"We needed to meet tonight to find out how everyone's handling what happened. As you all know by now, the woman you found dead was Melanie's sister-in-law, Saralynn. She used to be married to the man who raped Melanie. They'd just gotten divorced."
Firella shook her head. "Sunday dinners must be hell in that family."
Melanie nodded. Her plump, doughy face looked pinched and her eyes were definitely red. Her hair was frizzy as though she'd tried a home permanent that didn't work. But the same determination that had led her to prosecute her attacker when no one else in the world wanted to seemed to be getting her through this latest crisis.
"How are you getting along with your husband after all this?"
"We're fine," Melanie said. "He loves me and I love him, more than anything in the world, and he's not going to let me down. His brother is a no good piece of trash and Deke's always known it. Ain't Deke's fault his mom and dad turned out a bad 'un."
"That's wonderful, Melanie," Tamsin said. She didn't sound convinced, though. I leaned forward a little to get a good look at our counselor. "Do you think your brother-in-law could be responsible for the death of his wife?"
"No, seeing as how he's in jail," Melanie responded tartly.
I noticed that the ones who hadn't known this looked disappointed. Everyone, it seemed, would have been glad to have Tom Kleinhoff to blame for this murder.
"Why aren't you telling us how you feel about this?" Firella asked. She leaned forward so she could look right into Tamsin's face. "Why aren't you telling us what happened in here Tuesday night?"
This sudden aggression surprised almost everyone except me.
Tamsin flushed a deep plum color. "I've admitted I was hiding in the therapy room when Saralynn Kleinhoff was killed," she said in a low voice. I saw Sandy lean across the table to hear. "I've admitted to being scared when I knew there was a killer in the building. I don't think that's too surprising."
"But..." I began before I thought. I had leaned forward to focus on her myself. I stopped before I voiced my doubts.
"What, Lily?" Tamsin asked. But only because she had to; you could tell she was scared about what I was going to say. We were supposed to bare all to Tamsin; what about her being honest with us?
"Tell us exactly what happened," I said, with careful emphasis. "As far as we can tell, it could have been any one of us pinned to that wall in your office. How come Melanie's sister-in-law and Janet got attacked, and you didn't?"
"Are you blaming Tamsin for not getting hurt, Lily?" Firella asked. "Are you blaming the victim for the crime, so to speak?"
"Yeah, where are you going with this, Lily?" Carla croaked.
Good question.
"I just want to know exactly what happened. We come here every week." I simmered for a minute. "We're supposed to feel safe here. How did this person who killed Saralynn get in? How'd he get out without us seeing him?"
Everyone around the table looked thoughtful after hearing my questions. I wasn't sure why I was maneuvering our therapist into telling us something that would surely upset her, but I was determined to do just that.
"As I told you the night of the incident, Lily," Tamsin said with reluctance, "Saralynn was supposed to come early so I could give her the little talk I give everyone before she joins the group. I'd asked her to come in at seven fifteen, a little earlier than I'd asked you to come. You were the last one to get the lecture the first night you all came, and I remembered I'd had to rush through.
"I was a little worried about Saralynn having such a close relationship with Melanie, how that would impact the group, and we talked about that a little bit."
"You didn't hear anyone else in the building?" Firella asked.
"I may have. Now, I think I did. But it could have been someone staying late, or coming back in after something he'd left... anything."
"The end door was locked?" Sandy wanted to be sure.
"No, the end door wasn't locked." Tamsin flushed red. "I knew you guys would be coming in. So I didn't lock it behind her."
"Did you hear the door while you talked?"
"No. I don't think so."
When I looked skeptical, she said, "That's the most normal noise in the world, to me. I'm not sure I would have noticed!" She was getting angry.
"So there was a reason you had to leave Saralynn in your office? ..." Melanie said, to get Tamsin back on the track.
"Yes, I'd left the group list on the table in here, and I had to get it to enter Saralynn's name - just her first name - and phone number. You remember, I took that information from all of you in case we had to cancel sometime."
"So while you were in the therapy room ... ?" Melanie prompted.
"Okay, while I was in there I dropped everything. I spilled all my papers from my notebook and knocked my pop over."
After a brief vision of Tamsin pushing down an old man with white hair, I realized she meant she'd spilled a soft drink. Maybe it was a northern or midwestern thing? We all waited, watching her. Janet's mouth was pulled tight against her teeth. Anger? Skepticism?
"I started picking everything up, and while I was doing that I heard someone going into my office."
"Did you hear this person pass the door of the therapy room, or come from the direction of the end door?"
"I don't remember either way," she admitted. "I've tried and tried, but I don't remember."
Sandy interrupted. "What difference would that make, Lily?"
I shrugged. "The difference between someone hiding in this building until he was able to catch a woman alone, and someone coming in from the parking lot - maybe after Saralynn - on purpose."
An interesting difference, their faces said, and they turned to Tamsin again. She shook her head. "No use, I just can't recall it. After I heard someone go into my office, I heard Saralynn say something, but I couldn't make it out. She sounded surprised but not scared. But after that, she said, "What?" and she made an awful sound. Then there was a lot of scuffling and grunting, and I knew what was happening. I was so scared. I know I should have gone to help her, but I was so scared. I crawled over to the door to the therapy room. It was shut, you know how it falls shut? So as quietly as I could, I locked it."
She got a chorus of sympathy from everyone in the room except me. Her eyes traveled around the group of women, coming to stop at my face.
"Lily, I think we have to get this out in the open. Are you blaming me for not going to Saralynn's aid?"
"No," I said. "I think that was good sense."
"Then are you angry I let Janet come in without warning her?"
"No. If you don't go help one, why go help another?" She winced, and I knew that had sounded as if I thought her callous. "I mean, if you expected to be killed when he killed Saralynn, you would still have been killed if you'd tried to help Janet, I guess."
"Then what issue do you have with me?"
I thought for a minute. "You seem... already scared," I said, picking my way slowly. "Don't you think you should tell us the rest?" I could see the fear in her face, read it in the tightly drawn line of her mouth and the way her shoulders were set. I know a lot about fear.
"That don't make a lick of sense, Lily," Carla said.
"Well, yeah, it does," Janet said in her unnaturally husky voice. "Like Tamsin's already been a victim and she's anticipating being a victim again."
"The therapist isn't supposed to talk about her own problems," Tamsin reminded us. "I couldn't, even if I wanted to."
"And why wouldn't you want to? We share our big problems with you," Carla said illogically.
"This is where you come to get help," Tamsin began.
"Oh, yeah, like the help we got Tuesday night?" Sandy's voice was bitter and shrill. The rest of us tried to look at her without actually turning our heads to stare, because Sandy was the least forthcoming of the group by far. We didn't want to startle her, or she'd run; it was like having a wounded deer in your backyard, a deer you felt obliged to examine. "Seeing that dead woman in your office was the scariest thing that's happened to me in a long time, and if you know anything about it or if it happened because of you, I think we have a right to know that. Because what if it's connected to one of us?" I exchanged glances with Janet, not quite following Sandy.
"Sure," said Carla, who evidently hadn't had the same problem. "Think about it!" I was hopelessly confused.
"You're saying," Firella clarified, "that maybe if Saralynn's murder ties up with something in Tamsin's past, it hasn't got anything to do with us. Maybe we'd all been scared it did? Like maybe one of the bikers who raped Lily following Lily here and killing Saralynn as a lesson to Lily?"
"Right. Like that." Carla sounded relieved that someone understood her.
"Or like whoever raped Sandy, not that Sandy has chosen to reveal that to the rest of her sisters in the group, which every one of the rest of us has," said Melanie, and I thought through that sentence for a moment.
Sandy flushed a deep red. "Well, then, missy, I'll just tell you that it couldn't be connected to me because the man who raped me was my grandfather, and I'll tell you what I did about it. I put rat poison in his coffee and that son of a bitch died."
We all gazed at her with our mouths hanging open. In a million years, not one of us could have predicted what had come out of Sandy's mouth.
Firella said, "Way to go, Sandy."
So I had a sister under the skin. Another killer. I felt myself smile, and I was sure it was a very unpleasant smile to see. "Good for you," I told her.
Tamsin's face was a sight. A professional excitement that Sandy had spoken up was mingled with subdued dismay at Sandy's revelation, and concern over Tamsin's own situation.
"Didn't expect that, did you?" Carla jeered.
"No," Tamsin admitted readily, "I never suspected Sandy would share with us, especially to this extent. Sandy, do you feel good now that you've told us what happened to you?"
I observed that attention had turned away from Tamsin, which was undoubtedly what Tamsin had wanted.
Sandy looked as though she was rummaging around inside herself to discover what was there. Her gaze was inward, intensely blue, blind to all around her.
"Yes, I feel pretty good," she said. Surprise was evident in her voice. "I feel pretty damn good." She looked happily shocked at herself. "I hated that old man. I hated him. I was eighteen when it happened. You'd think an eighteen year old could fight off a grandfather, wouldn't you? But he was only fifty-eight himself, and he'd been doing manual labor all his life. He was strong and he was mean and he had a knife."
"What happened afterward?" Tamsin asked. She kept her voice very even and low, so Sandy's flow would continue.
"I told my mother. She didn't believe me until she saw the blood on the bed and helped me clean up. He'd been living with us since my grandmother died. After my mom and dad talked, they took Grandpa to a hospital. They told him he had to stay in the mental hospital till he died, or else they'd tell what he'd done to me and he'd have to go to regular jail."
"Did he believe them?"
"He must have, because he agreed. Oh, he tried to say no one would believe me. That was what I was afraid of, but then I turned up pregnant and of course," and Sandy's face was too awful to look at, "I would have had the baby to prove the paternity with."
I felt nauseated. "What happened with the baby?" I asked.
"I lost the baby, but only after Granddaddy was committed. And I thank God for that every day. Two days after I lost the baby, I visited Granddaddy in the hospital and I took him some coffee. It was spiked, so to speak. I was scared he'd talk his way out if he knew I wasn't pregnant any more."
Telling the bare and horrible truth takes its toll, and I could read that in the woman's face.
"You weren't prosecuted?" Firella, too, was keeping her voice very even and low.
"It's funny," Sandy said, in an almost detached way. "But though I wasn't trying to sneak in, no one saw me. Like I was invisible. If I'd sat and planned it a week, it couldn't've gone like that. No one at the front desk." She shook her head, seeing the past more clearly than she could see the present. "No one at the wing he was in. I pushed the button that opened the door myself. I went in. He was in his room alone. I handed him the cup. I had a plain one. We drank coffee. I told him I'd forgiven him." She shook her head again. "He believed that. And when the coffee was all gone - the tranquilizers had pretty much destroyed his sense of taste - I got up and left. I took the cups with me. And no one saw me, except one nurse. She never said a word. I just didn't register." Sandy was lost in a dreamlike memory, a memory both horrible and gratifying.
"Have you ever told your husband?" Tamsin asked, and her more recent world came crashing back to Sandy McCorkindale.
"No," she said. "No, I have not."
"I think it's time, don't you?" Tamsin's voice was gentle and insinuating.
"Maybe," Sandy admitted. "Maybe it is. But he may not want someone who's been through something so ... sordid ... my sons... the church ..." And Sandy began crying, her back arching with huge, heaving sobs.