Free Murder on a Girls' Night Out by Anne George

had indirectly referred to his job as a cook. He seemed satisfied to eat and watch the squirrel still trying to get the bird seed. Which suited me. The applesauce was as good as ever.
    “More?” I asked as he sopped up the last of the applesauce with the last of the toast.
    Henry smiled. “No, thanks. That was wonderful, though.”
    “More coffee?”
    Henry shook his head. “My wife died, Mrs. Hollowell, from a drug overdose. Or at least a reaction to drugs. Cocaine. The doctors said she had an underlying heart problem we didn’t know about and she died. Atrial fibrillation. Maybe if I had gotten her to the emergency room quick enough. But who knows?” Henry looked into his coffee cup as if he expected an answer.
    “Oh, Henry, I’m so sorry.” I was also startled at the suddenness of his confession.
    “Her name was Barbara and she was twenty-three. She was a student, too, and we had been married only a few months. I was the one bought the coke and brought it home, even talked her into trying it.” Henry twisted his coffee cup around and around.
    “You were a user, then?”
    “I wasn’t an addict, if that’s what you mean. Luckily. I was a recreational user. A stupid recreational user. In time things might have changed, though. I’d gotten to the point I enjoyed it more and more.” Henry shook his head. “Stupid.”
    His coffee cup was in danger of sailing off the table. “Let me get you some more coffee,” I said, rescuing it. Henry rubbed his hands together as if he hadn’t noticed the cup was gone.
    “They arrested me for manslaughter.”
    “But how could they do that? For not getting her to the hospital?”
    “I didn’t even know anything was wrong with her. I was in the bedroom, high as a kite, trying to write. Can you imagine?”
    “Yes,” I said, thinking of Faulkner and Fitzgerald.
    “What they said was that I had furnished the lethal drug.”
    “But you didn’t make her take it.”
    “Not physically. They couldn’t make the manslaughter charge hold up. But the charge of buying and sellingdrugs did. A couple of times I’d let the guy next door have some coke. They found out.”
    “Oh, Henry, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
    “There’s a mandatory one-year sentence.”
    “You went to prison?” I gasped.
    “Well, I’d never been in any trouble before, so they put me into a program that’s like a halfway house. You do community work and they even have some counseling for you. I ended up working in a homeless shelter. That’s where I learned how to cook.”
    I put the coffee cup in front of him.
    “I’ve got a record, but I got off easy. I could even have gone back to school if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t have the heart. I kept thinking Barbara was going to walk around every corner, or I’d see some girl with hair the color of hers and I’d forget for just a second what I’d done. That she was gone.”
    Henry picked up his cup and looked me straight in the eye. “That was when I came back to Alabama. My father died when I was a child and my mother remarried and moved to Florida. She’s dead, too, now. But Alabama’s home, and I figured this was the place to get my life together again.” He sipped the coffee. “Things like yesterday don’t help, though.”
    “No,” I agreed, still trying to absorb all he had told me.
    “I don’t know anything about Ed’s murder, Mrs. Hollowell.”
    “I know you don’t, Henry.”
    We sat quietly for a few minutes.
    “I was planning to call you when I got my act together, to say thank you.”
    “To thank me? For what?”
    “I was the only one at Iowa who always knew whento use ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’” His ironic smile was sadder than it should have been.
    “Oh, Henry.” I smiled, but I felt tears burning my eyes. “Let’s peel apples.”
    I spread newspaper on the table for the peelings and Henry pulled the bushel basket over so each of us could reach it.
    “How did you end up at the Skoot ’n’ Boot?” I asked,