distress.
“Oh, Lily!” Tamsin took a long, shuddering breath, and she appeared to be trying to pull herself together in the presence of a client. “I’m sorry,” she said, though damned if I could think for what. “This is just very upsetting.”
“Sure it is,” Jack agreed. “Don’t you think we ought to call the police, Ms. Lynd?”
“Oh, we’ll call them. We always do. But they can’t do anything,” her husband said, with sudden violence. He ran a big hand across his face. He had one of those neatly trimmed beards that frames the mouth. “They couldn’t do anything before. They won’t do anything now.” Cliff Eggers’s voice was choked and unsteady. He was fumbling with the keys to the door and he managed to open it.
They stepped in their hall, and Tamsin beckoned me in behind them. I caught a glimpse of a large, friendly room. There were pictures hung over an antique chest to the right of the door. In the framed grouping I saw a wedding picture with Tamsin in full white regalia, and her husband’s business college diploma. There was a big brass bowl of potpourri on the chest, and my nose began to stop up almost instantly.
Tamsin said, “We’ll call them tomorrow morning.” Her husband nodded. Then he turned back to us. “We appreciate your coming to help us. I’m sorry to involve you in something so unpleasant.”
“Excuse us, please,” Tamsin said. She was obviously just barely containing her anguish. I felt she knew she’d made a mistake asking us in, that she was just waiting for us to leave so she could drop that facade, crumble completely.
“Of course,” Jack said instantly. He looked at Cliff. “Would you like us to…” and he nodded toward the squirrel.
“Yes,” Cliff said with great relief. “That would be very kind. The garbage can is at the rear of the backyard, by the hedge.”
We stepped back out on the porch, and Cliff and Tamsin had closed the door before Jack and I chanced looking at each other.
“Huh?” I said, finally.
“Double huh,” Jack said. He fished a pocketknife out of his jeans and leaned over the waist-high railing to cut the string. Holding the little corpse at arm’s length, he went down the steps and around the house to the garbage can. Cliff’s telling Jack that the garbage can was “by the hedge” was unnecessary, since everything in the Eggers- Lynd yard was “by the hedge.” It was an older home, and the original owners had believed in planting. The front yard was open to the street, but the clipped thick growth followed the property line down both sides and across the back of the yard. The surrounding greenery gave the yard a feeling of enclosure. While I waited, I thought I heard voices, so I went around the house to look into the backyard. In the darkness by the hedge at the rear of the property, I saw two figures.
Jack came back after a few more seconds. “Their neighbor was outside, wanted to know what had happened,” he explained. “He’s a town cop, so at least law enforcement will know something about this.” I could tell Jack had suspected Cliff Eggers wouldn’t call about the incident.
I wondered belatedly if I should have tried to deduce something from the state of the squirrel’s body. But I was clueless about squirrel metabolism, especially in this heat, and it would be way beyond me to try to estimate how long the poor critter had been dead. After a last glance at the blood, and a pang of regret that I had nothing with which to swab it up, I joined Jack on the driveway and we resumed our walk.
We didn’t say anything else until we were a block away from the house, and then it wasn’t much. Someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd, and from all the cues in the conversation we’d had with the couple, this persecution had been going on for some time. If Tamsin and her husband were unwilling to ask for help, what could be done?
“Nothing,” I concluded, straightening up after washing my face in the bathroom sink.
Jack picked up on that directly. “I guess not,” he agreed. “And you watch your step around her. I think this therapy group is good for you, but I don’t want you catching some kind of collateral fallout when her situation implodes.”
As I composed myself for sleep thirty minutes later, I found myself thinking that it hardly seemed fair that Tamsin had to listen to the group’s problems, while her own were kept swept under the rug of her marriage. I reminded myself that, after all, Tamsin was getting paid to do her job, and she had been trained to cope with the inevitable depression that must follow hearing so many tales of misery and evil.
Jack wasn’t yet asleep, so I told him what I’d been thinking.
“She listens to a lot of bad stuff, yeah,” he said, his voice quiet, coming out of the darkness. “But look at the courage, look at the toughness. The determination. She hears that, too. Look how brave you all are.”
I couldn’t say anything at all. My throat clogged. I was glad it was dark. At last, I was able to pat Jack’s shoulder; and a minute later, I heard by his breathing that he was asleep. Before it could overcome me, too, I thought,
That was a fine reason.
Chapter Three
By my third therapy session, Tuesday night was no longer a time I dreaded.
I’d had hours sitting in a car, standing in a convenience store, and drifting around a mall-all in pursuit of the Worker’s Comp. claimant-to analyze our counseling sessions. I had to admit I couldn’t tell if Tamsin Lynd was following some kind of master plan in directing us along the path to recovery. It seemed to me that often we just talked at random; though from time to time I could discern Tamsin’s fine hand directing us.
Not one of the women in the group was someone I would’ve picked for a friend, with the exception of Janet Shook. Sandy McCorkindale made me particularly edgy. She tried very hard to be the unflawed preacher’s wife, and she very nearly succeeded. Her veneer of good modest clothes and good modest makeup, backed by an almost frenzied determination to keep the smooth surface intact, was maintained at a tremendous, secret cost. I had lived too close to the edge of despair and mental illness not to recognize it in others, and Sandy McCorkindale was a walking volcano. I was willing to bet her family was used to living on tiptoe, perhaps even quite unaware they were doing so.
The other women were OK. I’d gradually learned their personal histories. In a town the size of Shakespeare, keeping identities a secret was impossible. For example, not only did I know that Carla (of the croaking voice) was Carla Preston, I knew that her dad had retired from Shakespeare Drilling and Exploration, and her mom took the lunch money at the elementary school cafeteria. I knew Carla smoked like a chimney when she went out the back door of the Health Center, she’d been married three times, and she said everything she thought. She’d become a grandmother when she was thirty-five.
Melanie Kleinhoff no longer looked quite as sullen, and despite her youth and pale doughy looks, she set herself goals and met them (no matter how difficult) to the point of idiocy. She had never graduated from high school and she was still married to the man whose brother had raped her. Firella Bale, probably the most educated of all of us-with the exception of our counselor-seemed baffled sometimes by how to fit in; she was black, she was smart and deliberate, she had taught others, and she worked in a position of authority. She was a single mother and her son was in the army.
Sandy, Janet, and I had never doubted that we could share our problems with a woman of another race. Tamsin seemed a little more careful of Carla and Melanie. We would all have known right away if Carla was uncomfortable with Firella, since Carla had few thoughts she didn’t set right out in front of us. Luckily, she seemed to have passed that particular rock in the road. Melanie hadn’t, and we could watch her prejudice struggle with her good sense and her own kindness. Our common fate transcended our color or economic status or education, but that was easier for some of us to acknowledge than others.
I had neither witnessed any more incidents nor heard any rumors about Tamsin and her husband. I had not spoken a word about what Jack and I had seen that evening while we were out walking. As far as I could tell, no one in Shakespeare knew that someone was stalking our counselor.
Sandy McCorkindale was waiting outside when I arrived for our third evening together. While I knew more about Sandy’s life than I knew about almost any of the others-I’d met her husband, seen her sons, worked in her
