Read (LB1) Shakespeare's Champion for Free Online Page B

with a silk teddy and a Sunday dress.
    I valued control over my life more than anything. With Marshall, and now with Claude, I was not willing to relinquish that control, to bind my life to either of theirs. Neither of them was necessary enough to me for me to take that frightening leap. This was a bitter acknowledgment.
    Angry at myself, at Claude, I pulled on dark clothes and went out to walk. I wouldn’t sleep much tonight. The light in Claude’s window was on, a glance up at his apartment told me. If I’d found it in myself, I would be up there sharing that light with him, and he would be happy…at least for a little while.
    I drifted through Shakespeare, merging with the night. In a while, I began to feel the chill and the wet. After shivering in my jacket for a few blocks, I was on my way home when I saw I had company.
    On the other side of the street, walking as silently and darkly as I, went a man I didn’t know, a man with long black hair. In the silence we turned our heads to look at each other. Neither of us smiled or spoke. I was not frightened or angry. In seconds we were past each other, continuing on our ways in the chilly sodden night. I’d seen him before, I reflected; where? It came to me that he was the man who’d been working out with Darcy Orchard the day Jim Box had been out with the flu.
    I went home to work out with my punching bag, which hangs from the ceiling in the middle of my empty extra bedroom. I kicked kogen geri, a snapping kick, until my instep burned. Then mae geri, the thrusting kick, until my legs ached. Then I just punched the bag, over and over, making it swing; no art, just power expended.
    I slumped down to the floor and dried my face with the pink towel I kept hanging from a hook by the door.
    Now, after I showered, I would probably sleep.
    As I pulled up my covers and turned on my right side, I wondered where the man was, what he was doing, why he had been walking the night.

    I FELT TOO draggy to go to Body Time the next morning, even though I was due to do chest and biceps, my favorites. I forced myself to do fifty pushups and leg lifts as compensation. While I was on the floor, I had to notice that my baseboards needed dusting, and after I patted my face with the pink towel, I used it to do the job. I pitched the towel in the wash basket and went through my usual morning preparation.
    My first job on Fridays was Deedra Dean’s apartment in the building right next door, which coincidentally was upstairs by Chief of Police Claude Friedrich’s. At the request of a local lawyer who represented the estate of Pardon Albee, I had been cleaning the public parts of the apartment building until Pardon’s heir made some other arrangement. So I noticed all the mud the tenants had tracked in after the recent rain, and decided I’d have to work in an extra vacuuming before its regular late-Saturday cleaning. Unclipping my work keys from my belt, I went up the stairs quickly.
    But Deedra’s dead bolt was on. She was still home. She’d be late for work again. I pocketed my key and knocked. There was a kind of scuffling noise on the other side of the door, then a sharp exchange between Deedra and someone else, an exchange I couldn’t decipher.
    I went on alert. Not because Deedra had company; that was no surprise. Deedra believes in the joy of indiscriminate giving. But scuffling, harsh words, these weren’t things she was used to. As Deedra yanked open the door and stepped back, I saw that her guest was her stepfather, Jerrell Knopp. Jerrell had married “up” when he wed the widowed, well-to-do Lacey Dean. Jerrell was attractive—lean, gray-haired, with dazzling blue eyes—and he treated his wife with courtesy and tenderness, if the little interaction I’d observed was the norm. But Jerrell had a mean side, and Deedra was bearing the brunt of it now. She had a bright red mark on her arm as if Jerrell had been holding her with a squeezing grip. He wasn’t too pleased she’d