Chapter Nine

Bobo Winthrop stopped by that night. He knew the whole story about Cliff Eggers.

"There was a stake hidden under the steps," he told me, the relish of the young in his voice. We were sitting on my front steps, which are small and very public. I wanted the public part. There were good reasons I should not be along in a private place with Bobo. I had my arms around my knees, trying to ignore the ache in the pit of my stomach and the unpredictable flares of misery.

"Stake a-k-e, not steak e-a-k?"

He laughed. "A-k-e. Sharpened and planted in the dirt under the steps, so when the step gave way, his leg would go down into the area and be stuck by the stake." He pushed his blond hair out of his face. He'd come from karate class, and he was now in his gi pants and a white tank top.

"I guess that would've happened to anyone's leg," I suggested.

"Oh. Well, yeah, I guess so. If his wife had come home before he did, she would've gotten hurt instead of him."

I hadn't thought of that, and I winced as I pictured Tamsin going through the step and being impaled on the stake. "Did he have to stay at the hospital?" I figured if Bobo knew all this, maybe he knew even more.

"Nope, they sent him home. It was really an ugly wound, Mary Frances's aunt told me—she's an emergency room nurse, Mrs. Powell is—and she said it looked worse than it really was. But it's going to be really sore." Mary Frances was one of Bobo's former girlfriends. He had a talent for remaining on their good side.

Janet Shook came jogging down the street then, her small square face set in its determined mode, and her swinging brown hair darkened with sweat around her ears and temples.

"Stop and visit for a minute," I called, and she glanced at a watch on her left wrist and then cast herself down on the grass. "Want a lawn chair?"

"No, no," she panted. "The grass feels good. I needed to stop anyway. I'm still not a hundred percent after that knock on the head. And I had karate class, tonight. You should have been there, Lily. Bobo and I got to teach two ladies in their sixties how to stand in shiko dachi. But I missed running. I've signed up for a ten K race in Springdale next month."

Janet and Bobo began a conversation about running— wearing the right shoes, mapping your route, maximizing your running time.

I laid my cheek on my knee and closed my eyes, letting the two familiar voices wash over me. At the end of a day in which I'd done mighty little, I managed to feel quite tired. I was considering Cliff's leg going through the step—what a shock that must have been!—and the hostile visit of Detective Stokes. I mulled over green-eyed Officer McClanahan. I wondered if he'd seen the body of poor Saralynn Kleinhoff, if he'd looked at her with the same cool curiosity with which he'd eyed me.

Surely his face was familiar to me, too? Surely I had seen him before? I had, I was sure, after a moment's further thought. I began to rummage around in my memory. He hadn't been in a police uniform. Something about a dog, surely? A dog, a small dog ...

"Lily?" Janet was saying.

"What?"

"You were really daydreaming," she said, sounding more than a little worried. "You feeling okay?"

"Oh, yes, fine. I was just trying to remember something, one of those little things that nags at the edges of your mind."

"What Marshall doesn't realize," Bobo said to Janet, evidently resuming a conversation that my abstraction had interrupted, "is that Shakespeare needs a different kind of sporting goods store."

I could feel my eyebrows crawl up my forehead. This, from a young man whose father owned a sporting goods store so large there was a plan to start producing a catalog.

"Oh, I agree!" Janet's hands flew up in the air to measure her agreement. "Why should I have to drive over to Montrose to get my workout pants? Why shouldn't the kids taking jazz at Syndi Swayze's be able to get their kneepads here? I mean, there are some things you just can't get at Wal-Mart!"

I'd never seen Janet so animated. And she sounded younger. How old could she be? Wish some astonishment, I realized Janet was at least seven years younger than I was.

"So, are you totally satisfied with your job?" Bobo asked, out of the blue.

"Well." Janet scrunched up her face. "You know how it is. I've run Safe After School for four years now, and I feel like I've got it down. I'm restless. But I don't want to teach school, which is the only thing I'm trained for."

"My family, we're all merchants," Bobo said.

It was true, I realized, though I'd never have thought to put it that way. Bobo's family had made their money selling things; the sporting goods store that leaned heavily toward hunting and fishing equipment, the lumber and home supplies store, and the oil company that had supplied the money to build the Winthrop empire.

"So," he resumed, "I guess it's in my blood. See, what I've been thinking lately—now you tell me if you think this is a good idea, Janet, and of course you, too, Lily—I think that the sporting goods store isn't really the kind of place most women and kids want to come into. What they want, I think, is a smaller store where they can come in without going through a lot of crossbows and fishing rods and rifles, a smaller store where they can find their running shorts and athletic bras and those kneepads you mentioned—the ones you need to wear when you take jazz dancing."

"Tap shoes," said Janet, longing in her voice. "Ballet slippers."

"I think we really have an idea here."

"It would be great," she said, philosophically. "But ideas aren't money to underwrite a store start-up."

"Funny you should mention that," Bobo said. He was grinning. He looked about eighteen, but I knew he was at least twenty-one now. "Because my grandfather's will just got probated, and I happen to have a substantial amount of money."

Janet gaped at him. "We're talking serious? You weren't just dreaming? You really think there's a possibility of doing this?"

"We need to do a lot of figuring."

"We?" Janet asked, her voice weak.

"Yeah. You're the one who knows what we need. You're the idea woman."

"Well." Janet sounded out of breath. "You actually mean it?"

"Sure I do. Hey Lily, would you mind if we finished Janet's run and went over to her place to talk? What do you think about this idea?"

I felt rueful and old. "I think it's a great idea for both of you."

Janet's face lit up like a torch. Bobo's was hardly less excited. In a second, they were stretching before they began running. I noticed Bobo's eyes running over Janet's ass when she bent over. He gave a little nod, all to himself. Yep, it was a nice ass.

As they set off down the street, I had to smile to myself. All those hours I'd worried about Bobo's inappropriate affection for me, all the times I'd tried to repulse him, hate him, fight my own shameful physical attraction to him... and all it took was Janet Shook's brain, ass, and a dash of mercantile blood.

I went inside, and when I'd locked the door behind me, I laughed out loud.

The next morning—the next boring, boring, morning—I went to the library. I needed to swap my books, and I thought I might do some research on runaways. Jack had discussed printing a small pamphlet on the search for runaways, since so much of his business came from such searches. It would be good to feel I'd accomplished something.

The modest Shakespeare library was in the oldest county building, which was about the rank at which most Shakespeareans placed reading. In the summer, it was hot, and in the winter, the pipes clanked and moaned and the air was warm and close. The ceilings were very high. In fact, I believed the building had been a bank at one point in time. There was a lot of marble.