"Okay." I hesitated. "Saturday afternoon?"

He nodded. "Your place?"

"All right." I was doubtful about the wisdom of this, but I owed it to him to listen, whatever he wanted to say.

My forehead was beaded with sweat. Instead of searching out my towel, I lifted the hem of my T-shirt and dabbed at my forehead, ensuring Bobo saw the horrendous scars on my ribs.

I saw him gulp. I went on to my next exercise feeling obscurely vindicated. Though Bobo was handsome and wholesome as a loaf of good bread, and I had once or twice been tempted to take a bite, Toni was from his world. I intended to see he kept my age and bitter experience in his mind.

Janet was doing shoulders this morning, and I spotted for her while she worked on the Gravitron. Her knees on the small platform, the counterweight set at forty pounds so she wouldn't be lifting her whole body weight, Janet gripped the bars above her head and pulled up. She was working pretty hard the first few reps, and by number eight, I wandered over to hold her feet and push up gently to lighten the strain on her arms. When she'd finished number ten, Janet dangled from the bars, panting, and after a minute she slid her knees off the platform and stood on the uprights. Stepping off backward, she took a few more seconds to catch her breath and let the muscles of her shoulders recoup.

"Are you going to the funeral?" she asked. She moved the pin to the thirty-pound slot.

"I don't know." I hated the thought of dressing up and going into the crowded Shakespeare Combined Church. "Have you heard if the time's certain yet?"

"Last night, my mother was over at Lacey and Jerrell's when the funeral home called to say the coroner's office in Little Rock was sending the body back. Lacey said Saturday morning at eleven."

I considered, scowling. I could probably finish work by eleven if I got up extra early and hurried. If I ever got around to getting my clients to sign a contract, I decided one of the clauses would be that I didn't have to go to their funerals.

"I guess I should," I said reluctantly.

"Great!" Janet looked positively happy. "If it's okay with you, I'll park at your house and we can walk to the funeral together."

Making that little arrangement would never have occurred to me. "Okay," I said, struggling not to sound astonished or doubtful. Then I realized I had a bit of news I should share.

"Claude and Carrie got married," I told her.

"You're... you're serious!" Janet faced me, astonished. "When?"

"At the courthouse, yesterday."

"Hey, Marshall!" Janet called to our sensei, who'd just come out of the office in the hallway between the weight room and the aerobics room where we held karate classes. Marshall turned, holding a glass of some grainy brown stuff he drank for breakfast. Marshall was wearing his normal uniform of T-shirt and muscle pants. He raised his black eyebrows to ask, What?

"Claude and Carrie got married, Lily says!"

This caused a general burst of comment among the others in the room. Brian Gruber quit doing stomach crunches and sat up on the bench, patting his face with his towel. Jeri yanked her cellular phone from her workout bag and called a friend she knew would be up and drinking her coffee. A couple of other people sauntered over to discuss this news. And I caught a blaze of some emotion on Bobo's face, some feeling I found didn't fit in any category of comfortable response to my trivial piece of gossip.

"How did you know?" Janet asked, and I discovered I was in the middle of a small group of sweaty and curious people.

"I was there," I answered, surprised.

"You were a witness?"

I nodded.

"What did she wear?" Jerri asked, pushing her streaky blond hair away from her forehead.

"Where'd they go for their honeymoon?" asked Marlys Squire, a travel agent with four grandchildren.

"Where are they gonna live?" asked Brian Gruber, who'd been trying to sell his own house for five months.

For a moment, I thought of turning tail and simply walking away, but... maybe ... it wasn't so bad, talking to these people, being part of a group.

But when I was driving away from the gym I felt the reaction; I'd let myself down, somehow, a corner of my brain warned. I'd opened myself, made it easy. Instead of sliding between those people, observing but not participating, I'd held still long enough to be pegged in place, laid myself open to interpretation by giving them a piece of my thoughts.

While I worked that day, I retreated into a deep silence, comforting and refreshing as an old bathrobe. But it wasn't as comfortable as it had been. It didn't seem, somehow, to fit anymore.

That evening I walked, the cool night covering me with its darkness. I saw Joel McCorkindale, the minister of the Shakespeare Combined Church, running his usual three miles, his charisma turned off for the evening. I observed that Doris Massey, whose husband had died the previous year, had resumed entertaining, since Charles Friedrich's truck was parked in front of her trailer. Clifton Emanuel, Marta Schuster's deputy, rolled by in a dark green Bronco. Two teenagers were breaking into the Bottle and Can Liquor Store, and I used my cell phone to call the police station before I melted into the night. No one saw me; I was invisible.

I was lonely.

Chapter Six

Jack called Friday morning just as I was leaving for my appointment with Lacey at Deedra's apartment.

"I'm on my way back," he said. "Maybe I can come down Sunday afternoon."

I felt a flash of resentment. He'd drive down from Little Rock for the afternoon, we'd hop into bed, and he'd have to go back for work on Monday. I made myself admit that I had to work Monday, too, that even if he stayed in Shakespeare we wouldn't get to see each other that much. Seeing him a little was better than not seeing him at all... as of this moment.

"I'll see you then," I said, but my pause had been perceptible and I knew I didn't sound happy enough.

There was a thoughtful silence on the other end of the line. Jack is not stupid, especially where I'm concerned.

"Something's wrong," he said at last. "Can we talk about it when I get there?"

"All right," I said, trying to soften my voice.

"Good-bye." And I hung up, taking care to be gentle with the telephone.

I was a little early. I propped myself against the wall by Deedra's apartment door and waited for Lacey. I was sullen and grim, and I knew that was unreasonable. When Lacey trudged up the stairs, I nodded a greeting, and she seemed just as content to leave it at that.

She'd succeeded in getting Jerrell to remove the boxes we'd packed the previous session, so the apartment looked a lot emptier. After a minimum of discussion, I began sorting through things in the small living room while Lacey boxed the linens.

I pitched all the magazines into a garbage bag and opened the drawer in the coffee table. I saw a roll of mints, a box of pens, some Post-It notes, and the instruction booklet that had come with Deedra's VCR. I patted the bottom of the drawer, then reached back in its depths. That netted me a coupon for a Healthy Choice microwave meal. I frowned, feeling the muscles around my mouth clamp in what would be wrinkles before too many years passed.

"It's gone," I said.

Lacey said, "What?"

I hadn't even heard her in the kitchen behind me. The service hatch was open.

"The TV Guide."

"Maybe you threw it away Wednesday?"

"No," I said positively.

"What possible difference could it make?" Lacey didn't sound dismissive, but she did sound puzzled.

I stood to face her. She was leaning, elbows on the kitchen counter, her golden-brown sweater already streaked with lint from the dryer. "I don't know," I said, and shrugged. "But Deedra always, always kept the TV Guide in this drawer, because she marked the shows she wanted to tape." I'd always found it interesting that someone with Deedra's limited intelligence was blessed with a knack for small appliances. She could set her VCR to tape her favorite shows in a matter of minutes. On nights she didn't have a date, Deedra had television. Even when Deedra was going to be in her apartment, if there was a man present, often she wouldn't watch her shows. She'd set up her VCR to record.

Every workday morning, Deedra slid in a tape to catch her favorite soaps, and sometimes Oprah. She used the Post-It notes to label her tapes; there was always a little yellow cloud of them in the living room wastebasket.

Oh, hell, what difference could a missing magazine make? Nothing else was missing - nothing that I'd yet discovered. If Deedra's purse was still missing (and I hadn't heard that it had been found) then the thief hadn't been after her keys for entry into her apartment, but had wanted something else in her purse.

I couldn't imagine what that object could be. And there wasn't anything of value missing from the apartment, only the stupid TV Guide. Oh, there might be some Kleenex missing. I hadn't counted those. Marta would probably ask me to.

While I'd been grumbling to myself, I'd been running my hands under the bright floral couch cushions, crouching to look underneath the little skirt that concealed the legs.

"It's just not here," I concluded. Lacey had come into the living room. She was looking at me with a puzzled expression.

"Did you want it for something special?" she asked cautiously, obviously humoring me.

I felt like a fool. "It's the only thing that's missing," I explained. "Marta Schuster asked me to tell her if I found anything gone missing, and the TV Guide is the only thing."

"I just hardly see ..." Lacey said doubtfully.

"Me too. But I guess I better call her."

Marta Schuster was out of the office, so I talked to Deputy Emanuel. He promised to draw the absence of the magazine to Sheriff Schuster's attention. But the way he said it told me he thought I was crazy for reporting the missing TV Guide. And I couldn't blame him for his conclusion.

As I went back to my work, it occurred to me that only a maid would have noticed the absence of the TV Guide. And I had to admit to myself that I'd only noticed because once Deedra had left it on the couch and I'd put it on the kitchen counter: in the hatchway, though, so it was easily visible. But Deedra had had a fit, one of the very few she'd had while I'd cleaned for her. She'd told me in no uncertain terms that the TV Guide always, always went in the coffee-table drawer.

So a mad rapist molests Deedra, strangles her, parks her nude in her car out in the woods and... steals her TV Guided TV Guides were readily available in at least five places in Shakespeare. Why would anyone need Deedra's? I snorted, and put the thought aside to work over some other time. But Deedra herself wouldn't leave my thoughts. That was only right, I admitted to myself reluctantly. I'd cleaned her apartment for four years; I knew many tiny details about her life that no one else knew. That's the thing with cleaning people's homes; you absorb a lot of information with that cleaning. There's nothing more revealing about people than the mess they leave for someone else. The only people who get to see a home unprepared and unguarded are a maid, a burglar, and a policeman.

I wondered which of the men Deedra had bedded had decided she had to die. Or had it been an impulse? Had she refused to perform some particular act, had she threatened to inform someone's wife that he was straying, had she clung too hard? Possible, all three scenarios, but not probable. As far as I knew there was nothing Deedra would refuse to do sexually, she'd steered clear of married men for the most part, and if she'd valued one bedmate over another I'd never known about it.

The sheriff's brother could've been different. He was attractive, and he'd certainly carried on like he was crazy about Deedra.

Deedra would sure have been an embarrassing sister-in-law for Marta Schuster. I was lying on the floor checking to make sure nothing else was underneath Deedra's couch when that unwelcome thought crossed my mind. I stayed down for a moment, turning the idea back and forth, chewing at it.

I nearly discarded it out of hand. Marta was tough enough to handle embarrassment. And from my reading of the situation, I felt Marlon had just begun his relationship with Deedra; there was no other way to explain his extravagant display of grief. He was young enough to have illusions, and maybe he'd dodged the talk about Deedra with enough agility to have hope she'd cleave only to him, to put a biblical spin on it.

Perhaps she would have. After all, Deedra hadn't been smart, but even Deedra must have seen that she couldn't go on as she had been. Right?

Maybe she'd never let herself think of the future. Maybe, once started on her course, she'd been content to just drift along? I felt a rush of contempt.

Then I wondered what I myself had been doing for the past six years.

As I rose to my knees and then to my feet, I argued to myself that I'd been learning to survive - to not go crazy - every single day since I'd been raped and knifed.

Standing in Deedra Dean's living room, listening to her mother working down the hall, I realized that I was no longer in danger of craziness, though I supposed I'd have fits of anxiety the rest of my days. I had made a life, I had earned my living, and I had bought a house of my own. I had insurance. I drove a car and paid taxes. I had mastered survival. For a long moment I stood staring through the hatchway into Deedra's fluorescently bright kitchen, thinking what a strange time and place it was to realize such a large thing.

And since I was in her apartment, I had to think of Deedra again. She'd been slaughtered before she'd had time to come through whatever was making her behave the way she did. Her body had been degraded - displayed naked, and violated. Though I had not let myself think of it before now, I had a mental picture of the Coca-Cola bottle protruding from Deedra's vagina. I wondered if she'd been alive when that had happened. I wondered if she'd had time to know.