Do Unto Others

Where are my manners? Come sit on the porch with me and have some tea.” I turned to Hally. “You going to be here for a while?” He nodded. “Still got a fair amount of weeding to do.” “Okay. I’d like to talk with you when I’m done visiting with Eula Mae.” If Hally seemed surprised, he didn’t show it. He just nodded and knelt back to his gardening. Eula Mae and I walked up the long path to her gracious home. It reminded me of a shrunken antebellum mansion, one you might find on a Hollywood lot. She’d lived there alone since her terminally shy sister Patty died ten years ago. I’d always wondered if Patty simply succumbed to Eula Mae’s ego. She gestured languidly toward a porch chair and went inside. Loose pages, lying on a wicker table, caught the breeze at their corners and gently turned up. Printing and red marks covered the paper. Eula Mae’s latest. I leaned forward to peek, and one of Eula Mae’s multitude of cats yowled at me from a white whicker chair. I stuck my tongue out and the cat raised its head snidely. My hostess returned with another glass of tea and handed it to me. Absently, she shoved the cat out of the chair. The cat mewled in protest at the declining social standards on the porch while Eula Mae kept an eye on her gardener. “Jesus, Eula Mae. Why don’t you just go out there and undress the poor kid?” She looked at me with reproach. “Simply because I find your cousin aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean I want my way with him. Please. I’m doing research.”

“Research?” The displaced cat growled again, and Eula Mae scooped him into her lap. She stroked his fur contritely, and he allowed her to place her cheek on him while she spoke. “Yes, Jordy. That boy is going to be the hero of my next work. Well, someone very like him in form.”

“What about in mind?” Hally was a good kid and a great athlete, but not a straight-A student. “My hero will have a bit more on the ball than Hally, but nothing more in terms of physical endowment,” Eula Mae answered. “We must always look for inspiration and never turn it away.

He’d look divine painted on the cover of my next novel.” “I think you could find all sorts of inspiration round here if you were writing a murder mystery,” I observed dryly. “I was working up to that,” Eula Mae answered, “but I didn’t know your mental state. You over your shock, sugar pie?” She patted my knee in a friendly way. The cat glared balefully at me. “The shock of finding her body? Yes, for the time being. The shock of being suspected of killing her? Not quite yet.” Eula Mae played dreamily with one of her errant curls. “Yes, the police have already been here asking me about you and our beloved Beta.” She saw me tense and shook her head. “Junebug can’t possibly think you killed her. You know he’s really a sweet boy underneath all that bluster. Billy Ray’s a different story, though, and Junebug gets pressure from him.” She paused, giving me a speculative stare. “So what was your quote?” I told her. She shook her head, the ringlets dancing around her face. “Makes as much sense as mine. Job 31:35: My desire is, that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book. Well, I’ve written several award-winning books and I was her adversary. Big whoop. What’s the damn point of it all?” “I take it Junebug shared the list with you.” “Just my part. He wouldn’t divulge who else was on it.” I did. She sat and listened thoughtfully, harrumping at Tamma Hufnagel and Bob Don Goertz’s names. At my mother and Hally Schneider’s names, she frowned. “Don’t understand that at all. How could she hate or want to hurt someone with Alzheimer’s and”-she gestured in the direction of her gardener-“someone as sweet as Hally?” I shrugged. “Mama can’t remember any connection with her.