Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,51

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