(LB1) Shakespeare's Champion

by Charlaine Harris

  Again I held out my hand, and he wriggled the glove over my fingers, wrapping the strap around my wrist and Velcroing it snugly. I flexed my fingers, made a fist, looked at him. He smiled, and deep arcs appeared on each side of his mouth. The smile changed him totally, threw me off balance.

  “Don’t hit me here. Save it for later,” he murmured. “You’re quite a fighter.” I remembered I’d bitten him on the ear. I looked at it. It looked better than mine.

  It had been a long time since I’d met someone new. It had been even longer since I’d met someone who apparently didn’t know who I was.

  “Lived here long?” he asked, as if we’d just seen each other for the first time and he was introducing a standard conversational gambit. I looked down at the glove on my right hand, considered the fit.

  “Over four years,” I said, holding out my left hand.

  “And you have your own maid service?”

  “I clean houses and run errands,” I said a little sharply. “I work by myself.”

  His fingers stroked my hand as he pulled the other glove on.

  “Do you think they’re too tight?” I asked, pantomiming a seiken zuki strike to get the feel of the glove. I was able to curl my fingers more easily than I’d thought. I practiced a hammer fist strike. I’d looked at the price tag. The gloves were very expensive, and I’d better be sure they suited me. I picked up one of the twenty-pound barbells, gripped it, raised it over my head. It was a very unpleasant surprise to find it felt heavy.

  “They’ll loosen a little. Lily is a pretty name.”

  I shot him a look.

  He looked back steadily. “I know you live next to my apartment building. But if I wanted to call you, how are you listed in the phone book?”

  As if he couldn’t ask Howell. Or anyone else in town, for that matter. I put down the barbell very gently. I’d enjoyed a few minutes of feeling normal.

  “Bard,” I said. “My name is Lily Bard.” I knew he would remember.

  Because I didn’t want to see the look on his face, I took the package the gloves had come in from his suddenly still hands, walked out of the area stripping off the gloves. I paid for them at the front counter, exchanging a few idle words with Al Ferrar, a big, friendly redheaded man whose fingers seemed too large to punch the cash register keys. The hunting bows were behind him, and I stared at them as he rang up the purchase. The arrowheads hung in bubble containers on the wall behind him some so wickedly sharp, like four razors joined together, that I could hardly believe the user wouldn’t be frightened to fit them on the shafts. When Al handed me the plastic bag with the gloves in it, I stared at him blankly for a minute and then left the store.

  I stood looking up into the sky when I’d reached my car, lost in the gray emptiness of an overcast November day. Wet leaves had piled up in the lower parts of the parking lot. It was going to rain again that evening, the weatherman had predicted. I heard footsteps behind me. The apathy washed back over me, a wave that pulled me under. I was so tired I could scarcely move. I wished the coming scene to be over and done with, wished I could go somewhere else while it was accomplished.

  “Why’d you run out like that?”

  “You’d better go back to your area, or you’ll blow your cover.”

  “I’m working,” he said harshly.

  “Night and day. At the store and elsewhere, Jack.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Look at me, dammit.”

  It would have seemed too affected not to, so I stopped looking at the bleak sky and looked instead at Jack Leeds’s bleak face.

  “I get a hard-on every time I see you,” he said.

  “Try sending me roses. It’s a little more subtle.”

  He gazed off at a corner of the asphalt. He’d come out without a jacket. I was meanly glad to see him shiver.

  “OK. I’ll start over,” he said through gritted teeth. “You know I’m working, and you know what I am.”

  He waited for me to nod. To get it over with, I did.

  “I am not seeing anyone right now. I’ve been divorced twice, but you may remember that from the papers.”

  I leaned against my car, feeling far away, glad to be there.

  With the speed of a snake, he ran his hand under my jacket and T-shirt, placing it flat on my ribs. I gasped and flinched, but his hand stayed there, warm and firm.

  “Move your hand,” I said, my voice ragged.

  “Got your attention. Listen to me. This job in Shakespeare will come to an end. I want to see you then.”

  I shivered, standing stock-still, rigid, taken by surprise. His fingers moved against my skin, touching the scars gently. A silver pickup pulled into the space two vehicles away and the driver gave us a curious look. I chopped down on Jack Leeds’s wrist, knocking his hand from its intimate lodgment.

  “I have to go to work, Jared,” I said numbly, and got in my car and backed up, avoiding looking at him again.

  CARRIE WAS COMING to supper tonight and I thought about what I’d fix, not one of my usual frozen-ahead dishes that I prepared on Sundays to carry me through the week. Maybe fettuccine with ham…or chili would be good, on such a chilly gray day, but I didn’t have enough time to let it simmer.

  Keeping my thoughts to a simple minimum, I managed my afternoon well. It was a relief to go home, to allow myself ten minutes in my favorite chair reading a news magazine. Then I set to work, tossing a salad, preparing the fettuccine, heating some garlic bread, chopping the ham. When Carrie knocked on the front door, I was ready.

  “Those morons at the hospital!” she said, sliding out of her coat, tossing her gloves on the table.

  “Hello to you, too.”

  “You’d think they could see the handwriting on the wall. Everyone else can.” The tiny Shakespeare Hospital was in perpetual crisis trying to maintain its accreditation, with no adequate budget to supply its lacks, which were legion.

  I let Carrie bear the brunt of the conversation, which she seemed quite willing to do. There were few people Carrie could talk to, as a woman and a doctor and an outlander from northern Arkansas. I knew from previous talks with Carrie that she had gotten a loan to attend medical school. The terms of the loan stipulated that she had to go to somewhere other doctors didn’t want to go and stay there for four years; and other doctors didn’t want to go to Shakespeare. Carrie was one of four local GPs, who all made a decent living, but for more specialized medical care Shakespeareans had to travel to Montrose, or in dire need, Little Rock.

  “Where’d you get the ring?” Carrie asked suddenly.

  I’d been feeling a warm hand on my skin. It took me a second to reorient.

  “The older Mrs. Winthrop says Marie Hofstettler left me this,” I told Carrie.

  “It’s a pretty ring,” she said. “Can I see it?”

  I slid the ring off and handed it to Carrie. I thought of my strange visit to the Winthrop house the night before, the pallor of Howell Winthrop’s face as he saw the ring box in my hand.

  Some things that were supposed to be free actually came mighty expensive. I wondered if this little ring was one of them.

  Then I wondered why that thought had crossed my mind.

  I took the ring back from Carrie and slid it on my right hand, then took it back off and dropped it in my pocket. Carrie raised her thick dark brows, but didn’t say anything.

  We washed the dishes, talking in a companionable way of whatever crossed our minds: the price of milk, the vagaries of dealing with the public, the onset of hunting season (which would have a certain impact on Carrie’s job and mine, since hunting engendered both injuries and dirt galore), and the recuperation of Claude, which continued at too slow a pace to suit him, and, I suspected, Carrie. She told me she’d gotten the green light to move Claude from an upstairs to a downstairs apartment, but that he wanted to be on the scene to direct the move, so a date hadn’t been set yet.

  When Carrie left, it was a little later than usual, and I was worn out. I
took a quick shower, put on my favorite blue nightgown, laid out my clothes for the next morning. I went through my nightly routine of checking the locks at the windows and doors. I felt more relaxed, more content. Tomorrow might be a regular day.

  Chapter 6

  MY HEART WAS HAMMERING. THE BAD TIME WAS BACK again. I sat up in bed, gasping, my nightgown damp against my breasts. I’d been sweating in my sleep. Horrible dreams, old dreams, the worst: the chains, the shack, the rhythmic thud of the iron headboard against the wall.

  Something had wakened me, something besides the dream; or maybe something had sparked the dream. I scrambled out of bed and pulled on the white chenille robe I keep draped across the footboard. As I tied the sash tightly around my waist, I glanced at my digital clock. One-thirty. I heard a sound: a quick, light rapping at my back door.

  I crept out of my bedroom. It’s next to that door. I put my ear against the wood. A voice on the other side of the door was saying something over and over, and as my hand reached for the switch, I realized the voice was saying, “Don’t turn on the light! For God’s sake, don’t turn on the light!”

  “Who is it?” I asked, my ear pressed to the meeting of door and frame so I could hear better.

  “Jack, it’s Jack. Let me in, they’re after me!”

  I heard the desperation in his voice. I pushed the dead bolt back and opened the door. A dark form hurtled past me and crashed on the hall floor as I slammed the door shut and relocked it.

  I knelt beside him. The faint radiance provided by the nightlight burning behind the nearly shut bathroom door was almost useless. His breathing was ragged and loud; no point in asking him questions. I moved my fingers up Jack’s legs first: wet boots, damp blue jeans—it was raining again. My hands moved higher, running over his butt and crotch; then I felt his chest, his back, under his padded waterproof vest.

  The detective rolled to his right side. He groaned when my fingers found the sticky patch on his left shoulder. I flinched, too, but I made my hand return to the wound. There was a hole in the vest. I probed further. There was a big hole in the vest, and the shirt underneath was ripped. It seemed plain enough that Jack Leeds had been shot high in the shoulder.

  “I need to look at this in some light,” I said. His breathing seemed closer to normal. He was shaking now, from cold and perhaps relief.

  “If you turn on a light, they’ll know I woke you. They’re gonna knock on your door any minute.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, trying for control. He made a little sound through clenched teeth.

  I’d have to turn on the outside light, then. I thought about Jack’s wet boots and the little roof over the back porch.

  “Crawl into the first door on your left,” I said. I hurried into the kitchen, glad my leg was so much better. I washed my hands in the dark. I filled a saucepan with water. Returning to the back door, I edged it open and listened; not a sound beyond the cool patter of the rain. I opened the door wider. The security light in the parking lot to the rear of the apartment building also benefited my backyard, at least a little. I could see the dark wet footprints Jack had left on the boards. I poured water over the porch and steps, wiping out the marks of his entrance. I could only hope “they” (whoever they were) wouldn’t be observant enough to wonder why my sheltered porch was soaking wet.

  Shutting and locking the door again, I automatically placed the inverted pan in the kitchen drainer. I stood in the middle of the room, thinking furiously. No, there was nothing more I could do. Jack had surely left tracks on the wet ground, but it was beyond my power to obliterate them.

  I padded silently into my bedroom. “Where are you?” I whispered. This was like playing hide-and-seek, in a scary kind of way.

  “By the bed, on the rug,” he said. “Don’t want to mess up your sheets or your floor.”

  I appreciated the consideration. “How’d you get here? To the house?” I asked, ashamed of the anxious undertone I could hear in my own voice.

  “Over the fence, from the back lot of the lumber place. But I went further down to the vacant lot at the corner, then cut back here on the pavement. I started to come to your front door, but then I figured they might have a car cruising the neighborhood by now, if they’ve stopped to think. So I went up your driveway, around your carport, and took the stepping stones to the back door.” He paused. “Oh, shit, the porch! Footprints!”

  “I took care of it.”

  I could sense his movement as he turned to stare in my direction. But all he said was “Good.” His eyes closed, I thought, and he shifted positions painfully.

  My eyes had done some adjusting, enough to make him out. He hadn’t cut all his hair off, as it had looked at first. He was wearing a black knit watch cap and he’d tucked all his hair up under it. I eased it off. Of course the cap hadn’t done anything to keep his head dry. The released strands spread in rat’s tails across the white bedside rug.

  He opened his eyes and regarded me steadily. I found myself running my fingers through my hair to fluff it out. Ridiculous. I couldn’t postpone dealing with the wound any longer.

  “Let’s get your vest off,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I scooted closer. “Hold out your hand. I’ll help you sit up.”

  Jack had better night vision than I did. His hand was on mine instantly. I gripped and pulled, automatically giving the “Huh!” of heavy exertion. I leaned him against the side of the bed and unzipped the vest. I pulled it down his right arm first. I eased it across his back, leaning almost against his chest to accomplish the maneuver. I smelled the wet of his vest and his shirtsleeves, and the scent of his skin, the faintest trace of some aftershave. Then I scuttled over to his left side, held up his left arm with one hand while I tugged at the vest with the other. He gave a deep groan, and I sucked my breath in sympathetically. But I didn’t stop. The vest wasn’t actually stuck; it was the movement of his arm and shoulder that was causing him pain.

  His flannel shirt, now, that was stuck. I fetched my heavy kitchen scissors and began to cut through the thick material. This proved impossible and dangerous in the darkness. I left to push the bathroom door wide open. I’d worried about the nightlight, but I figured a nightlight in a bathroom was no big wonder, and it was my habit. Suddenly switching it off might be even more suspicious.

  With the slightly improved visibility I could just see enough to cut off the shirt without hurting Jack worse. He was leaning back against the bed with his eyes closed.

  I wanted to call Carrie, but her arrival would be a dead giveaway. Jack was still shivering, but it didn’t seem to be as teeth-chattering a tremor as before.

  There was a single loud knock at the back door. Jack’s eyes flew open and stared into mine, only a few inches away.

  “They won’t come in,” I promised. I looked down at my robe. It was streaked with dirt and damp and blood. I unbelted it and draped it over Jack, wiping my hands on its hem. I went into the hall and up to the back door, as noisily as I could.

  “Who is it?” I asked loudly. “I’m going to call the police!”

  “Lily, hey! It’s Darcy!”

  “Darcy Orchard, what the hell are you doing knocking at my door in the middle of the night? Go away!”

  “Lily, we just want to make sure you’re all right. Someone broke in over at the store.”

  “So?”

  “He took off running across the back lot. He scaled the fence and went into the lumber yard lot. We think he climbed out and came across the tracks.”

  “So?”

  “Let us lay eyes on you, Lily. We gotta be sure you’re not being held hostage.”

  That was clever.

  “I’m not letting you in my house in the middle of the night,” I said baldly, figuring that would be congruent with my history and character. And it was the simple truth. They would not come into my house.

  “No, that’s fine, honey. We just want to see you’re okay.” Darcy did a good job of sounding concerned.

  I switched on t
he light above the back door, which I’d been hoping to avoid in case Jack had left traces I hadn’t anticipated. I stuck my head out the door and glared at Darcy up on my back porch and the group of men in my backyard. Darcy wasn’t dressed for the weather; he looked exactly like he’d run out the door in whatever he had on. His thinning hair was plastered to his head. His pale eyes glistened in the porch light. Darcy was enjoying himself.

  I swept my eyes over the four bundled figures clustered together behind him, enduring the light rain and chill wind. I was trying to gather in a look at the posts supporting the little porch roof while I was at it.

  Dammit all to hell. Jack had left a bloody handprint on one of them; but it was on the inside toward me, thank God.

  To make sure their attention didn’t wander, I stepped out on the tiny porch in my nightgown, and five pairs of eyes bugged out.

  I heard a reverent “Wow,” which Darcy instantly suppressed by turning to glare at the offender. Despite the fact that all the men had pulled up their collars and pulled down their hats, I could recognize the exclamation had come from the boy who worked at the loading dock of the lumber supply house. I wondered how they’d picked Darcy to be the one who got his name on the record, so to speak.

  “See, I’m fine,” I said, not having to work at sounding furious. “I’m under no duress, and I could walk away from this house right now if I wanted to freeze. How come all of you are out in the rain chasing a burglar, anyway? Don’t you have an alarm system that calls the police?”

  As I’d hoped, going on the offense made them begin to back away.

  “We were having a little…” Darcy paused, clearly unsure how to end the sentence.

  “Inventory,” said one of the men. His voice was oddly muffled since he was trying to keep his face buried in his collar. I was pretty sure it was Jim Box, Darcy’s workout buddy and coworker. Jim had always thought quicker than Darcy, but without the panache. Behind him, a figure crouched with a hood covering most of his features, but I would recognize that thin, mean mouth anywhere. Tom David Meicklejohn, in mufti. Hmmm.