Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

I know my mouth was hanging open. I slowly shut it, but feared I looked no more intelligent.

“Someone’s really slapping us in the face, Arthur,” I said slowly. “Maybe especially challenging you. Mamie wasn’t even killed because she was Mamie .” That was especially horrible. “It was just because she was an insurance salesman’s wife.”

“But you’d figured it out last night. You know that.”

“But what if there are more? What if he copies the June Anne Devaney murder, and kills a three-year-old? What if he copies the Ripper murders? Or kills people like Ed Gein did, to eat?”

“Don’t go imagining nightmares,” Arthur said briskly. He was so matter of fact I knew he’d already thought of the possibility himself. “Now, I’ve got to write down everything you did yesterday, starting from when you left work.”

If he meant to jolt me out of the horrors, he succeeded. Even if only on paper, I was someone who had to account for her movements; not exactly a suspect, but a possibility. Then too, my arrival time at the meeting would help pinpoint the time of death. Though I’d gone over this all the night before, once more I carefully related my trivial doings.

“Do you have a good account of the Wallace killing I could borrow?” he asked, rising from the couch reluctantly. He looked even more worn, as if relaxing for a while hadn’t helped, just made him feel his exhaustion. “And I need a list of club members, too.”

“I can help you with the Wallace killing,” I said. “But you’ll have to get the list from Jane Engle. She’s the club secretary.” I had the book on hand I’d used to prepare my lecture. I checked to make sure my name was written inside, told Arthur I’d have him arrested if he didn’t return it, and walked with him to the front door.

To my surprise, he put his hands on my shoulders and gripped them with no mean pressure.

“Don’t look so dismal,” he said. The wide blue eyes caught mine. I felt a jolt tingle up my spine. “You caught something last night most people wouldn’t have. You were tough and smart and quick-thinking.” He caught a loose strand of my hair and rolled it between his fingers. “I’ll talk to you soon,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

As it turned out, we spoke somewhat sooner than that.

I’d noticed a moving van parked in front of Robin Crusoe’s apartment when I let Arthur out. Out of sheer curiosity, when the phone began to ring, I decided to take my calls on my bedside phone, which had a long cord, so I could stare out the front windows at the unloading. And the phone was ringing non-stop, as the news about Mamie Wright’s murder spread among friends and co-workers. Just when I was about to dial his number, my father called. He seemed about equally concerned with my emotional health and with whether or not I still felt I could keep Phillip.

“Are you okay?” Phillip himself said softly. He is a shrieker in person, but unaccountably soft-spoken over the telephone.

“Yes, brother, I’m okay,” I answered.

“Cause I really want to come see you. Can I?”

“Sure.”

“Are you going to make pecan pie?”

“I might, if I was asked nicely.”

“Please, please, please?”

“That’s pretty nice. Count on the pie.”

“Yahoo!”

“Do you feel I’m blackmailing you?” Father asked when Phillip relinquished the phone.

“Well, yes.”

“Okay, okay, I feel guilty. But Betty Jo really wants to go to this convention. Her best friend from college married a newspaperman, too, and they’re going to be there.”

“Tell her I’ll still keep him.” I loved Phillip, though at first I’d been terrified to even hold him, having no experience whatsoever with babies. To give Betty Jo credit, she’s always been all for Phillip’s getting to know his big sister.

After I’d hung up, the rest of the day gaped ahead of me like a black cave. Since it was my day off I tried to do day-off things; I paid bills, did my laundry.

My best friend, Amina Day, had just moved to Houston to take such a good job that I couldn’t grudge her the move; but I missed her, and I’d felt very much an unadventurous village bumpkin before I’d stepped into the VFW kitchen. Amina wasn’t going to believe I’d had a bona fide shocking experience right in Lawrenceton. I decided to call her that night, and the prospect cheered me.

Now that the first shock of last night had worn off, it all seemed curiously unreal, like a book. I’d read so many books, both fiction and nonfiction, in which a young woman walked into a room (across a field, down the stairs, in an alley) and found the body . I could distance myself from the reality of a dead Mamie by thinking of the situation, rather than the person.

I picked out all these distinctions while eating a nutritious lunch of Cheezits and tuna fish. All this thinking led me back to the depressing conclusion that so little had happened in my life for so long, that when something did I had to pick at it over and over. No moment was going to sneak by me unobserved and unanalyzed.

Clearly, some action was called for.

With the taste of lunch in my mouth it was easy to decide that that action should take the form of going to the grocery store. I made one of my methodical little lists and gathered up my coupons.

Of course the store was extra crowded on Saturday, and I saw several people who knew what had happened the night before. I found myself reluctant to talk about it to people who hadn’t been there. I hadn’t been asked to avoid mentioning the murder’s connection to an old murder case, but I didn’t see any sense in having to explain it to ten people in a row, either. Even the minimal responses I made slowed me down considerably, and forty minutes later I was only halfway through my list. As I stood at the meat counter debating between “lean” and “extra lean” hamburger, I heard a tapping noise. It grew more and more imperative, until I looked up. Benjamin Greer, the only member of Real Murders who hadn’t been at the meeting the night before, was tapping on the clear glass that separated the butchers from the refrigerated meat counter. Behind him, gleaming steel machines were doing their job, and another butcher in a bloodstained apron like Benjamin’s was packaging roasts.

Benjamin was stout with wispy blond hair that he swept up and over his premature bald spot. He’d tried to grow a mustache to augment his missing scalp hair, but it had given the impression that his upper lip was dirty, and I was glad to see he’d shaved the thing of. He wasn’t very tall, and he wasn’t very bright, and he tried to make up for these factors with a puppylike friendliness and willingness to do whatever one asked. On the down side, if his help was not needed, no matter how tactfully you expressed it, he turned sullen and self-pitying. Benjamin was a difficult person, one of those people who make you feel ashamed of yourself if you dislike him, while making it almost impossible to like him.

I disliked him, of course. He’d asked me out three times, and every time, feeling deeply ashamed of myself, I’d told him no. Even as desperate for a date as I was, I couldn’t stomach the thought of going out with Benjamin.

He’d tried a fundamentalist church, he’d tried coaching Little League, and now he was trying Real Murders.

I smiled at him falsely and damned the hamburger meat that had led me into his sight.

He hurried through the swinging door to the right of the meat. I steeled myself to be nice.

“The police came to my apartment last night,” he said breathlessly. “They wanted to know why I hadn’t come to the meeting.”

“What did you say?” I asked bluntly. The bloodstained apron was making me feel unwell. Suddenly hamburger seemed quite distasteful.