Murder Shoots the Bull

by Anne George

  I promised her I would think about it and get back to her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on the responsibility. On the other hand, it would be interesting.

  We all went to bed early. I fell asleep immediately and deeply and was dreaming of Sister howling at the moon when I awakened enough to realize the noise was real. Woofer wasn’t barking, but making a strange, howling noise.

  “Fred,” I said, grabbing for my robe. “Something’s wrong with Woofer.”

  “Choo,” he said, which was followed by a snore.

  I hurried down the dark hall, through the den and into the kitchen. No one but me seemed to have been awakened by the sounds. I reached up to turn on the back lights and that’s when I saw the light in the Phizers’ house. Someone was over there with a flashlight. Someone walking through their dining rom, hesitatingly, turning the light out. No, I realized. There was still a glow. They had moved into the hall.

  I opened the kitchen door quietly and stepped onto the back porch. Woofer ambled up the steps to greet me.

  “Who is it, boy?” I whispered. “Is that what you’re fussing about?”

  The flashlight next door slid across the inside of the burned kitchen.

  “Come on, sweetie.” I pulled Woofer into the house, picked up the phone, and called 911.

  “Mrs. Hollowell,” the 911 operator said. “Is that you again? What’s going on tonight?”

  Damn.

  I told her.

  So much for the quiet, sleeping neighborhood and the moonlit late summer night. In about three minutes, two police cars, sirens blaring, came screeching to a halt in front of the Phizers’. All of the lights in all of the houses came on, including ours. Fred, Lisa, Mitzi, and Arthur came staggering out of their beds, and Woofer decided to howl again.

  “What’s going on?” Arthur, I noticed, slept in his boxers.

  “Somebody’s going through your house.”

  “Our house?”

  “I called 911.”

  “The police are in our house?” Mitzi sounded confused. “Is it another fire?”

  “No, it was somebody with a flashlight. I saw them.”

  Woofer leaned his head back and howled.

  “Hush, Woofer.” Lisa patted his head.

  “You called 911?” Fred went to the window and looked out. “Turn the lights out. I can’t see what’s going on.”

  “I’m going to go find out.” Arthur opened the back door and started out.

  “Not without your pants, Arthur.” Mitzi stopped him. “Go put on some clothes.”

  Fred realized he just had on pajamas and rushed down the hall behind Arthur.

  “Woofer was howling,” I explained to Mitzi and Lisa, “and I got up to see about him and saw somebody with a flashlight going through your house.”

  “A burglar,” Lisa said. “I’ve heard of burglars looking in the paper for fires and finding out that way which houses aren’t occupied. They do it when people are at funerals, too. That’s why you never want to put the address of the person who died in the paper.”

  “Oh, my.” Mitzi clutched her robe together. “I wonder what they got.”

  “Nothing,” I said, crossing my fingers.

  “The silver and my good pearls are still in the fire safe in the hall closet. I should have gotten them out yesterday, shouldn’t I?”

  “Probably,” Lisa agreed. “Professional burglars can open up a little safe in a minute.”

  She was my daughter-in-law. I couldn’t give her the elbow punch or the slight kick like I can my sister. So I suggested that we go out in the backyard and see what was happening.

  As we stepped outside, Joanie Salk, Bo Mitchell’s partner, was coming up the steps.

  “Mrs. Hollowell, you’re the one who called 911 again?” She was out of breath.

  I nodded. The queen of the 911 system. “There was somebody over there going through the house with a flashlight.”

  Arthur and Fred came rushing out nearly knocking Joanie down.

  “Wait a minute, y’all,” she called. But they dashed through the gate. She sighed. “They really shouldn’t go over there.”

  “I don’t think they noticed you were a policeman,” I said.

  “I don’t guess it matters.” She took a small spiral notebook from her pocket. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Sure. But I don’t know anything. Just that somebody was over there.”

  “We know that. She’s still there. Says her name’s Arabella Hardt and you know her, that she’s been staying there.”

  “Arabella?” I think all three of us said it at the same time.

  “You know her?”

  “Of course we do,” Mitzi said.

  “You’re Mrs. Phizer?” Joanie asked.

  Mitzi nodded. “And she did spend a night or two with us. But I can’t imagine what she would be doing over there tonight.”

  “She says she came back for some of her things.”

  I looked through the window at the kitchen clock. “At two-thirty in the morning?”

  Joanie Salk shrugged. “Y’all wait here a minute. I’ll go see what’s going on.”

  “Well, damn,” Mitzi said. “Arabella.”

  The September night was cool. I suggested that we go back inside.

  “What kind of things could she have come back for?” Lisa asked as we sat down at the kitchen table. “Clothes?”

  “I suppose,” Mitzi said. “They’ll smell like smoke, though.”

  “Whatever she’s after, why didn’t she wait until morning?” I asked. “What kind of sense does it make to go into a house that’s been damaged by fire in the middle of the night? Plus, she knew the police had it cordoned off.”

  “Maybe she’s been drinking,” Lisa suggested.

  “I guess it’s possible,” Mitzi said. She put her head down on the table. “Lord, I’m tired.”

  “Why don’t you go back to bed?” I said. “Now that you know it was Arabella and not a burglar. There’s not a thing you can do.”

  Mitzi looked up. “Do you think they’ll arrest her?”

  “No. Arthur will vouch for her. It’ll all be ironed out in the morning.”

  “Then I think I will.” Mitzi pushed her chair back. “I swear I think those Sawyers are going to do me in.”

  “Not if you don’t let them. You want some milk?”

  “I just want to sleep.” Pretty, sparkly Mitzi looked like an old, old woman.

  Lisa and I looked at each other after Mitzi left.

  “What do you think?” she whispered.

  I shrugged. I had just thought of something. “You remember when Arabella first came?”

  Lisa nodded. “She was in a cab. She had a bunch of stuff.”

  “I wonder how she got here tonight.”

  “Maybe she’s rented a car.”

  “Probably.” It was reasonable. In fact, if she and her mother had been here for some time, they should already have had a car. So why had Arabella arrived in a taxi the first time? And there hadn’t been a car there when I had come home and found her sitting on our back steps. Curiouser and curiouser.

  I got up and got each of us a glass of milk. We were sitting at the table playing two-hand bridge when Fred came in.

  “That damn fool Arabella Hardt,” he said.

  “What did they do to her?” I asked.

  “Not a thing. She was crying. Said she had to get some clothes to wear to her mother’s funeral. The police were all but apologizing to her.”

  “Where is she now? And where’s Arthur?”

  “He’s gone to take her home.” Fred picked up my milk and finished it.

  “Back to her mother’s apartment?”

  “Hell, Patricia Anne, I don’t know. Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

  “How come Arthur’s taking her? Didn’t she have a car?”

  “Because she was drunk as a skunk. That’s why.” Fred put the empty glass in the sink.

  “Poor thing.” Lisa gathered up the card
s.

  “Poor thing, my butt,” Fred said. “I’m going to bed. Are y’all coming or are you going to stay up all night? We’ve got to start getting some sleep around here.”

  “Lisa,” I asked, “are you familiar with the word curmudgeon?”

  “Does it mean grumpy old man?”

  “You got it.”

  “Not funny,” the old curmudgeon said. We turned out the light and followed him down the hall, grinning.

  There was a mass exodus from the house the next morning which surprised me. I woke to the sound of Fred taking a shower and got up to put on some coffee. When I walked into the kitchen, Lisa and Alan were sitting at the table. I caught my breath. A dozen red roses were in a vase on the counter.

  “Hey, Mama,” he said, getting up to hug me.

  “Hey, sweetheart.” This man is a foot taller than I am and weighs a hundred pounds more, but he’s my baby. I patted him on the back. “I’ll come back in a few minutes. Give you time to talk.”

  “We’ve been talking for a couple of hours, Mama,” Lisa said. “I never went back to sleep last night, and I came back to get some more milk, and there was Alan standing at the door. Nearly scared me to death.”

  “Well, are you hungry? You want me to fix you some breakfast?”

  Alan pulled out a chair for me. “Sit down, Mama. We’ve had some cereal.”

  He sat down, too, and leaned forward. “I couldn’t sleep last night, either. All I could think of was what a fool I’d been acting. So I woke the boys up and told them I was coming to Birmingham to apologize to Lisa and the rest of you and ask if their mother would come back. I apologized to them, too.”

  “I’m going home, Mama,” Lisa said. “We’ve got a lot of things to work out, but we’ve got fifteen years of our lives invested in this marriage, and we’ve made two wonderful children together. And I told Alan that, by damn, we aren’t going to throw it away, that we’re going to get some help.”

  “That’s wonderful.” I felt like a weight had been lifted from me.

  “I’m going to go get my stuff together,” Lisa said.

  “You need some help?” Alan asked.

  Lisa shook her head no. “You sit here and talk to your mama.”

  “She’s a wonderful girl, son,” I said as Lisa disappeared down the hall.

  “I know.”

  I got up and poured each of us a cup of coffee. The roses on the counter were catching the early morning sun. “Where did you get the flowers in the middle of the night?”

  He looked sheepish. “The Winn-Dixie. I figured it wouldn’t hurt.” He took the coffee. “How’s Haley?”

  I was telling him about Warsaw’s roach problem when his father walked in.

  “Well,” Fred said. “About time.”

  The two of them hugged and beat each other on the back.

  “I apologize, Papa.”

  Alan was beginning to sound like one of the steps of AA.

  “It’s that sweet girl in yonder who deserves your apology,” Fred said. “They just don’t come any better than Lisa.”

  “I know that, Papa.”

  I left them and went down the hall to the guest bedroom where Lisa was closing her suitcase.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I will be.” She looked at me. “Won’t I?”

  “You will be.”

  She hugged me. “Thank you for everything.”

  And then they were gone, and the house seemed empty. Lisa had become such an integral part of our lives so quickly, maybe helping to fill the gap left by Haley. Who knows.

  “You think they can work it out?” Fred asked as he came back into the kitchen. He had walked out to the car with Alan. “I told him to act like he’s got some sense.”

  Good fatherly advice.

  “They’ll work it out.” I poured him some apple juice and stuck two waffles in the toaster. Then I went out to give Woofer his breakfast and tell him he was a good dog.

  The Phizers left just as quickly. They came in with their suitcases packed while I was putting the sheets from Lisa’s bed in the washing machine.

  “We’re gone,” Mitzi announced. “I’ll call you as soon as I know what our phone number is. And we’ll be over every day seeing about the house, I’m sure.”

  “Don’t you want some coffee? Something to eat?”

  “We had some earlier with Lisa and Alan. She told us she was going home. I’m so glad, Patricia Anne.”

  What a busy household this had been early this morning while I slept.

  “Was Arabella okay?” I asked Arthur.

  “She’d been drinking. But yes, she was okay. I took her back to her mother’s apartment. She was embarrassed to have caused so much commotion.”

  Mitzi and I glanced at each other. She had apparently not told Arthur of our suspicions about Arabella not living there.

  Mitzi hugged me. “Thanks for everything. I told Lisa I’d keep my fingers crossed for her and Alan.”

  “We all will. You call me, now.”

  A hug from Arthur and they, too, were gone. I had my house back, and it seemed strange. Strange and good. Maybe we could get some sleep.

  I started the washing machine, went into the den, turned on The Price Is Right, and picked up my smocking. Muffin climbed into my lap. Life, for a few minutes, seemed normal.

  The phone rang. Mary Alice. She was stopping by Subway. Did Lisa and I want chicken salad sandwiches for lunch?

  “I do. Lisa’s gone. Alan came for her, full of apologies.”

  Yes. Life was getting back to normal. Whatever that is.

  “And did you howl at the moon?” I asked her later as I was pouring tea and after we had agreed that it was wonderful that Lisa and Alan had gone home to face their problems which, hopefully could be resolved okay.

  “Of course. Even wrote a haiku about it. We all did. You want to hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  She reached in her purse, pulled out a notebook and read:

  “We howl at the moon.

  The sun crosses the equator

  and heads back this way.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said. It really was. I wasn’t about to tell her that every English teacher in the world automatically counts syllables when haikus are read and that she had one too many in the second line.

  “There’s another one.”

  I put the tea on the table and sat down. “Okay.”

  “Dew falls on the grass

  I wonder what I’ve stepped in

  in the cow pasture.”

  She looked up and giggled. “Everybody liked that one.”

  “I can understand why. So the party was in a pasture?”

  “Lord, yes. We all sat on the ground. My behind’s so sore today you wouldn’t believe. And I’d totally forgotten we were supposed to bring some kind of back-to-nature food to eat, so I stopped by Hardee’s and got a big box of fried chicken. That was the main thing everybody ate. The kudzu quiche somebody brought was pretty good, though.” She bit into her Subway.

  “Kudzu quiche?”

  “Tasted about like spinach. Now, tell me about Mitzi and Arthur’s apartment.”

  I not only told her what I knew about the apartment, I told her about Arabella’s visit during the night and that I was never going to call 911 again, that the woman recognized my voice.

  “How’s Arthur doing?”

  “Seems to be doing pretty good. Do you know what happens now that he’s out on bail? Did Debbie tell you?”

  “They have an arraignment in a couple of weeks.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Debbie says Peyton and Arthur go before the judge and the judge tells him what he’s been charged with and asks him if he has a lawyer.”

  “But he already knows that.”

  “That’s the way it works.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  While we were eating, a car pulled into the Phizers’ driveway. Two men in suits got out and walked around the back. W
oofer barked happily. He was feeling better.

  “Did Joy McWain call you?” Mary Alice asked.

  I nodded. “I told her I’d think about it. I’ll do it if you’ll help me.”

  Sister put her sandwich down and looked straight at me. “I don’t think I can, Mouse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re set on Alcorn Jones’s bank doing the actual investing for them and on him advising them.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You don’t remember skinny Al Jones that I went to high school with?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Probably not. I never talked about him after the accident.” Mary Alice held out her sandwich and examined it as if she were looking for something.

  I was intrigued. If I hadn’t known Sister better, I would have sworn she was blushing. “What accident?”

  “I think I lost my virginity to him.”

  “Accidentally?”

  “Yes, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, accidentally. We were parked up on Ruffner Mountain on the road that leads to the fire tower, and we were in the backseat of his ’48 Ford just fooling around, and he hadn’t put the brakes on good, I guess. Anyway, the car rolled a couple of feet and hit a tree. Just bumped it, really. Didn’t do any damage to the car.”

  “But you lost your virginity when the car hit.” I took a big sip of tea, trying to picture this.

  “I said I think I did.”

  I spit tea all over my sandwich.

  “Well, good Lord, Mouse, it’s not that funny.” Sister got up and rolled a couple of paper towels off the holder. “Besides, he told everybody at school.” She handed me the towels which I laughed into. “I’ve never forgiven him. I guarantee you.”

  I sobbed into the paper towel. “Poor Alcorn,” I managed to say.

  “Poor Alcorn, my foot. He’s the reason I didn’t get to be Homecoming queen. I’m sure of it. Bragging about it. Ruining my reputation.”

  “Oh, God.” I laughed harder.

  In a minute, I heard Mary Alice giggle. “Well, I guess it was a little bit funny.”