Murder on a Girls' Night Out

by Anne George

  “Nice,” I said, feeling a slight slip in my personal reality cog. An hour before, I had been baking oatmeal cookies in a suburb of Birmingham and worrying about what to give my husband for supper, and now I was sitting at a country-western bar watching a man with shifty eyes make his tattoo dance. I wondered if Sister had noticed those eyes. They were way too close together. I hoped she had studied the papers good before she signed them and that Debbie had done the legal work. Debbie Nachman is Sister’s second daughter, a lawyer and the single parent of the most precious twin girls God ever put on earth.

  “Here you go,” Sister said, handing me a cold, wet can.

  “Are there any napkins?”

  “I don’t see any.”

  Ed pointed again and she came up with a handful. “Patricia Anne doesn’t drink,” she explained to him. “She won’t even eat stuff with alcohol in it. We had an uncle used to send Patricia Anne and I chocolates from England with rum centers. Lord, they were good! And I got to eat every one of them.”

  “Me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He sent Pat and me candies.”

  “Picky, picky.” She came back around the counter. “She taught school for thirty years,” she told Ed, shaking her head in a pitying gesture.

  “I’m allergic to alcohol,” I explained to Ed, though I don’t know why I felt the need to justify myself, but Mary Alice does that to me. “My throat closes up, my eyes swell up, my nose turns bright red—”

  “She also upchucks,” Mary Alice said. “Mouse, I’m sure he gets the picture.” Ed had, indeed, backed away a little. “Come on, let me show you some more of the place.”

  Tables and chairs were packed in so tightly it looked like an army could be crammed into the place. Mary Alice had to twist and turn to get through without rearranging the furniture.

  “Here’s the dance floor,” she said. “Wait a minute and I’ll turn on the lights so you can see.” She wandered off into the gloom. “Ed,” she called after a moment, “where is the switch for the dance-floor lights?”

  “When did you say he was leaving?” I asked.

  “By the window. Left side,” Ed said.

  “Okay,” Mary Alice called back, ignoring my remark.

  In a moment lights recessed around the dance floor were glowing on shiny hardwood. A series of spotlights hanging from the ceiling alternately flashed red, green, and yellow against the small stage and the black curtain that declared SWAMP CREATURES with what looked like real tendrils of Spanish moss hanging from the letters. The same black curtain continued around and covered the window, on the side wall, where Sister stood flicking light switches.

  Green, red, yellow. The spot was affecting me like alcohol.

  “Ed!”

  He came over and fiddled with some switches. All three lights stayed on at the same time. “I’ll give you a walk-through before I leave,” he promised Mary Alice.

  “Thanks. Can you turn on some music?” Sister looked at me. “Listen to this,” she said.

  “Rockytop” came blaring out with enough decibels to deafen a robot.

  “Isn’t this great?” Mary Alice hollered over the music. “Come on, let’s dance.”

  I put my Coke down and we moved onto the dance floor in a jitterbug she had taught me when I was eight and which we had eventually turned into a pretty complicated routine. Surprisingly, it fit the music beautifully. It had been so long since we had danced, I’d forgotten the sheer fun of it. The Tate sisters dancing again.

  “Don’t sling me up too high,” I screamed.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Mary Alice led us into the quick walk that would end with each of us whirling around and coming together again to quick-step the other way. “Look at the boot! It’s inlaid tempered glass! Cost a fortune!”

  I glanced down as we glided over it. A colored glass boot centered the dance floor with a glow of light. “I’ll look at it later,” I yelled.

  “Rockytop Tennneeessseeee-e-e-e.” The song came to an end and we staggered to chairs as Ed clapped.

  “Great, ladies.” He came over and handed me my Coke and Sister her beer. “Y’all are professionals. Maybe we could get you on Star Search or something.”

  “Or something.” Mary Alice rubbed the beer bottle against her forehead. “Do this, Mouse. It feels great.” She was right. In a few minutes we were breathing normally again.

  “God, that was fun. You okay?” she asked. I nodded. “Then come on, let me show you the kitchen. You’re going to love this.”

  “Maybe Ed better go with us.”

  “There are knives in there, little sister. Lots of knives.”

  I laughed and followed Mary Alice into a large white kitchen. “Oh, my,” I said. Any doubts I might have had about the Skoot ’n’ Boot being a first-class establishment did not carry over into the kitchen. “This is wonderful.”

  Mary Alice beamed. “I thought you’d like it.”

  I walked around admiring the chrome mixers, the pots and pans that gleamed from an overhead rack, the huge freezer. “Oh, my.” I ran my hand over the Corian counter, the butcher block; checked out the utensils that any gourmet cook would kill for. Not that I am a gourmet cook, but I appreciate a beautiful kitchen. “This is wonderful, Sister. What are your specialties?”

  “Buffalo wings, pizza, hamburgers. You know.” Her voice trailed off at the look of pain on my face. “French fries, crab claws. What’s the matter?”

  “It’s sinful.”

  “We have a chef’s salad that’s good.”

  “Bottled dressing?”

  “Fat-free. Henry runs a tight ship.”

  “Let me guess. The cook?”

  “The chef. And don’t go getting on your high horse, Patricia Anne. Your kids used to beg to come to my house so they could have pizza.”

  It was true, the ungrateful brats, when they could have been having vegetables at home.

  “But this kitchen! I can see all sorts of fancy things being cooked here.”

  “Who would eat them? Look, you can hold a piece of pizza and line dance at the same time. Simple.”

  “I guess so.”

  “The truth is that this was a caterer’s shop. All Ed had to do was knock out the wall and there was his kitchen. Voilà.”

  “I wonder how much business the caterer did out here in the country.”

  “Not enough, I guess. And next door was a gift-and-craft shop. I think I’ll open that up again. Ladies who come in for lunch could browse around.”

  I was too nice to point out that the gift shop had also been closed and that I could not see ladies swarming in at lunchtime for Henry’s pizza.

  “I can go to the merchandise market in Atlanta to stock it. Lord, I love that place. Remember the fun we had that time we went with Sally?”

  Sally Delmar is a friend of ours who owns a Christmas shop. Sister and I went with her one year on a buying trip. Mary Alice bought everything Sally didn’t, and I ended up back in the hotel so exhausted I thought I would die.

  “I remember it well.”

  “We’ll do it just like we did last time, only we’ll stay an extra day. I saw all sorts of stuff I wish I’d gotten.”

  “You called back from home and had it all delivered.”

  “That’s true.” Mary Alice swept her hand across the gleaming countertop. “Don’t you just love this, Patricia Anne?”

  I answered truthfully that I did. “We ought to have Thanksgiving dinner here.”

  “That would be great. We could cook five or six turkeys and have all the kids and their in-laws and any friends they wanted to bring. And pans and pans of dressing.” It didn’t take much to get her started. Mary Alice was rattling on about cranberry salad or cranberry sauce or orange-cranberry relish or tons of each when I left the kitchen. I will never learn to keep my mouth shut.

  The trickle of the wishing well and the Coke made one more trip to the rest room a necessity before we left. When I came out, Mary Alice was on the phone
and Ed was leaning on the counter watching CNN on the TV built into the wall like a football the neon boot was about to kick. I looked around. The place really did have potential. There was a feeling of…I tried to put my finger on it, and came up with “hominess.” You could relax here and have a good time. The lunch ladies I had my doubts about, but the beer-drinking, line-dancing crowd, yes. Sister just might have herself a winner here.

  I told her that on our way home. The sun had dipped just below the horizon but was still shining golden at the tops of the tallest trees on the mountains. We glided through a valley of purples and blues as lights were being turned on in houses like sudden stars. A beautiful house that looked like something from Gone With the Wind was silhouetted against the sky. White fences crisscrossed pastures. Such a sight can make you feel kindly toward the whole world. So I said I really liked the Skoot ’n’ Boot and thought it had a lot of potential.

  “Yes,” Mary Alice said. I guess she was feeling mellow, too, because she didn’t say another word until we were almost in Gardendale, where she said she was going to stop at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, since she was starving.

  “One of the great regrets of my life,” she said, wheeling into a parking place, “was that Will Alec didn’t live to eat any of the extra crispy. He would have loved it. Remember how he loved crunchy fried chicken skin?”

  Will Alec had been her first husband, the one without a chin. He had lived just long enough to sire their daughter, Marilyn—who has a beautiful chin, thank God—before he succumbed to a heart attack. No doubt all that crunchy chicken skin.

  “Come on, Patricia Anne. I know you won’t eat anything, but at least keep me company.”

  I ate a drumstick, a thigh, slaw, mashed potatoes and gravy.

  “You want some dessert?” Sister asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “God, you just pick at your food.”

  Two

  After I retired from teaching, I thought that I would sleep late every morning. Not so. The truth is that first light, my eyes pop open just like they did all those years of getting Fred and the kids and myself off to work and school. Force of habit, I guess. It’s nice, though, knowing I don’t have to get up. I’ll snuggle over close to Fred, who could sleep through Big Ben and just drift for a while. I’ll hear the furnace click on or the air conditioner and I’ll smell the nice Fred smells of Gain and Bounce, soap, warmth, sleep, Prince Albert tobacco. Sometimes Fred turns over and we greet the morning in a rousing fashion that I’m sure would startle our children and grandchildren, who think passion is the province of the young. Somehow that makes it more fun. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed just contempt.

  But the morning after Mary Alice and I had gone to the Skoot ’n’ Boot, Fred was snoring lightly and I was thinking about nothing more important than what to get our daughter, Haley, for her birthday when the phone rang. It’s on Fred’s side of the bed. It rang a couple of times before he woke up enough to answer it. In fact, I was reaching across him to get it when he woke up.

  Phones ringing that early in the morning are seldom good news, so my heart was beating a little faster.

  “What?” Fred said. “What?”

  “What is it?” I poked his side anxiously.

  He handed me the phone. “It’s your sister. She says I’m dead,” he said sleepily.

  “What?” I grabbed the phone. “Mary Alice?”

  “Oh, Mouse, Fred’s dead!”

  “No, he’s not. He’s right here. You’re having a bad dream.”

  “Not Fred. Ed. It’s Ed who’s dead. Oh, Mouse! I meant to say Ed. Did I scare you? I know I scared you. It’s Ed. He’s dead in the wishing well.”

  I put my hand over the phone. “It’s Ed who’s dead, Fred. Not you.”

  “Thank God,” he said. He got up and ambled to the bathroom.

  When I put the phone back to my ear, Mary Alice was wailing, “Ed’s dead. Dead in the well.” She was crying so hard I was having trouble understanding her.

  “Died in the wool? What are you talking about?”

  “Dead in the well, Mouse. Hanging in the wishing well.”

  “Ed hanged himself in the well? My God!”

  “His throat was cut and he was tied up on the pulley thing!”

  “How awful! He must have been desperate.”

  “Mouse!” Mary Alice wailed again. “Wake up. I’ll call you again in a little while. I’ve got to get some aspirin.” The phone went dead.

  “What was that about?” Fred asked.

  “It seems that Ed, the man Sister bought the Skoot ’n’ Boot from, committed suicide last night by hanging himself in the wishing well after he cut his throat and tied himself to the pulley thing.”

  “He did what?”

  “Committed suicide.” I thought about it for a minute. “He couldn’t do all that, could he?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Somebody killed him, didn’t they?” I began to feel very cold. Fred came and sat down by me on the bed.

  “What did Mary Alice say?”

  “That he was dead. And that stuff about the well. She was pretty upset.”

  “I’ll bet she was. I wonder who called her.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just assumed he killed himself. Oh, Fred.” I held him as hard as I could. “He could make his tattoo dance.” I started shaking.

  “I’ll get you a robe and some coffee.” Fred disengaged himself just as the phone rang again. I grabbed it.

  “Somebody murdered him, didn’t they?”

  “Oh, Mouse, it must be awful. The police called me just a few minutes ago. Some men who had been at the lake fishing saw the door standing open and thought maybe they could get some coffee, and there he was.”

  By this time I had the big-time shakes. “Do they know anything?”

  “I don’t think so. They want me to come out there this morning. I don’t know why.” Mary Alice started the wailing again. “Oh, Mouse, I don’t want to see his body in a wishing well with its throat cut.”

  “It’s not the wishing well’s throat that’s cut. It’s Ed’s.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Just correcting your grammar.”

  The phone went dead again. I got up and put on the robe Fred had handed me. It was the pink quilted one, the elegant one I’m saving for when I have to go to the hospital. Well, what the hell.

  I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and splashed some water on my face. The phone rang again.

  “Do not say a word,” Mary Alice said.

  “All right.”

  “Not a word. A man is dead. Murdered. A man we saw yesterday who clapped when we danced. Someone has wrenched the life away from this beautiful young man, maybe someone who was lurking around even while we were there. I think that’s what the policemen want to ask us. If we saw anything.”

  Fred came in and handed me a cup of coffee.

  “Well?”

  I didn’t answer, just sipped my coffee. What was this “we” business? I didn’t want to see a dead body in a wishing well, either.

  “Well? Patricia Anne?”

  “You said not to say anything.”

  “Damn.”

  “Well, you did. Besides, he wasn’t beautiful, anyway. His eyes—”

  “One hour, Patricia Anne.” The phone went dead again. It was closer to two hours before I heard the horn blowing in the driveway. When I went out, I saw that Mary Alice was wearing the largest, darkest pair of sunglasses I had ever seen.

  “Can you see out of those things?” I asked. “You want me to drive?”

  “Yes, I can see, and no, I’ll drive. You aim at mailboxes.”

  “I haven’t hit a mailbox in forty-five years.”

  “Not from lack of trying.” Mary Alice backed out of the drive and we headed toward the same highway we had taken the day before. How quickly things change. The sun was just as warm, the sky just as blue, but somehow our world had
seemed more innocent yesterday.

  “Well, tell me about it,” I said.

  “I told you all I know. He was going to close up right after we left, since the place isn’t open on Monday. We said good-bye and that was that. We signed all the papers yesterday morning and I gave him a check, but he said he would stay around and help for a couple of weeks. I didn’t know anything about him, except the place is in pretty good financial shape and he said he needed to get back to Atlanta. I don’t even know if he had a girlfriend or what. Bill and I only saw him when we went there to dance.”

  “It was robbery. He cashed the check and someone knew it.”

  “We signed the papers at Ed’s bank and he deposited the check. I saw him. Besides”—Mary Alice shivered just as I had done earlier—“look at the way he died. The police said it was like an execution.”

  “My God!”

  “I just hope they have everything cleaned up before we get there.”

  They did and they didn’t. As we pulled into the parking lot, we saw the yellow canvas body bag being lifted into an ambulance. Mary Alice slammed on the brakes. “Eeee,” she squeaked.

  “Wuuuf,” I wheezed as I catapulted forward against the seat-belt straps, which knocked the air out of me.

  “It’s Ed.” Mary Alice covered her mouth with her hands.

  I tried to loosen the seat belt, which was slicing me in thirds.

  “Look, Mouse, they’re putting Ed’s body in the ambulance right now.”

  “I can’t see,” I said. “I think the blood supply to my brain is cut off.”

  Mary Alice reached down and unfastened my seat belt. “Just be glad it wasn’t an air bag.”

  I rubbed my chest and looked at the scene in front of us. There were three police cars, a fire truck, a rescue squad (I didn’t imagine there was much rescuing) and the ambulance, which was now being closed. While we watched, the attendants got back in the cab and drove out of the parking lot without the light flashing. Not that there was any hurry. It dawned on me for the first time that an ambulance without a siren and a light might be more sinister than one dashing through red lights.