Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (8 page)

Jimmy Hunter quickly brought me back to the present. It had been a long time since I’d seen him close up, and he’d aged and coarsened. The basic goodwill that had always lain behind his character seemed to be gone now, replaced by something like confusion, laced with a dose of wondering resentment. How could Jimmy Hunter’s life not be idyllic? he seemed to be wondering. What could possibly be missing? I’d always thought of him as an uncomplicated jock. I saw I would have to revise this assessment of Jimmy just as I’d had to correct my reading of his wife.

“You look great, Roe,” Jimmy said heartily.

“Thanks, Jimmy. How’s the hardware business?”

“Well, it keeps us in hamburger, with steak on the weekends once in a while,” he said casually. “How’s the realty market in Lawrenceton?”

Of course everyone in town had heard by now I’d left the library, and heard and speculated about my legacy from Jane Engle.

“Kind of upset, right now.”

“You mean about Tonia Lee? That gal just didn’t know when to quit, did she?”

“Oh, Jimmy,” Susu protested.

“Now, sugar, you know as well as I do that Tonia Lee would cheat on her husband any time it came in her head to do it. She just did it once too often, with the wrong man at the wrong time.”

As right as he might be, he said this in a very unpleasant way, a way that made me want to defend Tonia Lee Greenhouse. Jimmy was the kind of man who would say a woman deserved to get raped if she wore a low-cut blouse and tight skirt.

“She was unwise,” I said levelly, “but she didn’t deserve to be murdered. No one deserves to be killed for making some mistakes.”

“You’re right,” said Jimmy, backing down instantly, though obviously not changing his opinion at all. “Well, I can see you ladies have a lot to talk about, so I’ll just take myself outside to work in the toolshed. Call me when lunch is ready, Susu.”

“Okay,” she responded warmly. When he was out the back door and down the steps, her face seemed to fold in.

“Oh, Roe, he’s always going out to that toolshed! He’s redone it as a workshop, and he spends hours out there piddling with this or that. He’s a good husband as far as providing goes, and he loves the kids, but I just don’t feel like he really lives here half the time.”

Caught unawares, I couldn’t think of what to say. I patted her shoulder awkwardly, uncomfortable as usual when touching people.

“You know what he does?” Susu asked as she rummaged in the refrigerator and emerged with some leftover dishes. “He goes and looks at houses! When we have this lovely home that I don’t want to give up, ever! He just makes these appointments and looks at houses!” She popped the dishes in the microwave and punched in a time setting. “I don’t know how he explains to the realtors that I’m never with him—I’m sure they expect his wife to come along if he’s really house-hunting. I’ve had people whose homes were for sale ask me how Jimmy liked their house, and I didn’t know anything about it!” Susu grabbed a tissue from a crochet-covered tissue box and blotted her eyes with ferocious intensity. “It’s so humiliating.”

“Oh, Susu,” I said with considerable distress, “I have no idea why Jimmy would do that.” The microwave beeped, and Susu began pulling things out and then got two plates from the cupboard.

“I’ll bet you’ve heard about it, though, haven’t you?” She could tell my answer by my face.

“Everyone has. Even Bethany came home from school asking me if it was true her daddy was peculiar.”

“Maybe this house is just so much yours,” I said hesitantly. I knew it was stupid to open my mouth, but I did it anyway.

“Of course it’s mine,” Susu said grimly. “It’s been my family’s and it’s in my name and I love it and it’s going to stay that way.”

There seemed little more to say. Susu had drawn a line, and her husband was stepping over it, his fanciful house-hunting an odd symptom of a deep dissatisfaction.

Or at least that was the way I saw it. (I am as bad at practicing amateur psychology as anyone I know.) I tried to get up and leave, having turned down repeated invitations to eat with them, but Susu determinedly kept me talking, though lunch was seemingly ready. She wanted us to talk about all the other bridesmaids. These reminiscences seemed to feed her something she needed.

Naturally, all of them but me were married; some had been married more than once. Or twice.

“I heard you’ve been dating Aubrey Scott,” Susu said encouragingly.

“We’ve been going out for a few months.”

“What’s it like to date a minister? Does he want to kiss and everything?”

“He wants to kiss; I don’t know about ‘everything.’ He’s got hormones, same as anyone else.” I had to smile at her.

“Oooh, oooh,” said Susu, shaking her head in mock horror. “Roe, you may not have gotten married, but you’ve dated more interesting people than any of us ever dated.”

“Like who?”

“That policeman, for one. And that writer. And now a priest. Don’t the Episcopalians call ‘em priests like Catholics do? And remember, even when you were in high school, you dated. ..”

Now, I knew Susu intended this list to cheer me up, but it had exactly the opposite effect.

Like looking at my closetful of bridesmaid dresses. So as soon as I could, I started the parting process. As I was getting into my car, I said as casually as I could, “Did Little Jim have a football game Wednesday evening? I thought I saw your van parked at the Youth Club field.”

“What time?”

“Oh, I guess it was about five-thirty.”

“Let me think. No, no, Wednesday afternoon is Bethany’s Girl Scout meeting, and Little Jim has Tae Kwon Do at the same time, so Jimmy has to take him to that while I go with Bethany to Scouts. Jimmy has Wednesday afternoons off anyway—that’s the afternoon the store is closed, because it’s open on Saturdays. I think the older league had a game scheduled for Wednesday.

There are lots of vans like ours.”

“Little Jim’s Tae Kwon Do is in that building in the shopping center on Fourth Street?”

“Yes, right by that carpet and linoleum place.”

“Does Jimmy get to stay and watch Little Jim’s class?”

“No, the teacher won’t let parents stay except for special occasions. He says it distracts the boys, especially the littler ones. But the lessons are just half an hour or forty-five minutes. So Jimmy takes a book and reads in the car, or runs an errand. And it’s right before supper, too, at five o’clock, so on Wednesdays I have to have leftovers or run home from Scouts and get something out of the freezer to microwave.”

Susu didn’t seem to think it was strange I was interested in her family’s schedule, something she enjoyed detailing anyway. Like any specialist, she wanted to air her knowledge.

As I finally took my leave and drove away, I was thinking that if Jimmy Hunter had killed Tonia Lee, he’d done it on a tight time budget. Susu hadn’t actually said her husband had eaten with the family on Wednesday night, but she hadn’t mentioned it was different from any other Wednesday, either. So I had to decide this was inconclusive. But the odds were a little more in favor of Jimmy Hunter’s being innocent. It looked as if Patty Cloud’s favorite suspect had been sitting outside the Tae Kwon Do studio with a newspaper or a book, or sitting at the country pine table eating supper, at the time Tonia Lee Greenhouse had been killed.

THERE WAS a blinking light on my answering machine.

The first message was from my mother. “If you haven’t taken anything by Donnie Greenhouse’s, you need to do that. I took by a chicken casserole this morning, Franklin Farrell said he was going to take a fruit salad of some kind, and Mark Russell from Russell and Dietrich says his wife is making a broccoli casserole. But no one’s made a dessert. I know her mother’s church will take a lot of stuff, but if you could make a pie, that would mean that the realtors had provided a full meal. Okay?”

“Make pie,” I wrote on my notepad. (Despite the fact that I was not a realtor, and I supposed Eileen or Idella knew how to make a pie—probably Mackie, too, for that matter.)

“This is Martin Bartell,” began the second message. “I’ll see you tonight at your mother’s.”

I swear the sound of his voice made something vibrate in me. I had it bad, no doubt about it.

It was a helpless feeling, kind of like developing rabies, I figured. Though they had shots now for that, didn’t they? I wished I could take a shot and be over this thing with Martin Bartell.

Aubrey was sexy, too, and a lot safer; perhaps, despite my doubts, our relationship was viable.

With an effort, I dismissed Martin from my thoughts and began to rummage through the freezer to see if I had enough pecans for pecan pie.

Not enough pecans. Not enough coconut for German chocolate pie. (Yes, pie. I never make the cake.) Not any cream cheese for cheesecake. I turned my search to the cabinets. Ha! There was a can of pumpkin that must have come out of Jane’s cupboard. I would make a pumpkin pie.

I took off my navy blue sweater and put on my old red apron. After tying back my hair, which tends to fly into batter or get caught in dough, I set to work. After I cleaned up and ate my lunch—granola and yogurt and fruit—the pie was ready to go to Donnie Greenhouse’s.

Tonia Lee and Donnie’s modest home was surrounded by cars. I recognized Franklin Farrell’s Lincoln parked right in front, and several more cars looked familiar, though I am not much of a one for remembering cars. Franklin Farrell’s was the only powder blue Lincoln in Lawrenceton, and had been the subject of much comment since he’d bought it.

Donnie Greenhouse was right inside the door. He looked white and stunned and yet somehow—exalted. He took my hand, the one that wasn’t balancing the pie, and pressed it with both of his.

“You are so kind to come, Roe,” he said with doleful pleasure. “Please sign the guest book.”

Donnie had been handsome when Tonia Lee had married him seventeen years before. I remembered when they’d eloped; it had been the talk of the town, the high-school-graduation-night elopement that had been “so romantic” to Tonia Lee’s foolish mother and “goddamned stupid” to Donnie’s more realistic father, the high school football coach. Tonia Lee seemed to have worn Donnie thin. He’d been a husky football player when they’d married; now he was bony and looked undernourished in every way. Tonia Lee’s horrible death had given Donnie a stature he’d lacked for a long time, but it was not an attractive sight. I was glad to get my hand back, murmur the correct words of condolence, and escape to put the pie in the kitchen, which was already full of more homemade food than Donnie had eaten in the past six months, I’d have been willing to bet.

The cramped little kitchen, which had probably been ideal for Tonia Lee, a minimalist cook, was full of Tonia’s mom’s church buddies, who seemed to be mostly large ladies in polyester dresses. I looked in vain for Mrs. Purdy herself and asked a couple of the ladies, who suggested I try the bathroom.

This seemed a bit odd, but I made my way through the crowd to the hall bathroom. Sure enough, the door was open and Helen Purdy was seated on the (closed) toilet, dissolved in tears, with a couple of ladies comforting her.

“Mrs. Purdy?” I said tentatively.

“Oh, come in, Roe,” said the stouter of the two attendants, whom I now recognized as Lillian Schmidt, my former co-worker at the library. “Helen has cried so hard she’s gotten herself pretty sick, so just in case, we came in here.”

Oh, great. I made my face stick to its sympathetic lines and nervously approached Helen Purdy.

“You saw her,” Helen said pitifully, her plain face soggy with grief. “How did she look, Aurora?”

A vision of Tonia Lee’s obscenely bare bosom flashed through my head. “She looked very”—I paused for inspiration—“peaceful.” The bulging eyes of the dead woman, staring blankly out from her posed body, looked at me again. “At rest,” I said, and nodded emphatically to Helen Purdy.

“I hope she went to Jesus,” wailed Helen, and began crying again.

“I hope so, too,” I whispered from my heart, ignoring the wave of doubt that washed unbidden through my mind.

“She never could find peace on earth, maybe she can find it in heaven.”

Then Helen just seemed to faint, and I backed hastily out of the little bathroom so Lillian and her companion could work over her.

I saw one of the local doctor’s nurses in the family room and told her quietly that Helen had collapsed. She hurried to the bathroom, and feeling that I’d done the best I could, I looked around for someone to talk to. I couldn’t leave yet—I hadn’t been there quite long enough, my inner social clock told me.

I spied Franklin Farrell’s head of thick gray hair over the heads crowding the room, and

“excuse me’d” over to him. Franklin, a spectacularly tan and handsome man, had been selling real estate since coming to Lawrenceton thirty or more years before.

“Roe Teagarden,” Franklin said as I reached his side, giving every appearance of great pleasure. “I’m glad to see you, even though I’m sorry it’s here, on such a sad occasion.”

“I’m sorry it’s here, too,” I said grimly. I told him about Helen.

He shook his handsome head. “She has always been wrapped up in Tonia Lee,” he said.

“Tonia Lee was Helen’s only child, you know.”

“And Donnie’s only wife.”

He looked taken aback. “Well, yes, but as we all know .. .” Here he realized that bringing up Tonia Lee’s infidelities would hardly be proper.

“I know.”

“I brought a fruit salad with Jezebel sauce,” he said, to change the subject. Franklin was one of the few single men in town who didn’t mind confessing that he cooked for himself and did it well. His home was also definitely decorated, and beautifully so. Despite his flair for interior design, and his penchant for cooking something other than barbecue, no one had ever accused Franklin of being effeminate. Too many well-known cars had been parked overnight in the vicinity of his house.