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From Murder in Mayberry
Revisited...
I
wondered just how in the hell I was going to tell Helen Crump that she
had been viciously murdered a week earlier, lying spread-eagle across
the bed in my room at the Mayberry Hotel, her throat slit from ear to
ear, the blood collecting in twin pools on the chenille bedspread. This
was no ghost staring politely at me, sitting at one of the side chairs
of the Mayberry
Courthouse, her two suitcases next to her. This was no spirit of
Hamlet’s royal father, prowling the parapets of the castle Elsinore,
seeking retribution for his own ghastly murder at his brother’s hand.
This was the real Helen Crump, not the bogus schoolmarm who had gone by
the name of Helen Jackson and who had been in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Still, the townspeople, provincial as they were, would
never understand. “How can there be two Helens?” Floyd would quiz his
patrons, one at a time, as they came to the “Best Clip Joint in Town”
to have their ears lowered for one dollar – plus tip. “How do we
explain this to the good citizens of Mayberry?” their fat, little Mayor
Pike would ask, dumbfounded and agitated, at the emergency meeting of
the Town Council. But most of all, how in God’s name would the High
Sheriff himself, Andy Taylor, react to a second, dead ringer
doppelganger of the lady whom he had loved so dearly and who had died
so abruptly?
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