“A pretty good one.”
“How do you figure that?”
I said carefully, “Those of us who weren’t talking at the beginning are talking now. I don’t know how she did it, and maybe she didn’t have a lot to do with it at all, but it’s a fact that we’re all dealing with what happened to us, in some way or another.” There, hadn’t I put that well?
“You think I’d fit in the group?”
“No.”
“Why not? Cause I’m Yankee? Cause I’m black?”
“Tamsin’s a Yankee. Firella is black.”
“Then why?”
“Because you haven’t been raped.”
“How do you know that?”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t have to worry about fitting in with the counseling group if you had been raped.” And that mark just wasn’t on her, though I wasn’t about to say that. She’d ask me how I knew, and I just couldn’t tell her. The mark was not on her.
“So, in your opinion, how can I get close to this woman?”
“Why do you want to?”
“I need to watch her.”
I was getting a growing feeling of doom.
“It’s her,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s her. You took a leave of absence from the Cleveland force to watch her.”
“How did you know that?”
I shrugged.
“You better tell me now.”
“Jack made a few phone calls.” I didn’t want her to think I’d had a look at her personnel records or learned something out of school from Claude.
She sat back in her chair, tall and black and tense and angry.
“I know about you, too.”
“Most people do.”
She didn’t like that. I didn’t like her. I felt a certain grudging admiration for someone who would pursue a case with such relentless determination. At the same time, it seemed kind of nuts. Like the man who’d pursued Jean Valjean… what was his name? Inspector… Javert, that was it.
“What about this has you so hooked?” I asked, in honest puzzlement.
“I think she’s doing it herself,” Alicia Stokes said. She sat forward, her long hands capping her knees, her Coke forgotten on the table beside her. “I think she’s fooling everyone, and I can’t let her get away with it. The man- hours we wasted in Cleveland… enough to work four extra cases, cases where people really needed us. As opposed to trying to protect one neurotic woman who’s actually persecuting herself. She had everyone else fooled. Everyone.”
I gave Stokes a long hard look. “You’re wrong,” I said.
“On what basis?”
“She’s done good. She can’t be that crazy. We would know.”
“Oh yeah? You a licensed shrink? You know there have been cases like this before. They’re almost all women. All the men, they feel sorry for the poor persecuted woman. They feel frustrated because they can’t protect her from the evil demon who’s doing this to her. Then it turns out she’s doing it all herself!”
Alicia Stokes certainly believed what she was saying. I looked down at my hands, considering. I was trying to reconfigure my world, trying to see Tamsin as Stokes saw her. Tamsin, with her medical transcriptionist husband and her little old house. Tamsin, with her nice conservative clothes and her plump belly, her good mind, her compassionate nature. Nothing I got from Tamsin added up to the kind of emotional horror that could plan and execute such clever schemes against herself.
But I could be wrong. As the detective had pointed out, I was no therapist.
What if Stokes was right? The consequences-to me, to the whole group-would be devastating. We had all placed our trust in each other and begun to build on that; but the basis of this trust was the foundation laid by Tamsin Lynd.
I looked up to find the detective leaning forward, waiting patiently for me to finish my thoughts.
“Could be, couldn’t it?”
“I guess,” I said, my voice reluctant and unhappy. “I guess you realize that your own behavior is pretty damn fishy.”
Stokes was startled, and almost lost her temper. For a long, tense moment, I could see the war in her face. Then she pinched her lips together, breathed in and out, and collected herself. “I know that,” she said.
“It’s not my business,” I said slowly, surprising myself by telling her what I was thinking, “but what are you going to do when this is over? Sooner or later we will know the truth. The Cleveland Police Department may not take you back. Claude will be very angry when he finds he hired you under false pretenses. How did you get past his checking your references?”
“My superior owed me the biggest favor in the world,” Alicia Stokes said. She put the palms of her big hands together, bumped her chin with the tips of her fingers. I’d seen her make the gesture before, and it seemed to indicate that she was feeling expansive. “So I knew when Claude called him, he’d get a good recommendation from Terry. I passed the physical and psychological tests, no problem.” She smirked. “The others were glad I was going. They wouldn’t say anything-or I might stay.”
I tried not to let my surprise show on my face. Quite a change of heart, here: Stokes was sharing more than I wanted her to. But then I thought, Whom else could she talk to? And she must want to talk, want it desperately.
Detective Stokes needed a good therapy group.
Something twittered in the room. I looked around, startled.
“It’s my phone,” Stokes said. She pulled it from a small pouch clipped to her belt. “Yes?” she said into the unfolded phone, which looked very small in her hand.
Her face became hard as she listened, and the fire burned hotter in her eyes. “I’ll be there,” she said abruptly. The phone went back into the depths of her purse. “Take me to Tamsin Lynd’s house,” she said.
So she’d walked to my place. As I grabbed my keys, I looked back at the detective. Oddly, Stokes looked almost happy-or at least, less angry.
“Is Tamsin all right?” I asked, venturing onto shaky ground.
“Oh, yes, little Miss Counselor is just fine. It’s her husband, Cliff, who’s hurting.” Stokes was positively grinning.
I could find out what had happened without leaving my car, as it turned out. Cliff was on the lawn bleeding, and the ambulance attendants were bent over him, when we arrived within three minutes of the call.
“Stay here,” Alicia ordered, so I sat in the car and watched. I think her goal had been to keep me out of the crime scene, or the situation, whatever it was. If she’d been thinking straight, instead of being so intent on the scene, she would’ve sent me home. What did she need me for, now that I’d provided transportation?
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.
