Was It Murder?

There was no “he said, she said” since she was dead.
It was only “he said.” And he said the gun went off
accidentally while he was cleaning it. He said he didn’t
mean to kill her.

She was a grad assistant with my husband. He had lent
her some books. A police officer came to our apartment.
Said books with my husband’s name in them were
found in her apartment. Wanted to know what we knew
about the boyfriend.

Rumors circulated that she may have been pregnant.
They had been seen leaving a clinic. In response to
a greeting of hey, how ya doing? he said not that great.
Another police officer shared that the boyfriend’s explanation
of how the death occurred was not plausible. The pattern
of brain tissue on the wall told a different story. But nothing
could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The boyfriend
was never charged.

Several months later, boyfriend visited us at our apartment.
He was with his new girlfriend, one of my students from
the previous semester. She called me by my first name.
We never got our books back.

Solitary Death

A police officer came to our small apartment.
Not wanting to upset me, they asked if they could
speak to my husband outside. They wanted to know
if we had heard anything the night before—
like banging on a wall, or someone calling for help.

The bathroom in our apartment shared a wall
with the bathroom in the apartment next to ours—
where someone was found dead that morning.
The deceased had vomited a large amount of blood.
Blood was everywhere.

The man lived alone; didn’t have visitors.
Maybe his family lived too far away to visit.
Or perhaps they didn’t have time for visits.
But they had no trouble swooping in and
taking items from his apartment after his death.

Leslie Anne Perry, PhD, is a professor emerita in the Clemmer College of Education at East Tennessee State University, and is the author of 19 self-published poetry books. She met her husband in Fayette, Missouri, in 1954, when she was nine and he was ten. In 2023, they celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary at their home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.