killing me. I think Cliff planned to beat me to death.” She got right in my face to confide this. If I’d had the energy, the hair would have been lifting on my neck. “He could count on the investigators going through my patients, finding-this man-and arresting him.”
“And?” If I didn’t try to say too much, it came out okay. My legs were slowly feeling a little more functional. Cliff was moving a little more. She’d bound his hands in front, which wasn’t too competent. He was picking at the duct tape across his mouth.
“We moved once, in the Cleveland area, after I found a snake nailed to the door. Moving didn’t help. Then, as I’ve come to realize these past few days, Cliff stretched his fun out a little too long. Charles, my patient, died in a bar fight. Cliff had to stop. Of course, I didn’t put two and two together then.” Her face became blank, her eyes opaque. “I really thought Cliff suggested this move to Shakespeare because he was concerned about me. He gave up his business and everything to move south with me, and I believed we would be happy here. I didn’t put Charles’s death together with the end of the persecution, the end of the horrible messages on the answering machine. But Cliff told me just a few minutes ago that the police up there did make the connection, did mention-to
Cliff had succeeded in ungagging himself. “Lily,” he said in a weak voice, “don’t let her kill me.”
I didn’t even glance at him. “Yeah?” I said to Tamsin, to encourage her to talk. The longer she talked, the more time I had to recover.
“So we decided the police had been wrong. That someone else had followed me down here. It still didn’t occur to me to suspect the most obvious person.” She shook her head at her own naivetй. “We figured-that is, I figured, and Cliff pretended to-that since the calls only came when Cliff was gone, that meant the guy was watching me, knew when I was alone. That made it more scary. Notes slid under the door, notes in my clothes-oh, God!” She shuddered and wept.
My sympathy would have been deeper if I hadn’t been sitting there in wet pants.
“Lily,” Cliff said, “I didn’t do those things. I love my wife… even though she planted the stake in the step for me to get hurt on. If you’ll just let me go, we can work this out.” He was plucking awkwardly at the duct tape around his wrists, but that was going to be much harder.
I said, “Tamsin, why’d you call me here?”
“Because you can kill him.”
I shook my head.
“You can kill him,” she repeated persuasively. “You killed a man before. This one deserves it, too. Think of what he’s done to me. He shouldn’t live!” Her face grew crafty. “What if he gets off and does this to someone else? I know from our therapy group that you have a sense of justice.”
Unhampered by the rules of law, she meant.
“You could kill him for me. We’d all be safer.”
She had condensed Cliff into every man who’d hurt a woman.
“Please do this for me! My mind is too fragile, too delicate, to sustain killing him.” She made it sound like her mind was made out of old lace. “I just don’t have the guts, the determination. I need you to do this favor for another woman.” The empty hand touched her chest. “Help your sister out.”
“You-stunned me.”
“I was afraid you’d run away before I could talk to you if I didn’t do something,” she told me, and her voice was so reasonable that I winced. “I know you, from the group. You wouldn’t sit and listen to me unless I made you. Would you? Just think about it, Lily. You have to understand this. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. He took everything away from me. I think he did something to make me lose the baby. I don’t believe in anything any more.”
And she should have made him unconscious, because he was eyeing me frantically, shaking his head to deny what she was telling me. “Lily, Tamsin has just lost her mind. Don’t cater to her when she’s clearly off her rocker. I love my wife, and I’ve done everything I can to help her through this. Please don’t let her do something worse than this.” I noticed he was making progress on loosening the duct tape binding his wrists. It was difficult, but he was managing. The next time I wanted to secure someone, I wouldn’t call Tamsin to do the securing.
Tamsin went on enumerating her wrongs. Since I was still too weak to move, I had plenty of time to think. I thought it was pretty lucky their baby hadn’t been born, whatever had caused the miscarriage. What if what Tamsin was telling me wasn’t true? She was deeply disturbed. She might be mistaken, and she might just be a liar. What if she just wanted an excuse to kill Cliff, with a reasonable chance of an acquittal, or at the most a light sentence? Pretending he’d confessed his long persecution of her, pretending he’d told her he’d killed Saralynn and Gerry McClanahan, would provide an excellent story to tell a jury.
Especially with a witness like me.
She could have no serious hope that I would take the bait and do Cliff in, but she could provide a good case for herself if I was there to witness her frenzy and her anguish, even if she had to immobilize me to make me watch it. I was pretty sure Tamsin was not quite as crazy as she was making out; I was pretty sure she was making a case for temporary insanity.
But I wasn’t
The only certainty I had was that I hated Tamsin, my counselor, who was twisting what she’d extracted from our therapy sessions to serve her own ends: my disregard for the letter of the law, my strong sense of justice. She’d ignored other things about me that were just as important, like my absolute and total hatred of people who made me feel helpless, my loathing of being physically unclean, and my dislike of being bested.
“What happened in your office when Saralynn was killed?” I asked. My speech was better, too.
“I swear to God, exactly what I told the police,” Tamsin said.
“You knew I was there,” Cliff said, his voice ragged. “You knew someone was killing Saralynn. And you hid. I wondered the whole time, does she even care enough to come out? If she’ll come out, if she’ll be brave, I won’t finish… and she yelled for you, Tamsin. You heard her. And you stayed shut in that conference room, doing nothing.”
“Lily, he’s trying to take you in just like he took me!” She was all but wailing, rocking back and forth, the stun gun still in her hand.
“You knew she was being killed,” Cliff repeated, “and you knew it was me.”
Tamsin was breathing like she’d been running, and she was pale and sweating.
“I hear what you’re saying,” I said, unable to stop myself from registering that Tamsin wasn’t the only one who had had a sad disillusionment here.
I was feeling stronger by the minute. I was going to take that stun gun away from her if I had to beat her senseless to do it. In fact, that was starting to sound very appealing.
“I’ll help you out, Tamsin,” I said, staring into Cliff’s eyes. I noticed, as I pulled myself up to my knees, that Cliff had made great progress unwrapping his wrists. In a minute, he would be much more of a factor than he was right now. I gripped the arm of a couch, and pushed myself up. I thought my muscles would all work. Upright had never felt so good.
Cliff began rolling around on the open floor like a giant bowling pin. He had given up plucking subtly at his wrist bindings. His fingers were tearing at the last wraparound of the silver tape, yanking so hard they sometimes broke his skin.
Tamsin, standing in the open doorway, looked absolutely crazed. “Kill him, Lily!” she shrieked. “Kill him kill him kill him!”
They were both using up valuable oxygen, as far as I was concerned. While Tamsin had been enumerating her woes earlier, I’d been learning the room. A sofa and an armchair divided by a small table, a television on an oak stand, and my cleaning caddy; and in it, my cell phone. It was awfully close to Tamsin, too close, I’d decided. I wouldn’t willingly get within range of that stun gun again. Somewhat closer, there was a telephone on the table between the couch and the chair.
I snatched up the phone and hit nine one one before Cliff crashed into me from behind. I went sprawling on the couch, rapping my nose sharply on the edge of the wooden arm. Suddenly there was blood everywhere, and a blinding pain.
I scrambled up as quickly as the pain permitted. Tamsin was shrieking and darting at Cliff with the stun gun,
