A Rose For Emily

It was around 4:30 when I got the call that they found a dead body in Miss Emily's house. My first thought was who could it have been, and why did this sweet old woman do such a horrible thing. As I arrived to Miss Emily's house I see that almost the whole town was standing outside her house. I knew she had her funeral service earlier today but that was sometime ago. I also knew everyone was just sticking around to be nosey because that was how this town was. Everyone knew everyone.

As soon as I stepped foot in the house I could smell the dead body. It smelt like it had been there for years, and who knew it probably had been. I walked up the stairs and into the room with the dead body. I could not believe what I saw. The more I observed the room I noticed she had a wedding dress and many other things that a bride would wear. I noticed that his suit and tie were carefully folded and hung next to him in the chair. All he had on was a nightshirt, as he lay there all rotted and dusted. Then I noticed the pillow that laid right beside him. It had a hair on it that was black and grey. This made me think that Miss Emily was the one who murdered this man, because she is the only one that lived in this house with black and grey hair.

I took the black hair as evidence and immediately left Miss Emily's and went straight to the station. I decided since I didn't know Miss Emily as well as many of the other people in town did, that I would ask the people around the town if Miss Emily might have had a relationship with anyone in the past. The only person they ever said she dated was Homer Barron. They also said that one day he just left and never came back. I found this piece of information to be very odd.

It wasn't until days later that an old man stepped foot into my office. He said that he used to work at the drug store down the street many years ago. He asked me about the body that was in Miss Emily's house the other day. Then he told me he might have some useful information about the body, and what he thinks happened to it. I told him to have a seat and let me know what was on his mind. The old man told me that one-day when he was working at the drug store that Miss Emily came in wanting to buy rat poison.  He said she didn't just get any type of rat poison, but she got Arsenic. I asked what was Arsenic, and he told me that it could kill anything up to an elephant. I then asked him who he thinks the body was. He told me he thought it was Homer Barron, and that Miss Emily used the rat poison to kill him one night. The old man stood up from the chair looked right at me and said “Don’t you think it is weird that one day a woman comes into the drug store wanting to buy rat poison, and the next day Homer Barron is never seen again".

After the old man left my office I knew who the dead body was and the killer. But to me there was no need to keep wasting my time and energy on a case that had no meaning. Miss Emily was dead, it wasn't like I could go down to her house and arrest her for killing the love of her life. It was obvious that the night he went over to her house he was going to say goodbye. But that was not what Miss Emily wanted. I mean this was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. When she realized that he no longer loved her she had to find a way to keep him around. Her plan was to poison him and have him by her side forever. That secret room that no one had ever been into was Miss Emily's life. Everything she ever wanted was in that room.