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.”OF COURSE AFTER the restaurant discussion, the bookstore wasn’t much fun.I read biographies, mostly; maybe I’m hoping I’ll find the key to make my life lighter by finding out how someone else managed.Or maybe I loved company in my miserable past; I could always find a tougher life than mine.But not tonight.I found myself thinking not about Claude and myself, but about Darnell Glass.I glanced at the true crime books, which I cannot stomach any more than I can watch the news on television.No one would ever write a book about Darnell Glass.A beating death in Arkansas, especially the beating death of a black male, was not newsworthy, unless whoever’d killed Darnell got arrested and generated some lurid publicity—if the murderer was one of the local ministers maybe, or if Darnell’s death was the first escapade of a flamboyant serial killer.I had managed to make my way through the newspaper account.The Shakespeare paper did its best to defuse tense situations, but even its brief references to the young man’s long list of injuries made my stomach lurch.Darnell Glass had suffered a broken jaw, five broken ribs, multiple arm fractures, and the blow that had mercifully killed him, a crushing strike to the skull.He had suffered massive internal injuries consistent with a determined beating.He’d died surrounded by enemies—in rage, in terror, in disbelief—in an unremarkable clearing in the piney woods.No one deserved that.Well, I had to amend that thought.I could think of a few people I wouldn’t weep over if they met an identical end.But Darnell Glass, though no saint, was a very smart young man with no criminal record, whose worst crime (apparently) was a bad temper.“Let’s go,” I said to Claude, and he looked surprised at the shortness of my tone.All the way back home I kept silent, which Claude perhaps interpreted as regret.Or sulking.Anyway, he gave me a brusque cheek peck on the doorstep that had a sort of chilly finality to it.It seemed to me, watching his broad back retreat, that I’d never see him again.I went inside and looked at the flowers, still beautiful and sweet.I wondered if Claude regretted sending them now.I almost pulled them from the vase to throw away.But that would have been silly, wasteful.As I prepared for bed, thankful to be alone, I wondered if Marshall’s charge was true.Was I a cold woman?I could never see myself as cold; self-protective, maybe, but not cold.It seemed to me that underneath the surface, I was always on fire.I tossed and turned, tried relaxation techniques.I got up to walk.It was chilly outside now, midnight in late October, and it was windy; before morning it would rain again.I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and Nikes, all dark shades: I was in a hateful mood, and didn’t want anyone to see me.The streetlights at each corner of my street, Track Street, were dispensing their usual feeble nimbus.Claude’s window was dark, as was every window in the apartment building; an early night for tenants old and new.The Shakespeare Combined Church, or SCC as the members called it, was dark except for some security lights.There was very little movement in the town, period.Shakespeare rises early and goes to bed early, except for the men and women who work the late shift at one or two of the fast-food places, and the people who work nights at the mattress factory or the chicken processing plant, which run round the clock.I went as far as the lower-middle-class neighborhood in which Darnell Glass had grown up, one of Shakespeare’s few mixed-race areas.I passed the little house Glass’s mother, Lanette, had bought when she moved back to Shakespeare from Chicago.It, too, was dark and silent.None of these homes had garages or porte cocheres, so it was easy to see Lanette Glass was not at home.But I found out where she was.She was at Mookie Preston’s house.While I’d been thinking about my curious cleaning stint at Mookie’s that day, I’d drifted in that direction without conscious thought.So I was opposite the house when Lanette Glass emerged.I wasn’t close enough to see her expression, which the deep shadows of the streetlight behind her would have made difficult anyway, but from the way she walked—shoulders hunched, head shaking slightly from side to side, purse clasped hard against her side—Lanette Glass was a woman in trouble, and a troubled woman.More and more I wondered about the purposes of the mysterious Mookie Preston.As a cold breeze stirred my hair, I felt some of its chill creep down my spine.Something was brewing in Shakespeare, something sick and dangerous [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]