Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Counselor

“Gerry, aka Gibson Banks, knows not only about Tamsin and Cliff, but also about the obsessed policewoman. He’s come to watch the showdown.”

I nodded.

“And, once again, things start happening to Tamsin Lynd… and tangentially, to Cliff.”

“Tangentially. I love it when you use big words.” I bent over to kiss Jack’s forehead. He wiggled closer to me.

“Expeditious. Arraignment. Consequence. Territorial…” Jack smiled, his eyes closed against the glow of the sky, and I leaned over to kiss him again, this time not on the forehead.

“So, she gets phone calls,” he resumed. “We happen by when they find the dead squirrel.”

“Then Saralynn Kleinhoff is killed-and put on display- and put in Tamsin’s office. While Tamsin is still in the building. But Janet, who interrupts the killer, is not murdered, but rendered unconscious.”

“Then, the writer who is planning to do a book on both the stalking and the detective who can’t stop stalking the stalker, so to speak, is murdered while he watches the stalkee.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Then Tamsin’s husband, her last stronghold, falls into a boobytrap. Shortly thereafter, he’s attacked in their own driveway.”

“And that’s where we are now.” I lay down with my head on Jack’s chest, my arm thrown over him. I closed my eyes, too, and felt the sun kiss my cheek. I knew in a minute I’d be uncomfortable and itchy, but this moment was idyllic.

“And though we figure the stalker also has to be someone who’s new in town, the only other new person is a strange, possibly perverted, but apparently guiltless mortician.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

“And we’re nowhere.”

“Well, it’s not you and it’s not me.”

“Oh, good, just about ten thousand more people to go.” Sure enough, I was beginning to get itchy. I sat up and started to brush off the cut grass. I thought about packing up Gerry McClanahan’s house, the life he’d left behind him. His awards and accomplishments, his ties with people in small worlds and big worlds, his notes of projects yet to come, projects that now would never be completed unless his estate hired someone to finish the work he’d started.

The notes. All those notes. I wished now I’d had a chance to read them before the police gathered them up. Gerry McClanahan, after all, had been a trained detective with lots of experience. What had he concluded about the stalking of Tamsin Lynd? All I could remember was that he’d called it a fascinating case. That wasn’t a help.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Jack asked. He was propped up on his elbows.

I explained my line of thought to him.

“Fascinating,” he said, “he called it fascinating?”

“Yeah. And he said, ‘This is a case turned upside down. No one will forget this one.’ ”

“Turned upside down.”

I nodded. “So let’s see,” I said, mostly to myself. “If a case is upside down… the victim is the perpetrator? That would mean Tamsin has been responsible for the whole thing.”

“Or it could mean that whoever is guilty looks innocent.”

“Whoever loves Tamsin actually hates her.”

That gave us both a jolt. We looked at each other. “Who loves Tamsin?” Jack asked, almost in a whisper.

“Cliff loves Tamsin.”

After a wide-eyed moment, we both shook our heads in disbelief.

“Nah,” I said. “Did you see how he cried when he picked her up in the parking lot after Saralynn was murdered? And the gash on his leg after he fell through the step?”

“Let’s go look at their driveway,” Jack said.

We walked, because it was beautiful, and because it might make the visit look less rehearsed. But we need not have been concerned about that; no one was home at the house on Compton Street.

Up the driveway we went, as though we’d been invited. We gave a perfunctory knock to the front door, and then turned away to enact the attack of the night before.

“You be Cliff,” I told Jack. “Remember, your leg is still sore from going through the steps.” Jack pretended to emerge from the house. He limped down the front steps, and walked slowly over to where the couple parked their cars. Jack got his keys out, as someone naturally would if they expected to drive off. Then he stopped. I came up behind him as quietly as possible, but the driveway was loose gravel. Even the grass strip running between the driveway and the hedge was full of the stuff.

“I can hear you coming a mile away,” he said over his shoulder. “No way anyone snuck up on Cliff.”

Of course, if you heard someone coming up behind you when you were outside, you’d turn around to look. Anyone would. You wouldn’t just keep on with what you were doing.

But I raised my hand, again pantomiming the knifing. This time, I crouched a little until I approximated Tamsin’s height. I made an awkward swing, and was very close to the wound area as Carrie had described it to me. But the angle was all wrong, straight down instead of left-to-right. “That didn’t work,” I told Jack, almost cheerfully.

“You know, and I know, that when someone’s coming up behind you, you’re going to turn around to see what they want.” Jack’s face was getting grimmer and grimmer as he spoke. “And if the stabber was really determined he’d stick around and try again.”

Jack turned his back to me again. He bent his hand up behind his back as far as he could bend it. He had a pocketknife clenched in his right fist, with the end pointing down. Jack made a chopping, downward motion. The point of the knife grazed his rump in an arc from left to right. If he hadn’t been careful, it would’ve gouged the flesh of his right hip.

It was exactly as Carrie had described the wound.

“Oh, no, Jack.” I felt almost as though I was going to cry, and I couldn’t say why.

“It might not be that way,” Jack said. “But it looks like it to me.”

“So what’d he do with it?” I asked. “Put it in his pocket?”

“They’d find it at the hospital,” Jack said. He pantomimed the self-mutilation again, he put out a hand to rest on an imaginary car, and with the other he pitched his pocketknife into the depths of the hedge. Then we both got down on our hands and knees and searched, very carefully.

Jack found a splotch of dried blood in the bed of old leaves below the hedge, right after I’d retrieved his knife.

“Of course, his attacker could’ve thrown it in here and retrieved it later. It didn’t have to be Cliff that did the tossing and retrieving,” Jack said.

I nodded. I felt about twenty years older, all in a flash. This was betrayal on a grand scale. And on an incredibly mean scale, too.

“Do you think Claude has figured this out?” Jack and I strode down the sidewalk. Jack had thrust his hands in his pockets and he was scowling. “Or do you think he’s been too distracted by the upheaval in his department?”

We stopped at the next corner. Tamsin was at the stop sign facing us, and through the windshield of her car I could tell she was looking haggard. The plump and assured woman I’d met a few weeks earlier had simply vanished.

We’d finished our little experiment just in time. She waved us through the intersection, and tried to summon up a smile for us, but it failed. We nodded and kept on walking. I felt like a traitor to her. First I thought she’d been persecuting herself, and now I suspected her husband was her tormentor.

“We have to go talk to Claude,” I said.

Jack nodded unenthusiastically. Neither of us is happy in a police station. Since my ordeal, I’d become shy of the police, who were first to initiate me into the range of human reactions to my victimization that I now knew so well. And Jack is still ostracized by some cops for his involvement in the scandal that led to his leaving the force in Memphis.