Shakespeare's Christmas by Charlaine Harris

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 LeMay’s practice, had been replaced by a picture window.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 glass. Kind of wrapped up Bartley’s history in a nutshell, 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 knob 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 glass 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 space 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 bloody 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 glasses 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