Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Christmas

Mother, Father, and Varena laughed, as charmed by his smile as I was.

“As a matter of fact,” Jack went on, “I hoped this would be appropriate.”

“Why, thank you,” Varena said, surprised and showing it, taking the shallow wrapped box Jack pulled out of one jacket pocket.

When I turned to watch Varena opened the present, Jack’s arm went around my waist and pulled me against him, my back to his chest. I could feel the corners of my mouth tug up, and I looked down at my hands, resting on the arms crossed below my breasts. I took a deep breath. I made an effort to focus on the box Varena was holding.

She lifted the lid. From the tissue, she extracted an antique silver cake server, a lovely piece with engraving. When Varena passed it around, I could see the curling script read “V K 1889.”

“This is just beautiful,” Varena said, delighted and not a little stunned. “However did you find it?”

“Sheer luck,” Jack said. He was pressed very firmly against my bottom. “I just happened to be in an antiques store and it caught my eye.”

I could see the wheels turning in my mother’s head. I knew she was thinking that this was a serious present. Such a gift announced that Jack planned to be seeing me for some time, since he was displaying such a great desire to please my family. My father’s face lit up (way too obviously) as the same idea occurred to him.

I felt I was watching a tribal ritual unfold.

“I have to put this somewhere conspicuous, so everyone’ll notice it,” Varena told Jack, plainly wanting him to realize she was very pleased indeed.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said.

And before you could say Jack Robinson, Jack Leeds was installed at my parents’ kitchen table, a grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of soup in front of him, Varena and my mother waiting on him hand and foot.

After he’d eaten, Mother and Varena practically threw us out of the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to help with the dishes. They were flabbergasted when Jack offered to wash. They turned him down with fatuous smiles, and by the time I climbed into Jack’s car I was torn between laughter and exasperation.

“I think they approve of me,” Jack said with a straight face.

“Well, you are breathing.”

He laughed, but he stopped abruptly and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. He started the engine.

“Where are we going? I have to be at the manse at 6:00,” I reminded him. Mother and Varena had immediately told Jack I’d volunteered to keep the kids.

“We need to talk,” he said. We were silent on the ride to the motel, Jack grim and taciturn, I uneasily aware that I was not on the same page.

As we turned on the corner by the Presbyterian manse, I thought of Krista, Anna, and Eve.

And, oddly, I suddenly remembered spending nights with other girls when I was really young. I remembered how I’d carry a whole suitcase full of stuff with me for an overnight visit, everything and anything I thought we might want to play with, or look at, or gossip about.

Including a memory book.

Jack was staying in a different room, since the motel manager was having the bathroom window fixed from the break-in in the room he’d had before.

I was already on edge when we went in, and when Jack sat on one of the stuffed vinyl-covered armchairs, all my systems went on defense. I perched on the edge of the other chair and eyed him warily.

“I saw you last night,” he said without preamble.

“Where?”

He sighed. “Out with your old boyfriend.”

I made my breathing slow, fighting the rage that swept through me. I gripped the armrests of the damn orange chair. “You got back to town early, and you didn’t call me. Did you come back on purpose to spy on me?”

His back stiffened. He was doing a little chair gripping of his own. “Of course not, Lily! I missed you, and I finished what I was doing early, and I drove all afternoon to get back here. Then I saw you in that diner with the cop.”

“Were we kissing, Jack?”

“No.”

“Were we holding hands, Jack?”

“No.”

“Was I looking at him with love, Jack?”

“No.”

“Did he look happy, Jack?”

“No.” Jack bowed his head, rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.

“Let me tell you what happened the last time I went on a date with Chandler McAdoo, Jack.” I bent to his level until he had to look me in the eyes or be a coward. “It was seven years ago, the bad time, and I had been back in Bartley for two months. Chandler and I went to the movies, and then we drove out to the lake, like we’d done when we were kids.”

Jack’s hazel eyes didn’t flinch, and he was listening. I knew it.

“So when we were at the lake, Chandler wanted to kiss me, and I wanted to feel like a real woman again, so I let him. I even enjoyed it… a little. And then it went a little farther, and he pulled my T-shirt up. Want to know what happened then, Jack? Chandler started crying. The scars were real fresh then, red. He cried when he saw my body. And that’s the last I saw of Chandler for seven years.”

A heavy silence settled in the cold motel room.

“Pardon me,” Jack said finally. He was absolutely sincere, not mouthing a social catchall. “Pardon me.”

“Jack, you never believed I was sneaking behind your back.”

“I didn’t?” He looked a little angry and a little amused.

“You gave Varena her present before you even discussed last night with me,” I said. “You knew all along we weren’t… parting.” I had almost used the phrase “breaking up,” but it seemed too childish.

Abruptly, Jack’s face went absolutely still, as if he’d had a revelation of some kind.

He turned his eyes to me. “How could he cry?” Jack asked me. “You are so beautiful.”

I was still speechless, but for another reason. Jack had never said anything remotely like this.

“Don’t pity me,” I said softly.

“Lily, you said I never really doubted you. Now, I say, you know that pity is the last thing I feel for you.”

He lay with his chest to my back, one arm thrown around me. He was still awake, I could tell. I had another hour and a half, by my watch.

I didn’t want to think about Summer Dawn. I didn’t want to think about the dead people littering the path to her recovery.

I wanted to touch Jack. I wanted to twine my fingers in his hair. I wanted to understand his thoughts.

But he was a man with a job to do, and he wanted more than anything in the world to take Summer Dawn back to her parents. While he kept his arm around me and from time to time dropped a kiss on my neck, his thoughts had drifted away from me, and mine had to follow.

Reluctantly, I began to tell him what I’d found: the two memory books, one whole and one mutilated, in Anna Kingery’s room; the absence of the same book at Eve Osborn’s. I told him that Eve Osborn had been to the doctor recently, that I didn’t yet know about Anna. I told him about Anna’s mother… the woman we were assuming was Anna’s mother. And I pulled the plastic-wrapped brush and the birth photo of Anna out of my purse and placed them by Jack’s briefcase.

I rolled over to face him when I’d finished. I don’t know what he saw in my face, but he said, “Damn,” under his breath, and looked away from me.

“Have you learned anything?” I asked, to get that expression off his face.

“Like I said, my trip was pretty much of a washout,” he told me, but not as if he was upset about it. I guess private eyes encounter a lot of dead-end streets. “But early this morning, I wandered into the police station and took Chandler and a guy named Roger out for coffee and doughnuts. Since I used to be a cop, and they wanted to prove that small-town cops can be just as sharp as city cops, they were pretty forthcoming.”