Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,31

off as I looked up to meet her eyes.

"Yes," I said. "I have to."

A siren went off right behind me. The patrol officer must have been two blocks away when he got the call from the dispatcher, so he put on his siren. It nearly made me lose my grip. The car had "Bartley Police Department" printed in an arc over the Bartley town symbol, some complicated mishmash involving cotton and tractors. Under the symbol, the word "Chief" was centered in large letters.

"What we got here?" called the man in the uniform as he bounded up on the sidewalk. He had brown hair and a neat mustache. He was lean except for a curious potbelly, like a five-month pregnancy. He looked at the man on the sidewalk, at my grip on his arm.

"Hey, Lily," he said, after assessing all this. "What you got here?"

"Chandler?" I said, peering up at his face. "Chandler McAdoo?"

"In the flesh," he drawled. "You caught you a purse snatcher?"

"So it seems."

"Hi, Miz Bard," Chandler said, nodding at my mother, who nodded back automatically. I looked up at her shocked face, thinking as I did so that nothing could make her feel better for a little bit. Being the victim of a random crime was a shocking experience.

Chandler McAdoo had been my lab partner in high school, one memorable semester. We had done the frog thing together. I had been holding the knife - or the scalpel? I couldn't remember - and I had been on the verge of going silly-girl squeamish, when Chandler had looked me straight in the eye and told me I was a weak and useless critter if I couldn't cut one little hole in a dead frog.

He was right, I had figured, and I had cut.

That wasn't the only thing Chandler McAdoo had dared me to do, but it was the only dare I'd taken.

Chandler bent over now with his handcuffs, and with a practiced move, he had my prisoner cuffed before the man knew what was happening. I rose, with a courteous assist from Chief Chandler, and while I was telling him what had happened, he hauled the cuffed man to his feet and propelled the prisoner toward the squad car.

He listened, made a call on his radio.

I stared at every move he made, unable to square this man, this police chief with his severe haircut and cool eyes, with the boy who'd gotten drunk with me on Rebel Yell.

"Where you think he came from?" Chandler asked, as if it weren't too important. My mother had been coaxed inside the store by Varena and the sales clerks.

"Must have been there," I decided, pointing at the alley running between Corbett's and the furniture store. "That's the only place he could've been hiding unseen." It was a narrow alley, and if he'd been just a few feet inside it, he would have been invisible. "Where was Diane Dykeman when her purse was snatched?"

Chandler cocked an eye at me. "She was over by Dill's pharmacy, two blocks away," he said. "The snatcher dodged back in the alley, and we couldn't track him. I don't see how we could have missed this guy, but I guess he could have hidden until we'd checked the alley behind the store. There are more little niches and hidey-holes in this downtown area than you can shake a stick at."

I nodded. Since the downtown area of Bartley was more than a hundred and fifty years old, during which time the Square businesses had flourished and gone broke in cycles, I could well believe it.

"You stay put," Chandler said and strode down the alley. I sighed and stayed put. I glanced at my watch once or twice. He was gone for seven minutes.

"I think he's been sleeping back there," Chandler said when he reemerged onto the sidewalk. Suddenly my high school buddy was galvanized, and there wasn't any languid small-town-cop air about him anymore. "I didn't find Diane's purse, but there're some refrigerator cartons and a nest of rags."

Chandler had that saving-the-punchline air. He bent into his car and used the radio again.

"I just called Brainerd, who answered the call on the murder cases," he told me after he straightened. "Come look."

I followed Chandler down the alley. We arrived at the T junction, where this little alley joined the larger one running behind the buildings on the west of the square. There was a refrigerator carton tucked into a niche behind some bushes that had made their precarious lives in