Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,73

Carrie seemed to be in a chatty mood.

"In the back, oddly enough," Carrie said. "It was a funny kind of wound. Started here," and she touched a point just above my waist slightly left of my spine, "and ended here," which turned out to be a spot about midway down my right hip. "It was deeper toward the end."

"Kind of low for a blow from another man," I said, after I'd considered it.

"Yes, isn't it. I don't think I've ever seen a knife wound quite like that."

"Maybe ..." I thought for a minute. "Okay, what if Cliff was walking away, and the knifer was swooshing down." I raised my arm with an imaginary knife in it, and brought the arm down in an arc. "So if Cliff stepped away just then, the end of the knife would slice through the hip, rather than penetrating him higher up by the spine, as it was intended to."

"Could be. Could be," Carrie said, looking at my back doubtfully. "Of course, Cliff's at least six inches taller than you. But still, I would say his assailant had to be shorter than Cliff. Or kneeling, but I can't quite visualize that."

I couldn't either, but it was an interesting idea. "What was Tamsin doing while all this was going on?" I asked, trying to sound casual. I assumed that since Tamsin and Carrie were both in some sense medical professionals, they would know each other, and I was right.

"In the kitchen cooking, she told me," Carrie said, still staring at my back as if it would tell her the answer.

"I guess she came to the hospital with Cliff."

"Oh, yeah, as upset as she could possibly be. I don't know how much longer she's going to be able to do her job, if things like this keep happening around her. She said something about moving again."

I looked at Carrie. "What was she wearing?"

"Oh, I don't know. Ah, a pair of old jeans and an Arkansas Razorbacks T-shirt, seems like."

"No apron?"

"No. Either she's one of these women who cooks without, or she pulled it off before she came. Why?" Carrie seemed to realize that this was an odd question.

"Just wondered." I was relieved when the phone rang, because Carrie once more immersed herself in work. I didn't want to have to explain to Carrie what I didn't even want to admit to myself, that I'd been infected with Alicia Stokes's suspicions. I was wondering if it was my mental health counselor who had stabbed her husband in the back.

As I polished the sink in the women's bathroom, I longed for Jack. It was always easy to talk things over with him. He seemed to enjoy the process, too. Jack understood people a little better than I did. I was repulsed by people who were messy with their emotions; just look at the tangled mess of Bobo and me. It felt good to have encapsulated and pushed away our mutual attraction.

I had a sudden and unprecedented flight of fantasy. I pictured myself telling Beanie Winthrop that Bobo and I were going to be married, and the expression I could just imagine on her face tickled me all morning. Though Beanie had some admirable characteristics, we had never liked each other. It almost seemed worth telling her the lie just to see her face. I wondered if her only daughter, Amber Jean, would turn out to be a good woman. Her teen years were obviously shaky ground. Amber Jean had her picture in the paper this morning, helping with the canned goods drive for the soup kitchen maintained by Shakespeare Combined Church, Calvary Baptist, and First Presbyterian. She'd looked glossy and preppy in the picture; not the kind of girl who would take off her shirt in front of a group of boys, not the kind of girl who would try to subordinate a woman older than herself. "A picture is worth a thousand words" did not apply in Amber Jean's case.

What about my mental picture of Tamsin? Tamsin looked like the average young professional, the kind who didn't care terribly about money, the kind who really, really wanted to help. But she'd been stalked, or so it seemed, through three jobs and two states. Small animals around her died, unpleasant things happened to her everywhere, and people around her were beginning to drop like flies. She was in the center of a circle of destruction; she was the eye of a storm.

I drove to the gym thinking hard about