would mean Tamsin has been responsible for the whole thing.”
“Or it could mean that whoever is guilty looks innocent.”
“Whoever loves Tamsin actually hates her.”
That gave us both a jolt. We looked at each other. “Who loves Tamsin?” Jack asked, almost in a whisper.
“Cliff loves Tamsin.”
After a wide-eyed moment, we both shook our heads in disbelief.
“Nah,” I said. “Did you see how he cried when he picked her up in the parking lot after Saralynn was murdered? And the gash on his leg after he fell through the step?”
“Let’s go look at their driveway,” Jack said.
We walked, because it was beautiful, and because it might make the visit look less rehearsed. But we need not have been concerned about that; no one was home at the house on Compton Street.
Up the driveway we went, as though we’d been invited. We gave a perfunctory knock to the front door, and then turned away to enact the attack of the night before.
“You be Cliff,” I told Jack. “Remember, your leg is still sore from going through the steps.” Jack pretended to emerge from the house. He limped down the front steps, and walked slowly over to where the couple parked their cars. Jack got his keys out, as someone naturally would if they expected to drive off. Then he stopped. I came up behind him as quietly as possible, but the driveway was loose gravel. Even the grass strip running between the driveway and the hedge was full of the stuff.
“I can hear you coming a mile away,” he said over his shoulder. “No way anyone snuck up on Cliff.”
Of course, if you heard someone coming up behind you when you were outside, you’d turn around to look. Anyone would. You wouldn’t just keep on with what you were doing.
But I raised my hand, again pantomiming the knifing. This time, I crouched a little until I approximated Tamsin’s height. I made an awkward swing, and was very close to the wound area as Carrie had described it to me. But the angle was all wrong, straight down instead of left-to-right. “That didn’t work,” I told Jack, almost cheerfully.
“You know, and I know, that when someone’s coming up behind you, you’re going to turn around to see what they want.” Jack’s face was getting grimmer and grimmer as he spoke. “And if the stabber was really determined he’d stick around and try again.”
Jack turned his back to me again. He bent his hand up behind his back as far as he could bend it. He had a pocketknife clenched in his right fist, with the end pointing down. Jack made a chopping, downward motion. The point of the knife grazed his rump in an arc from left to right. If he hadn’t been careful, it would’ve gouged the flesh of his right hip.
It was exactly as Carrie had described the wound.
“Oh, no, Jack.” I felt almost as though I was going to cry, and I couldn’t say why.
“It might not be that way,” Jack said. “But it looks like it to me.”
“So what’d he do with it?” I asked. “Put it in his pocket?”
“They’d find it at the hospital,” Jack said. He pantomimed the self-mutilation again, he put out a hand to rest on an imaginary car, and with the other he pitched his pocketknife into the depths of the hedge. Then we both got down on our hands and knees and searched, very carefully.
Jack found a splotch of dried blood in the bed of old leaves below the hedge, right after I’d retrieved his knife.
“Of course, his attacker could’ve thrown it in here and retrieved it later. It didn’t have to be Cliff that did the tossing and retrieving,” Jack said.
I nodded. I felt about twenty years older, all in a flash. This was betrayal on a grand scale. And on an incredibly mean scale, too.
“Do you think Claude has figured this out?” Jack and I strode down the sidewalk. Jack had thrust his hands in his pockets and he was scowling. “Or do you think he’s been too distracted by the upheaval in his department?”
We stopped at the next corner. Tamsin was at the stop sign facing us, and through the windshield of her car I could tell she was looking haggard. The plump and assured woman I’d met a few weeks earlier had simply vanished.
We’d finished our little experiment just in time. She waved us through the intersection, and tried to summon up a smile for us, but it failed. We nodded and kept on walking. I felt like a traitor to her. First I thought she’d been persecuting herself, and now I suspected her husband was her tormentor.
“We have to go talk to Claude,” I said.
Jack nodded unenthusiastically. Neither of us is happy in a police station. Since my ordeal, I’d become shy of the police, who were first to initiate me into the range of human reactions to my victimization that I now knew so well. And Jack is still ostracized by some cops for his involvement in the scandal that led to his leaving the force in Memphis.
Claude was in and willing to see us. I had half hoped he’d be out fighting crime or swamped in paperwork.
We went into his office. Claude looked puzzled, but glad to see us, a reaction so far off base that I came pretty close to turning around and leaving. But conscience demanded that we take the wooden chairs in front of Claude’s old desk and state our business.
I glanced at Jack, took a deep breath, and launched in to our theory.
Claude said, when he was sure I’d finished, “That’s pretty interesting stuff, there. What do you have to prove it?”
My heart sank. “You haven’t found any evidence to point to Cliff, or Tamsin… or anyone else?”
“You mean, in general? Or in the death of Saralynn Kleinhoff? In the murder of my police officer? Let’s just take Saralynn’s murder. Let’s see,” Claude rumbled, scooting lower in his chair and crossing his ankles. “Got to be someone that had a key to the health center. That’s forty present and past employees, plus their families.”
I hadn’t even thought of that.
“Got to be someone who doesn’t mind getting their hands messy. Well, who knows? My grandmother, the most finicky woman on God’s green earth, could butcher a chicken as fast as you can say Jack Robinson,” Claude continued. “Got to be someone with a personal dislike of Tamsin Lynd. Mental health workers get all kinds of enemies, right? And as for thinking it has to be the same person here as was stalking her in Illinois-well, why? Could be a copycat. Doesn’t have to be someone who followed her down here. As far as hanging the squirrel, anyone could’ve done that at any time. You could tie up the squirrel ahead of time and take it over there, get it strung on the branch in a minute or less.”
This wasn’t going the way I’d hoped. Jack was looking pretty bleak, too.
“Then, Gerry. Now that I know about Gerry, I can understand a lot of things about him better. But that doesn’t stop me from being mad at him for deceiving me, and I’ll bet a lot of other people were mad at him, too. Just because he told you that he was watching Tamsin’s house doesn’t mean that was why he was killed. And Cliff is the only one giving Tamsin an alibi for that one; he says she was in the shower. Well, maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t.”
I closed my eyes and wished I were somewhere else.
“About this scenario you two have worked out-you may be right. May be. But if Cliff did stab himself, that doesn’t necessarily mean he killed Saralynn and Gerry. That doesn’t mean he’s been terrorizing his own wife. We have no proof either way.”
“No forensic evidence?” Jack was leaning forward in his chair.
“There were fibers on Saralynn that came from a pair of slacks a lot like the ones Cliff was wearing that day. Khaki Dockers. Everyone’s got a pair of those. And Cliff readily told us that he’d been in there earlier in the day, when he’d brought Tamsin her lunch. Fibers could’ve been left there then.”
“Say we’re right,” Jack said. “Say that the one behind everything is Cliff. What do you think he’ll do next?”
My eyes flicked to Claude, who was thinking the matter over.
“If he follows his pattern, he’ll quit. They’ll move. It’ll start all over again.”
Jack nodded.
Claude continued, his face looking as seamed and careworn as that of a man ten years older. “But he’s escalated and escalated. From nasty pranks, to small deaths like the squirrel, to human deaths like Saralynn’s and Gerry’s. What could be left? Next time, I reckon he’ll try to kill her.”
