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Chapter One

I was lying on my stomach under the kitchen sink, eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich and listening to Vivaldi's "Spring" when icy cold hands grasped my ankles. I screamed, reared up, and banged my head on the drainpipe so hard that zigzag lights streaked across my vision. The next thing I was aware of was being dragged from under the sink and hearing a very familiar voice saying, "What on God's earth is wrong with you?"

My chin hit the kitchen floor with a clunk and the zigzag lights streaked again; pain from both blows met in the top of my head.

"Are you okay?"

Maybe, I thought, if I just lay there she would go away -- "she" being my sister, the boss of the world. The pain would lessen, Vivaldi would move on to "Summer" and then to "Winter." Eventually I would get up, get some ice for the knot that was swelling like a balloon on the back of my head. If I were lucky, the brain damage would be minimal.

"You weren't trying to commit suicide, were you, like that poet woman? Tell me you weren't trying to commit suicide, Mouse. That would be a terrible thing to do to me."

"What?" I struggled to a sitting position and looked up at Mary Alice. Way up. She's six feet tall (she says five-twelve) and admits to two hundred fifty pounds.

"Well, I know I haven't been around as much lately since I've been seeing so much of Virgil, but I didn't think you were that depressed."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I touched the back of my head tentatively. "I may have a concussion, but I'm not suicidal."

"Well, what were you doing under the sink?"

"Putting down some of those tile squares. A couple of them weren't sticking good, so I was putting weight on them. Lying on them for a few minutes." I looked down and saw my peanut butter and banana sandwich squished on my T-shirt. "Actually I was eating my lunch. And the poet you're thinking of is Sylvia Plath. And it was a gas stove she stuck her head in, not a sink." I held up a hand. "Help me up."

Sister grabbed me with the cold hands that had started the trouble and pulled me up.

"How come your hands are so cold?" I asked, walking slowly to the kitchen table and casing into a chair. I quickly learned that if I didn't move my head suddenly, the pain was a simple throb. "You scared me half to death."

"I was getting ice for a Coke when I looked over and saw half of you sticking out from under the sink."

"Well, would you get me a couple of pieces now? just wrap them in a paper towel."

She opened the refrigerator. "You want some Coke and some aspirin, too?"

I forgot and nodded my head. Pain rattled around in there.

"I may really be hurt," I said. I closed one eye and then the other. Was the left eye a little blurry?

"Of course you're not. It's just a bump."

Sister handed me the Coke, aspirin, and a paper towel with ice in it. I swallowed the aspirin and tried the eye test again. I looked through the bay window at Woofer's igloo doghouse. Right eye first. Okay. Left eye. A couple of floaters.

"I have floaters in my left eye," I said. "I think I've jarred my retina."

Sister sat down across from me. "Doesn't mean a thing. You're fine. I have floaters all the time. One looks like one of those little white mealy worms Grandpapa used to fish with. Caught all the crappie with. Comes and goes."

"You have a mealy worm floater?"

"Sometimes. Comes and goes."

I held the paper towel with the ice in it against the back of my head and looked at Mary Alice for the first time since she had come in. Really looked at her. The view from the floor didn't count.

"You look very spiffy today," I said. She did. She was wearing a pink pantsuit and her hair was a darker blond than usual. Her bangs were pulled to one side and her skin glowed.

"Thanks. I've been to Delta Hairlines, and there was a lady there giving free makeovers advertising some new cosmetics for seniors. I told her I was only sixty-four, but she gave me one anyway."

"Sixty-four, huh?"

Sister didn't answer that. The truth is that she's sixty-six, but on her last birthday she decided to start counting backward. I'm five years younger than she is, or at least I was. In a couple of years I'll be older than she is and soon she won't qualify for senior-citizen makeovers.

"I bought some of it and would have gotten you some but our skin tones are completely different."

She was telling the truth about this. Everything about us is different. She has olive skin and brown eyes, and I have fair skin and hazel eyes. I used to have strawberry-blond hair, and Sister was a brunette. Now I'm gray and she's usually strawberry-blond. Add to that the fact that I'm a size six petite -- and Lord knows what Sister is -- and is there any wonder that when we were children and she told me I was adopted, that I believed her? So did everybody else. I'm just grateful that we were born at home so there was no chance that we had been mixed up at the hospital.

I closed my right eye again. One of the floaters in the left did look a little like a mealworm. I looked from one side to the other.

"Are you doing that or are you having some kind..."

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Excerpted from Murder Boogies with Elvis by Anne George
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