Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,50

that version of me with "Lily Bard, grieving Madonna" was not much better. If I'd been fully back to myself, I would've kept my mouth shut.

"I'm very sorry," he said. His words were stiff, but his tone was sincere enough to appease me.

"Good-bye," I said, and I pulled away. I went to Shakespeare's Cinema Video Rental Palace, picked out three old movies, and drove home to watch them all.

Maybe I would take up crocheting.

Chapter Nine

Bobo Winthrop stopped by that night. He knew the whole story about Cliff Eggers.

"There was a stake hidden under the steps," he told me, the relish of the young in his voice. We were sitting on my front steps, which are small and very public. I wanted the public part. There were good reasons I should not be along in a private place with Bobo. I had my arms around my knees, trying to ignore the ache in the pit of my stomach and the unpredictable flares of misery.

"Stake a-k-e, not steak e-a-k?"

He laughed. "A-k-e. Sharpened and planted in the dirt under the steps, so when the step gave way, his leg would go down into the area and be stuck by the stake." He pushed his blond hair out of his face. He'd come from karate class, and he was now in his gi pants and a white tank top.

"I guess that would've happened to anyone's leg," I suggested.

"Oh. Well, yeah, I guess so. If his wife had come home before he did, she would've gotten hurt instead of him."

I hadn't thought of that, and I winced as I pictured Tamsin going through the step and being impaled on the stake. "Did he have to stay at the hospital?" I figured if Bobo knew all this, maybe he knew even more.

"Nope, they sent him home. It was really an ugly wound, Mary Frances's aunt told me - she's an emergency room nurse, Mrs. Powell is - and she said it looked worse than it really was. But it's going to be really sore." Mary Frances was one of Bobo's former girlfriends. He had a talent for remaining on their good side.

Janet Shook came jogging down the street then, her small square face set in its determined mode, and her swinging brown hair darkened with sweat around her ears and temples.

"Stop and visit for a minute," I called, and she glanced at a watch on her left wrist and then cast herself down on the grass. "Want a lawn chair?"

"No, no," she panted. "The grass feels good. I needed to stop anyway. I'm still not a hundred percent after that knock on the head. And I had karate class, tonight. You should have been there, Lily. Bobo and I got to teach two ladies in their sixties how to stand in shiko dachi. But I missed running. I've signed up for a ten K race in Springdale next month."

Janet and Bobo began a conversation about running - wearing the right shoes, mapping your route, maximizing your running time.

I laid my cheek on my knee and closed my eyes, letting the two familiar voices wash over me. At the end of a day in which I'd done mighty little, I managed to feel quite tired. I was considering Cliff's leg going through the step - what a shock that must have been! - and the hostile visit of Detective Stokes. I mulled over green-eyed Officer McClanahan. I wondered if he'd seen the body of poor Saralynn Kleinhoff, if he'd looked at her with the same cool curiosity with which he'd eyed me.

Surely his face was familiar to me, too? Surely I had seen him before? I had, I was sure, after a moment's further thought. I began to rummage around in my memory. He hadn't been in a police uniform. Something about a dog, surely? A dog, a small dog ...

"Lily?" Janet was saying.

"What?"

"You were really daydreaming," she said, sounding more than a little worried. "You feeling okay?"

"Oh, yes, fine. I was just trying to remember something, one of those little things that nags at the edges of your mind."

"What Marshall doesn't realize," Bobo said to Janet, evidently resuming a conversation that my abstraction had interrupted, "is that Shakespeare needs a different kind of sporting goods store."

I could feel my eyebrows crawl up my forehead. This, from a young man whose father owned a sporting goods store so large there was a plan to start producing a catalog.

"Oh, I agree!" Janet's hands flew up in