because he finally fell asleep and she didn’t know what to do with herself.”
I nodded.
“Yeah.” Marshall did some stretches, and then we did our second set of pushups. “I guess you knew she has been followed by this crazy person,” he said, when we were through.
“Yeah, I heard about that,” I said carefully. “Hard to believe in a town this size, we wouldn’t notice someone new.”
Marshall turned an inquiring face to me as we assumed the pushup position for the third and last time. “That’s true,” he said, “but what other explanation is there? I guess you’ve thought of something.”
“What if it’s her?” I asked.
Marshall gave a derisive snort. “Yeah, right. She’s a nice enough woman but she doesn’t have enough grit in her to say boo to a goose. You think she’s doing this to herself so she can get a lot of sympathy as Velma Victim? That seems a little far-fetched.”
I shrugged as I stood up and shook my arms out to relieve the ache. “Who else could it be?” I really wanted to know what Marshall was thinking.
“I hadn’t given it a thought,” he said. “Ah… Cliff, but he’d hardly want to stab himself in the back, and he’s nuts about Tamsin. Okay, not him… well, what about the new police detective? The tall black woman?”
“She worked on Tamsin’s case when Tamsin lived in Ohio,” I said. “If Stokes stabbed Cliff, believe me, he’d be dead.”
I was serious, but Marshall laughed as though I were joking.
“There was the other new cop, the patrolman, but he’s dead now, too,” Marshall said, thinking out loud. “Oh, there’s Jack! He’s new in town.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” I said, my voice showing clearly how unfunny I found this.
“And there’s the guy that’s started dating my ex.”
“I thought Thea was getting married.”
“Me, too. But he got to know her a little too well.”
“And now she’s dating someone else?”
“Sure. You know Thea. She’s nothing if not flexible, when it comes to men.”
I disliked Thea intensely. She gave women a bad name.
“Who’s the guy?”
“The new mortician at the funeral home.”
“Oh, that’s right up Thea’s alley,” I said. “I bet she loves that.”
Marshall laughed again, but less happily. This time he knew I was serious, and he agreed with me. Thea had a cruel and macabre streak, and making love in a funeral home would suit her sexual playbook, if all I’d heard were true. “But he and Thea were in Branson when Saralynn Kleinhoff was killed,” Marshall said.
So I’d developed and eliminated a suspect in the space of five minutes. I was sure all these crimes had been committed by one person. Anything else would have been too much of a coincidence.
Not that I didn’t believe in coincidence. I did. But I thought it would be stretching, in this case, to even entertain it as a possibility.
Jack’s car was in the driveway when I got home. I was very glad to see it there.
He was cooking something when I went into the kitchen, something that smelled good.
“Bacon sandwiches for lunch. I have tomatoes picked right off the vine,” he told me, his voice unmistakably smug.
I don’t eat much bacon, since it’s not good for you, but a bacon and fresh tomato sandwich was just too good to pass up.
“Where’d you get ‘em?” There were at least six tomatoes on the kitchen counter. Two were green.
“From Aunt Betty,” he said. “Can we have fried green tomatoes tonight?”
Two fried things in one day was really a lot, but I nodded. I stood behind him, watching him cook.
“Hold still,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Pretend to stab you.”
“I guess that wasn’t the answer I was wanting to hear.” But Jack obligingly stood still.
I raised my hand above my head as though it held a knife pointing downward. My hand whizzed through the air, and I mentally marked the point at which the blade would have grazed Jack’s back.
“Hmmm.”
“Can I help?” Jack asked. He picked some of the bacon out of the skillet with some small tongs, and put the bacon to drain on a pad of paper towels. I got out the small cutting board and a knife, and began to slice a tomato.
“Let me stab you again,” I said, and this time, with the knife in hand, I held it straight out in front of me. The wound Carrie had described simply couldn’t be made, if the knife was held like this.
While Jack put ice in two glasses, I explained what I was doing.
“Okay, let me try.” He turned me around, and taking the precaution of using a dull table knife, he began to experiment. “A graze at the top, a true stab at the bottom, going from the left side of the back to the right.” he said. “So I think you’re right, it would have to be an overhand blow.”
“An overhand blow from someone much shorter, right?” I put our plates on the table and folded a paper napkin beside each plate. Jack got out the bread and mayonnaise, my mother’s homemade. “Cliff’s a little taller than you, huh?” Jack nodded, as he used a fork to put tomato slices on his bread. “Maybe six feet?”
Jack said, “Just barely.”
I could think of no one involved in the episodes who was short, besides a couple of the women in the group, and Tamsin herself. “Maybe Tamsin did it by accident? And they were too embarrassed to say it?”
Jack even looked good to me when he chewed, which is one of the more unattractive activities for a human being. He swallowed. “She could have mistaken Cliff for someone else, I guess, but there’s a streetlight practically in front of their house. He was attacked in the driveway, right? So how, in good light and in a place where she would expect him to be, could she knife him by accident?”
“There’s only one other new person in town,” I said, not able to think of any rebuttal. I told Jack about my conversation with Marshall, about Thea’s new lover. Jack said, “I’ve met him. He runs in the evening.”
“Joel McCorkindale does, too.” I tried to make something of that. Joel ran, Talbot ran, Joel’s wife was in the support group, and she was short. That didn’t add up to anything. This made as little sense as one of those logic problems the first time you read it through. “If Mary has a poodle, and Mary is taller than Sarah and Brenda, and Brenda’s dog is brown, read the following statements to figure out who has the dachshund.” Besides, Sandy McCorkindale might be half nuts, but I simply could not picture her catching a squirrel and hanging it in a tree. It was actually easier to imagine Sandy stabbing someone.
We ate in silence, enjoying our first summer BLT. While we washed the dishes, I asked Jack what would happen next.
“I don’t know. Stalking’s just not that common a crime, and I have no big backlog of experience with it. When I first started my apprenticeship, Roy was handling a case a little like this. The woman couldn’t get the police to take her seriously, because the intruder wasn’t doing anything to her.”
“Intruder?”
“Yeah, he was actually coming into her apartment while she was gone, sifting through her stuff. Leaving her presents.”
I made a face. Disgusting and scary.
“I agree.” Jack looked grim as he scrubbed the skillet. “Finally, she scratched up enough money to pay for around-the-clock surveillance. The spot-checking we were doing just wasn’t effective. But it didn’t take long after that. We caught him jacking off on her underwear the second day. It was her apartment manager. It was a tough case to take to court, because he had a legal key.”
“Did you win?”
“Yes. But of course she had to move, and she found she couldn’t stay in the city even after she’d moved. So he got a slap on the wrist, and her life was changed dramatically.”
Gee, that sounded familiar. I had only heard stories like that about a million times. I sighed, and asked Jack what he planned for that afternoon.
