Mother Finds a Body by Gypsy Rose Lee Page B

day to do that,” the sheriff said. “In the meantime someone steals the corpse, carries it out to the woods, pours gasoline on it, and sets it afire . . .”
    I knew what was going through Biff’s head. It was going through mine, too. The solution sounded good. We hadn’t said it. The sheriff said it. If he wanted to reconstruct the scene to please himself, why should we break it up?
    â€œNo,” Biff said slowly. “Gyp’s mother, Evangie, that is . . .”
    â€œMother set fire to the wood.” I said it quickly, before I could change my mind. “Mother did it so she could bury the body. She wouldn’t have poured gasoline on it, though. Mother wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
    The sheriff raised an eyebrow. Then he scratched his chin again.
    â€œIf anybody but an actor told me a story like that, I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Even with actors, I find it hard to swallow. For instance, why should your mother go to all that bother burying a body when none of you knew the corpse? Why not go right to the police and tell the story? Then another thing. How could you stand the smell of a body decaying right under your bed? Why didn’t you ask those four friends of yours about it? And why didn’t you tell me about it this morning when I was out there? How could a woman carry a body like that? What kind of a woman could lift it, let alone carry it almost five hundred feet?”
    â€œShe put it in a wagon,” I said. “You didn’t expect her to carry it over your shoulder, did you?” I didn’t realize I had used Mother’s exact words until they were out of my mouth. “It was a neighbor’s wagon,” I added lamely.
    â€œAnd the reason she didn’t want to tell the police was because she didn’t want Gyp to have all that bad publicity,” Biff said.“Evangie’s got a strange way of justifying things. She figured that as long as we didn’t kill the guy, why should we go through the mess of being suspected maybe. Hell’s bells, the guy was dead. There was nothing we could do about that. Then why tell the bunch that’s traveling with us? Telling them would be like broadcasting it over a national hookup. I’ll be damned if I can explain why we didn’t get wise to the odor, though. It may be because the bathtub adjoins the icebox. There’s only one drain, ya see. Maybe the ice kept the body chilled.”
    â€œIn other words,” the sheriff said, “you condone this act of your mother-in-law’s?”
    â€œNot exactly,” Biff replied. “But she is my mother–in-law. I gotta stick by her, don’t I? And she really was doing it for Punkin and me.”
    The sheriff got to his feet slowly. He reached over and took his hat from an antler hanging on the wall. “Think you could find the burial place?” he asked me.
    â€œI know the general direction,” I said.
    The sheriff looked at Biff and me for a moment. Then he threw open the door. The bright sunlight blinded me. Then I saw the Model T parked in front of us.
    The sheriff climbed into the front seat. “Well, come on,” he said. “Let’s go take a look at where your mother buried that body of hers.”
    Biff climbed into the front seat with the sheriff. I sat in the back. The sheriff, I decided, was certainly not squandering the taxpayers’ money. I have traveled in broken-down crates before, but the sheriff’s car was a new experience in discomfort. It was no time to beef, though, so I kept my ideas to myself.
    Instead of driving through the trailer camp, he took a longer route around the back. It brought us out near Mrs. Smith’s burned trailer. The sheriff parked the car, and we got out to walk from there.
    The dry grass underfoot was dusty and hot. It burned right through my thin-soled sandals. The same heavy smell of chemicals and gasoline filled the air. The