Murder on a Girls' Night Out (5 page)

“Long enough to be stiff as a board.” I stretched. “You want to go by the market and get some boiled shrimp? Call Bill and see if he wants to come for supper? That way we can tell the whole story at one time.”

“Sounds good. I need to stop by the house and check on Bubba, though.” Bubba is the laziest cat who ever lived. I could guarantee Mary Alice that he was right where she had left him that morning. But she persists in endowing him with all sorts of emotions, such as love and loneliness. Her hands are constantly Band-Aided from Bubba’s “love bites.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

As we left, she blew the horn and waved at Richardena and the little girls, who were both bouncing up and
down on toy horses with springs under them. I felt bleary-eyed, still not quite awake. I hate to take naps in the daytime. They disorient so. I rubbed my eyes.

“You really do snore,” Mary Alice said.

We picked up the makings for slaw and the shrimp. Mary Alice decided we should make a recipe she loves called Shrimp Destin, which is nothing but shrimp heated in a butter-and-garlic sauce and served on toast. Talk about cholesterol and indigestion! I told her Fred and I would both be up at two o’clock looking for the Maalox. She said wear a sexy nightgown.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she said when we got to her house. “Come on in. It’s too hot outside.”

Mary Alice’s house looks out over the whole city. I love the view. You can see all the interstates and planes landing and taking off at the airport. It is especially beautiful at night. She has a whole wall of windows where I love to stand.

The sun was getting low in the sky and rush-hour traffic was beginning.

“I’m going to give this sweet Bubba a couple of shrimp,” Sister said. “He’s starving, yes, he is.” She plucked the fat, starving animal from the counter where he had been all day and headed for the kitchen, flipping on her phone messages as she went by. “Maybe Debbie’s home.”

There were messages from the window washer and someone named Jane about lunch, and a couple of hangups. And then, loud, clear and unmistakable, my voice came from the machine. “I’m going to kill you in the most unpleasant way I can think of.”

“My God!” Sister said, frozen in the kitchen door. Her face turned white, as if she would faint. I knew how she felt because I felt the same way.

W
e both were so stunned we sat down in the nearest chairs. I put my head between my knees, which helped the dizziness but not the shaking.

“You did that, didn’t you?” Sister’s voice was still not normal.

“Did what?”

“Rigged it some way to get even with me for taping your snoring.”

I raised my head. The room was standing still. “What?”

“That’s it. You did it, didn’t you?”

“How could I have done that? We turned off the tape recorder and left. We got right up and left. Remember?”

Mary Alice tried to smile. “Okay, you’ve won. You’ve got me scared. That was what you wanted to do, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t
do
anything.”

Sister turned the answering machine on. There was my voice again, saying I was going to kill her in the most unpleasant way I could think of.

“Turn it off!”

“You did it, didn’t you?”

A thought even scarier than my voice threatening Sister lit up my brain. I jumped up. “Somebody’s in Debbie’s house, Sister! Call the police. Right now! Nine-one-one! Get them! Quick!”

“Oh, my God!” Sister suddenly believed me. She grabbed the phone and dialed with a shaking hand while I held my breath.

“Richardena? Is Debbie there?” She nodded. “Where are the babies? Right there with you in the kitchen? Okay. Listen, I’ll explain this later, but right now I want you to take Kay and May and go next door to Mrs. Haddin’s, and if she’s not there, take them down to the drugstore. Somewhere where there are people. Please, Richardena, and don’t go in the sunroom. Just leave. I’ll be there in a little while and the police may be there, too.” Mary Alice paused. “No, Richardena, you will not need a knife or a gun. Just take the children and leave.” She hung up. “She wanted to know if she would need her knife or gun. The woman has a knife and a gun around my grandbabies!”

“Call nine-one-one,” I said.

“I’m going to see if I can get Debbie on her car phone. I don’t want her going into that house.” She dialed again while I walked over to the window. The sun was touching the horizon now and some of the cars had their headlights on. Everything looked so normal, I began to think of some normal way my threat could have gotten on Sister’s answering machine. Maybe Debbie had one of those phones where you just punched one
button and one was for her mother’s phone and one of the twins had been playing with it. But that reasoning didn’t work out. The tape recorder would have had to be turned on, rewound. No toddler could do that. I started shaking again. I looked out at the cars going home. Fred was in one of them. Suddenly I wanted his arms around me so I could feel safe.

Sister was talking to Debbie. I could tell she was having a hard time explaining what had happened.

“Don’t go in the house,” she said. “Wait for us. The twins are either next door or down at the drugstore.

“She’s not taking this very seriously,” Sister told me, hanging up the receiver. “I’m going to get the tape out of the answering machine to take over there for the police to hear.”

A noise from the kitchen made us both jump. Bubba appeared in the doorway with a shrimp in his mouth. A glance at the kitchen floor showed the whole package, ripped apart. Bubba hadn’t been saving his strength all day for nothing. I grabbed him and put him out the back door. “Is Debbie calling the police?” I reached into the cabinet for a bowl and got down on my hands and knees to salvage what Bubba had left of our supper.

“She said she would.” Mary Alice stood in the doorway biting her fingernails while I scooped the shrimp into the bowl.

“Good.” I took the bowl to the sink, rinsed the shrimp—from which, hopefully, Shrimp Destin would kill Bubba’s germs—put them in the refrigerator and got the mop from the broom closet.

“Come
on
, Mouse! We’ve got to go. You can do that floor when we get back.”

“What?” I said. “What?”

She looked at me, puzzled. “I said we need to go.”

“Mary Alice.” I walked toward her with the mop.

“What?” she said, backing up slightly.

“Whose floor is this?”

“Mine.”

I shoved the mop at her. “Get that shrimp juice up that your cat got on your kitchen floor.”

She held the mop as if it were some kind of medieval torture tool. “And use Pine-Sol,” I said and stalked out. I needed to talk to Fred. Maybe he was home by now. Sweet Fred. Sweet, soothing Fred.

“Where the hell are you!” he yelled into the phone when I said hi. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”

Sweet, soothing Fred. “I’m at Sister’s.”

“I should have known. I called over there, though, and nobody answered. I saw the story about what happened at that hot spot she bought on the news. I want you to get home, Patricia Anne.”

Hot spot? He had the Skoot ’n’ Boot mixed up with our dog’s skin rash. “She didn’t buy the Skoot ’n’ Boot on the news, Fred.” Sometimes you know immediately that you have gone too far. There was a long silence. “Look,” I said, “so much has happened today, you won’t believe it.”

“I’ll believe it if Mary Alice was involved.” His voice was cold. “Get home, Patricia Anne.”

“I don’t have a way.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” The next thing I heard was a dial tone. I put the receiver back in its cradle. The phone immediately rang, startling me. “Good-bye,” Fred said when I answered it. I was smiling and once again thanking the marriage gods when Mary Alice came in reeking of Pine-sol and Victoria’s Secret peach-hyacinth hand lotion.

“Was that Debbie?”

“Fred.”

“Well, let’s go.” Mary Alice looked around for her
purse. “The police should be there by now.”

“I’m going to wait for Fred. He’s coming to get me. You don’t need me over there, anyway.”

“Okay. I’ll call you later, Mouse, and let you know what the police say.” Mary Alice slung her bag over her shoulder. “Let’s see, I’ve got the tape. Do I need anything else?” She looked around. “Nope. Just set the alarm when you leave, okay?”

Trust my sister. I had been expecting all kinds of protests about not going with her, and wasn’t even getting a small argument.

Not only that, she came over and hugged me.

“Thank you, Mouse, for all the help you’ve given me today.”

She sailed out, leaving me with my mouth open just like she had been doing for sixty years, leaving me to face a disgruntled husband, who showed up a few minutes later and deposited an equally disgruntled Bubba in the foyer.

“Some fool,” Fred said, “let the cat out.”

One of the first lessons I learned after marriage was “Don’t lie, but don’t tell everything.” It allows a certain amount of dignity to remain in the relationship. It is also a kindness. For instance, Fred had been perfectly happy for me to spend a quiet week in North Carolina with Mary Alice. He would have worried about the white-water rafting trip we took down the Nantahala. I saved him the worry. If he ever asks me if I went white-water rafting, I will, of course, say yes. I certainly don’t believe in lying.

As soon as he came in with the cat, though, I forgot my “don’t tell everything” rule and went from Ed in the well to the threatening phone message in about two minutes flat.

He listened, nodding at critical points when I stopped
to breathe. When I finished, I looked at him expectantly.

“What is that smell in here?” he asked.

“Shrimp, Pine-Sol, and peach-hyacinth lotion.”

“Oh.”

“It was our supper. The shrimp.”

“We’ll stop at Morrison’s takeout.”

I got my purse and set the alarm. When we went out, I noticed there was still a thin edge of light at the western horizon. This day had been a week long.

“Now,” Fred said after we got in the car, “do you want to start from the beginning?”

I did. I started with Ed Meadows’s body and how it had been found in the wishing well and how we had seen it lifted into the ambulance.

Fred said that was what he had seen on TV, the body being put into the ambulance.

I shuddered. “I wish that was the view I had.”

Fred patted my hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

We were quiet for a moment, and then Fred asked, “What did the sheriff say?”

I thought I had told him all this already, but figured I had better not ruffle the waters. “He thinks it was a gangland thing, I think. Connected to drugs, maybe. I don’t know. There was so much overkill.”

“Overkill?”

“They beat him, cut his throat, drowned him, tied him up. Killed him about three times.”

“Good God!”

“And then they arrested Henry Lamont. You remember me talking about my student Henry Lamont, Fred?”

Fred slowed to let a car enter our lane. “Faulkner, Welty and O’Connor rolled into one? I remember him. How did he get into this?”

“It’s a mistake. He’s the cook out at the Skoot ’n’
Boot and the sheriff found out he had been in trouble with drugs and took him in in chains. It was awful the way they treated him.”

“You saw chains?”

“No, I didn’t, but Sister did. And Bonnie Blue.”

“Figures. Who’s Bonnie Blue?”

“She’s a very nice lady who works at the Skoot ’n’ Boot. She reminds me of Mary Alice, except she’s African-American.”

“Black?”

“I don’t think that’s politically correct anymore, Fred.”

There was a silence while we stopped at a light. Fred drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “What?” I said.

“What do you mean, what?”

“What are you thinking about?”

“An African-American Mary Alice. Two Mary Alices.”

“When you meet her, you’ll see what I mean. They even have purses alike.”

Fred turned into the restaurant parking lot. “I don’t want you to get involved in this, Patricia Anne. I really don’t. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m sure the police are going to want to know why I threatened Sister, though.”

“You threatened Mary Alice?”

“When she taped me snoring. Or at least she said I was snoring.”

“Am I missing something here?”

I explained again about the message on the answering machine, though I had already told him once. While I was retelling it, I was reminded of the way Sister had gone rushing back to Debbie’s without insisting that I go with her. She was over there now, talking to the
police and in all sorts of danger, and here I was at Morrison’s takeout parking lot. She could at least have argued with me a little.

“Probably some simple explanation,” Fred said. He patted my leg. “What do you want for supper?”

This was what I needed to hear, wasn’t it? Then why didn’t it make me feel better? Because Fred was being patronizing? On the other hand, he wasn’t the one who had been there, who had gone through the roller coaster of emotions that I had gone through today.

“Vegetables,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what kind. I’ll wait in the car.”

As soon as Fred left the car, I reached under the seat, got the phone and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Sister had had plenty of time to get to Debbie’s.

After the second ring, someone picked up and I could hear heavy breathing. Then there was a low moan, a gasped “Oh, oh!”

My heart nearly stopped. “Debbie! Is that you? Debbie?”

“Oh, hi, Aunt Pat. That was Fay saying hello. She’s grabbing the phone away from me again. Say hello to her.”

“Oh?” I could hear Debbie coaching her. “It’s Aunt Pat, darling. Say hello to Aunt Pat.”

“Oh?”

“Hello, sweetheart. Hello, my baby girl.” My heart was assuming its normal rhythm.

“Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.”

I could just see that precious child with the phone. Sometimes I feel the lack of grandbabies living close by like a great void. Alan’s two are teenagers and live in Atlanta, and Freddie says he doesn’t want children. Besides, he’s in Atlanta, too. My only hope is knowing Haley wants children so much. Sometimes I wish she
would visit the University of Alabama at Birmingham sperm bank like Debbie did. But Haley wants a husband and a father for her children. She had known that kind of love once and knows it is possible.

“Aunt Pat?” Debbie’s voice broke into my thoughts.

“What’s going on over there, darling?”

“You mean about the message on the phone? Nothing. You know how Mama tends to exaggerate things. Richardena says she turned the tape recorder off when she went in and saw it was on, and the twins were with her, so anything could have happened.”

“I thought we turned it off,” I said. I didn’t tell her I was the one who had fallen apart first when we heard the message.

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course not.”

“You honestly think it was done accidentally?”

“Absolutely.”

She sounded so positive and so unconcerned, I felt my fright begin to subside. Maybe I
had
overreacted. Maybe one of the babies
could
have hit the right sequence of buttons. It certainly wasn’t impossible. I got to the second reason for my call.