The light wisn't crystal clear in the area around the door, but I could tell when I aimed my tiny key-ring flashlight at the crack that the deadbolt was not actually engaged.
So the door wasn't locked, after all. I tugged on it again, baffled. It didn't budge.
While the other women watched, I again punched the "on" button of my tiny flashlight. My insurance agent would be glad to hear I'd found his giveaway so useful. This time, I shone the light all the way around the edges of the door, trying to spy something that would give me a clue as to why the door was being so stubborn. I was rewarded maybe the second or third time around, when I realized a chip of wood was protruding from the bottom.
"There," I said, and squatted. I heard Melanie explaining to the others and many exclamations, but I ignored them. I tried to grip the sliver of wood in a pincer formed by my thumb and middle finger, but I didn't have much success. Tonight was the first time I'd ever wished I had long fingernails. I checked out the hands around me. "Firella," I said, "your nails are the longest. See if you can grip this little piece of wood, here. That's what's got the door wedged shut."
Sandy was suggesting in an increasingly nervous voice that we call the police right now, or at least her husband, but Carla put a hand on Sandy's arm and said, "Hush, woman." I noticed, while Firella crouched and tried to wriggle the strip of wood from its lodging, that Carla had put out her cigarette before it was smoked down to the filter. She was worried, too.
After a lot of shaking of her head and several little whispers of "No, not quite ... almost... damn thing!" Firella said, "Got it!" and held up the thin strip of wood. About four inches long and two wide, it could have been no more than two millimeters thick, if that. It was just the right size to slip in the crack in the door, just thick enough to get wedged there when the first person tried to open the door to go to Tamsin's office.
I reached out to turn the knob, hesitated.
"What you waiting for?" Carla asked, her voice raspier than ever. "Now we're late."
I was waiting because I'd thought of fingerprints, but then shrugged. By her own account, Sandy had already touched the door. "Remember, she didn't answer the phone," I said, my voice as quiet and calm as I could make it. I opened the door. The other women clustered around me.
The hall light was on, and Tamsin's office door was open, but not the door to the therapy room.
"Tamsin!" called Carla. "You and Janet in there? You two stop messing around, you hear! The rest of us'll get jealous!"
Carla was trying to sound jaunty, but the atmosphere in the hall was too thick with anxiety for that.
Melanie said, "I'm scared." It was an admission, but it didn't signal that she was going to run away. She'd planted her feet and had that bulldog look on her face that meant she wouldn't back down.
"We're all scared," Sandy said. Oddly, she'd gotten calmer. "Do you think we had better just stay out here in the parking lot and call the police?"
"No," I said.
They all turned to look at me.
"You can all stay outside," I said, amending my words. In fact, I would've preferred they all stay out. "But I have to see if they're... okay."
Even slow Melanie read between the lines on that one. To my surprise she said, "No. You go, we all go."
"We all go," Firella said, in a voice even more certain. Sandy didn't say anything, but she didn't walk away, either.
Oh, wonderful, I thought. The five musketeerettes.
We shuffled down the hall in a clump. I couldn't control my anxiety any longer and stepped out ahead of them, pivoted on my left foot and faced into Tamsin's office, my hands already floating up into the striking position. I was ready for something, but not for what I saw.
Behind Tamsin's desk, on the fuzzy wall where all the clippings had been stuck up with pins...
"Oh, dear God," said Sandy, miserably.
"Shit, shit, shit!" Carla's blackbird voice, hushed with shock.... was a body, and the whiteness of it was the first thing I noticed, the whiteness of the chest and arms and face. Then the blackness of her hair.
"Holy Mary, Mother of God," Firella said, her voice more steady than I would have believed. "Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death."
But then there was the redness of it; that was startling, and considerable. The glistening redness mostly issued from the - stake? Was that really a metal stake? Yes, driven through the heart of...
"Who is that woman?" Carla said, more struck by this shock than by any of the others, apparently.
That naked woman, I amplified her statement.
"The naked and the dead," I said, drawing from somewhere in the attic of my mind.
"So," Firella said. Her voice was unsteady, and I heard her gulp back nausea. "She's actually pinned to the wall?"
There was a groan practically under my feet, and I was shocked enough to lurch back, knocking everyone else into confusion.
Janet was lying on the floor in front of the desk. We'd been so transfixed by the dead woman that we hadn't even seen her. Janet rolled, with great effort, from her back to her front, and I saw a darkening bruise on her forehead. But her hand went to the back of her head, moving slowly and painfully.
In a moment, Firella was on her other side, and we tried to raise her. Though we believed we were the only ones in the building (at least I did) I wanted to get Janet out of there as fast as possible, as if the woman's deadness was contagious.
Janet began mumbling something, but I couldn't make it out. She moaned, though, as we tried to pull her to her feet. Without discussion, we lowered her back to the carpet.
"We gotta get out of here," Carla said urgently, and I agreed. But we couldn't all go. I handed my cell phone to Melanie, who was silent and shocked.
"Go outside and call the police," I said.
"Can't we just leave and call it in later?" Carla asked.
We all stared at her. She shrugged.
"I mean, take Janet to the hospital ourselves. Just so we won't be connected to the police side of this. I mean, someone offed this gal, someone really, really seriously sick. Right?"
Sandy said, "That's true."
"Look," I said, and they did all look at me. I was feeling Janet's pulse, trying to decide if her pupils were even. I stopped and collected myself. "We're listed on some schedule as coming here tonight, you know. All of us. Our names are written down somewhere, no matter how confidential Tamsin promised us this would be. I don't think we can opt out of this."
"Do you think whoever killed this woman put her there for us to see?" Sandy asked in a quavering voice. "Or for Tamsin?"
It was a funny question if you weren't there. If you were there, you could see the intention of display that had gone into arranging the body. To see the poor woman pinned up there, among the articles about rape and the empowerment of women, the accuracy of DNA testing and the heavier sentences being handed down to men who raped... we were meant to know we were powerless, after all.
We tried to look anywhere but at the body. "White as a sheet" was a phrase that came to mind when I looked at my therapy group... except Firella, and she had turned an ashen color.
"So we can't dodge this," Carla admitted. "But... no, I guess, we just have to face the music."
"After all, we didn't kill her," Sandy said briskly - as if that cleared up the whole thing, and assured smooth sailing ahead.
When there was a long, thick pause, she said, "Well, I didn't."
"Enough of this, we have to get help for Janet." I looked at Melanie. "You and Carla and Sandy go out the door we came in," I said. "Call nine one one. Firella and I will stay here with Janet. Be sure to tell them we need an ambulance."
"We haven't found Tamsin," Sandy said.
The rest of us had forgotten all about Tamsin in the turmoil of finding the naked impaled woman and the unconscious Janet.
"She might be in here somewhere," Sandy whispered.
"She might be the one who did this." We stared at Sandy as though she'd sprouted another head.
"Or she might have been killed, too," Carla reminded her.
"I don't think we better wander around here looking for her," Firella said sensibly. "I think we better call the cops, like Lily said. Janet needs an ambulance bad."
Carla, Melanie, and Sandy turned to go, when Firella said, "Just for the hell of it, any of you know this woman?"
"I do," Melanie said. She started out, not looking back. "That's my sister-in-law, who was married to the man who raped me."
After a moment of stunned silence, Carla and Sandy hurried after her, down the hall and out into the parking lot. They stood holding open the door so we wouldn't be shut off from them, a piece of thoughtfulness I appreciated. I could hear Carla placing the phone call, having to repeat herself a few times. Firella and I stared at each other, sideswiped by the identification of the dead woman and uncertain how to react to it.
I turned my attention from what I couldn't understand to what I could, the fact that my friend had been attacked. But there didn't seem to be much I could do for her. Janet made little movements from time to time, but she didn't appear to be exactly conscious.
"She's not really stuck up there, is she? Like the newspaper clippings?" Firella said after a moment. Of course, the white-and-red display on the wall was what we were really thinking about.
"I don't see how the wall could be soft enough to drive the stake in far enough to actually hold her up." Janet's color was awful, a sort of muddy green.
"I see what you're saying. I'm looking behind the desk." Firella, proving she was tougher than I - I guess years of the school system will do it - stood and peered over the top of the desk.
She abruptly sat down on the floor again.
"I think she's kind of propped up," she reported, "with string around her arms in loops, attached to nails that have been driven into the wall. Her bottom half's kind of sitting on the back of Tamsin's rolling chair. There's a wadded-up doctor coat stuck under the wheels to keep the chair from moving."
I couldn't think of anything to say to that.
"I wonder if one person could fix her that way. Seems like it would take two," Firella said thoughtfully.
"I guess if one person had enough time it could be done," I said, so she wouldn't think I was shucking her off. "That's a lot of preparation. The wedge to keep us out until the scene was set, and the coat to keep the chair from moving."
"I'm worried about Tamsin," Firella said next.
"Me, too." That was easy to agree with. I was wondering if Tamsin was in the therapy room. I was wondering if she was alive.
"Janet, help is coming," I told her, not at all sure she could hear me or understand. "You hang on one minute more." It was true that I could hear sirens. I didn't think I'd ever been happier to know they were coming.
I hadn't talked to my friend Claude Friedrich in a while, and I'd just as soon not have talked to him that night. But since he's the chief of police, and since it was a murder scene in the city limits, there wasn't any way around it.
"Lily," he greeted me. He was using his police voice; heavy, grim, a little threatening.
"Claude." I probably sounded the same way.
"What's happened here tonight?" he rumbled.
"You'll have to tell us," I said. "We got here for our therapy group - "
"You're in therapy?" Claude's eyebrows almost met his graying hair.
"Yes," I said shortly.
"Accepting help," he said, amazement written all over him. "This must be some doing of Jack's."
"Yes."
"And where is he, tonight?"
"On the road."
"Ah. Okay, so you were here for your therapy group. You and these women?"
"Yes."
"A group for ... ?"
A very tall African American woman appeared at Claude's shoulder. Her hair was cut close to her scalp. She was truly almost black, and she was wearing a practical khaki pantsuit with a badge pinned to the lapel. A pale yellow tank top under the jacket shone radiantly against her skin. She had broad features and wore huge blue-framed glasses.
"Alicia, listen to the account of this witness. I know her, she's observant," Claude said.
"Yes, sir." The magnified eyes focused on me.
"Lily, this is Detective Stokes. She's just come to us from the Cleveland force."
"Cleveland, Ohio?" Cleveland, Mississippi wouldn't have been surprising.
"Yep."
Alicia Stokes would have to be classified as a mystery.
Focusing on the more pertinent problem, I explained to Claude and Detective Stokes that we were a group composed of rape survivors, that we met every Tuesday night at the health center, that we were led by a woman who was missing and might be somewhere in the building.
"Tamsin Lynd," said Stokes unexpectedly.
I stared at her. "Yes," I said slowly. "Tamsin Lynd."
"I knew it," the detective said to herself, so swiftly and in such a low voice that I wasn't sure I'd understood her correctly.
Stokes turned to a man in uniform and gave him some quick orders. He stared back at her, resentment all over his face and in his posture, but then he turned to obey. I shook my head. Stokes had her work cut out for her.