Read Online (LB1) Shakespeare's Champion by Charlaine Harris - Free Book Online

when the accident occurred?”
    I stood perplexed, unable to follow. Then I made the leap. All the intervening conversation had just been waffling. Howell wanted to know about the death of Del Packard.
    I wondered what “indication” Howell imagined there might have been. Footprints on the indoor/outdoor carpet? A monogrammed handkerchief clutched in Del’s fingers?
    “Excuse me, Howell, I have to finish here and get to my next job,” I said abruptly, and rinsed out my mop. Though it took him a second, the man who signed so many local paychecks took the hint and hurried out the kitchen door. His companion lingered a moment behind him, long enough for me to meet his eyes when I looked up to see if they’d gone. I kept my gaze down until I heard the car start up in the carport.
    After conscientiously mopping up their footprints, I wrung the mop and put it outside the back door to dry. With some relief, I locked the Winthrop house behind me and got into my car.
    The Winthrops had irritated me, interested me, been a source of thought and observation for me for four years. But they had never been mysterious. Howell’s sudden swerve from the straight-and-narrow of predictability made me anxious, and his association with the night-walking stranger with the black ponytail baffled me.
    I discovered I had feelings ranging from tolerant to fond for the members of the Winthrop family. I had worked for them long enough to absorb a sense of their lives, to feel a certain loyalty to them.
    Discovering this did not make me especially happy.

Chapter 3

    DRIVING HOME FROM MY LAST JOB OF THE DAY, I BEcame acutely aware of how tired I was. I’d had little sleep the night before, I’d had a full working day, and I’d observed a lot of puzzling behavior.
    But Claude’s personal car, a burgundy Buick, was parked in front of my house. On the whole, I was glad to see it.
    His window was rolled down, and I could hear his radio playing “All Things Considered,” the public-radio news program. Claude was slumped down in the driver’s seat, his eyes closed. I wondered how long he had been waiting, since someone had stuck a blue sheet of paper under his windshield wiper. I could feel a smile somewhere inside me as I pulled into my carport and turned off the ignition. I’d missed him.
    I walked quietly down the drive. I bent to his ear.
    “Hey, hotshot,” I whispered.
    He smiled before his eyes flew open.
    “Lily,” he said, as if he enjoyed saying it. His hand went up to smooth his mustache, now more salt-and-pepper than brown.
    “You going to sit out here or you going to come in?”
    “In, now that you’re here to offer.”
    As Claude emerged from his Buick, I pulled the blue flyer from under his passenger-side wiper. I figured it was an ad for the new pizza place. I glanced at the heading idly.
    “Claude,” I said.
    He’d been retucking his shirtail. “Yep?”
    “Look.”
    He took the sheet of blue paper from me, studied the dark print for a moment.
    “Shit,” he said disgustedly. “This is exactly what Shakespeare needs.”
    “Yes indeed.”
    TAKE BACK YOUR OWN, the headline read. In smaller print, the text read:

     The white male is an endangered species. Due to government interference, white males cannot get the jobs they want or defend their families. ACT NOW!! BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE !!! Join us in this struggle. We’ll be calling you. TAKE BACK YOUR OWN . We’ve been shoved enough. PUSH BACK !

    “No address or phone number,” Claude observed.
    “Dr. Sizemore got one, too.” I remembered the color, though naturally I hadn’t extracted the sheet from the dentist’s garbage can.
    Claude shrugged his heavy shoulders. “No law against it, stupid as it seems.”
    Northern Arkansas had hosted several white supremacist organizations over the past few decades. I wondered if this was an offshoot of one of them, one that had migrated south.
    Everywhere I went, in the grocery, in the doctor’s office, the rare