For once, she’d been engrossed in what she was doing, and she took a minute to focus on my question.
“Mostly by computer these days,” she answered. “Which is great for me. I do work for a company that advertises in small specialty magazines, or regional mags, like
“Did you want your folks traced?” she asked me now, a hint of amusement in the set of her mouth.
“I know who my family is,” I said, and spoke the truth, for my mother’s idea of a great Christmas present was a family tree ready-framed for my wall. For all I knew, she’d hired Mookie Preston’s company to do the research.
“Then you’re lucky. Most Americans can only name as far back as their great-grandparents. They’re shaky after that.”
I tried to think of myself as lucky.
I failed.
I wanted to sit in the battered armchair in front of her desk and ask her what I really needed to know. Why was she here? What trouble was she getting into? Would I come to work next week and find her dead, for sticking her nose into a hornet’s nest and getting stung?
Mookie laughed uneasily. “You’re looking at me funny, Lily.”
Bits of information slid around in my head and rearranged into a pattern. Lanette had come looking for Mookie secretly one night. Mookie had moved to town right after Darnell Glass had been killed. Mookie had an Illinois license plate.
Lanette had returned to Shakespeare after living in Chicago for a time. I studied the round line of Mookie’s cheeks and the strong column of her neck, and then I knew why she seemed familiar.
I gave Mookie a brisk nod and went back to work on the kitchen. Mookie was Darnell’s half-sister. But there seemed no point in talking to Mookie about it: Strictly speaking, it wasn’t my business, and Mookie knew better than anyone who she was and what she had to mourn. I wondered whose idea it had been to keep silent. Had Mookie wanted to do some kind of undercover work on the murder of her brother, or had Lanette been unwilling to admit to the town that she’d had a liaison with a white man?
I wondered if Lanette had left for Chicago pregnant.
I wondered if the father was still alive, still here in Shakespeare. I wondered if he and Mookie had talked.
The rifle, black and brown and deadly, had spooked me. I hadn’t seen loose firearms in anyone’s house since I began cleaning. I’d polished my share of gun cabinets, but I’d never found one unsecured and its contents easily available; which didn’t mean the guns hadn’t been there, in night tables and closets, just that they hadn’t been quite so… accessible. I felt I hadn’t been meant to see the rifle, that Mookie’s carelessness had been a mistake. I had no idea what Arkansas gun laws were, since I’d never wanted to carry a gun myself. Maybe the rifle was locked in Mookie’s car trunk.
I remembered the targets. If they were typical of Mookie’s marksmanship, she was a good shot.
I thought of the pack of men who’d been after Jack. Darcy knew Mookie’s name and address. I thought of him thinking the same thoughts about Mookie that I’d been thinking.
I gathered up my things and told Mookie I was leaving. She was coming outside to check her mailbox at the same time, and after she’d paid me we walked down the driveway together. I thought hard about what to say, if to speak at all.
Almost too late, I made up my mind. “You should go,” I said. Her back was to me. I already had one foot in the car.
She twisted halfway around, paused for a moment. “Would you?” She asked.
I considered it. “No,” I said finally.
“There, then.” She collected her mail and passed me again on her way back into that half-empty echoing house. She acted as though I wasn’t there.
When I got home that night, all the sleeplessness of the night before and the emotional strain of the day hit me in the face. It would have done me good to go to karate, blow off some tension. But I was so miserable I couldn’t bring myself to dress for it. Waves of black depression rolled over me as I sat at my bare kitchen table. I thought I’d left death behind me when I’d found this little town, picked it off the map because it was called Shakespeare and my name was Bard-as good a reason as any to settle somewhere, I’d figured at the time. I’d tried so many places after I’d gotten out of the hospital: from my parents’ home to Jackson, Mississippi, to Waverly, Tennessee… waitressed, cleaned, washed hair in a salon, anything I could leave behind me when I walked out the door at the end of the workday.
Then I’d found Shakespeare, and Shakespeare needed a maid.
When Pardon Albee had died, it had been a small thing, an individual thing. But this that was happening now, this craziness… it was generated by a pack mentality, something particularly terrifying and enraging to me. I’d experienced men in packs.
I thought of Jack Leeds, who would never be part of any pack. He’d get over being mad at me… or he wouldn’t. It was out of my hands. I would not go to him, no matter how many grieved girlfriends and widows passed through my mind. Sometimes I hated chemistry, which could play such tricks with your good sense, your promises to yourself.
When the knock came at the front door, I glanced at the clock on the wall. I’d been sitting and staring for an hour. My injured hip hurt when I rose, having been in the same position for so long.
I looked through the peephole. Bobo was on my doorstep, and he looked anxious. I let him in. He was wearing a brown coat over his gi.
“Hey, how are you?” he asked. “I missed you at karate. Marshall did, too.” He added that hastily, as though I would accuse him of hogging all the missing that was going around.
If it had been anyone but Bobo, I wouldn’t have opened the door. I’d known him since he was just beginning to shave; he’d sometimes been arrogant, sometimes too big for his britches, but he had always been sweet. I wondered how this boy had gotten to be my friend.
“Have you been crying, Lily?” he asked now.
I reached up to touch my cheek. Yes, I had been.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, wanting him to not notice, to drop it.
“Yes, it does,” he said. “You’re always beating yourself up, Lily. It does matter.” Amazingly, Bobo pulled a clean handkerchief from his coat pocket, and wiped my cheeks with gentle fingers.
This was not the way conversations with Bobo usually went. Usually he told me how his classes were going, or we talked about a new throw Marshall had taught us, or the boy Amber Jean was dating.
“Bobo,” I began uneasily, puzzled. I was trying to think how to proceed when Bobo acted instead, decisively. He gathered me up and kissed me hard, with an unnerving degree of expertise. For a few shocked seconds I stood quietly accepting this intimacy, feeling the warmth of his mouth against mine, the hard pressure of his body, before my internal alarm system went off. I slid my hands up and pressed gently against his chest. He instantly released me. I looked into his face, and saw a man who desired me.
“I’m so sorry, Bobo,” I said. “I hope I’m always your friend.” It was a dreary thing to say, but I meant it.
Not that pushing him away was effortless: It was all too easy to envision welcoming Bobo-young, vigorous, strong, handsome, endearing-into my bed. I’d been hoping to wipe out bad memories with good ones; Bobo and I could certainly give each other a few. Even now I felt the pull of temptation, as I saw his face close around the pain.
“I-have someone else,” I told him. And I hated the fact that what I said was true.
“Marshall?” he breathed.
“No. It’s not important who it is, Bobo.” I made another effort. “You have no idea how tempted and flattered I am.” The unevenness of my voice gave witness to that. I saw the pride return to his face as he heard the truth in what I was saying.
“I’ve cared about you for a long time,” he said.
“Thank you.” I never meant anything as much. “That makes me proud.”
Amazingly, after he’d opened the door to leave, he turned and lifted my hand and kissed it.
I watched his Jeep pull away.
