"So out of those, who do you think had anything to do with Deedra?"

"Well, Terry, for sure. He had a lot to do with her, real often. But I don't think either of them took it to heart," Becca said slowly. "Terry just isn't serious about anything besides cars and trucks. He loves being single. I don't think the Bickel twins even speak—even spoke—to Deedra, besides hello. Claude . .. well, you know, actually I think Claude might have visited Deedra once or twice, if you get my drift."

I could not have been more surprised. I was sure my face showed it.

I was disgusted, too.

"You know how men are," Becca said dryly.

I did, for sure.

"But from what Deedra said, I think it was a long time ago, maybe after he first moved back to Shakespeare from Little Rock. Before he kind of knew what was what. Right after his divorce."

Still.

"Anyway, nothing recent. And Tick? I don't think Tick lusts after anything but the next bottle, you know? You ever see him coming down the stairs after the weekend, trying to go to work? It's grim. If he smoked, I'd worry about being burned up in our beds."

That was only sensible.

"And before you ask me just like the cops did, I didn't see any strangers around that weekend, but that's not to say there weren't any. Everyone's got their own key to the outside doors." Those doors were locked at ten at night, after which the residents used their own keys.

"Speaking of keys," Becca said suddenly, and went to the desk by the door. She opened the top drawer, pulled out a key. "Here's the outside door key for when Anthony and I go on our trip."

I put it in my pocket and stood to leave as Anthony came in. He'd been to Stage, where one of the Bickel twins worked, I could see from his bag. He'd bought a lot of clothes. Getting excited about his trip, I guess.

"Where are you-all going?" I asked. I was trying to be polite.

"Oh, who can tell!" Becca laughed. "We might go to Mexico, we might go to the Dominican Republic! If we really like someplace, we might just stay there."

"You'd sell up here?"

"I think that's a possibility," Becca said, more soberly. "You gotta admit, Lily, I'm a fish out of water here."

That was true enough.

"Becca needs to see the world," Anthony said proudly.

They sure were excited. The idea of travel wouldn't make me happy at all, but I could tell Becca was ready to leave town. She'd never really been at home in Shakespeare.

I went home to find a baffled Jack squatting by the television, two stacks of tapes to his right. "Lily, would you like to tell me where you got these tapes?" he growled, staring at the episode of The Bold and the Beautiful unfolding on the screen. "Some of these are homemade porn, and some of them are Oprah or soaps."

I smiled. I couldn't help it. I explained about Deedra and about my desire to help by getting the tapes out of the apartment.

"I think you better tell me the whole story about Deedra from the beginning, all over again," he said. "Wasn't she that girl with no chin who lived across the upstairs hall from me?"

The previous fall, Jack had rented an apartment when he was working in Shakespeare undercover, on a job.

"Yep, that was Deedra," I told him. I sighed. The girl with no chin. What a way to be remembered. I began telling Jack, all over again, about finding Deedra in her car— the call of the bobwhite, the silence of the forest, the gray dead woman in the front seat of the car.

"So, how long had she been dead?" Jack asked practically.

"In the newspaper article, Marta is quoted as saying she'd been dead for somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four hours."

"Still got the paper?" Jack asked, and I went to rummage through my recycle bin.

Jack stretched out on the floor, pretty much filling my little living room, to read. I recalled with a sudden start that he was moving in with me, and I could look at him as much as I liked, every day. I didn't have to fill up with looking so I could replay it while he was gone. And he'd be taking up just as much space, much more often. We had a few bumps in the road ahead of us, for sure.

"So, the last one to see her was her mother, when Deedra left church on Sunday to walk home to her apartment." Jack scanned the article again, his T-shirt stretching over his back, and his muscle pants doing good things for his butt. I felt pretty happy about him being displayed on my floor like that. I felt like taking the paper away from him. Tomorrow morning he had to leave, and I had to work, and we were not making the best use of the time we had.

"I wonder what she was doing," Jack said. He was thinking things through like the former cop he was. "Did she make it home to her apartment? How'd she leave?"

I told Jack what I knew about the population of the apartment building that Sunday afternoon. "Becca was in town but I don't know exactly where she was then," I concluded. "Claude was gone, the Bickels were gone, Terry Plowright was gone. Tick, I guess, was drunk. The woman who works at Wal-Mart, Do'mari Clayton, was at the store, according to Becca."

"Where was Becca?"

"I don't know, she didn't say." I had no idea what Becca usually did on Sundays. She wasn't a churchgoer, and though she often made an appearance at Body Time, she didn't stay long. Maybe on Sunday she just slopped around in her pajamas and read the papers, or a book.

"Had that brother of hers gotten here yet?"

"No, yesterday was the first time I'd seen him."

"So he never even knew Deedra." Jack rested his chin on his hands, staring at the wood of the floor. While he thought, I fetched the old TV Guide from my bedroom— our bedroom—and opened it to Saturday. This would have been the one day pertinent to Deedra, since she'd died on Sunday.

I read all the synopses, checked all the sports listings, pored over the evening shows. When Jack snapped out of his reverie long enough to ask me what I was doing, I tried to explain it to him, but it came out sounding fuzzier than it was.

"Maybe the TV Guide had blood on it or something, so the killer took it with him," he said, uninterested. "Or maybe Deedra spilled ginger ale on it and pitched it in the garbage. It's the purse that's more interesting. What could have been in her purse? Did she carry those big bags you could put bricks into?"

"No. Hers were big enough for her billfold, a brush, a compact, a roll of mints, and some Kleenex. Not much else."

"Her apartment hadn't been tossed?"

"Not so I could tell."

"What's small enough to be carried in a purse?" Jack rolled onto his back, an even more attractive pose. His hazel eyes focused on the ceiling. "She have jewelry?"

"No expensive jewelry. At least nothing worth staging that elaborate death scene for. If she'd been knocked on the head with a brick while she was at an urban mall, that would be one thing. She had some gold chains, her pearls, they would be worth that. But this, this arrangement in the woods ... it seemed personal. And her pearls were there, hanging on the tree."

"Then we're back to her sex life. Who did she actually have sex with, that you know of?" Jack looked a little uncomfortable as he asked. That was sort of strange.

"Anyone she could," I said absently, beginning to think suspicious thoughts. "Do you want a list?"

Jack nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

"Marcus Jefferson, that guy who used to live in the top front—the apartment you had for a while." I thought a little. "Brian Gruber's son, Claude, Terry Plowright, Darcy Orchard, Norvel Whitbread, Randy Peevely while he was separated from Heather, plus at least"—I counted on my ringers—"four others. And those are just the ones I saw there, actually saw in her apartment. But I wasn't about to give Marta Schuster a list."

"You didn't tell the police?"