Murder Shoots the Bull by Anne George

Author:Anne George
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1999-04-12T22:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Dawn comes slowly in September. I hadn’t gone back to sleep, though Fred and Arthur had come in around four.

“You awake?” Fred whispered.

I assured him that I was.

He pulled off the pants he had on over his pajamas, got in the bed, and held me. He smelled like smoke, I probably did, too, and we lay there, our arms around each other.

“Is Arthur okay?” I asked.

“He’s lying down.”

I rubbed his back between his shoulder blades. In a few minutes, his breathing shallowed.

But sleep was lost for me. I watched the day beginning, first as a pale light through the blinds, a light I might be imagining, and then a definite brightness. I slipped from the bed.

“What?” Fred murmured sleepily.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.” I pulled on some jeans and a sweater, found the huaraches I had had on earlier, and slipped down the hall. There was no sound from either of the other bedrooms. Hopefully, everyone was asleep.

I stepped onto the back porch into a perfect late summer dawn. The sun hadn’t crested the horizon yet, but the sky was more blue than gray, with a pink glow toward the east. If I had come out at this time yesterday morning, I would have smelled the Carolina jasmine blooming along the fence. Today there was smoke.

A heavy dew seeped through the weave of my shoes as I went to check on Woofer. He looked up, wagged his tail, and yawned.

“Go back to sleep,” I told him, just as I had told Fred.

I opened the gate and walked next door to the Phizers’. I wondered if the crape myrtle tree had suffered any damage from the fire. Mitzi’s beautiful daylilies had, I saw immediately. They had been trampled by the firemen or had a heavy hose dragged over them. I lifted one of the long stems that yesterday had held a deep rust-colored flower. When I let it go, it dropped to the ground.

The crape myrtle tree had fared better. Hopefully, it was far enough away from the house that the heat hadn’t done any damage. I examined one of the lower limbs. While I was looking at it, the first rays of the sun broke across the horizon. It was a perfect beginning of a September day.

And then I turned and looked at the house.

I guess I had expected to see the back wall of the house gone, but it was standing. The kitchen windows as well as the back bedroom windows were knocked out, and the kitchen door was hanging askew. But it still didn’t look as bad as I had thought it would.

Mitzi had a five-legged table that had belonged to her grandmother, a funny-looking table that was a conversation piece. Could the table still be there? I walked slowly toward the house.

“Morning, Patricia Anne.”

I jumped. I had been concentrating so on the damage to the house, that I hadn’t seen Officer Bo Mitchell of the Birmingham Police Department as she came around the corner.

“Morning, Bo. You’re out mighty early.

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