Shakespeare's Champion

The nurse went to stand out of earshot, and I raised my hand, with great effort, to touch Mookie Preston, that odd and lonely and brave woman.

"Mookie, I'm here - Lily," I said.

"Lily. You lived," she said very slowly, and her eyes never opened.

"Thanks to you." If I had gone in there by myself, I would have died horribly and slowly. By asking her to go with me, I had set her death in motion.

"Don't be sorry," she said. Her voice was slow, and soft, but the words were distinct. "I got to kill some of them, the ones that killed my brother."

I sighed softly. I had been thinking, while in my haze of pain and drugs. "Did you kill someone else?" I whispered.

"Yes." She dragged out the word painfully.

"Len Elgin?"

"Yes."

"He was involved in Darnell's death."

"Yes. I talked to him before I shot him. He was my ... father."

I should not remind Mookie of Len Elgin. I should say something else to Mookie Preston, something good. She was on her way to meet her Maker, and I could not send her out thinking of the deaths she had caused.

She spoke again. Her eyes opened and fastened on mine. "Don't tell."

I understood after a moment, even through the drugs. "Don't tell about Len," I said, to be sure.

"Don't tell," she repeated.

This was my punishment for leading this woman to her death. I would know the truth, but could not reveal it. No matter what happened to Len Elgin's extramarital lover, Erica Moore, and her husband Booth. No matter what suspicions attached to Mary Lee Elgin.

"I won't tell," I said, accepting it. I was so doped up it seemed logical and appropriate.

"Mama," she said.

"Lanette," I called, and she leaped up from her chair and came to the bed. I motioned to the nurse who was waiting in the doorway, and she came to take me back to my room.

I think Mookie died before I got there.

After three days, I went home. The doctor herself drove me.

This homecoming-from-the-hospital routine - the stale house, the life untouched while I was gone - was getting old. I didn't want to get hurt anymore. I didn't want pain. I needed to work, to have order, to have emotional quiet.

What I had was pain and phone calls from Jack.

He'd had to talk to many many people: local, state, federal. Most of that I had been spared because of my concussion, the second I'd had in a month, but I'd had my share of interviews. Some questions I just hadn't been able to answer. Like: Why had I called Mookie Preston? The answer, because I thought she could help me kill the men who had Jack, just wasn't palatable. So I had lied, just a little. I said that I'd called Mookie when I discovered Jack was gone - I figured they could find that out somehow from the phone company - and that she'd agreed to accompany me to Winthrop Sporting Goods because I was so distraught. Yes, I knew what Jack was doing, so I suspected where he'd been taken and who had taken him.

I never said that Mookie had brought the rifle or the knife, and I think they all assumed both weapons came from the store stock. When it was found the bullets that had killed Tom David (and ultimately Jim) had come from the same weapon that had killed Len Elgin months ago, the official line of reasoning seemed to be that someone from the store's little cadre of bad boys had been responsible for shooting Len. A motivation for this assassination was never uncovered, but it was assumed that somehow he had thwarted one of their plans or uncovered evidence that implicated one of them in the death of Darnell.

So Len Elgin came out looking better in death than he'd been in life, and I never opened my mouth. The police knew, from all of us, that Mookie had shot men in the store; but since they all supposed she'd found and loaded the weapon when she got there, Mookie, too, emerged from the inquiry looking posthumously brave and resourceful - as, indeed, she had been.

The Winthrops pulled up the drawbridge and weathered the siege. Howell Winthrop, Sr., was arrested and promptly made bail, and he was denying all involvement in the bombing and in the deaths of Darnell Glass, Len Elgin, and Del Packard. He was admitting he'd been present during Jack's torture, but alleging he'd thought Jack was a renegade white supremacist. No one believed him, but that was what he was saying. Bobo transferred to a college in Florida (Marshall told me), and Amber Jean and Howell Three just left school and went on a vacation with Beanie in an unspecified location.

Howell called me one afternoon before I left the hospital, and we had a brief, horribly uncomfortable conversation. He assured me that he would pay for every ache and pain I endured for the next few years, and I assured him just as earnestly that this hospitalization and the ensuing pharmacy bills were the only ones I would appreciate him paying.

"Your mother can have her ring back," I said.

"She'll never want it," he answered.

"She told me it was Marie Hofstettler's bequest to me." I wanted to be sure Howell knew I had not taken the ring as some kind of bribe, which is what he had assumed when he saw the brown velvet box - which he knew to be his mother's - in my hand. "Why did your parents want me to come to their house?"

"I can't talk about that," he said stiffly. "But Bobo told me I had to tell you he knew nothing."

I am sure we were both glad to hang up. I thought about that strange evening on Partridge Road, the big white house, the tiny old people. I hoped Arnita Winthrop had not known about her husband then, had really been the gracious woman she had seemed. Maybe she had reasoned I deserved something tangible for being Marie's friend; maybe that was why she'd given me an old ring of her own, passed it off as a posthumous gift. Maybe her husband had had a curiosity to see me, had asked her to think of a way to get me to the house so he could look me over. The running figure that night had been Jack, he'd finally told me. Jack had been asked to watch the comings and goings at the Partridge Road house whenever he could. He'd been at Marie's funeral to get a good look at the older Winthrops, since there was no casual way for him to meet them.

Jack made the papers, state and national. He was something of a hero for a while. It was good for his business. He got all kinds of inquiries, and as soon as he could manage physically, he left for Little Rock. I had a feeling it was a relief to get a little distance between himself and the place and time of his ordeal. He'd been overpowered, bound, and tortured; he had managed to regain some measure of maleness, of wholeness, back by conquering Jim and Darcy. But I knew the bad nights he'd have, the self-doubts. Who could know better?

As the days passed, I began to have the dreary conviction he would write me off as part of that time. Sometimes I was anguished and sometimes I was angry, but I could not return to my former detachment.

I had been back at work for three weeks, back to working out at Body Time for one week, when I came home to find Jack's car in the driveway. He had flowers - a bigger arrangement than Claude had sent me, of course - and a present festooned with a huge pink net bow.

I felt a rush of joy at the sight of him. Suddenly I didn't know what to say to him, after weeks of imagining this moment. I pointed to the flowers. "For me?"

"Jeez," he said, shaking his head and smiling. "If you are still the Lily Bard who sucker-punched me right here in this doorway, these are indeed for you."

"Want me to do it again? Just to verify my identity?"

"No, thank you, ma'am."

I unlocked the door and he followed me in. I took the flowers from him and headed down the hall with them.

"Where you taking those?" he asked, with some interest.

"My bedroom."

"So ... are you planning on letting me join you in admiring them?"

"I expect so, depending on your good behavior this evening. I'm assuming you brought a doctor's note, to prove that you're up to such vigorous... activity."

"We are so playful this evening, Miss Bard. We are so relaxed and - normal-date-like."

"It's a stretch," I said. "But I'm up to it."