the state of the squirrel's body. But I was clueless about squirrel metabolism, especially in this heat, and it would be way beyond me to try to estimate how long the poor critter had been dead. After a last glance at the blood, and a pang of regret that I had nothing with which to swab it up, I joined Jack on the driveway and we resumed our walk.
We didn't say anything else until we were a block away from the house, and then it wasn't much. Someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd, and from all the cues in the conversation we'd had with the couple, this persecution had been going on for some time. If Tamsin and her husband were unwilling to ask for help, what could be done?
"Nothing," I concluded, straightening up after washing my face in the bathroom sink.
Jack picked up on that directly. "I guess not," he agreed. "And you watch your step around her. I think this therapy group is good for you, but I don't want you catching some kind of collateral fallout when her situation implodes."
As I composed myself for sleep thirty minutes later, I found myself thinking that it hardly seemed fair that Tamsin had to listen to the group's problems, while her own were kept swept under the rug of her marriage. I reminded myself that, after all, Tamsin was getting paid to do her job, and she had been trained to cope with the inevitable depression that must follow hearing so many tales of misery and evil.
Jack wasn't yet asleep, so I told him what I'd been thinking.
"She listens to a lot of bad stuff, yeah," he said, his voice quiet, coming out of the darkness. "But look at the courage, look at the toughness. The determination. She hears that, too. Look how brave you all are."
I couldn't say anything at all. My throat clogged. I was glad it was dark. At last, I was able to pat Jack's shoulder; and a minute later, I heard by his breathing that he was asleep. Before it could overcome me, too, I thought, This is why Jack is here beside me. Because he can think of saying something like he just said.
That was a fine reason.
Chapter Three
By my third therapy session, Tuesday night was no longer a time I dreaded.
I'd had hours sitting in a car, standing in a convenience store, and drifting around a mall - all in pursuit of the Worker's Comp. claimant - to analyze our counseling sessions. I had to admit I couldn't tell if Tamsin Lynd was following some kind of master plan in directing us along the path to recovery. It seemed to me that often we just talked at random; though from time to time I could discern Tamsin's fine hand directing us.
Not one of the women in the group was someone I would've picked for a friend, with the exception of Janet Shook. Sandy McCorkindale made me particularly edgy. She tried very hard to be the unflawed preacher's wife, and she very nearly succeeded. Her veneer of good modest clothes and good modest makeup, backed by an almost frenzied determination to keep the smooth surface intact, was maintained at a tremendous, secret cost. I had lived too close to the edge of despair and mental illness not to recognize it in others, and Sandy McCorkindale was a walking volcano. I was willing to bet her family was used to living on tiptoe, perhaps even quite unaware they were doing so.
The other women were OK. I'd gradually learned their personal histories. In a town the size of Shakespeare, keeping identities a secret was impossible. For example, not only did I know that Carla (of the croaking voice) was Carla Preston, I knew that her dad had retired from Shakespeare Drilling and Exploration, and her mom took the lunch money at the elementary school cafeteria. I knew Carla smoked like a chimney when she went out the back door of the Health Center, she'd been married three times, and she said everything she thought. She'd become a grandmother when she was thirty-five.
Melanie Kleinhoff no longer looked quite as sullen, and despite her youth and pale doughy looks, she set herself goals and met them (no matter how difficult) to the point of idiocy. She had never graduated from high school and she was still married to the man whose brother had raped her. Firella Bale, probably the most educated of all of us - with the