Shakespeare's Christmas by Charlaine Harris

I’d given them.
    Fleetingly, I thought about Teresa and Simon Macklesby. How many good nights’ rest had they managed in the eight years since their daughter had vanished?
    The murders of the doctor and his nurse, the strain of the wedding rehearsal, and the shock of all Jack had told me should have kept me awake. But being with Jack had drained the tension from me. Even if we hadn’t had sex, I thought with some surprise, I would have felt better. I crawled in my bed, turned on my side, slid my hand under the pillow, and was immediately asleep.
     
    THE NEXT DAY I had showered and dressed before I came out to have some coffee and breakfast. I’d done some situps and leg lifts in my room so I wouldn’t feel like a slug the rest of the day. My parents were both at the table, sections of newspaper propped up, when I got a mug from the cabinet.
    “Good morning,” my mother said with a smile.
    My father grunted and nodded.
    “How was your date last night?” Mother ventured when I was sitting with them.
    “Fine,” I said. My toast popped up, and I put it on a plate.
    Dad peered over his glasses at me. “Got home late,” he observed.
    “Yes.”
    “How long you been dating this man? Your mother says you told her he was a private detective? Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
    I answered the safest question. “I’ve been dating him for a few weeks.”
    “You think he might be serious?”
    “Sometimes.”
    My father regarded me with some exasperation. “Now, what does that mean?”
    “I think it means she doesn’t want to answer any more questions, Gerald,” Mother said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, hiding a little smile.
    “A father needs to know about men who are seeing his girl,” my father said.
    “This girl is almost thirty-two,” I reminded him, trying to keep my voice gentle.
    He shook his head. “I don’t believe it. Why, that would make me old , gosh dog it!”
    We all laughed as the little touchy moment passed.
    Dad got up to shave, following his nearly invariable morning routine. He stuck his head back in the door just as I bit into my toast. “Can you make any kind of living as a detective?” he asked, then hurried away before I could either laugh or throw my toast at him.
    “The paper says,” my mother began when I’d finished my coffee, “that Dave LeMay and Binnie Armstrong were killed right before you and Varena found them.”
    “I thought so,” I said after a pause.
    “You touched them?”
    “Varena did. She’s the nurse,” I said, reminding my mother that I was not the only one present when awful things happened.
    “That’s true,” my mother said slowly, as one who has received a revelation of which she’s half proud, half dismayed. “She has to deal with things like that all the time.”
    “That bad or worse.” Once upon a time, Varena had given me a graphic description of a motorcycle rider who’d stretched out his arm at the wrong moment and come into the hospital without it. A passerby had had the presence of mind to wrap it in the blanket his dog sat on when it rode in the car and bring it into the hospital. I had seen bad things . . . maybe just as bad . . . but I didn’t think I could have dealt calmly with that. Varena had been excited—not by the crisis but by her team’s effective response.
    Evidently she didn’t talk about some aspects of being a nurse, at least to our mother.
    “I never quite pictured her job that way.” Mother looked thoughtful, as if she were seeing her younger daughter in a different light.
    I read the comics for a minute or two, Ann Landers, the horoscopes, the scrambled words, the “find the errors” drawing. I never had time to do this at home. Thank God.
    “What’s on the agenda today?” I asked, without feeling one bit excited. The pleasure of Jack’s presence in town had faded, to be replaced by the gnawing anxiety of his suspicions.
    “Oh, there’s the shower at Grace’s in the