I FOUND MURPHY

As a child, our family dog was an irish setter, who, duh, was named Murphy. He came from a champion bloodline of bird dogs and was trained in all manner of dead bird retrieval. When he joined our family, those dead birds were replaced with tennis balls, and his once predatory skills were reduced to really cool tricks with tennis balls. He was also prone to wander, sometimes for days, but he would always return, full of burrs and hungry, but there was no question that he knew how to find his way home after his wanderlust subsided.
When I was 12 we moved to 512 Grace Lane, called such because the Grace family owned the surrounding property of ours, and thier road was the only access. The Grace family had the monopoly on garbage pick up in the hill country at the time, were southern baptists to the extreme, and pumped out a variety of, erm, challenged successors to the the Grace garbage dynasty. The two daughters went to my school and were the constant ridicule of the other kids...one was called penquin, the other waffle wiffer...I too, engaged in this teasing until I got involved in the special education department as an aide and got to know Sherry and Nancy...the aformentioned penquin and waffle wiffer...at the encouragement of my dad who worked with the retarded for the state.
Sherry and Nancy had an older brother, Roy...he was in his early twenties, and I only ever saw him on the garbage trucks. Except for two times. Roy was not right...not by a long shot.
The first time, he was pounding on our door, weilding an ax, screaming at us about teasing his sisters. I tried explaining that I was trying to help his sisters not tease them, but he would have no part of it and stormed off. I'm not sure, but the ax was probably just a prop to intimidate us...but considering he was in the most shallow end of the gene pool, he was probably chopping firewood and ruminating on his sisters torment and just clicked off and marched up the hill to our house ax in hand.
The next time he had come to warn us to stay off thier property, all of us. After that, anything below the hill from our house was off limits. This was before westlake hills was littered with subdivisions and you could wander for miles in undisturbed woods out where we lived. I ignored the warning...I loved these woods, all of them, including the woods owned by the Graces. Wildcat Creek ran through the property and some of the best pools were below the hill.
Murphy took one of his walkabouts shortly after the last visit and when he didn't return in a week, we started to worry. Time passed, and even though we tried to be optimistic, after a couple of months, we accepted he was gone. but what had happened to him?
Several months later, I was in the forbidden zone, running along wildcat creek and I came across a skeleton on the trail...the skeleton of a dog, a red haired dog...bones and red hair, and a collar.
Murphy's collar.
I ran home as fast as I could and burst into the house and announced to my mom...
"I found Murphy"!
We could never prove what happened, but I am sure that Roy Grace killed him.
And I did what any 12 year old would do under the circumstances, I waged war on the Graces.
They had killed Murphy, a member of my family, and for that they would pay.