As it turned out, we spoke somewhat sooner than that.
Chapter 5
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. "Oh, I hated to miss your presentation," he assured me, as if I'd been worried, "but I had something else I had to do." Put that in your pipe and smoke it, his expression said. Benjamin's words were as mild and apologetic and his voice was as abased as usual, but his face was another matter. I looked inquiring and waited. Definitely not the hamburger. Maybe no red meat at all.
"I'm in politics," Benjamin told me, his voice modest but his face triumphant.
"The mayoral race?" I guessed.
"Right. I'm helping out Morrison Pettigrue. I'm his campaign manager." And Benjamin's voice quivered with pride.
Whoever Morrison Pettigrue was, he was sure to lose. The name rang a faint bell, but I wasn't willing to stand there waiting to recall what I knew. "I wish you luck," I said with as good a smile as I could scrape together.
"Would you like to go to a rally with me next week?" My God, he wanted me to kick him in the face. That was the only explanation. I looked at him and thought, You pathetic person. Then I felt ashamed, of course, and that made me angry at myself, and him.
"No, Benjamin," I said with finality. I could not offer an excuse. I did not want this to happen again.
"Okay," he said, with martyrdom in his voice. "Well... I'll be seeing you." The hurt quivered dramatically just under his brave smile. The old reply came to the tip of my tongue, and I bit it back. But as I wheeled my cart away, I whispered, "Not if I see you first." As I slowed down to stare at the dog food bags, just so he wouldn't look out the window and see me speeding away as fast as I could move, I realized there were a couple of funny things about our conversation.
He hadn't asked any questions about last night. He hadn't asked who had been at the meeting, he hadn't said how strange it was that the only night he'd missed was the night something extraordinary happened. He hadn't even asked how it felt to discover Mamie's body, something everyone I'd seen today had been trying to ask me in roundabout ways.
I puzzled over it while I selected shampoo, and then decided not to worry about Benjamin Greer. Instead, I would get mad at the shelf stockers. Naturally, every kind of heavily sugared cereal based on a cartoon show was at my eye level, while cereal bought by grown-ups was stacked way above my head. I could reach them, but then the stockers had laid other boxes down on top of the row of upright boxes. If I pulled out the one I could reach, the others on top of it would come toppling down, making lots of noise and attracting lots of attention. You can tell I know from experience.