Charlaine Harris [Lily Bard Shakespeare's Landlord (v5.0) (

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.He turned it over and clutched my fingers.“Umhum,” rumbled a deep voice at the other end of the line.“Claude,” I said.“Lily,” he said, warm and relaxed.“I’m at Body Time.” I gave him a minute to switch gears.“Okay,” Claude said cautiously.I could hear a creaking of bedsprings as the big policeman sat up in bed.Maybe if I took this step by step it wouldn’t be so bad? I glanced over at the still figure on the bench.No way to ease up to this.I’d just plunge right in.“Del Packard is here, and he got squashed,” I said.I DID MAKE it to my first job on time, but I was still in my workout sweats, and still barefaced.So I was uncomfortable, and disinclined to do more than nod by way of greeting Helen and Mel Drinkwater.They weren’t chatty people either, and Helen didn’t like to see me work; she just liked seeing the results.She’d been giving me hard looks, since September when I’d been sucked into a notorious brawl in the Burger Tycoon parking lot—but she hadn’t said anything, and she hadn’t fired me.I’d decided that she’d passed the point of most concern.Her pleasure in a clean house had outweighed her misgivings about my character.Today the Drinkwaters went out their kitchen door at a pretty sharp clip, each sliding into a car to begin his/her own workday, and I was able to start my usual routine.Helen Drinkwater doesn’t want to pay me to do a total cleaning job on the whole house, which is a turn-of-the-century two-story.She pays me for two and a half hours, long enough to change the sheets, do the bathrooms and kitchen, dust, gather up the trash, and vacuum.I do a quick pickup first because it makes everything easier.The Drinkwaters are not messy, but their grandchildren live just down the street, and they are.I patrolled the house for scattered toys and put them all in the basket Helen keeps by the fireplace.Then I pulled on rubber gloves and trotted up to the main bathroom, to start scrubbing and dusting my way through the house.No pets, and the Drinkwaters washed and hung up their clothes and did their own dishes.By the time I rewound the cord on the vacuum cleaner, the house was looking very good.I pocketed my check on the way out.Helen always leaves it on the kitchen counter with the salt shaker on top of it, as if some internal wind would blow it away otherwise.This time she’d anchored down a note, too.“We need to pick a Wednesday for you to do the downstairs windows,” said Helen’s spiky handwriting.Wednesday is the morning I reserve for unusual jobs, like helping with someone’s spring cleaning, or doing windows, or occasionally mowing a yard.I looked at the calendar by the phone, picked two Wednesdays that would do, and wrote both dates on the bottom of the note with a question mark.I deposited the check in the bank on my way home for lunch.Claude was walking up my driveway when I arrived.Chief of Police Claude Friedrich lives next door to me, in the Shakespeare Garden Apartments.My small house is a little downhill from the apartments, and separated from the tenants’ parking lot by a high fence.As I unlocked my front door, I felt Claude’s big hand rubbing my shoulder.He likes to touch me, but I have put off any more intimate relationship with the chief; so his touches have to have a locker-room context.“How was it after I left?” I asked, walking through the living room to the kitchen.Claude was right behind me, and when I turned to look up at him he wrapped his arms around me.I felt the tickle of his mustache against my face as his lips drifted across my cheek to fasten on a more promising target.Claude was my good friend but he wanted to be my lover, too.“Claude, let me go.”“Lily, when are you going to let me spend the night?” he asked quietly, no begging or whining in his voice because Claude is not a begging or whining man.I turned sharply so my face was to the refrigerator.I could feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders tighten.I made myself hold still.Claude’s hands dropped to his sides.I got out some leftover dishes and opened the microwave, moving slowly, trying not to show my agitation with jerky gestures.When the microwave was humming, I turned to face Claude, looking up at his face.Claude is in his midforties, ten years or more older than I, and he has graying brown hair and a permanent tan.After years of working in dark corners of Little Rock and dark places in people’s hearts, Claude has a few wrinkles, deep and decisive wrinkles, and a massive calm that must be his way of keeping sane.“Do you want me?” he asked me now.I hated being backed into a corner [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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