Read Online Shakespeare's Counselor by Charlaine Harris - Free Book Online Page A

more than once?”
    â€œNo, no. I just mean…the whole cycle. You know, I called you about the squirrel being left hanging on my front porch,” she said tremulously, her shaking hand pointing to Claude.
    â€œI know about your past problems,” Detective Stokes said curtly. Claude rumbled, “I’d gotten a sort of outline picture.” Tamsin nodded. She made an effort to control her ragged breathing and tears.
    After a moment, she went on. “I was hiding in the therapy room,” she confessed. She looked at my face as if it were up to me to absolve her of this piece of self-preservation.
    â€œSaralynn got there early so I could give her my little orientation speech. I said hi to her and then I remembered I’d left some papers in the therapy room, so I went in there to fetch them, and while I was in there, I heard…I heard…”
    â€œYou heard the woman being killed?”
    Tamsin nodded. “And I shut the door,” she said, and shuddered and gasped. “As quiet as I could, I shut the door and then I locked it.”
    That was hard to swallow. We had ventured into a building we thought contained danger, to help Tamsin. But from her own account, Tamsin wouldn’t open the door to try to save a woman’s life. I made myself choke this knowledge down, shove it aside. Fear could make you do almost anything: I had known fear before, and I was willing to bet this wasn’t Tamsin’s first experience of it. “Didn’t you hear Janet come in?” My voice was as even as I could make it.
    â€œThat room’s pretty soundproof,” she said, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes. “I thought I heard someone calling down the hall, but for all I knew it was the same person who’d killed poor Saralynn, so I was too scared to answer. That was Janet, I guess. Then, later, I heard other sounds, other people.”
    I’d have said we’d made enough noise to establish our identities, but it wasn’t my business. Now that I knew the situation was more or less under control, I would be glad to leave, if Claude would give me a green light. I was finding that the idea of Tamsin cowering in a safe, locked room—while one woman was killed and another popped over the head—was not agreeing with me.
    I had opened my mouth to ask Claude if I could go when another car pulled into the parking lot, toward the back where the police cars weren’t as thick. Cliff Eggers sprang out as though he’d been ejected. He hurried to his wife.
    â€œTamsin!” he cried. “Are you all right?”
    â€œCliff!” Our therapist hurled herself into the big man’s arms and sobbed against his chest. “I can’t stand this again, Cliff!”
    â€œWhat’s happened?” he said gently, while Stokes, Claude, and I stood and listened.
    â€œSomebody killed a woman and left her in my office!”
    Cliff’s dark eyes bored into Claude, another large white male.
    â€œIs this true?” he asked, as though Tamsin often made up fantasies of this nature. Or as though he wished she had.
    â€œI’m afraid so. I’m the police chief, Claude Friedrich. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?” Claude extended his hand, and Cliff disengaged from Tamsin to shake it.
    â€œCliff Eggers,” he responded. “I’m Tamsin’s husband.”
    â€œWhat do you do, Mr. Eggers?” Claude asked in a social way, though I could practically see Detective Stokes twitch.
    â€œI’m a medical transcriptionist,” he said, making an obvious effort to relax. “I believe your wife is one of my clients. Mostly I work out of our home, my wife’s and mine.”
    We must all have looked blank.
    â€œDoctors record what they find when they examine a patient, and what they’re going to do about it. I take the recordings and enter the information into a computerized record. That’s paring my job