They would've wondered if the calls had kept coming. So here we are, and we get settled, and I think everything is going so good, and I start getting the calls again. The house is entered. There's... poop... smeared on the door."
Cliff had succeeded in ungagging himself. "Lily," he said in a weak voice, "don't let her kill me."
I didn't even glance at him. "Yeah?" I said to Tamsin, to encourage her to talk. The longer she talked, the more time I had to recover.
"So we decided the police had been wrong. That someone else had followed me down here. It still didn't occur to me to suspect the most obvious person." She shook her head at her own naivet茅. "We figured - that is, I figured, and Cliff pretended to - that since the calls only came when Cliff was gone, that meant the guy was watching me, knew when I was alone. That made it more scary. Notes slid under the door, notes in my clothes - oh, God!" She shuddered and wept.
My sympathy would have been deeper if I hadn't been sitting there in wet pants.
"Lily," Cliff said, "I didn't do those things. I love my wife... even though she planted the stake in the step for me to get hurt on. If you'll just let me go, we can work this out." He was plucking awkwardly at the duct tape around his wrists, but that was going to be much harder.
I said, "Tamsin, why'd you call me here?"
"Because you can kill him."
I shook my head.
"You can kill him," she repeated persuasively. "You killed a man before. This one deserves it, too. Think of what he's done to me. He shouldn't live!" Her face grew crafty. "What if he gets off and does this to someone else? I know from our therapy group that you have a sense of justice."
Unhampered by the rules of law, she meant.
"You could kill him for me. We'd all be safer."
She had condensed Cliff into every man who'd hurt a woman.
"Please do this for me! My mind is too fragile, too delicate, to sustain killing him." She made it sound like her mind was made out of old lace. "I just don't have the guts, the determination. I need you to do this favor for another woman." The empty hand touched her chest. "Help your sister out."
"You - stunned me."
"I was afraid you'd run away before I could talk to you if I didn't do something," she told me, and her voice was so reasonable that I winced. "I know you, from the group. You wouldn't sit and listen to me unless I made you. Would you? Just think about it, Lily. You have to understand this. I loved him more than anyone else in the world. He took everything away from me. I think he did something to make me lose the baby. I don't believe in anything any more."
And she should have made him unconscious, because he was eyeing me frantically, shaking his head to deny what she was telling me. "Lily, Tamsin has just lost her mind. Don't cater to her when she's clearly off her rocker. I love my wife, and I've done everything I can to help her through this. Please don't let her do something worse than this." I noticed he was making progress on loosening the duct tape binding his wrists. It was difficult, but he was managing. The next time I wanted to secure someone, I wouldn't call Tamsin to do the securing.
Tamsin went on enumerating her wrongs. Since I was still too weak to move, I had plenty of time to think. I thought it was pretty lucky their baby hadn't been born, whatever had caused the miscarriage. What if what Tamsin was telling me wasn't true? She was deeply disturbed. She might be mistaken, and she might just be a liar. What if she just wanted an excuse to kill Cliff, with a reasonable chance of an acquittal, or at the most a light sentence? Pretending he'd confessed his long persecution of her, pretending he'd told her he'd killed Saralynn and Gerry McClanahan, would provide an excellent story to tell a jury.
Especially with a witness like me.
She could have no serious hope that I would take the bait and do Cliff in, but she could provide a good case for herself if I was there to witness her frenzy and her anguish, even if she had to immobilize me to make me