Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Counselor

Tamsin screamed.

Jack was there before I was. He moved to one side as I caught up, and I saw that there was a puddle of blood on the gray-painted concrete of the porch. I cast my gaze from side to side, saw nothing that could have produced it.

“There,” Jack said, still one step ahead of me.

Following his pointing finger, I saw there was a squirrel hanging from a branch of the mimosa tree planted by the porch. The heavy scent of the mimosa twined with the hot-penny smell of blood.

Since I didn’t have a bird feeder or fruit bushes, I happened to like squirrels. When I realized the squirrel’s throat had been cut and the little animal had been hung on the tree like an out-of-season Christmas ornament, I began a slow burn.

I could hear Tamsin sobbing in the background and her husband saying, “Oh, not here, too. Honey, maybe it was just some kids, or someone playing a sick joke…”

“You know it was him. You know that,” Tamsin said, choking and gasping. “I told you about the phone calls. It’s him, again. He followed me.”

Jack said, “Excuse me, I’m Jack Leeds. This is Lily. We were just out walking. Sorry to intrude, but can we help?”

The man with his arm around Tamsin said, “I’m sorry, too. We can’t believe… excuse me, I’m Cliff Eggers, and this is my wife, Tamsin Lynd.”

“Tamsin and I know each other,” I murmured politely, trying not to look at Tamsin’s face while she was in such distress.

“Oh, Lily!” Tamsin took a long, shuddering breath, and she appeared to be trying to pull herself together in the presence of a client. “I’m sorry,” she said, though damned if I could think for what. “This is just very upsetting.”

“Sure it is,” Jack agreed. “Don’t you think we ought to call the police, Ms. Lynd?”

“Oh, we’ll call them. We always do. But they can’t do anything,” her husband said, with sudden violence. He ran a big hand across his face. He had one of those neatly trimmed beards that frames the mouth. “They couldn’t do anything before. They won’t do anything now.” Cliff Eggers’s voice was choked and unsteady. He was fumbling with the keys to the door and he managed to open it.

They stepped in their hall, and Tamsin beckoned me in behind them. I caught a glimpse of a large, friendly room. There were pictures hung over an antique chest to the right of the door. In the framed grouping I saw a wedding picture with Tamsin in full white regalia, and her husband’s business college diploma. There was a big brass bowl of potpourri on the chest, and my nose began to stop up almost instantly.

Tamsin said, “We’ll call them tomorrow morning.” Her husband nodded. Then he turned back to us. “We appreciate your coming to help us. I’m sorry to involve you in something so unpleasant.”

“Excuse us, please,” Tamsin said. She was obviously just barely containing her anguish. I felt she knew she’d made a mistake asking us in, that she was just waiting for us to leave so she could drop that facade, crumble completely.

“Of course,” Jack said instantly. He looked at Cliff. “Would you like us to…” and he nodded toward the squirrel.

“Yes,” Cliff said with great relief. “That would be very kind. The garbage can is at the rear of the backyard, by the hedge.”

We stepped back out on the porch, and Cliff and Tamsin had closed the door before Jack and I chanced looking at each other.

“Huh?” I said, finally.

“Double huh,” Jack said. He fished a pocketknife out of his jeans and leaned over the waist-high railing to cut the string. Holding the little corpse at arm’s length, he went down the steps and around the house to the garbage can. Cliff’s telling Jack that the garbage can was “by the hedge” was unnecessary, since everything in the Eggers-Lynd yard was “by the hedge.” It was an older home, and the original owners had believed in planting. The front yard was open to the street, but the clipped thick growth followed the property line down both sides and across the back of the yard. The surrounding greenery gave the yard a feeling of enclosure. While I waited, I thought I heard voices, so I went around the house to look into the backyard. In the darkness by the hedge at the rear of the property, I saw two figures.

Jack came back after a few more seconds. “Their neighbor was outside, wanted to know what had happened,” he explained. “He’s a town cop, so at least law enforcement will know something about this.” I could tell Jack had suspected Cliff Eggers wouldn’t call about the incident.

I wondered belatedly if I should have tried to deduce something from the state of the squirrel’s body. But I was clueless about squirrel metabolism, especially in this heat, and it would be way beyond me to try to estimate how long the poor critter had been dead. After a last glance at the blood, and a pang of regret that I had nothing with which to swab it up, I joined Jack on the driveway and we resumed our walk.

We didn’t say anything else until we were a block away from the house, and then it wasn’t much. Someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd, and from all the cues in the conversation we’d had with the couple, this persecution had been going on for some time. If Tamsin and her husband were unwilling to ask for help, what could be done?

“Nothing,” I concluded, straightening up after washing my face in the bathroom sink.

Jack picked up on that directly. “I guess not,” he agreed. “And you watch your step around her. I think this therapy group is good for you, but I don’t want you catching some kind of collateral fallout when her situation implodes.”

As I composed myself for sleep thirty minutes later, I found myself thinking that it hardly seemed fair that Tamsin had to listen to the group’s problems, while her own were kept swept under the rug of her marriage. I reminded myself that, after all, Tamsin was getting paid to do her job, and she had been trained to cope with the inevitable depression that must follow hearing so many tales of misery and evil.

Jack wasn’t yet asleep, so I told him what I’d been thinking.

“She listens to a lot of bad stuff, yeah,” he said, his voice quiet, coming out of the darkness. “But look at the courage, look at the toughness. The determination. She hears that, too. Look how brave you all are.”

I couldn’t say anything at all. My throat clogged. I was glad it was dark. At last, I was able to pat Jack’s shoulder; and a minute later, I heard by his breathing that he was asleep. Before it could overcome me, too, I thought, This is why Jack is here beside me. Because he can think of saying something like he just said.

That was a fine reason.

By my third therapy session, Tuesday night was no longer a time I dreaded.

I’d had hours sitting in a car, standing in a convenience store, and drifting around a mall-all in pursuit of the Worker’s Comp. claimant-to analyze our counseling sessions. I had to admit I couldn’t tell if Tamsin Lynd was following some kind of master plan in directing us along the path to recovery. It seemed to me that often we just talked at random; though from time to time I could discern Tamsin’s fine hand directing us.

Not one of the women in the group was someone I would’ve picked for a friend, with the exception of Janet Shook. Sandy McCorkindale made me particularly edgy. She tried very hard to be the unflawed preacher’s wife, and she very nearly succeeded. Her veneer of good modest clothes and good modest makeup, backed by an almost frenzied determination to keep the smooth surface intact, was maintained at a tremendous, secret cost. I had lived too close to the edge of despair and mental illness not to recognize it in others, and Sandy McCorkindale was a walking volcano. I was willing to bet her family was used to living on tiptoe, perhaps even quite unaware they were doing so.