“Ma’am? You need to move on,” he said apologetically. He laid his hand on the door. He was wearing a heavy gold ring, and he tapped it against the car door as he stared off at the paramedics’ activities.
I looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. He wasn’t tall, or fat, or pumped, or handsome. In fact, he was a plain pale man with freckles and red hair, a narrow mouth, and light green eyes that were much the color of a Coke bottle. But there was intelligence there, and assurance, too, and then there was the odd coincidence of his always being at hand whenever I was with Detective Stokes.
“Then you will have to tell Detective Stokes that you told me to go home, since she told me to stay right here,” I said.
We took each other’s measure.
“Oh, really,” he said.
“Really.”
“Lily Bard, isn’t it?”
“You know who I am?” People never looked at me in the same way once they knew. There was always some added element there: pity, or horror, or a kind of prurient wonder- sometimes even disgust. Curiosity, too. McClanahan was one of the curious ones.
“Yes. Why did the detective ask you to wait here?”
“I have no idea.” I suspected she’d just plain forgotten she didn’t need me any more, but I held the knowledge to myself.
He turned away.
“Where are you from?”
It was his turn to jump. “I haven’t lived here long,” he said noncommittally. His bottle green eyes were steady and calm.
“You’re not…” But I had to stop. To say, “You’re not an ordinary cop,” would be unbearably patronizing, but it was true that Officer McClanahan was out of the general run of small town cop. He wasn’t from around here; he wasn’t from below the Mason-Dixon Line at all, or I’d lost my ear completely. Granted, the accents I heard every day were far more watered down than the ones I’d heard in my youth; a mobile population and television were taking care of that.
“Yes, ma’am?” He waited, looking faintly amused.
“I’ll leave,” I said, and started the car. I had lost my taste for sparring with this man. “If Detective Stokes needs me to come back, I’ll be at home.”
“Not working today?”
“No.”
“No cleaning jobs?”
“No.”
“Been ill?” He seemed curious, mildly amused.
“I lost a baby,” I said. I knew I was trying to erase “Lily Bard, the victim” from his mental pigeonhole, but replacing that version of me with “Lily Bard, grieving Madonna” was not much better. If I’d been fully back to myself, I would’ve kept my mouth shut.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. His words were stiff, but his tone was sincere enough to appease me.
“Good-bye,” I said, and I pulled away. I went to Shakespeare’s Cinema Video Rental Palace, picked out three old movies, and drove home to watch them all.
Maybe I would take up crocheting.
Chapter Nine
Bobo Winthrop stopped by that night. He knew the whole story about Cliff Eggers.
“There was a stake hidden under the steps,” he told me, the relish of the young in his voice. We were sitting on my front steps, which are small and very public. I wanted the public part. There were good reasons I should not be along in a private place with Bobo. I had my arms around my knees, trying to ignore the ache in the pit of my stomach and the unpredictable flares of misery.
“Stake a-k-e, not steak e-a-k?”
He laughed. “A-k-e. Sharpened and planted in the dirt under the steps, so when the step gave way, his leg would go down into the area and be stuck by the stake.” He pushed his blond hair out of his face. He’d come from karate class, and he was now in his
“I guess that would’ve happened to anyone’s leg,” I suggested.
“Oh. Well, yeah, I guess so. If his wife had come home before he did, she would’ve gotten hurt instead of him.”
I hadn’t thought of that, and I winced as I pictured Tamsin going through the step and being impaled on the stake. “Did he have to stay at the hospital?” I figured if Bobo knew all this, maybe he knew even more.
“Nope, they sent him home. It was really an ugly wound, Mary Frances’s aunt told me-she’s an emergency room nurse, Mrs. Powell is-and she said it looked worse than it really was. But it’s going to be really sore.” Mary Frances was one of Bobo’s former girlfriends. He had a talent for remaining on their good side.
Janet Shook came jogging down the street then, her small square face set in its determined mode, and her swinging brown hair darkened with sweat around her ears and temples.
“Stop and visit for a minute,” I called, and she glanced at a watch on her left wrist and then cast herself down on the grass. “Want a lawn chair?”
“No, no,” she panted. “The grass feels good. I needed to stop anyway. I’m still not a hundred percent after that knock on the head. And I had karate class, tonight. You should have been there, Lily. Bobo and I got to teach two ladies in their sixties how to stand in
Janet and Bobo began a conversation about running- wearing the right shoes, mapping your route, maximizing your running time.
I laid my cheek on my knee and closed my eyes, letting the two familiar voices wash over me. At the end of a day in which I’d done mighty little, I managed to feel quite tired. I was considering Cliff’s leg going through the step-what a shock that must have been!-and the hostile visit of Detective Stokes. I mulled over green-eyed Officer McClanahan. I wondered if he’d seen the body of poor Saralynn Kleinhoff, if he’d looked at her with the same cool curiosity with which he’d eyed me.
Surely his face was familiar to me, too? Surely I had seen him before? I had, I was sure, after a moment’s further thought. I began to rummage around in my memory. He hadn’t been in a police uniform. Something about a dog, surely? A dog, a small dog…
“Lily?” Janet was saying.
“What?”
“You were really daydreaming,” she said, sounding more than a little worried. “You feeling okay?”
“Oh, yes, fine. I was just trying to remember something, one of those little things that nags at the edges of your mind.”
“What Marshall doesn’t realize,” Bobo said to Janet, evidently resuming a conversation that my abstraction had interrupted, “is that Shakespeare needs a different kind of sporting goods store.”
I could feel my eyebrows crawl up my forehead. This, from a young man whose father owned a sporting goods store so large there was a plan to start producing a catalog.
“Oh, I agree!” Janet’s hands flew up in the air to measure her agreement. “Why should I have to drive over to Montrose to get my workout pants? Why shouldn’t the kids taking jazz at Syndi Swayze’s be able to get their kneepads here? I mean, there are some things
I’d never seen Janet so animated. And she sounded younger. How old could she be? Wish some astonishment, I realized Janet was at least seven years younger than I was.
“So, are you totally satisfied with your job?” Bobo asked, out of the blue.
“Well.” Janet scrunched up her face. “You know how it is. I’ve run Safe After School for four years now, and I feel like I’ve got it down. I’m restless. But I don’t want to teach school, which is the only thing I’m trained for.”
