"Luke cried all night," she said sullenly when someone asked her for the third time where her brother was.

"Oh, Krista!" one of the other bridesmaids said disapprovingly. Varena's lifelong best friend, Tootsie Monahan, was blond and round-faced and low on brain cells. "How can you say that about a little kid like Luke? Toddlers are so cute."

I saw Krista's face flush. Tootsie was pushing the old guilt b.u.t.ton hard. I'd been leaning against the wall in the living room. I shoved off and maneuvered myself closer to the little girl.

"Varena cried all night when she was baby," I told Krista very quietly.

Krista looked up at me unbelievingly. Her round hazel eyes, definitely her best feature, fastened on me with every appearance of skepticism. "Did not," she said tentatively.

"Did too." I nodded firmly and drifted into the kitchen, where I managed to sneak Krista some sort of carbonated drink that she really enjoyed. She probably wasn't supposed to have it. Then I wandered around the house, from time to time retreating to my room and shutting the door for ten minutes. (That was the length of time, I'd found from trial and error, before someone missed me and came to see how I was, what I was doing.) Varena popped her head in my door about 12:45 to ask me if I'd go with her to the doctor's. "I need to go in to pick up my birth-control pill prescription, but I want Dr. LeMay to check my ears. The right one is feeling a little achy, and I'm scared it'll be a full-blown infection by the wedding day. Binnie said come on in, he'd see me before the afternoon patients stacked up."

One of the perks of being a nurse was the quick in-and-out you got at the local doctors' offices, Varena had told me years ago. As long as I could remember, Varena had suffered from allergies, which frequently caused ear infections. She had always developed them at the most inconvenient times. Like four days before her wedding.

I followed her out to her car with a sense of release. "I know you need to get out of the house," Varena said, giving me a little sideways glance. We pulled out of the driveway and began the short hop to Dr. LeMay's office.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Only to someone who knows you," Varena said ruefully. "Yes, Lily, it's like seeing a tiger in a cage at the zoo. Back and forth, back and forth, giving all the people who walk by that ferocious stare."

"Surely not that bad," I said anxiously. "I don't want to upset them."

"I know you don't. And I'm glad to see you caring."

"I never stopped."

"You could have fooled me."

"I just didn't have the extra ..." Staying sane had taken all the energy I had. Trying to rea.s.sure other people had been simply impossible.

"I think I understand, finally," Varena said. "I'm sorry I brought it up. Mom and Dad know, better than me, that you care about them."

I was being forgiven for something I hadn't done, or at least had done only in Varena's opinion. But she was making an effort. I would make an effort, too.

Dr. LeMay was still based in the same little building in which he'd practiced medicine his entire career, all forty years of it. He must be nearing retirement age, his nurse Binnie Armstrong, too. They'd been a team for twenty-five years, I figured.

Varena pulled into one of the angled parking spots, and we went down the narrow sidewalk to the front door. A matching door, the one that had been labeled "Blacks Only" at the beginning of Dr. LeMay's practice, had been replaced by a picture window. In the past five years, a set of bars had been installed across the vulnerable gla.s.s. Kind of wrapped up Bartley's history in a nutsh.e.l.l, I decided.

The door had been painted blue to match the eaves, but the paint had already chipped to show a long-familiar shade of green underneath. I twisted the k.n.o.b and pushed, stepping in ahead of Varena.

The little building was oddly silent. No phones ringing, no copier running, no radio playing, no piped-in music.

I turned to look at my sister. Something was wrong. But Varena's gaze slid away from mine. She wasn't going to admit it, yet.

"Binnie!" she called too cheerfully. "Lily and I are here! Come see her." She stared at the closed door on the other side of the waiting room, the door leading back to the examining rooms and offices. The gla.s.s that enclosed the receptionist's cubicle remained empty.

We heard a faint, terrible sound. It was the sound of someone dying. I had heard it before.

I took six steps across the waiting room and opened the second door. The familiar hall, with three rooms to the right and three rooms to the left, was now floored with imitation wood-pattern linoleum instead of the speckled beige pattern I remembered, I thought incongruously.

Then I noticed the advancing rivulet of blood, the only movement in the hall. I traced it, not really wanting to find the source, but in that small s.p.a.ce it was all too obvious. A woman in a once-white uniform lay in the doorway of the middle room on the right.

"Binnie," screamed Varena, her hands flying up to her face. But then my sister remembered that she was a nurse, and she was instantly on her knees by the b.l.o.o.d.y woman. It was hard to discern the contours of Binnie Armstrong's face and head, she was so bludgeoned. It was from her throat the noise had come.

While Varena knelt by her, trying to take her pulse, Binnie Armstrong died. I watched her whole body relax in final abandonment.

I glanced in the door to the right, the one to the receptionist's little office. Clean and empty. I looked in the room to the left, an examining room. Clean and empty. I moved carefully down the hall, while my sister did CPR on the dead nurse, and I cautiously craned around the door of the next room on the left, another examining room. Empty. The doorway Binnie lay in led to the tiny lab and storage room. I stepped carefully past my sister and found Dr. LeMay in the last room to the right, his office.

"Varena," I said sharply.

Varena looked up, dabbled with blood from the corpse.

"Binnie's dead, Varena." I nodded in the direction of the office. "Come check Dr. LeMay."

Varena leaped to her feet and took a couple of steps to stare in the door. Then she was moving to the other side of the desk to take his pulse but shaking her head as she went.

"He was killed at his desk," she said, as though that made it worse.

Dr. LeMay's white hair was clotted with blood. It was pooled on the desk where his head lay. His gla.s.ses were askew, ugly black-framed trifocals, and I wanted so badly to set them square on his face-as if, when I did, he would see again. I had known Dr. LeMay my whole life. He had delivered me.

Varena touched his hand, which was resting on the desk. I noticed in a stunned, slow way that it was absolutely clean. He had not had a chance to fight back. The first blow had been a devastating one. The room was full of paper, files and claim forms and team physicals . . . most of it now spotted with blood.

"He's gone," Varena whispered, not that there had been any doubt.

"We need to get out of here," I said, my voice loud and sharp in the little room with its awful sights and smells.

And we stared at each other, our eyes widening with a sudden shared terror.

I jerked my head toward the front door, and Varena scooted past me. She ran out while I waited to see if anything moved.

I was the only live person in the office.

I followed Varena out.

She was already across the street at the State Farm Insurance office, pulling open the gla.s.s door and lifting the receiver off the phone on the receptionist's desk. That stout and permed lady, wearing a bright red blouse and a Christmas corsage, was looking up at Varena as if she were speaking Navaho into the telephone. Within two minutes a police car pulled up in front of Dr. LeMay's office, and a tall, thin black man got out.

"You the one called in?" he asked.

"My sister, in the office over there." I nodded toward the plate-gla.s.s window, through which Varena could be seen sitting in the client's chair, sobbing. The woman with the corsage was bending over her, offering Varena some tissues.

"I'm Detective Brainerd," the man said rea.s.suringly, as though I'd indicated I'd thought he might be an imposter. "Did you go in the building here?" Yes.

"Did you see Dr. LeMay and his nurse?"

"Yes."

"And they're dead."

"Yes."

"Is there anyone else in the building?"

"No."

"So, is there a gas leak, or was there a fire smoldering, maybe smoke inhalation . . . ?"

"They were both beaten." My gaze skimmed the top of the old, old gum trees lining the street. "To death."

"Okay, now. I'll tell you what we're going to do here."

He was extremely nervous, and I didn't blame him one bit.

"You're gonna stay right here, ma'am, while I go in there and take a look. Don't go anywhere, now."

"No."

I waited by the police car, the cold gray day pinching my face and hands.

This is a world of carnage and cruelty: I had momentarily put that aside in the false security of my hometown, in the optimistic atmosphere of my sister's marriage.

I began to detach from the scene, to float away, escaping this town, this building, these dead. It had been a long time since I'd retreated like this, gone to the remote place where I was not responsible for feeling.

A young woman was standing in front of me in a paramedic's uniform.

"Ma'am? Ma'am? Are you all right?" Her dark, anxious face peered into mine, her black hair stiff, smooth, and shoulder length under a cap with a caduceus patch on it.

"Yes."

"Officer Brainerd said you had seen the bodies."

I nodded.

"Are you ... maybe you better come sit down over here, ma'am."

My eyes followed her pointing finger to the rear of the ambulance.

"No, thanks," I said politely. "My sister is over there in the State Farm office, though. She might need help."

"I think you may need a little help yourself, ma'am," the woman said earnestly, loudly, as though I was r.e.t.a.r.ded, as though I couldn't tell the difference between clinical shock and just being numb.

"No." I said it as finally and definitely as I knew how. I waited. I heard her muttering to someone else, but she did leave me alone after that. Varena came to stand beside me. Her eyes were red, and her makeup was streaked.

"Let's go home," she said.

"The policeman told me to wait."

"Oh."

Just then the same policeman, Brainerd, came striding out of the doctor's office. He'd gotten over his fit of nerves, and he'd seen the worst. He was focused, ready to go to work. He asked us a lot of questions, keeping us out in the cold for half an hour when we'd told him the sum of our knowledge in one minute.

Finally, we buckled up in Varena's car. As she started back to our parents' house, I switched Varena's heater to full blast. I glanced over at my sister. Her face was blanched by the cold, her eyes red from crying with her contacts in. She'd pulled her hair back this morning in a ponytail, with a bright red scarf tied over the elastic band. The scarf still looked crisp and cheerful, though Varena had wilted. Varena's eyes met mine while we were waiting our turn at a four-way stop. She said, "The drug cabinet was closed and full."

"I saw." Dr. LeMay had always kept the samples, and his supplies, in the same cabinet in the lab, a gla.s.s-front old-fashioned one. Since I'd been his patient as a child, that cabinet had stood in the same place with the same sort of contents. It would have surprised me profoundly if Dr. LeMay had ever kept anything very street-desirable ... he'd have antibiotics, antihistamines, skin ointments, that kind of thing, I thought vaguely. Maybe painkillers.

Like Varena, I'd seen past Binnie's body that the cabinet door was shut and everything in the room was orderly. It didn't seem likely that the same person who would commit such messy murders would leave the drug cabinet so neat if he'd searched it.

"I don't know what to make of that," I told Varena. She shook her head. She didn't, either. I stared out of the window at the familiar pa.s.sing scenery, wishing I was anywhere but in Bartley.

"Lily, are you all right?" Varena asked, her voice curiously hesitant.

"Sure, are you?" I sounded more abrupt than I'd intended.

"I have to be, don't I? The wedding rehearsal is tonight, and I don't see how we can call it off. Plus, I've seen worse, frankly. It's just it being Dr. LeMay and Binnie that gave me such a wallop."

My sister sounded simply matter-of-fact. It hit me forcefully that Varena, as a nurse, had seen more blood and pain and awfulness than I would see in a lifetime. She was practical. After overcoming the initial shock, she was tough. She pulled into our parents' driveway and switched off the ignition.

"You're right. You can't call it off. People die all the time, Varena, and you can't derail your wedding because of it."

We were just the Practical Sisters.

"Right," she said, looking at me oddly. "We have to go in and tell Mom and Dad."

I stared at the house in front of us as if I had never seen it.

"Yes. Let's go."

But it was Varena who got out of the car first. And it was Varena who told my parents the bad news, in a grave, firm voice that somehow implied that any emotional display would be in bad taste.

Chapter Three.

The rehearsal was scheduled for six o'clock, and we arrived at the Presbyterian church on the dot. Tootsie Monahan was already there, her hair in long curly strands like a show poodle's, talking and laughing with Dill and his best man. It was apparent that no one was going to talk about the death of the doctor and his nurse, unless they went into a corner and whispered. Everyone was struggling to keep this a joyous occasion, or at the very least to hold the emotional level above grim.

I was introduced to Berry Duff, Dill's former college roommate and present best man, with some significance. After all, we were both single and in the same age group. The barely unspoken hope was that something might happen.

Berry Duff was very tall, with thinning dark hair, wide dark eyes, and an enviable olive complexion. He was a farmer in Mississippi, had been divorced for about three years, and, I was given to understand, the embodiment of all things desirable: well-to-do, solid, religious, divorced without child custody. Dill managed to cram a surprising amount of that information into his introduction, and after a few minutes' conversation with Berry, I learned the rest.

Berry seemed like a nice guy, and it was pleasant to stand with him while we waited for the players to a.s.semble. I was not much of a person for small talk, and Berry didn't seem to mind, which was refreshing. He took his time poking around conversationally for some common ground, found it in dislike of movie theaters and love of weight lifting, which he'd enjoyed in college.

I was wearing the white dress with the black jacket. At the last minute my mother had insisted I needed some color besides my lipstick, a point I was willing to concede. She'd put a filmy scarf in autumn reds and golds around my neck and anch.o.r.ed it with the gold pin I'd brought.

"You look very nice," Dill said, on one of his pa.s.s-bys. He and Varena seemed to be awfully nervous and were inventing errands to send them pacing around the small church. We were all hovering near the front, since the back was in darkness beyond the last pew. The door close to the pulpit, opening into a hall leading past the minister's study, gave a pneumatic hiss as people came and went. The heavier door beyond the big open area at the back of the church thudded from time to time as the members of the wedding party a.s.sembled.

Finally, everyone was there. Varena; Tootsie; me; the other bridesmaid, Janna Russell; my mother and father; Jess and Lou O'Shea, the one in his capacity as minister and the other in her capacity as church organist; Dill; Berry Duff; Dill's unmarried younger brother Jay; a cousin of Dill's, Matthew Kingery; the florist who'd been hired to supply the wedding flowers, who would double as wedding director; and miracle of miracles, Dill's mother, Lula. Watching the relief spread over Varena's face as the old woman stomped in on Jay's arm made me want to take Lula Kingery aside and have a few sharp words with her.