(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord

by Charlaine Harris

  I had a gun and one bullet. It was so tempting, the thought of being out of all this. But what stopped me was the thought of my parents. They would know by now I was gone; people would be looking for me. I might not be found for years out here in this shack, and in all that time they would worry about me, pray for me, refuse to believe I was dead.

  It suited me better to kill the man they called Nap. After a moment, I began to look forward to it.

  Every moment cost me pain, but I figured out how to load the revolver, though the handcuffs made it difficult; at least there was enough slack in the chain to move my arms. I loaded, emptied out the bullet, and reloaded several times, until I had mastered it and knew the bullet was in the chamber that would fire. Then I tucked the gun down by my side and waited in the stinking, hot shack for Nap to come for me. I could see the sky through a hole in the roof; when the sun was almost overhead, I heard a van coming down the dirt road. I remembered the second man, and prayed he hadn’t come this time.

  I shut my eyes when the footsteps came close.

  “How you feeling this morning, honey?” Nap asked jovially. “Where did Rooster leave that key? Shit, they messed you up. It’s gonna take you a while to get over this….” I could tell he was angry that I was too damaged to be useful for a while. I opened my eyes and looked at him, straight at him, and what he saw made him stop in the act of picking up my discarded blindfold.

  I raised the gun and pointed it as carefully as I could, then fired.

  It caught Nap in the eye.

  He died far too quickly to suit me.

  Of course, I had no idea where the key to the handcuffs was. Nap had said he’d left it with Rooster. I slid off the cot, then hitched myself across the floor, dragging the cot behind me. With incredible difficulty, I searched Nap just to make sure it wasn’t on him. It wasn’t.

  It seemed to me there must be a way I could get out of the shack, but trying to get myself and the cot through the door was too hard for me. By that time, I was weak.

  So I got to lie on the bed in the shack with the dead man for another day. Bugs came, and my cuts got infected, and the body began to smell.

  By the time a farmer working in the adjacent field came to investigate Nap’s van, maybe twenty-four hours later, I was running a high temperature, but not high enough to make me delirious. I longed for unconsciousness the way people in hell want ice water. The farmer saw the body of Nap lying on the floor inside the open door and ran to call for help. The flood of people who arrived after that had no idea a live person was inside the shack. The horror on the faces of the men who came to investigate the body told me that I had gone beyond some boundary.

  I had passed; I had become the thing that had happened to me.

  No one who saw me chained to that bed would ever be able to imagine that I’d had a dog named Bolo when I was little, that I’d enjoyed playing with dolls, that I’d gotten three raises in the past two years, that I came from a home as clean and orderly as any of theirs.

  In the slow weeks of recovery, after repeated questioning by law-enforcement officials on several levels, after enduring a media drench that sensationalized what was already sensational, I realized that returning to my former life was no longer possible. It had been stolen from me. My boyfriend was still posing for the newspapers as my boyfriend, but he wasn’t any longer. My parents simply could not cope with the horror of my ordeal or my execution of the man responsible.

  I began to suspect that, in their secret hearts, they thought I had made the wrong choice in my use of the bullet.

  My younger sister, Varena, was a rock at first, but gradually my slow physical and mental recovery wore Varena’s lighthearted nature down and then defeated it. Varena was ready for me to rise from my bed and walk. Varena was ready to refer to my crisis in the past tense, to have conversations that did not refer to it even in terms of my recovery. After a few increasingly acrimonious exchanges that included such statements as “Pull up your socks and get on with your life” and “You can’t go on living in the past,” Varena drifted back to her normal routine of nurse’s duties at the little hospital in our family’s town, teaching Sunday school, and dating a local pharmacist.

  For a month longer, I stayed with my parents, with my belongings stored in their attic and toolshed. There was a healing quality in the house with the big front porch and the rose garden, the known neighbors. But most of those neighbors found it impossible to be natural around me; the best managed it, but the sheer horror of my victimization defeated the rest.

  I tried hard not to be a tragic figure, tried desperately to reclaim my past, but I finally acknowledged defeat. I had to leave Bartley, to forget Memphis, to go somewhere new.

  “AND WHY DID you pick Shakespeare?” Marshall asked me.

  “The name,” I said, almost surprised that someone else was with me. I pulled my T-shirt back over my head. “My name is Bard, as in the Bard of Avon. This is Shakespeare.”

  “You picked it off the map like that?”

  I nodded, stood. “I’d tried a couple of places earlier that didn’t work out, so random selection seemed as good a method as any.” I stood still for a moment. It was such an effort to move.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said. “I don’t want to talk any more now.” I lifted the bag with my gi and obi inside and strode out, not forgetting to turn and bow as I reached the door.

  I drove home automatically, trying to keep my mind blank. It had been years since I had told my story, years since I had relived it in full. They had been good years, having people look at me quite normally, as if I was a full woman, not a thing, not a victim.

  Now Chief Friedrich had indicated he knew who I was, so he knew I’d killed someone. Maybe he’d think I had had some kind of flashback and killed Pardon Albee, too. The pointed question about a personal relationship might mean that he suspected I’d killed Pardon because he’d paid me unwelcome attention. Knowing Pardon, that was a strange idea.

  I sat on the side of my bed when I got home. I tried to picture myself as a vigilante, as some kind of—who was the girl who’d been raped in Titus Andronicus? Lavinia…yes, Lavinia, whose hands and tongue had been cut out by her attackers so that she could not reveal their identity. But Lavinia, I remembered, managed to tell her brothers somehow, and served the attackers to their mother as lunch, since the mother had permitted the rape to happen.

  I wasn’t set on gaining some kind of vengeance on all men for what had happened to me. But I certainly wasn’t a trusting person anymore, and I definitely never expected much of people, and I would never be surprised to hear of any perfidy again.

  I did not believe in the underlying goodwill of men or the unspoken sisterhood of women.

  I did not believe that people everywhere are really the same, or that if you treat people kindly you will get kindness in return.

  I did not believe in the sanctity of life.

  If all the men were lined up in front of me, the four rapists and the man who cuffed me, and I had a loaded gun…I would kill them all, I thought. But I’m not scouring biker bars across America and I’m not standing in the post offices looking at wanted posters to see if they’ve done anything else. I haven’t hired a private investigator to look for them.

  Did that speak to my sanity, or did that say I would commit murder only if it was convenient? I felt a tingling all over, like a hand that had been asleep prickling as it woke up. I’d felt that before after the times when I couldn’t dodge remembering. It was the rest of my personality seeping back into the shell I became when I immersed in the memory.

  I turned down my covers, checked that my alarm clock was set, and gratefully crawled into bed. I reached over to switch out the lamp.

  I’d kill the woman, too, I thought, feeling a wave of weariness sweep through my body. The woman I’d never seen. The bikers I’d never actually seen, only heard, felt.

  But Pardon Albee—could Friedrich really believe I’d kill someone like that, someone I knew in
the ordinary course of my life?

  Of course he could.

  I wondered what weapon had been used to kill the landlord. I hadn’t seen much blood, though I hadn’t examined Pardon very carefully. Since I’d been taking Goju from Marshall for two years or more, I thought maybe I could kill someone with my hands if I needed to—that had originally been my reason for studying a martial art.

  That, too, would enter Friedrich’s picture of me: a very fit woman…in conjunction with a middle-aged, nosy, presumably heterosexual man who lived very close to me…. Put like that, it seemed pretty obvious to me that I must have killed Pardon in my sleep.

  Starting tomorrow, I decided as I rolled onto my left side, I have to find out who killed the landlord. In the stage before sleep, it seemed that simple.

  Chapter 6

  I WAS ON MY WAY INTO THE HOUSE TO SHOWER AFTER my morning workout at Body Time—Marshall’s assistant had opened the gym this morning, to my relief—when I saw Marcus Jefferson and a little boy. My hair was wet with sweat and big dark patches spotted my gray T-shirt and shorts. I was about to unlock my front door when I heard someone call my name.

  “Good morning, Lily,” Marcus said from the sidewalk. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile, and I understood the attraction he has for Deedra. Marcus is well-muscled and tall, the color of coffee with one tablespoon of milk. His brown eyes have a golden cast. The little boy looked even more attractive, smiling and immaculately dressed, with long, curly eyelashes and huge dark eyes.

  Though I longed to go right inside and get in the shower, out of courtesy I strolled down my driveway to the sidewalk and squatted down in front of the child.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kenya,” the boy said with a beaming grin.

  “Kenya, that’s a nice name,” I said. “How old are you?” I supposed I was asking the right questions, since Marcus and the child both seemed pleased.

  The boy held up three fingers. I had to repress a shudder at seeing how tiny those fingers were. The terrible vulnerability of children frightens me so much, I am leery of liking one. How could I ever be vigilant enough to protect something so frail and precious? Yet other people don’t seem to share this terror, are foolish or defiant enough to have children and expect those children will live to adulthood without being harmed.

  My face had gone wrong, I could tell. The child’s uncertain eyes and faltering smile recalled me to my senses.

  I yanked my lips into a grin and very gently patted the boy’s shoulder. “You’ll grow up to be a big man, Kenya,” I said, and rose to my feet. “Is this your son, Marcus?”

  “Yes, this is my only one,” he said proudly. “My wife and I have been separated for a few months, but she and I agree that I should spend as much time with Kenya as I can.”

  “You must have worked four to midnight,” I said, pretty much at a loss for conversation topics.

  Marcus nodded. “I came home and got some sleep; then I got Kenya from his mom before she left for work—she works at the welfare office.”

  “So, what are you two going to do today?” I asked politely, trying not to look at my watch. Thursday mornings, I have to be at the Drinkwaters’ at eight-thirty.

  “Well, we’re going to McDonald’s for breakfast,” said Marcus, “and then I think we’ll go to my place and play Candy Land, and maybe we’ll watch Barney. That suit you, sport?”

  “McDonald’s, McDonald’s,” Kenya began to chant, pulling on his father’s hand.

  “I better take this boy to get some food in him,” Marcus said, shaking his head at the boy’s impatience. But he was grinning at the same time.

  “I guess,” I said, “you couldn’t have him here, with Pardon being the way he was about the apartments being adults only.”

  “I had Kenya over one time, and Mr. Albee let me have it,” Marcus said, watching the child trot down the sidewalk. “I’m wondering what the next owner will do. Would you know who that’s going to be?”

  “No,” I said slowly. This was the second time the subject had come up. “No, I have no idea. But I’m going to try to find out.”

  “Let me know,” Marcus said, and raised a hand in goodbye.

  “Cute kid,” I said, and watched the young man trot to catch up with the little boy before I turned to go into my own house.

  Mel and Helen Drinkwater have me in once a week for an all-morning cleaning job. They are both in their fifties and work, he as county supervisor, she at a bank, and they are not messy people. But they have a large old house and their grandchildren, who live down the street, come in and out several times a week.

  Helen Drinkwater is a woman who likes things done exactly to her taste, and she has a room-by-room checklist of things I should accomplish in the three and a half hours I am there. At first, Mrs. Drinkwater actually tried to get me to check things off the list and leave a checked list in each room, but I wouldn’t. In fact, as I was learning the Drinkwater house, the list was helpful, but it would have felt like a paint-by-numbers kit if I’d checked the little boxes.

  Mrs. Drinkwater (I have sworn never to call her Helen) hadn’t said a thing. I’d left the list in the exact middle of the room each time I’d cleaned the house the first few visits.

  Then Mrs. Drinkwater had left a pile of dirty clothes by the washer with a note asking me to “pop these in the washer and dryer for me.” The first time it happened, I had fumed and done it; the second time, I left a note myself, which said, “Not on any of my lists,” and after that, Helen Drinkwater had not added to my duties.

  The two-story turn-of-the-century family home looked especially pretty in the clear, warm morning light. The house is pale yellow, with white trim and dark green shutters, and it is set far back from the street. Of course, a house like this is in the oldest surviving section of Shakespeare, and it has at least half an acre of woods behind it, which the Drinkwaters have left untouched.

  This morning, I had a lot to think about. Marshall had said he was separated from Thea, and he’d said it as if that was significant to me. As I scrubbed the second-floor bathroom, I wondered if Marshall still had that spark of feeling for me after last night. The few times in the past I’d felt more than calm acceptance of a man, all I’d had to do to make him run was to tell him what had happened to me. Except one man, who’d gotten so excited that he’d tried to force himself on me. I’d hurt him, but it had taken time and a struggle. After that, I’d been ready to try martial arts, which has turned out to be the most pleasurable element in my life.

  These thoughts tapped at my consciousness like raindrops hitting the sidewalk, thoughts that were significant but not wholly engrossing. I was also thinking about the Drinkwaters’ bathtub ring, and what to do with the comic book I’d found behind the toilet. So it wasn’t until the floorboards downstairs creaked a second time that I came to attention.

  I became absolutely still, the sponge in my hand held motionless an inch from the surface of the sink. I was looking into the mirror over the sink, but I was not seeing myself. I was trying to make sense of the floorboards.

  The Drinkwaters always leave the kitchen door unlocked when they depart at eight-fifteen, knowing I will be here at eight-thirty. I lock it behind myself when I get here, though daytime burglaries are unknown in this section of Shakespeare.

  Someone had gotten in the house in that fifteen minutes.

  I shut my eyes to listen harder. I tried to pull off my rubber gloves without making a sound. I set them in the sink. He’d not yet started up the stairs; I could improve my position.

  There wasn’t time to take off my shoes. I stepped silently out of the bathroom, trying to remember where the creaking boards upstairs were. If I could flatten myself against the wall at the beginning of the hall, which leads off at right angles from the stairs, I would be ready to strike when the intruder reached the top.

  I crept closer to the stairs, flexing my hands to loosen the muscles. My heart had begun pounding heavily, and I felt a little l
ight-headed, but I was ready—I would not be afraid; I would fight.

  I should relax; I felt the tightness of my muscles; it would slow me down…so many things to think of.

  He was on the stairs.

  My hands clenched into fists and my leg muscles were hard and tense. My blood pounded harder through my heart.

  A little noise, like material brushing against the wall. Very close.

  Then there was a tiny sound I couldn’t interpret. I felt a frown pull my brows together.

  Had it been something metal?

  And another creak of the stairs.

  Surely—the creak had been from a lower step?

  I shook my head, puzzled.

  The next sound was from even farther, off the steps entirely, all the way into the kitchen….

  Getting away, the son of a bitch was getting away!

  I flew down the stairs, ignoring something white as I pelted down, rage lifting me out of myself so that I barely felt my feet touch the floor. But I heard the slam of the back door as I came through the kitchen doorway, and though I was only seconds behind him, it was enough for the intruder to conceal himself in the woods in back of the Drinkwaters’ house.

  I stood in the door for a minute or more, panting. For the first time, I understood the phrase “spoiling for a fight.” Then common sense prevailed and I retreated, locking the kitchen door behind me.

  I suffered an immediate reaction to the adrenaline my body had pumped into my blood to prepare me for action; at every step, I felt my flesh sag on my bones. With a terrible reluctance, I went to see what had been left on the stairs. A spotless white handkerchief was tented over something about halfway up. I reached out slowly and pulled off the handkerchief.

  Shining in the sun pouring through the stained-glass window at the landing was a set of cheap metal toy handcuffs. By them was a plastic gun.

  I sank onto the stairs and buried my head in my hands.