Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,17

both beaten." My gaze skimmed the top of the old, old gum trees lining the street. "To death."

"Okay, now. I'll tell you what we're going to do here."

He was extremely nervous, and I didn't blame him one bit.

"You're gonna stay right here, ma'am, while I go in there and take a look. Don't go anywhere, now."

"No."

I waited by the police car, the cold gray day pinching my face and hands.

This is a world of carnage and cruelty: I had momentarily put that aside in the false security of my hometown, in the optimistic atmosphere of my sister's marriage.

I began to detach from the scene, to float away, escaping this town, this building, these dead. It had been a long time since I'd retreated like this, gone to the remote place where I was not responsible for feeling.

A young woman was standing in front of me in a paramedic's uniform.

"Ma'am? Ma'am? Are you all right?" Her dark, anxious face peered into mine, her black hair stiff, smooth, and shoulder length under a cap with a caduceus patch on it.

"Yes."

"Officer Brainerd said you had seen the bodies."

I nodded.

"Are you ... maybe you better come sit down over here, ma'am."

My eyes followed her pointing finger to the rear of the ambulance.

"No, thanks," I said politely. "My sister is over there in the State Farm office, though. She might need help."

"I think you may need a little help yourself, ma'am," the woman said earnestly, loudly, as though I was retarded, as though I couldn't tell the difference between clinical shock and just being numb.

"No." I said it as finally and definitely as I knew how. I waited. I heard her muttering to someone else, but she did leave me alone after that. Varena came to stand beside me. Her eyes were red, and her makeup was streaked.

"Let's go home," she said.

"The policeman told me to wait."

"Oh."

Just then the same policeman, Brainerd, came striding out of the doctor's office. He'd gotten over his fit of nerves, and he'd seen the worst. He was focused, ready to go to work. He asked us a lot of questions, keeping us out in the cold for half an hour when we'd told him the sum of our knowledge in one minute.

Finally, we buckled up in Varena's car. As she started back to our parents' house, I switched Varena's heater to full blast. I glanced over at my sister. Her face was blanched by the cold, her eyes red from crying with her contacts in. She'd pulled her hair back this morning in a ponytail, with a bright red scarf tied over the elastic band. The scarf still looked crisp and cheerful, though Varena had wilted. Varena's eyes met mine while we were waiting our turn at a four-way stop. She said, "The drug cabinet was closed and full."

"I saw." Dr. LeMay had always kept the samples, and his supplies, in the same cabinet in the lab, a glass-front old-fashioned one. Since I'd been his patient as a child, that cabinet had stood in the same place with the same sort of contents. It would have surprised me profoundly if Dr. LeMay had ever kept anything very street-desirable ... he'd have antibiotics, antihistamines, skin ointments, that kind of thing, I thought vaguely. Maybe painkillers.

Like Varena, I'd seen past Binnie's body that the cabinet door was shut and everything in the room was orderly. It didn't seem likely that the same person who would commit such messy murders would leave the drug cabinet so neat if he'd searched it.

"I don't know what to make of that," I told Varena. She shook her head. She didn't, either. I stared out of the window at the familiar passing scenery, wishing I was anywhere but in Bartley.

"Lily, are you all right?" Varena asked, her voice curiously hesitant.

"Sure, are you?" I sounded more abrupt than I'd intended.

"I have to be, don't I? The wedding rehearsal is tonight, and I don't see how we can call it off. Plus, I've seen worse, frankly. It's just it being Dr. LeMay and Binnie that gave me such a wallop."

My sister sounded simply matter-of-fact. It hit me forcefully that Varena, as a nurse, had seen more blood and pain and awfulness than I would see in a lifetime. She was practical. After overcoming the initial shock, she was tough. She pulled into our parents' driveway and switched off the ignition.

"You're right. You can't call it off. People die all the time, Varena, and you can't derail your wedding