Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,75

was cooking something when I went into the kitchen, something that smelled good.

"Bacon sandwiches for lunch. I have tomatoes picked right off the vine," he told me, his voice unmistakably smug.

I don't eat much bacon, since it's not good for you, but a bacon and fresh tomato sandwich was just too good to pass up.

"Where'd you get 'em?" There were at least six tomatoes on the kitchen counter. Two were green.

"From Aunt Betty," he said. "Can we have fried green tomatoes tonight?"

Two fried things in one day was really a lot, but I nodded. I stood behind him, watching him cook.

"Hold still," I said.

"What are you going to do?"

"Pretend to stab you."

"I guess that wasn't the answer I was wanting to hear." But Jack obligingly stood still.

I raised my hand above my head as though it held a knife pointing downward. My hand whizzed through the air, and I mentally marked the point at which the blade would have grazed Jack's back.

"Hmmm."

"Can I help?" Jack asked. He picked some of the bacon out of the skillet with some small tongs, and put the bacon to drain on a pad of paper towels. I got out the small cutting board and a knife, and began to slice a tomato.

"Let me stab you again," I said, and this time, with the knife in hand, I held it straight out in front of me. The wound Carrie had described simply couldn't be made, if the knife was held like this.

While Jack put ice in two glasses, I explained what I was doing.

"Okay, let me try." He turned me around, and taking the precaution of using a dull table knife, he began to experiment. "A graze at the top, a true stab at the bottom, going from the left side of the back to the right." he said. "So I think you're right, it would have to be an overhand blow."

"An overhand blow from someone much shorter, right?" I put our plates on the table and folded a paper napkin beside each plate. Jack got out the bread and mayonnaise, my mother's homemade. "Cliff's a little taller than you, huh?" Jack nodded, as he used a fork to put tomato slices on his bread. "Maybe six feet?"

Jack said, "Just barely."

I could think of no one involved in the episodes who was short, besides a couple of the women in the group, and Tamsin herself. "Maybe Tamsin did it by accident? And they were too embarrassed to say it?"

Jack even looked good to me when he chewed, which is one of the more unattractive activities for a human being. He swallowed. "She could have mistaken Cliff for someone else, I guess, but there's a streetlight practically in front of their house. He was attacked in the driveway, right? So how, in good light and in a place where she would expect him to be, could she knife him by accident?"

"There's only one other new person in town," I said, not able to think of any rebuttal. I told Jack about my conversation with Marshall, about Thea's new lover. Jack said, "I've met him. He runs in the evening."

"Joel McCorkindale does, too." I tried to make something of that. Joel ran, Talbot ran, Joel's wife was in the support group, and she was short. That didn't add up to anything. This made as little sense as one of those logic problems the first time you read it through. "If Mary has a poodle, and Mary is taller than Sarah and Brenda, and Brenda's dog is brown, read the following statements to figure out who has the dachshund." Besides, Sandy McCorkindale might be half nuts, but I simply could not picture her catching a squirrel and hanging it in a tree. It was actually easier to imagine Sandy stabbing someone.

We ate in silence, enjoying our first summer BLT. While we washed the dishes, I asked Jack what would happen next.

"I don't know. Stalking's just not that common a crime, and I have no big backlog of experience with it. When I first started my apprenticeship, Roy was handling a case a little like this. The woman couldn't get the police to take her seriously, because the intruder wasn't doing anything to her."

"Intruder?"

"Yeah, he was actually coming into her apartment while she was gone, sifting through her stuff. Leaving her presents."

I made a face. Disgusting and scary.

"I agree." Jack looked grim as he scrubbed the skillet. "Finally, she scratched up enough money to pay for around-the-clock surveillance. The