Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (4 page)

And amazingly, he felt it, too.

That was what was so shocking—that it was mutual. After a lifetime of considering and dissecting, I was seriously in danger of being swept away by something I couldn’t control.

Oh—sure I could! I slapped myself lightly on one cheek. All I had to do was
never see Martin
Bartell again.

That would be the honorable thing. I was dating Aubrey Scott, a fine man and a handsome one, and I should count myself lucky.

Which introduced a drearily familiar train of thought.

Where was my relationship with Aubrey going? We’d been dating for several months now, and I was sure his congregation (including my mother and her husband) expected great things.

Of course, someone had told Aubrey about my involvement in the Real Murders deaths—due to my membership in a club devoted to discussing old murder cases, my half-brother Phillip and I had almost gotten killed—and we’d talked about it a little. But on the whole, other people seemed to consider our relationship suitable and unsurprising.

We found each other attractive, we were both Christians (though I was certainly not a very good one), neither of us drank more than the occasional glass of wine, and we both liked reading and popcorn and going to the movies. He enjoyed kissing me; I liked being kissed by him. We were fond of each other and respected each other.

But I would be a terrible minister’s wife, inwardly if not outwardly. He must know that by now. And he wouldn’t be right for me even if he was a—well, a librarian.

But I hated to do anything fast and drastic. Aubrey deserved better than that. My het-up feelings for Martin Bartell might disappear as suddenly as they’d appeared. And at least half of me fervently hoped those feelings would vanish. There was something degrading about this.

Also something terribly exciting, the other half admitted.

The phone rang just as I was about to go through my whole thought cycle again.

“Roe, are you all right?” Aubrey was so concerned it hurt me.

“Yes, Aubrey, I’m fine. I guess my mother called you.”

“She did, yes. She was very upset about poor Mrs. Greenhouse, and worried about you.”

Maybe that wasn’t exactly what Mother had been feeling, but Aubrey put the nicest interpretation on everything. Though he was certainly not naive.

“I’m all right,” I said wearily. “It was just a tough morning.”

“I hope the police can catch whoever did this, and do it fast,” Aubrey said, “if there’s someone out there preying on lone women. Are you sure you want to go into this real estate business?”

“No, actually I’m not sure,” I said. “But not because of Tonia Lee Greenhouse. My mother has to carry a calculator all the time, Aubrey.”

“Oh?” he said cautiously.

“She has to know all about the current interest rate, and she has to be able to figure out what someone’s house payment will be if he can sell his house for X amount so he can put that down on the next house, which costs twenty thousand dollars more than the house he has ...”

“You didn’t realize that was involved in house-selling?” Aubrey was trying hard to sound neutral.

“Yes, I did,” I said, trying equally hard not to snap. “But I was thinking more of the house-showing part of it. I like going into people’s houses and just looking.” And that was the long and short of it.

“But you don’t like the nuts and bolts part,” Aubrey prompted, probably trying to figure out if I was nosy, childish, or just plain weird.

“So maybe it’s not for me,” I concluded, leaving him to judge.

“You have time to think about it. I know you want to do
something
—right?” My being completely at liberty, except for the nominal duty of listening to any complaints that might arise from the townhouse tenants in Mother’s complex, made Aubrey very uneasy. Single women worked full-time, and for somebody other than their mothers.

“Sure.” He was not the only one who found the concept of a woman of leisure unsettling.

“Did your mother mention her plan for tomorrow night to you. Oh,
damn.
”The dinner at her house?“

“Right. Did you want to go? I guess we could tell her we had already made other plans.” But Aubrey sounded wistful. He loved the food Mother’s caterer served. “Caterer” was a fancy term for Lucinda Esther, a majestic black woman who made a good living “cooking for people who are too lazy,” as she put it. Lucinda also got extra mileage out of being a “character,” a factor of which she was fully aware.

Oh, this was going to be awful. And yet, maybe it would clear the air in some way.

“Yes, let’s go.”

“Okay, honey. I’ll pick you up about six-thirty.”

“I’ll see you then,” I said absently.

“Bye.”

I said good-bye and hung up. My hand stayed on the receiver.

Honey? Aubrey had never called me an endearment before. It sounded to me as if something was happening with Aubrey ... or maybe he was just feeling sentimental because I’d had a very bad experience that morning?

Suddenly I saw Tonia Lee Greenhouse as she had been in that huge bed. I saw the elegant matching night tables flanking the bed. I could see the strange color of Tonia Lee’s body against the white sheets, the red of the dress folded so peculiarly at the foot of the bed. I wondered where Tonia Lee’s shoes were—under the bed?

And speaking of missing things—here a thought hovered on the edge of my mind so insistently that my eyes went out of focus as I tried to pin it down. Missing things. Or something at least not included in my mental picture of the bed and surrounding floor. The night tables ...

There it was. The night tables. My mental camera zoomed in on their surfaces. I picked up the phone and punched in seven familiar numbers.

“Select Realty,” said Patty Cloud’s On-the-Ball voice.

“Patty, this is Roe. Let me speak to my mother if she’s handy, please.”

“Sure, Roe,” said Patty in her Warm Personal voice. “She’s on another line—wait, she’s off.

Here you go.”

“Aida Queensland,” said my mother. Her new name still gave me a jolt.

“When you first listed the Anderton house,” I said without preamble, “think about going in the bedroom with Mandy.”

“Okay, I’m there,” she said after a moment.

“Look at the night tables.”

A few seconds of silence.

“Oh,” she said slowly. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I have to call Detective Liggett right away. The vases are missing.”

“She should check the formal dining room, too. There was a crystal bowl with crystal fruit in there that cost a fortune.”

“I’ll call her right away.”

We hung up at the same moment.

It had been years since I was at the Anderton house, but I still remembered how impressed I’d been that instead of tissues or bed lamps, Mandy’s parents had Chinese vases on their bedside tables. In her charming way, Mandy had bragged about how much those vases had cost. But she had never liked them. So when I realized they were gone, I didn’t for an instant think she’d had them packed up and shipped to Los Angeles. She would have left them to coax a buyer. Anyone who would have enough money to consider buying her parents’ house would not want to steal vases, right?

I dumped an indignant Madeleine from my lap and moved around the room restlessly. I was standing at the window staring out at my patio, thinking I’d have to bring in my outdoor chairs and table and store them down in the basement during the coming weekend, when the phone rang. I reached out to the kitchen wall extension.

“It’s me again,” said my mother. “We’re having a meeting this afternoon for everyone on the staff, two o’clock. You’re going to need to come, too.”

“Did the police question Mackie?”

“They took him to the police station.”

“Oh, no.”

“It turns out Detective Liggett—I mean Detective
Smith
— was already here when I was on the phone with you. I’m sure this all happened as a result of what I told Jack Burns, about Mackie taking Tonia Lee the key. I was only thinking of Mackie having possibly seen who was at the house with Tonia Lee. It didn’t occur to me until too late that they might pick up Mackie as a suspect.”

“Do you think it’s because he’s—?”

“Oh, I’d hate to think that. I hope our police force is not like that. But you know, being black may work in his favor, actually. Tonia Lee would never have gone to bed with Mackie. She didn’t like blacks at all.”

“They might just say he raped her.”

There was a long pause while Mother digested this. “You know, somehow it didn’t.. . well, I can’t say why. And I only looked for a second. But it didn’t look like a rape, did it?”

I paused in turn. Tonia completely undressed, the sheets pulled back as if two people had actually gotten in the bed together . .. Mother was right, it looked like a seduction scene, not a hasty rape, even though the leather thongs might indicate force. My first thought had been consensual kinky sex. But maybe Mother and I were both factoring in Tonia Lee’s known reputation for infidelity. When I suggested this to Mother, she agreed.

“Anyway, I’m sure Mackie is not involved,” she said staunchly. “I like him a lot, he’s a hard worker, and for the year he’s been here, he’s been totally honest and aboveboard. Besides... he is too smart to put the key back.”

After we’d hung up, I wondered about that. Why had the Anderton house key been put back on the hook so mysteriously? That key had enabled us to enter and find the body.

I thought a number of interesting questions depended on the answer to that riddle.

The office meeting ought to be stimulating.

I ate an apple and a left-over chicken breast while flipping through Jane Engle’s copy of
The
Murderers’ Who’s Who.
I read the entries for some of my favorite cases and wondered if an updated edition would include our local murderous duo whose dreadful but brief career had made national headlines; or perhaps our only other claim to fame might rate an entry, the disappearance of an entire family from a house outside of Lawrenceton. That had been—

what?—five or six years ago.

My familiarity with old murder cases was my mother’s despair. Now, since the disbandment of the Real Murders club, I had no one to share it with. I sighed over spilt milk.

After putting my dishes in the dishwasher, I glumly mounted the stairs to get ready for the meeting. For one thing, I had to brush all the cat hairs off my skirt.

* * *

Mother’s office building, with its soothing gray and blue carpeting and walls, peaceful prints, and comfortable chairs, exuded calm and profitable efficiency. That was Mother’s essence, and she and the office designer had captured it when they renovated the building. Mother had insisted on a conference room, for staff meetings. Every Monday every realtor working for Mother had to attend this meeting. She’d planned to expand, and the room was still more than large enough for the whole staff.

I saw with interest that one of John Queensland’s daughters-in-law had been brought in to answer the phones and take messages while Mother held the meeting. I knew my stepfather’s sons and their wives only slightly, and as I nodded to Melinda Queensland, I tried to figure out what my relationship to her was. Stepsister-in-law? It looked to me as if I was going to be a stepaunt in a few months, but Melinda had had several miscarriages and I wasn’t going to ask.

Melinda was sitting at Patty Cloud’s desk, which of course was not only orderly but also decorated with a tidy plant and a picture in an expensive frame. Patty’s desk faced the front door, and her underling, Debbie Lincoln, had a desk at right angles to it, in effect forming the start of the corridor down to the conference room and Idella’s and Mackie’s offices. In the square created by two walls and the desks, firmly screwed to the wall behind Patty, was the key board, a large pegboard striped with labeled hooks. The more popular letters of the alphabet claimed two or even three hooks. A person of even the feeblest intelligence could figure out the system in seconds, and every other agency in town had something similar.

I snapped out of my study of the key board to find that Melinda was waiting for me to acknowledge her, and her smile was growing strained as I stared at the wall behind her. I gave her a brisk nod and started down the hall to the conference room. I was in time to sit at Mother’s left, a chair left vacant deliberately for me, I presumed. All the realtors expected me to inherit this business from Mother, and saw my presence in the office this week as the first step in my becoming second-in-command.

This was far from true. I had quit my job at the library on a whim, and I already regretted it more than I ever would have believed possible. (Of course, even regretting it mildly was more than I ever would have believed possible.)

Idella Yates, a frail-looking fair woman in her mid-thirties, divorced with two children, slid into the chair at the end of the table and put a briefcase on the table in front of her as if building a barrier between herself and the room. Her short straight hair was the color of dead winter grass.

Eileen Norris bustled in, carrying a large stack of papers and looking abstracted. Eileen was Mother’s second-in-command, the first realtor Mother had hired after she’d gone out on her own.

Eileen was big, brassy, loud, and cheerful on the surface; underneath, she was a barracuda. Patty Cloud, the receptionist/secretary, groomed to a tee, had perched her bottom dead in the center of the chair next to Idella’s. Patty, who was maybe all of twenty-four, baffled and irritated me far more than she should have. Patty worked hard at being perfect, and she had damned near succeeded. She was always helpful on the phone, always turned out high-quality work, never forgot anything, and never, never came to work in anything frumpy or out of style or even wrinkled. She was already studying for her realtor’s license. She would probably pass at the top of her group.