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and waddled quickly toward us. For just a second, she reminded me of our grandmother Alice. The housedress, I realized. How long since I’d seen anyone wear a printed housedress with a belt to show where the waist is?
    Mary Alice let down the window on my side and Meemaw leaned in, panting. “Everything in there’s just torn up! I mean everything. They even broke the Elvis magnets on the refrigerator.” Meemaw began to cry and held out her hand. Elvis’s head had left the building. The white jumpsuit and blue suede shoes remained.
    “Kerrigan just loved these.”
    “Get in, Meemaw,” Sister said. “I’ll turn on the air-conditioning.”
    “I want to find Elvis’s head for Kerrigan. It can be glued back on.”
    “We’ll find it after the police come,” Sister said. “We really shouldn’t compromise the crime scene.”
    I looked at her and she seemed serious. Compromise the crime scene? We had only stepped, fallen, touched, and peed on every inch of Meemaw’s trailer.
    Meemaw opened the back door and got in. “Oh, Lord.” She began to cry in earnest. “Anybody got a Kleenex? Something awful’s happened to my Sunshine. I just know it. And that girl’s my heart. Always has been.”
    Mary Alice fished in her purse and handed Meemaw a tissue. “Sunshine’s all right. I’m sure.”
    Meemaw looked up. “You haven’t seen what they did to Kerrigan’s trailer.”
    “But why would someone come in here and do something like that?” I asked.
    Meemaw shrugged and blew her nose. For a few minutes we sat quietly, each lost in our ownthoughts. Mary Alice started the motor and turned on the air; the dogs looked up.
    “Who lives in the other mobile homes, Meemaw?” I asked finally.
    Meemaw sniffed and leaned forward. “The one next to Kerrigan’s with the Christmas lights around it belongs to Eddie. He’s my oldest, works at the chicken plant in Trussville. The one next to that’s Howard’s. He’s the baby. Does something in Atlanta for the city. I’m not sure what, but the Olympics just about wore him out. And then the last one’s Pawpaw’s. The one next to mine.”
    Mary Alice, who had been only half listening, looked up in surprise. “Pawpaw? I thought you were a widow.”
    “A widow? Lord, no, child. Far from it. Pawpaw and I visit each other real frequently. But he likes his privacy. And he’s deaf as a post since that accident he had at NASA ages ago when he was working with Wernher von Braun.” She began to cry again. “How am I going to tell him that there’s a dead man in my trailer and Sunny’s gone? He’ll have an attack.”
    I patted Meemaw’s hand. “He has heart trouble?”
    “No. He just has these attacks.”
    “What about Eddie and Howard?” Mary Alice asked. “Do they have wives and children?”
    “Several. The manufactured homes are the boys’ homes away from home, though.”
    The sound of a siren coming through the briar patch was a relief. It was also a signal to the dogs to rise up as one, their hackles rigid. Meemaw got out of the car and picked up a stick.
    “I’m gonna get you!” she yelled. The dogs slunkback into their somnolent states. “It’s Junior Reuse,” she said through Mary Alice’s window. “Shit!”
    We knew what she was talking about. Sheriff Reuse, while very polite and efficient, is one of the most rigid people God ever put on earth.
    “I’ll bet he’s not sweating,” Sister said to me. “You want to lay money on it?”
    “I’d lose. We heard him laugh the other day, though.”
    “Probably choked on something.”
    The sheriff got out of the patrol car and walked toward us. Meemaw met him, and though we couldn’t hear what she was saying, the words were accompanied by gestures, one of which appeared to be the insertion of a hog-butchering knife into a man’s chest.
    The sheriff listened closely and motioned the man who was with him toward Meemaw’s trailer. The man, I noticed, picked up a stick. Sheriff Reuse took Meemaw by the arm