“Joel.” He didn’t like me using his first name. I’d always found him distasteful, but fair, and I didn’t want to be as ugly as my first inclination led me to be.
“Joel,” I said again, trying to pick my words carefully. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard Tamsin say one word about any religion in our therapy group.” I took a deep breath. “It seems to me you should be more concerned about your wife’s mental health than about the possible theological opinions of her counselor.”
“Of course, Sandy’s well-being is my primary concern,” Joel said. “I’m just-why does she feel the need to go to this group at all?” he burst out, seeming genuinely puzzled. Suddenly, Joel looked like a real man, not like a little impervious god. “We’ve prayed about it and asked for her healing and her forgiveness of the one who did such a terrible thing to her. Why does she need to talk about it?”
“Because your wife was raped,” I said, as if I was telling him this for the first time. “She needs to talk to other women who’ve lived through the experience. She needs to be able to express her own true feelings about what happened to her, away from people who expect so many different things from her.”
He tilted back in his chair for a moment. At that second, he looked more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him. I didn’t doubt that Joel McCorkindale loved his wife. I did doubt that he knew what a burden his public persona was on his wife’s shoulders and what a struggle it was for her to preserve the image of the kind of wife she thought he deserved.
“My wife was accosted in college, over twenty years ago, from what little she’s told me,” he said. “Why would she need help now?”
Accosted? He made it sound as unthreatening as a panhandler asking you for spare change-though under some circumstances, that could be pretty damn scary. And I noticed that even Joel didn’t seem to know exactly what had happened to his wife. “Don’t you ever counsel members of your congregation who’ve been raped?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’d be glad to help if someone came to me with that problem, but it hasn’t happened.”
“Then you’re not doing your job,” I said, “in some sense. Because believe me, Reverend, your congregation contains rape victims.”
Joel looked unhappy at the idea, though what caused that unhappiness I couldn’t guess. “How many women are in your group?” he asked, staring at his fingers so evenly matched together in front of him.
“More than me and your wife, I can tell you that,” I said sadly. “And we’re just a fraction. How many women in yours?”
He blinked. Considered. “Two hundred fifty, more or less.”
“Then you have about twenty-five victims,” I told him. “Depending on whose estimates you use.”
He was shocked, no question.
“Now, Joel, I have to leave. I don’t think I was any help to you. But I hope you can be to Sandy, because she definitely has some heavy problems.” I pushed myself to my feet, thinking this had been a waste of time and energy, and I left.
He was still sitting in the chair when I shut the door behind me, and unless I was completely wrong, Joel McCorkindale was deep in thought. Maybe he was praying.
I had more phone calls to return, so I ate a salad and some crackers to get supper out of the way. I was hungrier than I thought I’d be, and it was a little later than I’d planned by the time I called Carrie.
Claude answered the phone and bellowed Carrie’s name. I could hear her telling him she’d be there in a minute, then the sound of water being shut off.
“It’s my night to do the dishes,” she explained. “Listen, the reason I called you, the woman who’s been coming in to clean every day-Kate Henderson-has taken a little sabbatical because her daughter had a baby. So I was wondering… I hate to mix friendship and business, but is there any way you can come in for a few minutes a day until Kate gets back from Ashdown?”
I’d cleaned Carrie’s office until about eighteen months ago, when she’d found her increased patient load called for a daily cleaning, an obligation I couldn’t schedule in at the time. “I’m working in Little Rock this week,” I told her. “But I can come Thursday and Saturday for sure. The other days, I’ll have to see. I may finish up my job in Little Rock pretty soon.” That was probably optimistic thinking, but it was possible.
“I appreciate any time you can give me,” Carrie said. “So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Sure. I’ll get there first thing tomorrow morning before you start seeing patients, then I have to go to the Winthrops. But I can come back after you close.”
“So it’ll be clean for Thursday morning and Friday morning, and you’ll come in on Saturday so it’ll be looking good on Monday. Great.” Relief was running high in Carrie’s voice. I heard a rumbling in the background at her house.
“Claude wants to know if Alicia Stokes called you,” Carrie relayed.
“Tell him yes, and I’m just about to call her back.”
“She did,” Carrie called to Claude. “Lily’s returning her call after we hang up.”
“He says good.” Carrie listened to some more rumbling. “He says to tell you Alicia Stokes might be almost as tough as you.”
I could hear from her voice she was smiling. “Tell him, from me, that in that case I’ll be extra careful,” I said.
Chapter Five
Alicia Stokes had her own little cubicle at the Shakespeare Police Department, which for the past three years had been “temporarily” housed in an older home after the jail and the police station had been declared substandard and put on notice to meet the state requirements. The city had responded sluggishly, as Shakespeare always did when money was involved. After a couple of years, the new jail was completed. Prisoners could march extra yards and be incarcerated in a decent facility. To no one’s surprise, the police station in front of it had run into work delays.
It was sort of nice to walk up onto a front porch to go in to see the police, but the old house really wasn’t suited to the purpose, and it would be abandoned within the next two months. Alicia’s cubicle was at the back of the former living room, and she’d already hung pictures of some of her heroes there. All her heroes were black and female. Alicia Stokes, obviously, had the courage to be different. And she was dedicated. She’d told me to come on in when I’d called, even though it was getting dark.
She stood to shake my hand, which I liked, and she gestured me into a chair that wasn’t too uncomfortable. Unlike Joel McCorkindale, Stokes seated herself firmly on the power side of the desk. Then we both had to pretend that no one else could hear us, which wasn’t easy, since the partitions were about as high as the detective’s head.
“I’d like to review what happened last night,” the detective said to open the interview. “And then, we’ll get a statement typed up for you to sign before you leave.”
So I’d be here a while. I nodded, resigned.
Detective Stokes had a legal pad in front of her. She opened it to a fresh page, wrote my name at the top of it, and asked, “How long have you been attending this survivors’ therapy group?”
“This would have been my third session. My third week.”
“And all the members of the group have been raped and are in the process of recovery?”
“That’s the idea.” The air conditioning, probably as old as the house, could barely keep up with the heat.
“How were you contacted to join this group? Were you already a patient at the center?”
“No.” I told her about the flyer at the grocery store and described coming to the first meeting.
“Who was there?”
“The same people that were there last night.” I went through the list.
“Did Ms. Lynd say anything about others who were supposed to come?”
“No, but that wouldn’t be surprising.” I remembered my own reluctance. “I’d expect someone to have second thoughts, or back out entirely.” I remembered Tamsin looking out into the hall that first night, as though she were waiting to hear someone knocking on the door at the end of the hall.