Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,5

was approaching fifty, and the years had been hard. "I was winning some money, too. I guess one of them good ole boys didn't like me beating the pants off of 'em, put something in my drink. Next thing I know, I'm in my car buck naked without a dime, my keys stuck up my privates. They'd had sex with me while I was out. I know all of 'em."

"Did you report?" Tamsin asked.

"Nope, I know where they live," Carla said.

There was a long silence while we chewed that over. "That feeling, the need for vengeance, is something we'll talk about later," Tamsin said finally. "Melanie, would you tell us what happened to you?"

I decided that Tamsin didn't know Melanie that well, just from the timbre of her voice.

"I'm new to anything like this, so please just bear with me." Melanie gave a nervous and inappropriate giggle that may have agreed with the plump cheeks and pink coloring, but clashed with the anger in her dark eyes. Melanie was even younger than Janet, I figured.

"Why are you here, Melanie?" Tamsin was in full therapist mode now, sitting with her clothes arranged over her round form in the most advantageous way. She crossed her ankles, covered with thick beige stockings, and tried not to fiddle with the pencil in her clipboard.

"You mean, what incident?" Melanie asked.

"Yes," Tamsin said patiently.

"Well, my brother-in-law done raped me, that's why! He come to my trailer all liquored up, and he busted in my door, and then he was on me. I didn't have time to get my .357 Magnum, I didn't have time to call the cops. It was so fast you wouldn't believe it."

"Did the police arrest him?"

"Sure they did. I wouldn't leave the police station until he was in it, behind bars. The police tried to talk me out of it, said it was a family feud gone wrong, but I knew what I was doing and I know what he was doing, which was nothing I wanted him to do. His wife had told me he made her do it, too, when she was sick and didn't want to. They was married, so I guess she didn't feel like she could complain, but I sure could."

"Good for you, Melanie," Tamsin said, and I mentally echoed that. "It can be hard to stand up for what you know is right. Firella?"

"Oh. Well... I moved here from New Orleans about a year ago," Firella said. "I'm an assistant principal at the junior high school here in Shakespeare, and I had a similar job in Louisiana." I revised my estimate of her age upward. Firella was probably closer to fifty than to the thirty-five I'd originally assumed. "When I lived in New Orleans, I got raped at the school, by a student." Then Firella's lips clamped shut on the rest of her story, as if she'd given me enough to think about, and she was right. I remembered the smell of school, chalk and lockers and dirty industrial carpeting, and the silence of the building after the children had gone home. I thought of someone, some predator, moving silently through that building... .

"He broke my arm, too," Firella said. She moved her left arm a little as if testing its usability. "He knocked out some of my teeth. He gave me herpes."

She said all this quite matter-of-factly.

She shrugged, and was silent.

"And they caught him?"

"Yeah," the woman said wearily. "They caught him. He told them I'd been having sex with him for months, that it was consensual. It got really ugly. It was in all the papers. But the broken arm and the missing teeth were powerful testimony, yes indeed."

Tamsin cut a glance toward me to make sure I was absorbing the fact that I wasn't the only victim in the world who'd gone through an extraordinary ordeal. I've never been that egotistical.

"Lily, do you feel able to tell us your story tonight?" the therapist asked.

Fighting a nearly overwhelming impulse to get up and walk out, I forced myself to sit and consider. I thought about Jack's nose, and I thought about the trust the other women had extended to me. If I had to do this, it might as well be now as any other time.

I focused on the doorknob a few feet past Tamsin's ear. I wished that some time in the past, I'd made a tape recording of this. "Some years ago, I lived in Memphis," I said flatly. "On my way home