Mama shouted, “A hundred dollars!” which startled Teensy, and began a whole new round of barking, along with a discussion of supply and demand and the principles of capitalism.

Just kidding about that last part. It started Mama and Maddie on the topic of what a bad person I am for taking advantage of nature-wary rich folk who can’t tell a rat snake from a rattlesnake.

“Can we just eat, please?” Marty finally said. “All this arguing is making my head hurt.”

We all hushed up, quick. Marty suffers terrible migraines. Sometimes, they’re bad enough to send her to bed in a darkened room for a full day. None of us wanted to be to blame for one of those headaches.

Maddie opened the pizza boxes and started divvying up the slices onto the good china.

“You know what I always say, girls: Life’s too short to eat off paper plates.” Mama topped off hers and Marty’s glasses from a cold box of Rambling Rosé wine.

I grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge, and got Maddie a glass of tap water with ice. Teensy circled the table, looking for the easiest mark. He bypassed Maddie and me for Mama, who plucked a pepperoni slice from her pizza and slipped it to him under her chair.

“That’s why that dog begs, Mama,” I said. “You’ve taught him all he needs to do is stand there and look pitiful.”

Mimicking Teensy, Maddie turned soulful, starving dog eyes on us. Marty and I laughed. “I’ve seen that same expression,” I said. “That’s how Mama looks when one of us is eating butterscotch pie. No wonder she loves that dog so much. He’s just like her when it comes to mooching hand-outs.”

Mama scooped Teensy off the floor and into her lap. A shower of white dog hair fell onto her blueberry-colored pantsuit. “Come up here, you darlin’ dog.” She nuzzled his neck. “You’re Mama’s little baby, aren’t you? You’d never criticize or make fun of me, would you?”

The dog licked her face. When Mama kissed him on the mouth, I nearly lost the bite of pizza I’d just swallowed.

“Mama, are you still planning on having Teensy be your ring bearer?” Marty asked the question in a careful, neutral tone.

We’d all tried to talk Mama out of that plan. But she wouldn’t be dissuaded, not even when we told her it wasn’t very Gone with the Wind to have a Pomeranian prance down the aisle with wedding rings tied to a satin pillow secured to his back like a miniature saddle.

“Teensy’s a member of the family, girls,” she’d announced, and that was that.

She’d even bought him a little vest and bowtie in celadon-colored satin to match the ring pillow. I could hardly wait for the wedding pictures.

“Of course I’m having him carry our rings, Marty.” Mama held up Teensy for our inspection. A few stray hairs floated onto my pizza slice.

“Look how adorable Mama’s little darlin’ is! Besides, Betty at the salon already helped me find him the cutest little top hat from that Wide World of the Web. Those people with the Internet are going to put a rush shipment on it, so it’ll be here in time for the wedding.”

And here I’d thought the ceremony couldn’t get any tackier.

“Now, don’t forget, girls,” she continued, “our final fitting for the dresses is Wednesday morning. And then the shower is Thursday night at Betty’s. She says she has all kinds of fun games planned.”

My stomach formed a hard knot around the beer and pizza. I loathed bridal showers, with their organized gaiety. Mama had invited most of the female population of Himmarshee. There’d be enough estrogen in the place to make me start smiling at babies and weeping at sad movies. Most of the invited guests would probably show, too. Everybody wanted to see how a woman about to embark on her fifth marriage would manage to blush when she opened the gift wrapping on yet another sexy negligee.

I was just about to point out that Mama seemed to be going a bit over the top, considering this wasn’t the first, or even the fourth, time she’d tied the knot, when a sound from outside stopped the words in my throat.

“Shhhh.” I held up my hand. “Did y’all hear that?”

Maddie cocked her head, her pizza stalled in midair. Marty brushed a lock of blond hair behind an ear, as if to listen harder. Mama put Teensy, now barking and squirming, on the floor. The dog flew toward the living room, his nails scrabbling across peach-colored tile. He launched himself against the front window like a cartoon dog, howling at whatever was outside.

“I don’t hear anything but that ridiculous animal,” Maddie said.

“It sounded like a scream,” I said. “I think it came from Alice and Ronnie’s house.”

Within moments, there was a loud pounding at Mama’s front door. A woman’s frantic voice called from the porch. “Let me in, Rosalee.”

We jumped up from the table. “That’s Alice,” Mama said, as we rushed to the living room.

“It’s awful.” The tremor in Alice’s voice came right through the front window. “Dead. Bloody. Somebody left it on my front porch.”

When I opened the door, Maddie grabbed a hold of Alice. She was white and trembling; her eyes glazed. I hoped she wasn’t going to pass out.

“Get her onto the couch,” I told Maddie, who did so without argument.

“Who would do such a thing?” Alice muttered the words, not really focusing on any one of us. “Especially now.”

Once Alice was seated, Marty asked her, “What is it? How can we help?”

“I can’t talk about it. I don’t want to see it again.” Alice’s hands tugged at the fabric of the same faded housedress she’d worn that morning at the VFW. “The stench. It’s horrible. Would you go over and get rid of it for me?

“Well, what …” Mama began, but I put a restraining hand on her arm.

Whatever was dead on Alice’s front porch clearly had her in a state. With everything she’d been through, the least we could do was take care of this without a lot of back-and-forth and fuss.

“Mama, why don’t you pour Alice a little drop of that wine you and Marty had? We’ll go on over there and see what we can do.”

Maddie got a cast-iron frying pan from the stove top. Marty grabbed a heavy cane from the umbrella stand in the hallway. We started for the door.

“Mace?”

Alice’s voice, a bit stronger now, stopped us. I turned around. The color was returning to her face. She took a tiny sip from the wine glass Mama poured.

“I don’t think you’ll need those weapons,” she said. “But you better take a shovel and a big trash bag. It’s not pretty.”

_____

We crept toward Alice’s house, hugging the picket fence that runs along the property line between the two yards. An orange jasmine bush bloomed out front, snowy white flowers glowing in the moonlight. A scent as sweet as orange soda perfumed the air.

As we got closer to Alice’s, a different odor prevailed. Rusty, like dried blood, and fetid, like rotting meat. I heard the buzz of flies before I saw them. Within seconds, Marty and Maddie heard them, too.

“That doesn’t sound good.” Marty nodded toward Alice’s house.

“Well, she did say something was dead,” I said.

As we approached, I shone a flashlight onto the porch, near the front door, and toward the far railings.

“What is it, Mace?” Maddie and her cast-iron pan were right beside me, so close I felt her breath on my cheek. I got a faint whiff of the grease Mama uses to season the heavy pan, which was preferable to that other smell that hung in the air.

“I don’t know yet, Maddie. I need to get closer to see it. And watch out with that pan. You could knock somebody out.”

“Isn’t that the idea?” she said, lowering it just a little.

At the bottom step, we stopped. The thing that Alice saw was a dark mass in the shadows at the corner of her porch, placed between a white wicker footstool and a pot of geraniums. Flies circled and landed, illuminated in the beam of my flashlight.

“Can you see it yet, Mace?” Marty hid behind me, her hand a tight fist balling up the back of my T-shirt.