“She did look like Tamsin, didn't she?”

Detective Stokes laid her pen down on top of her yellow tablet. “Just what do you mean, Miss Bard?”

“You know what I mean. The dead woman. She looked like Tamsin.”

“Who mentioned that to you?” Her interest was keen now.

“No one. I'm not blind. She was pale, she was plump, she was brunette. She looked like Tamsin.”

I had no idea what the detective was thinking as she regarded me.

“But as you know, I was told by…,” she checked a note on the tablet, “Melanie Kleinhoff that the dead woman was her sister-in-law, that is, the wife of her husband's brother.”

“Melanie did say that,” I admitted. “Saralynn, wasn't that her name?”

“And yet you told me last night you didn't know the name of the dead woman.”

“No, I told you I hadn't known her. You asked me if the others had recognized her, and I told you to ask them.” Splitting hairs, but I had technically told her the truth. “I don't like repeating what other people tell me, when I don't know it for myself.”

Detective Stokes's face told me what she thought of that, and for once I wondered if I wasn't just being balky, like a stubborn mule.

“So where is Saralynn's husband, the one who raped Melanie?” I asked. “I guess he raped Saralynn, too, since she was going to join our group?”

“Tom Kleinhoff's in jail,” Detective Stokes said, not confirming and not denying my assumption. “He didn't make bail on the rape charge, because he already had other charges pending.”

It would have been good if he had been the guilty one. That would have been simple, direct, and over.

“Too bad it wasn't him, isn't it?” said Stokes, echoing my thoughts. I guess that wasn't too great a leap to take.

I nodded.

“So let me just ask you, Miss Bard. Since your boyfriend, I understand, is a private eye.” The distaste in her voice told me she knew all about the circumstances of Jack's becoming a private eye; he'd left the police force in Memphis under a black cloud. “If you think the dead woman was killed in mistake for Tamsin Lynd…why? Was that supposed to send a message to Tamsin Lynd herself, that a woman resembling her was killed in her office? Was it a genuine mistake—the killer finds a dark-haired fat woman in the right place so he's sure he has the right victim? Or was the message for your group?”

I hadn't speculated that far, wasn't sure if that was a conclusion I'd have reached.

“Hadn't thought about that? Well, maybe you'd better.” Alicia Stokes's expression was definitely on the cold and hard side. “Someone thinks they've killed the woman supposed to be helping five rape victims, you've got to ask yourself why.”

She was so far ahead of me all I could do was gape at her.

“How does your boyfriend feel about you being in this group?” she asked, pounding on down the track.

“He was the one who wanted me to go to it.”

“You sure he doesn't resent you giving such a big part of your time to a group of women? Maybe he doesn't like some of the advice Tamsin gave you? Maybe Tamsin told you to stand up to him? How long has he lived here?”

Scrabbling for the most recent question, I said, “He's lived here in Shakespeare for only a few weeks. He lived in Little Rock for a few years.”

Angry with myself for babbling, I realized just how battered I felt.

Then I began feeling angry.

Even as I tried to remember all the other questions she'd asked so I could begin to respond, I thought, Why bother? I got up.

“You sit your butt back down in that chair,” Alicia Stokes told me.

I fixed my eyes on her face.

“Before I make you,” she added.

Rage hit me like fireball. “You can't make me do shit,” I said, slow and low. “I came in to give a statement. I gave it. Unless you arrest me, I don't have to sit here and answer any questions.”

Stokes loomed over me, leaning across her desk, her knuckles resting on its surface. A patrolman I'd never met, a wiry freckled man, peered in the entrance to the cubicle, went wide eyed, and backed away.

“This looks like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” Claude's voice said behind me.

I let out my breath in a long gust. I speculated on what could've happened if the new patrolman hadn't fetched him—would Stokes have launched herself across her desk at me? Would I have hit a police officer?

“I was just leaving,” I told Claude. I edged past him and strode out the front door, picking my way through the desks and chairs and a few assorted people with my eyes fixed on the floor. The freckled patrolman held open the front door for me. His nametag read “G. McClanahan.” I made a mental note that I owed G. McClanahan a free house cleaning. Right now, getting in the car and driving away appeared to be my best move.

I wondered if Claude would have a talk with Stokes now, and what that talk would be like. I knew she would have no cause to like me any better afterward, that was for sure, and I didn't know if I'd care or not. What was more certain was the fact that as fast as I could think, the detective could think faster, and I added that to the list of her sins, as I was sure her fellow officers would. Stokes was northern, black, a woman, aggressive, very tall (and I'd bet strong), and smart as hell. She would have to perform like a one-woman band to be popular, or even tolerated.

How would she live in Shakespeare? Why had she taken the job?

To my mind, that was as much a puzzle as the woman pinned to the wall in the health center. Maybe the city paid better than I'd assumed, or maybe Stokes had a master plan that included some time in a small force—a very small force. Maybe Stokes had family in the area.

But it hadn't escaped my attention that a puzzling and bizarre murder had occurred in Shakespeare (where the norm was a Saturday night knifing) just when a puzzling and mysterious detective had turned up to solve it.

Some might think that suspicious, too.

 

I felt groggy when I woke up. I had to force myself to obey the clock. This was one of my days in Shakespeare, and I had to clean Carrie's office in addition to putting in a stint at the Winthrops' house. Forcing myself every step of the way, I got dressed and ate; though my head was aching and the rest of me felt exhausted already, as if I'd already put in a hard day. I wondered if I had dreamed a lot—dreams that were best forgotten—and had therefore slept restlessly. I caught no echoes of it as I cleaned my teeth and fluffed my hair. I expected my new sneakers to make me perk up; I don't often get new things, and these black high-tops had been on extreme sale.

But after they were laced and tied I stared down at them as if I'd never seen them before; or my feet, either, for that matter.

I saw a car already parked in the lot to the rear of Carrie's office, and I had a feeling I'd seen it before. I just couldn't place where and when. It was an hour earlier than any of the staff should appear. When I tried the back door, it was already unlocked.

“Hello?” I said cautiously, not wanting to scare anyone.

“Good morning!” called a horribly happy voice. Cliff Eggers stuck his head out of one of the doors on the left. “Carrie left a message you'd be coming in.”

I brought in my cleaning caddy and a few other things. I didn't know what Carrie's new cleaner kept here, so I'd piled my car with stuff. I had to do a great job for Carrie.

“And you're here so early to do medical transcriptions?” I said in a voice that would carry down the hall as I deposited my burdens.

“That's right.” Cliff appeared in the doorway again, beaming at me as though I'd said something very clever. “It works out better for me this way. I can do the rest of my doctors at home.”

“And you like your job,” I prodded.

“It's fascinating. I learn something every day. Well, I'd better get back to it.” Cliff retreated to his desk, and I started with the waiting room. Dust, straighten, polish, vacuum, mop. In short order, the magazines were lined up on the square table in the middle of the room; the chairs were sitting in neat rows against the wall. The large mat in front of the door where most of the dirt from patients' shoes was supposed to fall had been shaken out the front door and replaced, exactly square with the door.

Cliff squeaked down the hall in rubber shoes, and I cleaned the glass barrier between the patient sitting room and the clerks' office. I saw with disapproval that Carrie's new maid had been slacking off there. And the counter in the reception clerk's area was just nasty.