Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,52
sullen gray of the sky was echoed in the marble. I stepped from the damp heat of the morning into the chilly marble interior and shivered. Through the high windows, with the happy yellow curtains pulled back to show the sky, I could see a silver maple tossing in a strong wind. The rain would come soon.
I consulted one of the computers, and began scribbling down a list of books and magazine articles. One article was very recent. In fact, it should still be in the current magazine area, a sort of nook made comfortable by deep chairs and an area rug.
After I'd read the article and made some notes, I picked up a copy of People and flipped through it, amazed all over again that the reading public would be interested in the outsider's view of the life of someone they would never know. Why would a hairdresser in Shakespeare care that Julia Roberts had worn that designer's slacks to the premier of a new movie? Would a bartender in Little Rock ever be the richer by the knowledge that Russell Crowe had turned down a part in that film?
Of course, here I was, reading the same article I was deriding. I held the magazine a little closer to peer at a ring some singer had paid a third-world budget to purchase. A ring ... a celebrity magazine. Suddenly, some synapsis fired in my head.
The picture I remembered wasn't in this magazine in particular, but I associated the picture with a magazine very like it.
How had I happened to see the picture? These things weren't on my normal reading agenda. I pulled and prodded at my faint memory until I'd teased a thread loose. I'd seen the picture when I'd been at Carrie's office, when I'd been dusting. The magazine had been left open in one of the rooms - which one? I could almost see the cover after I'd automatically flipped the magazine shut and returned it to a pile. The cover had been primarily ivory, with the picture of an actress - maybe Julia Roberts again - dressed in jeans and boots and a handkerchief, looking brilliant against the neutral color. Carrie's office!
Trying to keep hold of the image in my memory, I drove to Carrie's. Of course, her office was open and full of patients, and I explained to the receptionist that I wasn't there to see the doctor, that I was trying to find something I'd lost the last time I'd cleaned. Gennette Jenks, the nurse, gave me a suspicious look, but then Gennette was always suspicious of me. A hard-faced woman in her fifties, Gennette was chemically brunette and naturally efficient, which was the only reason Carrie kept her on. I looked around the small front office, which was crammed with a fax machine, a copier, a huge bank of files, and mounds of paper everywhere. No magazines.
And no magazines in Carrie's office besides a tattered old Reader's Digest left there on the little table by the chair in front of the desk. That was the bad-news chair; because most often when Carrie invited patients into her office and sat behind her desk, that meant she was about to deliver bad news. I twitched the chair to a more hospitable angle.
The magazine I'd been seeking was in the big pile on the table by the waiting area, a few chairs at the end of the hall where caregivers could wait while their charges were being examined. I shuffled through the stack and extracted the cover I'd been searching for. I stepped sideways into the little room where the part-time clerk, a milkmaidish blonde with a lust for Twinkies, worked on insurance claims. This was the same room where Cliff Eggers had been working the morning I'd cleaned, and this was where I'd picked up the magazine and returned it to the pile. That explained why I'd remembered the magazine. I'd stood in there for such a long time while he talked to me, I'd had time to memorize the cover.
After nodding to the clerk, who gave me an uncertain smile in return, I began paging through the magazine. Once, twice ... I was beginning to doubt myself when I noticed the jagged edge. Someone had removed a page from the magazine. Maybe it had had a great recipe for chicken salad on the other side - but on the whole, I doubted that. Someone besides me had found the picture interesting.
Now that I