Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Champion

“Like the most exciting woman I’d ever seen.”

Every now and then, Jack said exactly the right thing.

He whispered, “I wanted to touch you. I just wanted to lay my hands on you.” He demonstrated. “When Howell heard about the bomb he called me and told me to go down to the hospital to verify how many hurt and dead there were. He knew it would seem strange if he did it. He’s sure one of his employees set the bomb, and he wanted to know if one of them had been brought in hurt. He thought maybe they’d hang around to see the explosion, get caught in it. So I went down to the hospital. It was eerie. I just walked in, and strolled through the halls looking. No one stopped me, or asked me what my business was there. The idea was a good one, but it didn’t pan out. No one associated with the group was brought in injured. But I saw you on the gurney.”

“You were at the hospital! I thought it was a dream.”

“It was me. I wanted to stay, but I knew that would look strange.”

“You asked me if there was anyone you could call for me.”

“I wanted someone to come take care of you. And I wanted to know if there was anyone ahead of me. Everyone had told me you were with Marshall. I felt he was pretty formidable competition. If you’d asked me to call him…”

“What would you have done?”

“I would have called him. But I would have tried to find some way to pry you loose when you were feeling better.”

We didn’t talk for a while.

I got up to get a drink, came back.

“Why do you think Howell doesn’t trust me?” I asked. That stung me. I had kept faith with the Winthrop family over and above the demands of my paycheck.

“I don’t know. When I was asking him who had keys to the house, as a matter of routine, he said, ‘The maid,’ and he said you’d worked for him for four years and he was sure you were absolutely reliable. But then, about a week ago, he called me into his office first thing in the morning to tell me to avoid you, that he thought you were in on something.”

He kissed me to show me how little he’d listened.

“I can’t think of what I’ve done to earn Howell’s mistrust.” I stowed that away to think of later. “What’s their goal in stockpiling all these weapons?”

“From what I’ve pieced together, their goal is to start a white supremacist militia group here, using Cleve Ragland’s hunting camp as a training base. They want to be a big-time organization rather than a few bastards who grouse and murder children in bombings.”

“Have you heard anything about Darnell Glass?” I asked.

Jack lay back, pushed his hair back with his fingers. “It’s strange,” he said finally. “It’s like there were two things going on. After meeting most of the men who are involved in this, at least I think I’ve met most of them, what I’ve been impressed with most is their stupidity. Keeping the arms they were stealing at the store: dumb. Trying to steal them back from Howell’s house: dumb. Spray-painting Deedra’s car, and that was the boy who works at the loading dock at the Home Supply store-I actually saw him do it-there again, dumb. I think Deedra snubbed him when she went in the store to get a new curtain rod, so he got her back. Then the bomb. The day after the bomb went off, when they’d heard Claude Friedrich and you were hurt and Sheriff Schuster was killed- they were all hangdog as hell. I think it bothered them about the little girl, too. You know why that all happened? The bomb didn’t go off at the right time. That I did overhear, directly, Jim and Darcy venting their guilt. They were trying to shift the blame to the victims-you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Sheriff Schuster shouldn’t have agreed to attend the meeting. Claude should have gotten out faster. The little girl should have been home doing her homework. Crap like that.”

“They killed those people out of incompetence.” I closed my eyes. I remembered the scene inside the church.

“There are groups that like to kill as many black people as they can, Lily, and don’t care what age they get. These guys, no… they hadn’t ever built a bomb before and they got it wrong.”

“How’d they get it in the church before the meeting?”

“The church is unlocked during the day. Jim just chanced it, best as I can piece it out.”

I felt sick.

“But Darnell, they haven’t said anything about him?”

“No, but your name has come up a bunch of times.”

“Wait.” The most important question of all hadn’t even occurred to me until now. Jack was new at the store. Why would they trust him to keep silent? “How can you overhear all this?”

“Lily, I put a bug in the employee lounge.”

“Is that legal?”

“Well…”

“Hmmm.”

“It’s not exactly true to say they haven’t talked about Darnell’s murder,” Jack said, perhaps to distract me from wondering about how much illegality he’d put up with. “They all feel like he got what was coming to him. Don’t ask me to explain their thinking, because that’s impossible. And then they mention you, because I gather that was a real brawl. Did you have to pitch in?” He turned me to face him and looked me in the eyes. His own eyes were serious. I ran my finger down his cheek, down his scar, traced his neck to his collarbone.

“Don’t think I haven’t had regrets that the whole thing happened, that I happened to be there, even. I’m no activist. I want to be left alone. But I was there, and he was outnumbered, and those boys would’ve beat the shit out of him.”

Jack absorbed that, accepted it. “But you see, from their point of view,” he said, very quietly, “you defended Darnell, and you were there at Howell’s when they came to reclaim the rifles, and you were in the church when it blew up. That’s too many coincidences for them, no matter that you were minding your own business in every instance.”

“Do they think I’m you? Do they think I’m some kind of detective?”

“They think you like black people too much and they do think you might have something to do with their not being able to get the guns back. Then I spend the night with you on the very night they’re trying to find out who was spying on them. So they wonder about you, a lot. At the same time, it seems like they have a weird kind of respect for you.”

“How did they come to chase you last night?”

“I was hidden in a sort of niche I’d made. If you think the customer part of the store is overwhelming, you should see the back of the store. Someone could live back there for a week and no one would ever know. Anyway, I knew they were going to be meeting after hours in the storeroom, and it’s not bugged. I wanted to know what they were planning.”

“How’d they know you were there?”

“You’re going to laugh,” he said gloomily, and I had a feeling I really wasn’t. “The boy, Paulie, who works at the Home Supply store, brought his dog with him. He’s real proud of that dog, talks about it all the time. It cost some ungodly amount. A bluetick hound, I think. The dog sniffed me, started barking. It seemed smarter to run for it than to wait until they came to investigate.”

I was right. I wasn’t laughing. “They would have killed you.”

“I know it.” He lay staring at my ceiling, thinking about that real hard. “I don’t think all of them were in on Darnell’s murder, but they would have killed me last night because they were all together and they were scared.”

“Do you think they’re suspicious now?”

“Maybe. I got a phone call today from Jim. He said he’d heard from Darcy that I was courting Lily Bard. He suggested I’d be better off with some more traditional girl.”

“Courting, huh? That what this is?”