Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Counselor

“What on earth happened here?”

I became aware that the audience had grown quite large around us, listening to this exchange. One glare from Stokes sent them scattering, but she and Claude flanked me.

And at that moment, looking into Tamsin Lynd’s eyes, I remembered the phone calls and the slit throat of the squirrel, and the fear she lived with. I had been very upset, deeply upset, but in that second I drew myself under control. “There was a dead woman in your office,” I said, after a little pause to let the two cops stop me, if they would. “Where were you?”

Only someone who’d witnessed at least part of Tamsin’s problem would have understood her reaction.

“Oh, my God,” she moaned. “Not again!”

“Again?” I repeated, because that hadn’t been quite what I expected. Then, I said more harshly, “Again? You’ve found women killed in your office more than once?”

“No, no. I just mean… the whole cycle. You know, I called you about the squirrel being left hanging on my front porch,” she said tremulously, her shaking hand pointing to Claude.

“I know about your past problems,” Detective Stokes said curtly. Claude rumbled, “I’d gotten a sort of outline picture.” Tamsin nodded. She made an effort to control her ragged breathing and tears.

After a moment, she went on. “I was hiding in the therapy room,” she confessed. She looked at my face as if it were up to me to absolve her of this piece of self-preservation.

“Saralynn got there early so I could give her my little orientation speech. I said hi to her and then I remembered I’d left some papers in the therapy room, so I went in there to fetch them, and while I was in there, I heard… I heard…”

“You heard the woman being killed?”

Tamsin nodded. “And I shut the door,” she said, and shuddered and gasped. “As quiet as I could, I shut the door and then I locked it.”

That was hard to swallow. We had ventured into a building we thought contained danger, to help Tamsin. But from her own account, Tamsin wouldn’t open the door to try to save a woman’s life. I made myself choke this knowledge down, shove it aside. Fear could make you do almost anything: I had known fear before, and I was willing to bet this wasn’t Tamsin’s first experience of it. “Didn’t you hear Janet come in?” My voice was as even as I could make it.

“That room’s pretty soundproof,” she said, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes. “I thought I heard someone calling down the hall, but for all I knew it was the same person who’d killed poor Saralynn, so I was too scared to answer. That was Janet, I guess. Then, later, I heard other sounds, other people.”

I’d have said we’d made enough noise to establish our identities, but it wasn’t my business. Now that I knew the situation was more or less under control, I would be glad to leave, if Claude would give me a green light. I was finding that the idea of Tamsin cowering in a safe, locked room-while one woman was killed and another popped over the head- was not agreeing with me.

I had opened my mouth to ask Claude if I could go when another car pulled into the parking lot, toward the back where the police cars weren’t as thick. Cliff Eggers sprang out as though he’d been ejected. He hurried to his wife.

“Tamsin!” he cried. “Are you all right?”

“Cliff!” Our therapist hurled herself into the big man’s arms and sobbed against his chest. “I can’t stand this again, Cliff!”

“What’s happened?” he said gently, while Stokes, Claude, and I stood and listened.

“Somebody killed a woman and left her in my office!”

Cliff’s dark eyes bored into Claude, another large white male.

“Is this true?” he asked, as though Tamsin often made up fantasies of this nature. Or as though he wished she had.

“I’m afraid so. I’m the police chief, Claude Friedrich. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?” Claude extended his hand, and Cliff disengaged from Tamsin to shake it.

“Cliff Eggers,” he responded. “I’m Tamsin’s husband.”

“What do you do, Mr. Eggers?” Claude asked in a social way, though I could practically see Detective Stokes twitch.

“I’m a medical transcriptionist,” he said, making an obvious effort to relax. “I believe your wife is one of my clients. Mostly I work out of our home, my wife’s and mine.”

We must all have looked blank.

“Doctors record what they find when they examine a patient, and what they’re going to do about it. I take the recordings and enter the information into a computerized record. That’s paring my job down to the bare bones.”

I had no idea Carrie employed a medical whatever, and from his face Claude had either been ignorant of it, too, or had forgotten; he wasn’t happy with himself. I was probably the only one present who knew him well enough to tell, though.

“You live here in Shakespeare?” Claude said.

“Right over on Compton.” Cliff Eggers’s big hand smoothed Tamsin’s hair in a cherishing gesture.

I was about to ask Tamsin if she’d heard anyone leave the building before our group had broken in, when I heard a voice calling, “Lily! Lily!”

I peered around the parking lot, trying to find its source. Full dark had fallen now, and the lights of the parking lot were busy with insects. The people buzzed around below them, looking as patternless as the bugs. I was hoping all the police were more purposeful than they appeared. Claude was no fool, and he’d sent everyone in his department through as much training as he could afford. No wonder he was so quick to snap up a detective from a big force, one who was sure to have more experience than anyone he could hire locally. And though he’d never spoken to me of it, I was aware that Claude had quotas he had to meet, and his force was probably always trying to catch up on the minority percentage, especially since Shakespeare had had some racial troubles about eighteen months ago.

“Lily!”

And there he was; the most handsome young man in Shakespeare, prom king, and thorn in my side, Bobo Winthrop. My heart sank, while another part of me reacted in a far different way.

I turned a hose on myself mentally.

“Bobo,” I said formally.

He disregarded my tone and put his arm around me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Claude’s bushy eyebrows escalate toward his hairline.

“You okay?” Bobo asked tenderly.

“Yes, thank you,” I said, my voice as stiff as I could make it.

“Is this your friend, Lily?” Tamsin asked. She’d recovered enough to try to slip back into her therapist role, and the neutral word friend suddenly seemed to have many implications.

“This is Bobo Winthrop,” I told her. “Bobo: Tamsin Lynd, Cliff Eggers.” I had done my duty.

“What happened here?” Bobo asked, giving Tamsin and Cliff a distracted nod. I was glad to see that Detective Stokes had drawn Claude away to huddle with him on real police business.

I wanted to be somewhere else. I started walking to my car, wondering if anyone would stop me. No one did. Bobo trailed after me, if a six-foot-tall blond can be said to trail.

“A woman got killed in there tonight,” I said to my large shadow when we reached my car. “She was stabbed, or stuck through somehow.”

“Who was she?” Bobo loomed over me while I pulled my keys out of my pocket. I wondered where the rest of my therapy group had gone. The police station? Home? If Melanie didn’t tell the police the identity of the corpse herself, they’d find it out pretty quick. She’d look bad.

“I didn’t know her,” I said accurately, if not exactly honestly. Bobo touched my face, a stroke of his palm against my cheek.