Murder Gets a Life by Anne George

called about the bloody nightgown?”
    “Meemaw. I was surprised. It doesn’t sound good, though, Mouse. She said the sheriff’s searching the woods around the trailers. Sounds like he thinks he’s going to find a body, doesn’t it?”
    “What can we do?”
    “Nothing right now that I know of. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”
    I hung up the phone and forced myself to relax. I tried closing my eyes and saying my mantra. I tried the old imagining-the-penny-on-the-forehead trick.But it did no good. Images of Chief Joseph’s body impaled with a hog-butchering knife kept pushing forward.
    “ Think it’s the Mexican guy who chiefs at Crystal Caverns .” I could hear Jed Reuse’s voice. “ Dresses up like an Indian and has his picture made with kids .”
    His picture made with kids. Was it possible? I went to the closet and pulled down our most recent family album which has the pictures from the last five or so years. Fred and I are both terrible about taking pictures, even remembering our camera. And when we do, we forget to take the film to have it developed. We slink into Harco’s with rolls of film so old that we feel the necessity to apologize to the clerk. The pictures that manage to survive we stick into albums in the envelopes, swearing that someday we’ll arrange them. The only person in the family who is bothered by this is my daughter-in-law, Lisa. Her picture albums are perfect.
    So she could have gone right to the pictures that I lucked into finding, pictures of her two sons, Charlie and Sam, taken about five years earlier at Crystal Caverns. Then about six and eight, they stood proudly, one on each side of an Indian chief. There were two other photographs, one of each child standing in front of the chief. Charlie held a drum in his picture, Sam a tomahawk. I remembered those souvenirs had cost us a fortune.
    I sat on the sofa and studied the pictures. Was it Chief Joseph? I hadn’t gotten a good look at the face of the man on Meemaw’s floor. In fact, I had looked at him as little as possible. But he was small and dark like this man who peered straight at the camera, his feathered headdress pushed back just a fraction too far, giving him a slightly cocky look I hadn’tnoticed when I first saw the pictures. “ Sure ,” he seemed to be saying. “ I’m chiefing. But you’re the fools paying me ten bucks .”
    I laid the photographs on the coffee table. I didn’t want the body I had seen today to be this man who had posed with my grandchildren. Maybe that’s why I’m terrible about pictures. When you look back at them, you already know too much about how the story will turn out.
    I put the album back in the closet and tried to call Haley. She had sounded excited, and I had cut her off. Her line was busy, though. I couldn’t call Debbie. She would know in a second that something was wrong by the tone of my voice. It’s one of the things that makes her a good lawyer. So I tried TV. Rosie O’Donnell, one of my favorites, was interviewing Debbie Reynolds, also a favorite. I freshened my iced tea and willed myself to sit back and relax.
    Might as well have willed myself to fly. I had to stay busy. Which is why I was in the middle of vacuuming the whole house when Haley arrived. I saw her car pull into the driveway, watched her go pat Woofer who was still curled in his cave. Such a pretty woman, her strawberry-blonde hair gleaming in the late August sun. She had once thought that she would have a long, happy life with her husband, Tom Buchanan. She would have his children, his love. A drunk driver put an end to that dream three years ago. For a long time, Fred and I thought we would never see our daughter happy again. And we know now that we’ll never see the Haley we knew before Tom’s death. But the lovely, confident woman crossing our backyard had accepted and moved beyond her grief. In fact, she looked radiant. I opened the door and hugged her.
    “Any news?” she asked.
    “No. Nothing