“Me, too.” That was easy to agree with. I was wondering if Tamsin was in the therapy room. I was wondering if she was alive.
“Janet, help is coming,” I told her, not at all sure she could hear me or understand. “You hang on one minute more.” It was true that I could hear sirens. I didn’t think I’d ever been happier to know they were coming.
I hadn’t talked to my friend Claude Friedrich in a while, and I’d just as soon not have talked to him that night. But since he’s the chief of police, and since it was a murder scene in the city limits, there wasn’t any way around it.
“Lily,” he greeted me. He was using his police voice; heavy, grim, a little threatening.
“Claude.” I probably sounded the same way.
“What’s happened here tonight?” he rumbled.
“You’ll have to tell us,” I said. “We got here for our therapy group-”
“You’re in therapy?” Claude’s eyebrows almost met his graying hair.
“Yes,” I said shortly.
“Accepting help,” he said, amazement written all over him. “This must be some doing of Jack’s.”
“Yes.”
“And where is he, tonight?”
“On the road.”
“Ah. Okay, so you were here for your therapy group. You and these women?”
“Yes.”
“A group for…?”
A very tall African American woman appeared at Claude’s shoulder. Her hair was cut close to her scalp. She was truly almost black, and she was wearing a practical khaki pantsuit with a badge pinned to the lapel. A pale yellow tank top under the jacket shone radiantly against her skin. She had broad features and wore huge blue- framed glasses.
“Alicia, listen to the account of this witness. I know her, she’s observant,” Claude said.
“Yes, sir.” The magnified eyes focused on me.
“Lily, this is Detective Stokes. She’s just come to us from the Cleveland force.”
“Cleveland,
“Yep.”
Alicia Stokes would have to be classified as a mystery.
Focusing on the more pertinent problem, I explained to Claude and Detective Stokes that we were a group composed of rape survivors, that we met every Tuesday night at the health center, that we were led by a woman who was missing and might be somewhere in the building.
“Tamsin Lynd,” said Stokes unexpectedly.
I stared at her. “Yes,” I said slowly. “Tamsin Lynd.”
“I knew it,” the detective said to herself, so swiftly and in such a low voice that I wasn’t sure I’d understood her correctly.
Stokes turned to a man in uniform and gave him some quick orders. He stared back at her, resentment all over his face and in his posture, but then he turned to obey. I shook my head. Stokes had her work cut out for her.
She caught the headshake and glared at me. I don’t know how she interpreted my reaction, but she definitely didn’t want sympathy.
Claude made a “go-on” gesture, so I went on to explain how we hadn’t been able to get in, had finally managed to do so, what we had found. I was glad to see the ambulance team taking Janet out, before I’d finished my account.
Stokes, who was at least four inches taller than my five foot six, said, “Do you know the victim?”
“No.”
“Did any of you know her?”
“Ask them.”
Stokes clearly was about to come down on me like a ton of bricks when I caught sight of something that made me weak-kneed with relief. The officer Stokes had sent into the building was leading Tamsin Lynd out, his arm around her, and Tamsin appeared to be in good physical shape. She was walking on her own. She was crying and shaking, but she seemed to be unhurt. Not a drop of blood on her.
Following my gaze, Stokes and Claude saw her, too.
“She’s your missing counselor?” Claude asked.
“Yes,” I said, relief making me almost giddy. I strode over to her and didn’t even think about the other two, right on my heels.
“Lily, are all of you okay?” Tamsin called, pulling away from the officer to grip my arms.
“Except Janet,” I said. I told her Janet had gone in the ambulance.
“What on earth happened here?”
I became aware that the audience had grown quite large around us, listening to this exchange. One glare from Stokes sent them scattering, but she and Claude flanked me.
And at that moment, looking into Tamsin Lynd’s eyes, I remembered the phone calls and the slit throat of the squirrel, and the fear she lived with. I had been very upset, deeply upset, but in that second I drew myself under control. “There was a dead woman in your office,” I said, after a little pause to let the two cops stop me, if they would. “Where were you?”
Only someone who’d witnessed at least part of Tamsin’s problem would have understood her reaction.
“Oh, my God,” she moaned. “Not again!”
“Again?” I repeated, because that hadn’t been quite what I expected. Then, I said more harshly,
“No, no. I just mean… the whole cycle. You know, I called you about the squirrel being left hanging on my front porch,” she said tremulously, her shaking hand pointing to Claude.
“I know about your past problems,” Detective Stokes said curtly. Claude rumbled, “I’d gotten a sort of outline picture.” Tamsin nodded. She made an effort to control her ragged breathing and tears.
After a moment, she went on. “I was hiding in the therapy room,” she confessed. She looked at my face as if it were up to me to absolve her of this piece of self-preservation.
“Saralynn got there early so I could give her my little orientation speech. I said hi to her and then I remembered I’d left some papers in the therapy room, so I went in there to fetch them, and while I was in there, I heard… I heard…”
“You heard the woman being killed?”
Tamsin nodded. “And I shut the door,” she said, and shuddered and gasped. “As quiet as I could, I shut the door and then I locked it.”
That was hard to swallow. We had ventured into a building we thought contained danger, to help Tamsin. But from her own account, Tamsin wouldn’t open the door to try to save a woman’s life. I made myself choke this knowledge down, shove it aside. Fear could make you do almost anything: I had known fear before, and I was willing to bet this wasn’t Tamsin’s first experience of it. “Didn’t you hear Janet come in?” My voice was as even as I could make it.
“That room’s pretty soundproof,” she said, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes. “I thought I heard someone calling down the hall, but for all I knew it was the same person who’d killed poor Saralynn, so I was too scared to answer. That was Janet, I guess. Then, later, I heard other sounds, other people.”
I’d have said we’d made enough noise to establish our identities, but it wasn’t my business. Now that I knew the situation was more or less under control, I would be glad to leave, if Claude would give me a green light. I was finding that the idea of Tamsin cowering in a safe, locked room-while one woman was killed and another popped over the head- was not agreeing with me.
I had opened my mouth to ask Claude if I could go when another car pulled into the parking lot, toward the back where the police cars weren’t as thick. Cliff Eggers sprang out as though he’d been ejected. He hurried to his wife.
“Tamsin!” he cried. “Are you all right?”
“Cliff!” Our therapist hurled herself into the big man’s arms and sobbed against his chest. “I can’t stand this
