Jethro barked.
“My God, no,” I said aloud. But I knew that bark. It was high-pitched, anxious. “Weezie, come back to me,” it seemed to say. Or maybe it was just his “Weezie, I’m bored and I’ve got a squirrel treed” bark. We were still working on communication skills.
I stood, rooted to the spot, looking down at Caroline. I felt dizzy, but I kept looking. Jethro kept barking. A horn beeped somewhere outside. That did it. I ran into the bedroom and stuck my head out the window.
“Hush,” I called. “Hush, puppy.” The magnolia leaves made a thick, nearly impenetrable canopy over the lawn below. The hot humid air was perfectly still. Jethro whimpered, and I heard his tail thump against the grass.
Then a beam of light sliced through the syrupy softness of the night. I put my hand up to shield my eyes, but the beam was relentless. Jethro whimpered again. I felt like joining in.
“Ma’am?” The voice below was loud, but not deep. “Ma’am? I’m from Paragon Security. An alarm went off. Are you the owner of this home?”
“She’s dead.” I meant Anna Ruby Mullinax, but I was thinking of that corpse on the bathroom floor too.
He cleared his throat. “Ma’am? Could you come down, please? And, uh, I think you should know, I’m an armed response officer. You’re, uh, under arrest.”
Under the circumstances, I decided to hide my bag of loot under the bed.
The magnolia tree suddenly looked threatening, the ground seemed miles away. “How about I come downstairs and meet you at the front door?” I tried.
“Come down the way you came in, please,” he said. He shone the flashlight up into the treetop again. I took my time climbing, putting one foot gingerly beneath the other, not looking down. From below, I could hear the buzz and drone of a radio. He was talking into it. Calling in reinforcements, probably.
When I was about four feet off the ground, I saw a car with flashing blue lights speeding down Beaulieu’s front drive.
“That’s fine,” the security guard said. “Jump on down, please, ma’am.”
My foot slipped, and I fell in a heap, rolling away from the base of the tree, scraping a long patch of skin from my right thigh and my right hand when I tried to cushion my fall. Jethro trotted over and licked my face.
“Stay right there,” the guard said. I got the impression of youth, of a tan uniform, and of a big gun barrel, pointed politely, but resolutely, in my direction.
Jethro started in to howling when he heard the police siren. One by one, lights flickered on around the darkened grounds of Beaulieu. The first police car was followed by a Paragon Security Armed Response vehicle, which was really just a battered tan Chevy Blazer with a gun rack in the rear window.
“I was just looking for a bathroom,” I told the skinny young guard. It sounded lame, even to me. “I saw a window open, and I went in the house, and I used the facility, but then I needed something to dry my hands on, and I opened the closet.” I paused and took a gulp of soupy air. A gnat flew into my mouth. It was that kind of night. “Officer? You might want to call the real police.”
A beefy older guy grabbed me by the arm. “Ma’am? We’re as real as it gets. And we’re gonna swear out a real honest-to-God warrant against you for breaking and entering.”
I winced and tried to twist out of his grasp, but he held on tighter. There was no good way to bring up the subject of a dead body for somebody in my predicament. Still, I’d been raised Catholic. Confession seemed only natural.
I swatted at the gnat cloud around my face. “Officer? There’s a dead woman in the bathroom closet upstairs.”
“Oh.” A vein throbbed in the skinny guy’s neck. The beefy guy produced a set of rinky-dink handcuffs that looked like he’d gotten them with cereal box tops.
You could hear the police sirens coming from a long way away. People around the grounds began to stir. A crowd gathered there around us, at the base of the magnolia tree. People whispered and pointed at me. My head was pounding. I needed coffee and ibuprofen because I was not thinking clearly. I should have been thinking about a lawyer, about who put that big ugly bloodstain on Caroline’s chest. Instead, I was wondering whether or not they’d postpone the estate sale until after I got out of this messy little jam.