1 A Small Case of Murder by Lauren Carr

interjected. “Did the barn have electricity?”
    “Nah! The place was ancient. Johnny and I had flashlights. I had taken off my tuxedo jacket and put it down on the hay for Lulu. When she laid down on it, she said there was some-thing lumpy under her. When she felt the hay under the jacket, she shrieked.” He chuckled at the memory. “She thought it was a dead animal. At the time, I thought it was funny. It was such a high-pitched shriek. Johnny was getting a little annoyed with all the noise we were making.”
    “I can imagine,” Joshua commented in a soft voice.
    Rick stared into space while recalling what had happened next. “You should have heard her scream when we saw those eyes on that man’s face when I shone that flashlight on him, I’ll never forget it.”
    Murphy reminded them of Lulu’s words in her letter. “Lulu said that the memory was seared into her brain.”
    “I believe that.” Rick cleared his throat before continuing. “He had been shot or stabbed. There was all this dried blood on his chest. I thought it was a joke, and he was a store dummy because he was so stiff, but then—We went and got Sheriff Delaney.”
    “All of you together?” Joshua asked.
    “None of us had the guts to stay alone with that dead body.”
    “Then what happened?”
    Rick let out a quick breath. “There was no body.”
    “It was gone?”
    Nodding his head, Rick recalled, “I led Delaney right back to the stall where we all saw it. Johnny and I even dug through that old musty hay with our bare hands looking for it, but it was gone. The sheriff made some sort of joke about him going back to the cemetery on the hill where he belonged, but that was all the joking he did. He threatened to take us all in and call our folks for filing a false police report.” 
    Joshua wondered, “Why didn’t he?”
    “I think it was because he did half-believe us. I mean, your daddy never lied. He told me once that when he was a little kid that his mom caught him in a lie and he couldn’t sit down for a week. He never told another lie ever again and everyone knew it. So, when Johnny told Delaney that there was a dead body there, he had to have believed him.”
    Ruth went into the kitchen to retrieve another beer for her husband. When she wordlessly asked if he wanted another, Joshua declined with a shake of his head while mouthing, “No, thank you.”
    “What happened to it?” Joshua sensed Rick had been struggling to answer that question for decades.
    Rick’s tone held a hint of fear despite the safety of years and distance. “The killer had to have moved him. That’s what Johnny said…” His voice trailed off.
    Joshua sat forward. “What did my father say happened?”
    “That the killer moved him,” he whispered.
    “If he was as stiff as a board, then rigor mortis had already set in,” Joshua said. “It takes a while for rigor mortis to set in.”
    J.J. was puzzled. “But if he had been dead for a while, why would the killer have moved him after they found him?”
    “Because he didn’t want him found,” Rick answered the obvious.
    “My son’s point,” Joshua explained, “is well taken. If the killer left the victim in an abandoned barn long enough for rigor mortis to set in, how did he even know you found him? Plus, why go to the trouble of moving the body again after you left to get the sheriff?”
    “Like Johnny said, the killer was there when we found him.” Rick looked questioningly at Ruth. She appeared equally puzzled.
    “He stuck around in an abandoned barn hours after offing the guy?” Joshua shook his head. “That makes no sense. If I was the killer, I would have been long gone.”
    The Pendletons didn’t offer any other suggestion.
    Joshua’s mind was working on the answer to his own question. He stood up to gaze across the yard at the two young boys going down the slide.
    Murphy voiced a thought. “Someone had to have told him that the body had been found. The killer came back to move