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.
Chapter Five
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 own?”
“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
“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
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.
