Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,43

my heart. I had a lot of memories of this woman.

"You never called me," she said now, looking up at me. She meant, after the rape. I could never get away from it here.

"I never called anyone," I said. I had to tell Mary Maude the truth. "I couldn't face doing it. I had too hard a time."

Her eyes filled with tears. "But I've always loved you."

Always right to the emotional truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Could this be why I'd never called Mary Maude after my Bad Time? We'd let go of each other, taken a step back.

I remembered another important truth. "I love you too," I said. "But I couldn't stand to be around people who were always thinking about what had happened to me. I couldn't do it."

She nodded. Her red hair, almost to her shoulders, turned under in a neat curve all the way around, and she had heavy gold earrings in her pierced ears. "I think I can understand that. I've been all these years forgiving you for refusing my comfort."

"Are we all right?"

"Yeah," she said, smiling up at me. "We're all right, now."

We both gave a little laugh, half happy, half embarrassed.

"So, you're getting boxes for Varena?"

"Yeah. She's getting her stuff out of the cottage. The wedding's day after tomorrow. And after the murder last night..."

"Oh, right, that's the place Varena rented! You know, the husband, Emory, works right here, with me." And Mary Maude pointed at the door from which she'd issued. "He's the sweetest guy."

He would certainly have been aware of Christopher Sims's presence in the alley in back of the store.

"So, I guess you knew this guy was living back here, the purse snatcher?"

"Well, we'd caught glimpses. Just in the two days before the police got him. Wait... my God, Lily, was that you who kicked him?"

I nodded.

"Wow, girl, what have you done with yourself?" She eyed me up and down.

"Taken karate for a few years, worked out some."

"I can tell! You were so brave, too!"

"So you knew Sims was back here?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. But we weren't sure what to do about it. We've never had any problem like that, and we were trying to decide what the safe thing to do was, and what the Christian thing to do was. It's tough when that might not be the same thing! We got Jess O'Shea down here to talk to the man, try to see where he wanted a bus ticket to, you know? Or if he was sick. Or hungry."

So Jess had actually met the man.

"What did Jess say?"

"He said this Sims guy told him he was just fine right where he was, he had been getting handouts from some people in the, you know, black community, and he was just going to stay in the alley until God guided him somewhere else."

"Somewhere where they had more purses?"

"Could be." Mary Maude laughed. "I hear Diane positively identified him. He told Diane at the police station that he was an angel and was trying to point out to Diane the hazards of possessing too many worldly goods."

"That's original."

"Yeah, give him points for a talent for fiction, anyway."

"He say anything about the murders?" Since Mary Maude apparently had such access to the local gossip pipeline, I thought I might as well tap in.

"No. Isn't that a little strange? You'd think on one hand he'd be too deranged to understand that the murders are so much more serious, and yet he's saying that he never saw the pipe until the police found it stuffed behind his box, you know, the one where he was sleeping."

I noticed that Mary Maude had come to check me out without a coat on, and she was shivering in her expensive white blouse and sweater-vest embroidered in holly and Christmas ornaments. Our reunion had its own background sound track, as the loudspeakers positioned around the square continued to blare out Christmas music.

"How do you stand it?" I asked, nodding my head toward the noise in the square.

"The carols? Oh, after a while you just tune them out," she said wearily. "They just leach the spirit out of me."

"Maybe that's what made the purse snatcher deranged,"

I offered, and she burst into laughter. Mary Maude had always laughed easily, charmingly, making it impossible not at least to smile along with her.

She hugged me again, made me promise to call her when I came back to town after the wedding, and scampered back into the store, her body shaking with the