Shakespeare's Christmas (17 page)

“We have to start the list, Daddy!” She looked up at him sternly.

I thought that Eve had probably been hugged and patted enough for two lifetimes in the day just past.

She began the list herself, in shaky and idiosyncratic writing. I told her how to do it, and she perched on a stool at the counter, laboriously entering the food gifts on one side, the bringer on the other, and a star when there was a dish that had to be returned.

Galvanized by our activity, Emory began making calls from the telephone on the kitchen counter. I gathered from the snatches of conversation I overheard that he was calling the police department to find out when they thought Meredith’s body could come back from its autopsy in Little Rock, making arrangements for the music at the funeral service, checking in at work, trying to start his life back into motion. He began writing his own list, in tiny, illegible writing. It was a list of things to do before the funeral, he told me in his quiet voice. I was glad to see him shake off his torpor.

It was getting late so I accelerated my work rate, sweeping and mopping and wiping down the kitchen counters with dispatch. I selected a few dishes for Emory and Eve’s supper, leaving them on the counter with heating instructions. Emory was still talking on the phone, so I just drifted out of the room with Eve behind me. I pulled on my coat, pulled up the strap of my purse.

“Can you come back, Lily?” Eve asked. “You know how to do everything.”

I looked down at her. I was betraying this child and her father, abusing their trust. Eve’s admiration for me was painful.

“I can’t come back tomorrow, no,” I said as gently as I was capable of. “Varena’s getting married the day after, and I still have a lot to do for that. But I’ll try to see you again.”

“OK.” She took that in a soldierlike way, which I was beginning to understand was typical of Eve Osborn. “And thank you for helping today,” Eve said, after a couple of gulps. Very much woman of the house.

“I figured cleaning would be more use than more food.”

“You were right,” she said soberly. “The house looks so much nicer.”

“See ya,” I said. I bent to give her a little hug. I felt awkward. “Take care of yourself.” What a stupid thing to tell a child, I castigated myself, but I had no idea what else to say.

Emory was standing by the front door. I felt like snarling. I had almost made it out without talking to him. “I can’t thank you enough for this,” he said, his sincerity painful and unwelcome.

“It was nothing.”

“No, no,” he insisted. “It meant so much to us.” He was going to cry again.

Oh, hell. “Good-bye,” I told him firmly and was out the door.

Glancing down at my watch again as I walked out to my car, I realized there was no way to get out of explaining to my folks where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

To compound my guilt, my parents thought I’d done a wonderful Christian thing, helping out Emory Osborn in his hour of travail. I had to let them think the best of me when I least deserved it.

I tried hard to pack my guilt into a smaller space in my heart. Reduced to the most basic terms, the Osborns now had a clean house in which to receive visitors. And I had a negative report for Jack. I hadn’t discovered anything of note, except for Eve’s trip to the doctor. Though I had stolen the brush.

When Varena emerged from her room, looking almost as weepy as Emory, I put the second part of my plan into effect.

“I’m in the cleaning mood,” I told her. “How about me cleaning Dill’s house, so it’ll be nice for your first Christmas together?” Varena and Dill weren’t leaving for their honeymoon until after Christmas, so they’d be together at home with Anna.

Somehow, since my mission was to save Varena grief, I didn’t feel quite as guilty as I had when I’d told Emory I was going to clean his house. But I had a sour taste in my mouth, and I figured it was self-disgust.

“Thanks,” Varena said, surprise evident in her voice. “That would really be a load off my mind. You’re sure?”

“You know I need something to do,” I told her truthfully.

“Bless your heart,” Varena said with compassion, giving me a hug. Somehow, my sister’s unwanted sympathy stiffened my resolve.

Then the doorbell rang, and it was some friends of my parents’, just back from a trip to see the Christmas decorations at Pigeon Forge. They were full of their trip and had brought a present for Dill and Varena. It was easy for me to slip off to my room after a proper greeting. I took a hot, hot shower and waited for Jack to call me.

He didn’t. The phone rang off the wall that evening, the callers ranging from friends wanting to check on wedding plans, Dill asking for Varena, credit card companies wanting to extend new cards to my parents, and church members trying to arrange a meal for the Osborn family after the relatives had arrived for Meredith’s funeral.

But no Jack.

Something was niggling at me, and I wanted to look at the pictures of Summer Dawn at eight. I wanted to ask Jack some questions. I wanted to look at his briefcase. That was the closest I could get to figuring out what was bothering me.

About eight-thirty, I called Chandler McAdoo. “Let’s go riding,” I said.

Chandler pulled into my parents’ drive in his own vehicle, a Jeep. He was wearing a heavy red-and-white-plaid flannel shirt, a camo jacket, jeans, and Nikes.

My mother answered the door before I could get there.

“Chandler,” she said, sounding a little at sea. “Did you need to ask us something about the other day?”

“No, ma’am. I’m here to pick up Lily.” He was wearing an Arkansas Travellers gimme cap, and the bill of it tilted as he nodded at me. I was putting on my coat.

“
This
brings back old times,” my mother said with a smile.

“See you in a while, Mom,” I said, zipping up my old red Squall jacket.

“Okay, sweetie. You two have a good time.”

I liked the Jeep. Chandler kept it spick-and-span, and I approved. Jack tended to distribute paperwork all over his car.

“So, where we going?” Chandler asked.

“It’s too cold and we’re too old for Frankel’s Pond,” I said. “What about the Heart of the Delta?”

“The Heart it is,” he said.

By the time we scooted into a booth at the home-owned diner we’d patronized all through high school, I was in the midst of being updated about Chandler’s two stabs at marriage, the little boy he was so proud of (by Cindy, wife number two), and the current woman in his life—Tootsie Monahan, my least favorite of Varena’s bridesmaids.

When we had glanced at the menu—which seemed almost eerily the same as it had been when I was sixteen, except for the prices—and had given the waitress our order (a hamburger with everything and fries for Chandler, a butter-scotch milkshake for me), Chandler gave me a sharp, let’s-get-down-to-it look.

“So what’s the deal with this guy you’ve hooked up with?”

“Jack.”

“I know his damn name. What’s his business here?”

Chandler and I stared at each other for a moment. I took a deep breath.

“He’s tracing an . . .” I stopped dead. How could I do this? Where did my loyalty lie?

Chandler made a rotary movement with his hand, wanting me to spill it out.

Chandler had already told Jack several things, operating on his affection for me. But the actual physical effort of opening my mouth, telling him Jack’s business, was almost impossible. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath. “A missing person,” I said.

He absorbed that.

“Okay, tell me.”

I hesitated. “It’s not my call.”

“What do you want from me, Lily?”

Chandler’s face was infinitely older.

Oh, Jesus, I hated this.

“Tell me what people were doing when Meredith Osborn was killed. I don’t know if that has anything to do with Jack’s job, Chandler, and that’s the truth. I was in that house, just a few feet away from her, and if there’s anything I know it’s how to fight.” I hadn’t known how that bothered me until I said it. “I didn’t have a chance to lift a finger to help her. Just tell me about that evening.”

He could do that without violating any laws, I figured.

“What people were doing. What happened to Meredith.” Chandler appeared to be thinking, his eyes focused on the saltshaker with its grains of rice showing yellower than the stark white of the salt.

I didn’t know I’d been holding my breath until Chandler began talking. He folded his small hands in front of him, and his face took on a faintly stern, stiff set that I realized must be his professional demeanor.

“Mrs. Osborn died, as far as I could tell by a visual exam, from multiple stab wounds to the chest,” he began. “She’d been hit in the face, maybe to knock her on the ground so the stabbing would be easier. The attack took place in the backyard. It would have required only a minute or two. She wasn’t able to move more than a yard after she was stabbed. Her wounds were very severe. Plus, the temperature was below freezing, and she didn’t have a coat on.”

“But she did move that one yard.”

“Yes.”

“Toward Varena’s little house.”

“Yes.”

I could feel my mouth compress in a hard line and my eyes narrow, in what my friend Marshall had once called my “fist face.”

“What kind of knife?”

“Some kind of single-blade kitchen knife, looked like, but we have to wait on the autopsy to be sure. We haven’t found any kind of knife.”

“Did you go in the Osborns’ house?”

“Sure. We had to see if the killer was in there, and the back door was unlocked.”

“So someone had made a noise, or called Meredith out of the house . . . ?”

He shrugged. “Something like that, we figure. She wasn’t scared. She would have stayed in the house and locked the back door if she’d been scared. She could have called us. The phone was working, I checked. Instead, she went outside.”

Unspoken between us lay the inescapable conclusion that Meredith had seen someone she knew and trusted in the yard.

“When does Emory say he left the house?”

“About seven. He had the two little girls. He wanted to give his wife some time to herself, he said. She’d had a hard time with the baby’s birth, wasn’t getting her strength back, and so on.”

I raised my brows.

“Yes, the waitress confirms that Emory got to the restaurant about five after. It took about forty-five minutes for Emory and Eve to eat, and then the baby woke up and Emory gave her a bottle, burped her, the whole nine yards. So they left the restaurant maybe fifteen minutes after eight. Emory had some things to pick up at the Kmart, so he took the girls with him in there, and they got some vitamins and other junk . . . that brings us up to around eight-fifty, nine o’clock, somewhere in there.”

“Then he comes home.”

“Then he comes home,” Chandler agreed. “He was mighty tore up. Turned white as a sheet.”

“You had already searched the house?”

“Yes, had to. Didn’t find any evidence anyone but the family had been in it. Nothing suspicious in any way. No forced entry, no threatening messages in the answering machine, no sign of a struggle . . . a big zero.”

“Chandler . . .” I hesitated. But I could think of no other way to find out. “Did you search his car?”

Chandler shifted in his seat. “No. Do you think we should have?”

“Did you ask Eve if her dad had stopped back by the house for anything?”

“I did my best to ask her that. I had to be real careful how I put it, didn’t want the girl to think we figured her dad had done it. She’s just eight!” Chandler looked at me angrily, as if that were my doing.

“What did she say?” I asked, keeping my voice very quiet and level.

“She said they went to the restaurant. Period. Then to Kmart. Period.”

I nodded, looked away. “Where was Jess O’Shea?” I asked.

I could feel the heat of Chandler’s glare even though I was looking over at the chipped Formica counter.

“Dave asked Emory what church he went to, and when he said Presbyterian, we called Jess,” Chandler said slowly. “Lou said he was over in his office counseling a member of the congregation.”

“Did you call over there?”

“Yes.”

“Get an answer?”

“Yes. But he said he couldn’t come right that second.”

I wondered if Jess had actually come over to the Osborns’ house that night. I couldn’t remember if the scene between him and Emory the next day had given me a sense of an original encounter or a continuation of a dialogue begun the night before. I had been so embarrassed that I had tried to block out their conversation.

“Did he give a reason?”

“I just assumed he had to finish talking to whoever was there.”

The upshot was, Jess had been away from home and the police had not asked him to account for his time. There was no reason why they should, from their point of view.

Varena had told me Dill was going to spend the evening at home with Anna. I didn’t think Dill was the kind of father who’d leave Anna in the house by herself, but he could have worked it out somehow, I guessed. I wondered if I could think of a way to ask questions that wouldn’t make red flags go up in Varena’s mind.

“Lily, if someone’s safety is at stake, or if you have any idea at all who killed that poor woman, you are legally obliged to tell me. Morally, too.”

I looked into Chandler’s round brown eyes. I’d known this man my whole life, been friends with him, off and on, that long. When I’d come home to Bartley after my spectacular victimization and subsequent media bath, Chandler had been a constant visitor. He’d been between marriages, and we had gone out to eat together, ridden around together, spent time together so I could get away from my family and their love that was just choking me.

During that time, seven years ago, we had also shared a horribly embarrassing evening in the big pickup Chandler had been driving then. But I was sure we both did our best not to remember that.