Killer, Come Back to Me

Why, even Grandma would quit playing chess all day with Uncle Flinny, choke on her brandy, stare at him through thick glasses, and cry, “My God, child, your snooping finally came to a profit, did it?”

Sure! Sure! Johnny blinked rapidly, his heart pounding.

Cousin William might even faint at the news!

He, Johnny Menlo, had found the body. Pictures in the papers of himself instead of Mother beaming out of the society columns!

Hiding the note in his pocket, Johnny took one last long look at the pretty lashes and the pink lips and the dark black hair of the Trunk Lady. He closed the lid on her sleeping.

He’d scream. Yes, at the top of the grand stairs. Scream till the sky fell down, and the party with it! Scream!

His screaming wasn’t bad at all.

Down the stairs, across the hall, making a path with his screaming through the startled ranks of people, Johnny reached Mother’s glittering cocktail gown and held onto it very tightly.

“Johnny, Johnny, why are you downstairs? What’s the matter? I told you—” Mother’s girl-face looked down over the glitter. He grabbed another fistful of spangles. He yelled it:

“Mom, there’s a body in the attic!”

Like faces in a football stadium, the faces watching them. Mother stiffened, then relaxed. “Let go my dress, darling, you’ll get it dirty. Look at your hands, cobwebs and all.

Now run up to your room like a good boy.” She patted his head.

“But Mom!” he wailed. “There’s a body—”

“Good Lord,” someone murmured. “Just like his father.”

Johnny spun angrily. “You shut up! There is so a body!”

Mother didn’t see him. She looked at her guests, and all Johnny could see was her lovely swanlike throat, the firm chin with the pulse beating under it, her fingers fixing the chestnut shine of hair swept up from her ears.

“Please forgive Johnny,” she was saying. “Children are so imaginative, aren’t they?”

Her chin came down. There was no light in her blue eyes. “You’d better go upstairs, Johnny.”

“Oh, but, Mom—”

His world was crashing. The spangles slipped from between his fingers. He suddenly hated everyone at the party looking at him.

“You heard what your mother said, General.”

That was Dad’s resonant voice and it meant the fight was lost. Johnny jerked around, shot one last glare at the people, and ran upstairs, tears coming into his eyes.

He twisted the brass knob of Grandma’s door. She sat playing chess with Uncle Flinny before the great glaring window. Sunlight glinted off her glasses. She hardly looked up.

“Pardon me, Granny, but—”

She shifted her cane against her thin knee. “Well?”

“There’s a body in the attic and nobody’ll believe me—”

“Go away, Johnny!”

“But,” he cried, “there’s a body!”

“We know it, we know it! Now run get Cousin William a bottle of cognac! Scat! Go!”

Johnny went and got the cognac from the wine pantry, rapped on Cousin William’s door, and thought he heard indrawn breath behind the paneling. Then Cousin William whispered quickly.