Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Christmas

While Varena knelt by her, trying to take her pulse, Binnie Armstrong died. I watched her whole body relax in final abandonment.

I glanced in the door to the right, the one to the receptionist’s little office. Clean and empty. I looked in the room to the left, an examining room. Clean and empty. I moved carefully down the hall, while my sister did CPR on the dead nurse, and I cautiously craned around the door of the next room on the left, another examining room. Empty. The doorway Binnie lay in led to the tiny lab and storage room. I stepped carefully past my sister and found Dr. LeMay in the last room to the right, his office.

“Varena,” I said sharply.

Varena looked up, dabbled with blood from the corpse.

“Binnie’s dead, Varena.” I nodded in the direction of the office. “Come check Dr. LeMay.”

Varena leaped to her feet and took a couple of steps to stare in the door. Then she was moving to the other side of the desk to take his pulse but shaking her head as she went.

“He was killed at his desk,” she said, as though that made it worse.

Dr. LeMay’s white hair was clotted with blood. It was pooled on the desk where his head lay. His glasses were askew, ugly black-framed trifocals, and I wanted so badly to set them square on his face-as if, when I did, he would see again. I had known Dr. LeMay my whole life. He had delivered me.

Varena touched his hand, which was resting on the desk. I noticed in a stunned, slow way that it was absolutely clean. He had not had a chance to fight back. The first blow had been a devastating one. The room was full of paper, files and claim forms and team physicals… most of it now spotted with blood.

“He’s gone,” Varena whispered, not that there had been any doubt.

“We need to get out of here,” I said, my voice loud and sharp in the little room with its awful sights and smells.

And we stared at each other, our eyes widening with a sudden shared terror.

I jerked my head toward the front door, and Varena scooted past me. She ran out while I waited to see if anything moved.

I was the only live person in the office.

I followed Varena out.

She was already across the street at the State Farm Insurance office, pulling open the glass door and lifting the receiver off the phone on the receptionist’s desk. That stout and permed lady, wearing a bright red blouse and a Christmas corsage, was looking up at Varena as if she were speaking Navaho into the telephone. Within two minutes a police car pulled up in front of Dr. LeMay’s office, and a tall, thin black man got out.

“You the one called in?” he asked.

“My sister, in the office over there.” I nodded toward the plate-glass window, through which Varena could be seen sitting in the client’s chair, sobbing. The woman with the corsage was bending over her, offering Varena some tissues.

“I’m Detective Brainerd,” the man said reassuringly, as though I’d indicated I’d thought he might be an imposter. “Did you go in the building here?” Yes.

“Did you see Dr. LeMay and his nurse?”

“Yes.”

“And they’re dead.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone else in the building?”

“No.”

“So, is there a gas leak, or was there a fire smoldering, maybe smoke inhalation…?”

“They were both beaten.” My gaze skimmed the top of the old, old gum trees lining the street. “To death.”

“Okay, now. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do here.”

He was extremely nervous, and I didn’t blame him one bit.

“You’re gonna stay right here, ma’am, while I go in there and take a look. Don’t go anywhere, now.”

“No.”

I waited by the police car, the cold gray day pinching my face and hands.

This is a world of carnage and cruelty: I had momentarily put that aside in the false security of my hometown, in the optimistic atmosphere of my sister’s marriage.

I began to detach from the scene, to float away, escaping this town, this building, these dead. It had been a long time since I’d retreated like this, gone to the remote place where I was not responsible for feeling.

A young woman was standing in front of me in a paramedic’s uniform.

“Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you all right?” Her dark, anxious face peered into mine, her black hair stiff, smooth, and shoulder length under a cap with a caduceus patch on it.

“Yes.”

“Officer Brainerd said you had seen the bodies.”

I nodded.

“Are you… maybe you better come sit down over here, ma’am.”

My eyes followed her pointing finger to the rear of the ambulance.

“No, thanks,” I said politely. “My sister is over there in the State Farm office, though. She might need help.”

“I think you may need a little help yourself, ma’am,” the woman said earnestly, loudly, as though I was retarded, as though I couldn’t tell the difference between clinical shock and just being numb.

“No.” I said it as finally and definitely as I knew how. I waited. I heard her muttering to someone else, but she did leave me alone after that. Varena came to stand beside me. Her eyes were red, and her makeup was streaked.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

“The policeman told me to wait.”

“Oh.”

Just then the same policeman, Brainerd, came striding out of the doctor’s office. He’d gotten over his fit of nerves, and he’d seen the worst. He was focused, ready to go to work. He asked us a lot of questions, keeping us out in the cold for half an hour when we’d told him the sum of our knowledge in one minute.

Finally, we buckled up in Varena’s car. As she started back to our parents’ house, I switched Varena’s heater to full blast. I glanced over at my sister. Her face was blanched by the cold, her eyes red from crying with her contacts in. She’d pulled her hair back this morning in a ponytail, with a bright red scarf tied over the elastic band. The scarf still looked crisp and cheerful, though Varena had wilted. Varena’s eyes met mine while we were waiting our turn at a four-way stop. She said, “The drug cabinet was closed and full.”

“I saw.” Dr. LeMay had always kept the samples, and his supplies, in the same cabinet in the lab, a glass-front old-fashioned one. Since I’d been his patient as a child, that cabinet had stood in the same place with the same sort of contents. It would have surprised me profoundly if Dr. LeMay had ever kept anything very street-desirable… he’d have antibiotics, antihistamines, skin ointments, that kind of thing, I thought vaguely. Maybe painkillers.

Like Varena, I’d seen past Binnie’s body that the cabinet door was shut and everything in the room was orderly. It didn’t seem likely that the same person who would commit such messy murders would leave the drug cabinet so neat if he’d searched it.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” I told Varena. She shook her head. She didn’t, either. I stared out of the window at the familiar passing scenery, wishing I was anywhere but in Bartley.

“Lily, are you all right?” Varena asked, her voice curiously hesitant.

“Sure, are you?” I sounded more abrupt than I’d intended.

“I have to be, don’t I? The wedding rehearsal is tonight, and I don’t see how we can call it off. Plus, I’ve seen worse, frankly. It’s just it being Dr. LeMay and Binnie that gave me such a wallop.”

My sister sounded simply matter-of-fact. It hit me forcefully that Varena, as a nurse, had seen more blood and pain and awfulness than I would see in a lifetime. She was practical. After overcoming the initial shock, she was tough. She pulled into our parents’ driveway and switched off the ignition.

“You’re right. You can’t call it off. People die all the time, Varena, and you can’t derail your wedding because of it.”