Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Champion

Four weeks later, he’d been beaten to death in a clearing in the woods north of town.

No one had been arrested for the crime.

“If the rumors are true and Mrs. Glass does bring a suit, you’re sure to be called as witness.” Claude felt obliged to point that out to me, and he wasn’t happy about it, any more than I was.

“I wish we hadn’t started talking about this,” I said, knowing it was futile to say. “If you’re really worried about the future of your police department, thinking it’ll rest on my testimony… I can’t change or shade what I saw. You may not want to be around me.” This wasn’t the right place. I said it too bluntly. And I felt a funny pang when the words left my mouth.

“Is that what you want?” Claude said. His voice was very quiet.

Truth time. “I want to see you if you’re going to be my friend, but I don’t see us becoming lovers. I don’t think that’s right for us.”

“And if I do?” I could see the distance growing in his eyes.

“Claude, I feel comfortable when I’m in your company, but if we have sex that’ll be ruined. I don’t think we can carry this to another dimension.”

“Lily, I’ll always like you,” he said after a long pause. “But I’m at the age and disposition where I’m thinking, I can’t be in law enforcement forever. I want a wife, and a home, and someone to go camping with, someone to decorate the Christmas tree with. That was what I was thinking might happen with you. As I hear it, you’re telling me it’s not gonna.”

God, I hated explaining my emotions.

“I can’t see my way to that, Claude. I just can’t make that leap with you. And if I use up your time trying, you might miss something better.”

“Nothing can be better, Lily. I may find something different, something good. But nothing better.”

“So,” I said quietly. “Here we are in Montrose, have to drive home, have to be with each other. We should have done this in Shakespeare, huh? Then you could go over to your apartment and I could lock my door and we could lick our wounds.”

“I wish I could believe that you have wounds to lick, Lily,” he said. “Let’s go look at some books.”

Of course after the restaurant discussion, the bookstore wasn’t much fun.

I read biographies, mostly; maybe I’m hoping I’ll find the key to making my life lighter by finding out how someone else managed. Or maybe I loved company in my miserable past; I could always find a tougher life than mine. But not tonight.

I found myself thinking not about Claude and myself, but about Darnell Glass.

I glanced at the true crime books, which I cannot stomach any more than I can watch the news on television.

No one would ever write a book about Darnell Glass.

A beating death in Arkansas, especially the beating death of a black male, was not newsworthy, unless whoever’d killed Darnell got arrested and generated some lurid publicity-if the murderer was one of the local ministers maybe, or if Darnell’s death was the first escapade of a flamboyant serial killer.

I had managed to make my way through the newspaper account. The Shakespeare paper did its best to defuse tense situations, but even its brief references to the young man’s long list of injuries made my stomach lurch.

Darnell Glass had suffered a broken jaw, five broken ribs, multiple arm fractures, and the blow that had mercifully killed him, a crushing strike to the skull. He had suffered massive internal injuries consistent with a determined beating.

He’d died surrounded by enemies-in rage, in terror, in disbelief-in an unremarkable clearing in the piney woods.

No one deserved that. Well, I had to amend that thought. I could think of a few people I wouldn’t weep over if they met an identical end. But Darnell Glass, though no saint, was a very smart young man with no criminal record, whose worst crime (apparently) was a bad temper.

“Let’s go,” I said to Claude, and he looked surprised at the shortness of my tone.

All the way back home I kept silent, which Claude perhaps interpreted as regret. Or sulking. Anyway, he gave me a brusque cheek peck on the doorstep that had a sort of chilly finality to it. It seemed to me, watching his broad back retreat, that I’d never see him again. I went inside and looked at the flowers, still beautiful and sweet. I wondered if Claude regretted sending them now. I almost pulled them from the vase to throw away. But that would have been silly, wasteful.

As I prepared for bed, thankful to be alone, I wondered if Marshall’s charge was true. Was I a cold woman?

I could never see myself as cold; self-protective, maybe, but not cold. It seemed to me that underneath the surface, I was always on fire.

I tossed and turned, tried relaxation techniques.

I got up to walk. It was chilly outside now, midnight in late October, and it was windy; before morning it would rain again. I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and Nikes, all dark shades: I was in a hateful mood, and didn’t want anyone to see me. The streetlights at each corner of my street, Track Street, were dispensing their usual feeble nimbus. Claude’s window was dark, as was every window in the apartment building; an early night for tenants old and new. The Shakespeare Combined Church, or SCC as the members called it, was dark except for some security lights. There was very little movement in the town, period. Shakespeare rises early and goes to bed early, except for the men and women who work the late shift at one or two of the fast-food places, and the people who work nights at the mattress factory or the chicken processing plant, which run round the clock.

I went as far as the lower-middle-class neighborhood in which Darnell Glass had grown up, one of Shakespeare’s few mixed-race areas. I passed the little house Glass’s mother, Lanette, had bought when she moved back to Shakespeare from Chicago. It, too, was dark and silent. None of these homes had garages or porte cocheres, so it was easy to see Lanette Glass was not at home.

But I found out where she was.

She was at Mookie Preston’s house.

While I’d been thinking about my curious cleaning stint at Mookie’s that day, I’d drifted in that direction without conscious thought. So I was opposite the house when Lanette Glass emerged. I wasn’t close enough to see her expression, which the deep shadows of the streetlight behind her would have made difficult anyway, but from the way she walked- shoulders hunched, head shaking slightly from side to side, purse clasped hard against her side-Lanette Glass was a woman in trouble, and a troubled woman.

More and more I wondered about the purposes of the mysterious Mookie Preston.

As a cold breeze stirred my hair, I felt some of its chill creep down my spine. Something was brewing in Shakespeare, something sick and dangerous. I’d always felt comfortable about the state of race relations in my adopted town. There were still taboos, plenty of them, probably several of which I wasn’t even conscious. But there were also blacks in managerial positions, blacks who owned comfortable homes. Several clubs and one church were integrated. The public school system seemed to be functioning with little friction, and Lanette Glass was only one of many black teachers.

The habits and prejudices of over a century weren’t going to vanish overnight, or even in thirty years; and I’d always felt that progress, quiet and slow, was being made.

I wondered now if I’d been in a fool’s paradise. I had assumed that my approval of this change was shared by most people of both races, and I still thought so. But something evil was slithering through Shakespeare, had been for months.

Perhaps three weeks after Darnell Glass had been killed, Len Elgin had been found shot dead in his Ford pickup, on a little-traveled country road just within the city limits. Len, a prosperous white farmer in his fifties, was a genial and intelligent man, a pillar of his church, father of four, and an avid reader and hunter. Len had been a personal friend of Claude’s. Failure to solve Len’s murder had been eating at Claude, and the rumors that spread like wildfire had made handling Len Elgin’s death investigation even more delicate.