When Will the Dead Lady Sing? Read Free Page A

the door with an expression that said “If that was the morning’s entertainment, I want my money back.”
    Joe Riddley was still pressed against the door. How long did he think he could hold it against a determined buffalo?
    “Call animal control,” he ordered. “I’ll keep an eye on him.” He locked the dead bolt—did he expect the animal to try the knob?—and moved to the front window. “Hurry. He’s looking at my car again.”
    Animal control wasn’t open, so I called the police. After all, as a county magistrate, I regularly get up and drive down to the sheriff’s detention center in the middle of the night to save deputies the trouble of coming to me. I figured it was time somebody paid back the favor.
    Royce Wharton, a deputy who regularly had the night shift and had roused me four times in the past month, answered. “Hey, Royce. This is Judge Yarbrough. Can you send somebody over here to remove a buffalo from our front lawn?”
    I had to hold the receiver six inches from my ear to keep from being deafened by his laugh. “Our cowhands haven’t arrived yet, Judge, but as soon as one gallops in, I’ll send him over.”
    “This isn’t a joke,” I informed him. “We have a buffalo in our yard, and if you don’t help me deal with it, you’d better call somebody else next time you need a judge to sign a warrant.”
    “What’s it doing?”
    “What does it matter what it’s doing? It’s there . What do you suggest we do? And I don’t want to hear a smart aleck answer, either.”
    “No, ma’am, but I don’t know what to suggest. We don’t do buffalo.”
    I was about to suggest that he didn’t do much of anything when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the blasted animal was wandering happily across the yard in a new direction.
    “My roses!” I slammed down the receiver and grabbed the broom. The way Joe Riddley tells it, I mounted the broom, flew out the front door, and zoomed over the yard. I didn’t, of course, but I was determined to save those roses. I’d transplanted them from our old yard, and had grown them originally from Mama’s cuttings. I wasn’t going to lose them to any varmint, even if he had strayed fifteen hundred miles and a hundred and fifty years off course.
    “Get out of here! Out! You hear me?”
    I yelled at the top of my lungs and waved my broom. I was just about to bring it down on the creature’s hump when I heard a shout.
    “Wait, Mackie! Don’t hit him. It’s okay. Sarge will get him.”
    A man in gray slacks and a yellow polo shirt stepped from behind the big Emily Brunner holly tree up by the street. Another man, short and stubby, hurried around him with a chain in his hand.
    The short man wore jeans and a green T-shirt and walked with a limp. “Hey, boy. Hey, boy.” He sidled toward the buffalo holding out something on one palm. That brute nuzzled his palm as nice as anything and let the man snap the chain through a loop hanging from its neck. “I’ll get him back in the truck,” he called to the taller man. He and the buffalo strolled amiably across the lawn and down the street.
    I wished I could go with them. I’d rather walk a buffalo than remain where I was.
    Every woman worth her salt has at least one guilty secret in her past. Mine was staring me in the face.

2
    “Hey, Mackie, surprised to see me?” Burlin Bullock squinted against the morning sun. I wished a sinkhole would open in our lawn and swallow one of us. I wasn’t particular about which one.
    Mama always said that women who don’t fix their faces before they come out of their rooms in the morning are asking Fate to fix their wagons. I stood in the early-morning sunlight wearing no makeup whatsoever, my hair at its day-before-beauty-parlor worst, dressed in fuzzy slippers and one of those snap-front coffee coats that are so easy to throw on. Why hadn’t I developed a taste for flaming-orange satin pajamas with matching high-heel mules?
    Burlin was handsomer at sixty-four