Murder on a Girls' Night Out by Anne George Read Free Book Online

the sheriff and thought somehow we were missing the point here, mainly that a dead body had just been carted out with its throat cut. That didn’t happen just every day in a person’s life. I suddenly thought of a news story I had read the week before, about a woman finding her husband’s body. The reporter had written, “When she saw that his head was missing, she became greatly alarmed.” At the time I thought, Alarmed ? What kind of a reporter would write something like that? Now I was beginning to understand how we can put horror in a little cubbyhole in our brains to deal with later.
    “Let’s go see Debbie,” I told Sister.
    It was good to get out of the Skoot ’n’ Boot. The warm sunshine was a pleasant surprise. As we approached the interstate, we saw a woman with long blond hair riding a horse across the field toward the big house we had admired the evening before. It was a lovely picture.
    Sister turned the car onto the interstate ramp. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, slowing as a tractor-trailer rig thundered by, then pulling in behind it. “I think I may have jumped the gun buying that place like I did. I probably should have looked into it a little more.”
    I wanted to say, “No kidding,” but decided the best thing to do was to keep my mouth shut. Which I did all the way to town.
    Debbie’s office is in an old, remodeled Victorian house on Birmingham’s south side, where the wealthy lived a hundred years ago but which is now a neighborhood in transition. The huge old homes that were falling into disrepair are now being turned into smart apartments and offices. Debbie’s house is both; her apartment is upstairs. She thinks it’s wonderful, especially since it’s right across from a park where Richardena can take Fay and May to play every day. She actually says that, having obviously inherited her mother’s tendency toward rhyme. Mary Alice is suspicious of the neighborhood and the park, and if she sees two people talking together on the sidewalk, she is sure a drug deal is going down. Richardena, the nanny, is not beyond her suspicions, either, since she has had her own criminal tendencies.
    “She shot him in self defense, Mama!” Debbie insists. “And she aimed for his foot!”
    “Then how come she hit him about three feet higher?”
    “An accident, Mama!”
    At any rate, the judge believed Debbie, and Richardena escaped a prison tern just in time to get settledbefore the twins were born. She is a loving, gentle woman and May and Fay adore her. The fact that Richardena’s ex-husband will never sire children bothers no one but Mary Alice. And probably the ex-husband.
    Which brings up another matter that bothers Mary Alice: the sire of Fay and May. One day Debbie had announced to her mother that she was thirty-five years old, wanted a child and had taken matters into her own hands, so to speak, and been artificially inseminated at University Hospital.
    “Do you believe that?” Sister had asked me. “I’ll bet it was that Barney what’s his name who has hair growing across his nose.”
    After the twins were born, Mary Alice was so enamored of them, I don’t think she even looked for stray hairs across the bridges of those precious little noses. She even sent a large check to University’s fertility clinic. She said it was in grateful appreciation. I figured she was planning on looking into their records someday.
    The little girls were taking their naps when we arrived at Debbie’s. Debbie was sitting on the front steps in blue jeans, eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and drinking a diet Shasta.
    “My, aren’t you casual,” Sister said.
    “I dress for court,” Debbie said, unperturbed. “Y’all sit down. Want a Coke or something?”
    “If I get down on those steps, I’ll have to get up,” Sister said. She pulled a wicker chair over. “Where are the babies?”
    “Taking a nap.”
    “Richardena up there?”
    “She’s gone to the store.” Debbie motioned