NaNoWriMo: Murder in Wilson Park, Chapter 2

Sally didn’t really like chair yoga. She thought it was a copout. It was an old people’s thing – an accommodation to age – and she didn’t go for it. She kept her yoga mat in the car and could still do a mean downward dog. At 74, Sally was slim and thrifty. She walked a couple of miles a day, shopped at Goodwill, and put up her own storm windows. She wore t-shirts from neighborhood clean-ups and budget protests, had the newspaper delivered to her front porch every day, and cut her own hair.

Her friends couldn’t have been more different. They thought chair yoga was a real workout. When she was younger, Sally would have called Debbie and Esmeralda fancy. What Sally might wear for a funeral or to dress up for a party (which never happened), her two friends wore everyday. Color coordinated tops and slacks, shoes and boots to match every season, and jewelry – big necklaces and earrings. The two of them went shopping at the mall every Saturday. Sally used to feel left out but she didn’t anymore. There was never anything she wanted to buy.

As different as they were, they had one very big thing in common. All three had dead husbands. That, and the fact that they were the only three women at the senior center who could shoot pool cut through their fashion differences gave them a bond. They became pals, loyal through thick and thin and chair yoga. The old guys at the senior center called them the Three Dorothys. Nobody knew why.

“Oh look! Here come the Three Dorothys! How ya doin’ ladies?” Carl’s greeting was the same every single day. He volunteered to man the front desk in the morning so the center director could meet with the cafeteria crew, give them the menu for the day’s lunch, and unlock the refrigerators. He was the center’s greeter and he loved the job more than the real one he used to have working for McMillan Tractors. “Whoa! Slow down, girls. What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing. We just found a dead person on the sidewalk. We have to go wash.” Sally held the bathroom door open for Esmeralda and Debbie.

“Why are we washing? We didn’t touch anything.” Esmeralda collapsed on the bench next to the full length mirror. She shifted her weight on the embroidered bench pillows like she intended to sit there for a good long time, maybe read a book or file her nails. She was tired, finding a dead body on the way to chair yoga had worn her out.

“We’re washing because it was a disgusting thing to find. And because we have to compose ourselves and not go running around the center like hysterical women.” Sally pushed her jacket sleeves up to her elbows, waved her hand under the soap dispenser, and kicked on the water. Hands-free stuff was cool, she thought, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to avoid touching stuff. There was so much other stuff to touch – dead people and the doors they probably just walked through for two – the soap dispenser and faucet seemed like small potatoes in comparison.

“When we go back out there, everybody’s going to ask what’s going on. They saw the Sheriff’s car and the ambulance so they know something happened. What are we going to tell them?” Debbie applied a fresh dusting of blush and smoothed her eyebrows back into their perfect arches.

“We tell them that somebody killed Fat Jacob.” Sally held her hands under the blower. “We tell them we were walking up the back way and found him laying there, splat on the sidewalk just outside the door.

“When did he become Fat Jacob?” Esmeralda was always worried about labels. “We never called him that when he was alive.”

“He looked way fatter laying there, blown up, like someone’d taken a bicycle pump to him.” Sally motioned that it was time to go back out in the center, join the morning coffee group, tell the story of what they found, pretend it was a terrible thing that Fat Jacob was dead. She didn’t say all this but her friends got the drift. They were simpatico that way, always reading each other’s minds.

“Who the hell would kill Jacob? That’s what I don’t get.” Carl brought his coffee over to the table where the Three Dorothys sat reading the November class schedule for the center. Sally hoped that actual yoga might finally replace chair yoga but no such luck. She looked up at the clock. They had ten minutes until the excitement of chair yoga would commence. Yippee.

“Probably one of them bums from that camp down there by the lake. Bunch of no-goods. One of ’em probably wanted to rob Jacob or was just crazy and went after him. That’s who I think.” Sally rolled her eyes. It was Ron, the big-mouth fishing lure guy, know-it-all jerk who led the charge on protesting the County using part of the senior center for a homeless warming room last winter. He stood up at the public hearing and talked about lice and diseases and how all the old folks were so vulnerable and would be put in danger if homeless people slept in a room nobody ever used after everybody who used the senior center had gone home. It was disgusting, Sally thought. He was disgusting. Still, he could be right. Maybe it was one of those guys down in that camp. Nobody knew them. There could be murderers down there.

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NaNoWriMo is a national novel writing challenge. 50,000 words by the end of November. This year, my husband, Howard Snyder, and I are collaborating on a mystery novel. You are invited to read, comment, suggest plot lines, laugh at our folly, or cover your eyes and run to the next blog to read. Either way, we’re going to keep at it this November until we run out of gas, which could be tomorrow. We can only hope.