Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,62
cop."
"Were we kissing, Jack?"
"No."
"Were we holding hands, Jack?"
"No."
"Was I looking at him with love, Jack?"
"No."
"Did he look happy, Jack?"
"No." Jack bowed his head, rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.
"Let me tell you what happened the last time I went on a date with Chandler McAdoo, Jack." I bent to his level until he had to look me in the eyes or be a coward. "It was seven years ago, the bad time, and I had been back in Bartley for two months. Chandler and I went to the movies, and then we drove out to the lake, like we'd done when we were kids."
Jack's hazel eyes didn't flinch, and he was listening. I knew it.
"So when we were at the lake, Chandler wanted to kiss me, and I wanted to feel like a real woman again, so I let him. I even enjoyed it... a little. And then it went a little farther, and he pulled my T-shirt up. Want to know what happened then, Jack? Chandler started crying. The scars were real fresh then, red. He cried when he saw my body. And that's the last I saw of Chandler for seven years."
A heavy silence settled in the cold motel room.
"Pardon me," Jack said finally. He was absolutely sincere, not mouthing a social catchall. "Pardon me."
"Jack, you never believed I was sneaking behind your back."
"I didn't?" He looked a little angry and a little amused.
"You gave Varena her present before you even discussed last night with me," I said. "You knew all along we weren't... parting." I had almost used the phrase "breaking up," but it seemed too childish.
Abruptly, Jack's face went absolutely still, as if he'd had a revelation of some kind.
He turned his eyes to me. "How could he cry?" Jack asked me. "You are so beautiful."
I was still speechless, but for another reason. Jack had never said anything remotely like this.
"Don't pity me," I said softly.
"Lily, you said I never really doubted you. Now, I say, you know that pity is the last thing I feel for you."
He lay with his chest to my back, one arm thrown around me. He was still awake, I could tell. I had another hour and a half, by my watch.
I didn't want to think about Summer Dawn. I didn't want to think about the dead people littering the path to her recovery.
I wanted to touch Jack. I wanted to twine my fingers in his hair. I wanted to understand his thoughts.
But he was a man with a job to do, and he wanted more than anything in the world to take Summer Dawn back to her parents. While he kept his arm around me and from time to time dropped a kiss on my neck, his thoughts had drifted away from me, and mine had to follow.
Reluctantly, I began to tell him what I'd found: the two memory books, one whole and one mutilated, in Anna Kingery's room; the absence of the same book at Eve Osborn's. I told him that Eve Osborn had been to the doctor recently, that I didn't yet know about Anna. I told him about Anna's mother ... the woman we were assuming was Anna's mother. And I pulled the plastic-wrapped brush and the birth photo of Anna out of my purse and placed them by Jack's briefcase.
I rolled over to face him when I'd finished. I don't know what he saw in my face, but he said, "Damn," under his breath, and looked away from me.
"Have you learned anything?" I asked, to get that expression off his face.
"Like I said, my trip was pretty much of a washout," he told me, but not as if he was upset about it. I guess private eyes encounter a lot of dead-end streets. "But early this morning, I wandered into the police station and took Chandler and a guy named Roger out for coffee and doughnuts. Since I used to be a cop, and they wanted to prove that small-town cops can be just as sharp as city cops, they were pretty forthcoming."
I stroked his hair away from his face and nodded to show him I was listening. I didn't want to tell him they'd have told him nothing if Chandler hadn't checked up on him and talked to me about him.
"They told me the pipe recovered in the alley was definitely the one used to kill the doctor and his nurse," Jack said. "And Christopher Sims's fingerprints were nowhere on it. The pipe has a