(3T)Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

by Charlaine Harris

  “Mrs. Teagarden—no, Mrs. Queensland now, isn’t it? I haven’t seen you since your wedding; congratula- tions. And these must be our new residents? Hope you don’t feel like running back north after today. Lawrence- ton used to be such a quiet town, but the city is reaching out to us here, and I guess in a few years we’ll have a crime rate like Atlanta’s.”

  Mother introduced her clients.

  “Guess you won’t want this house after today,” Jack

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  Burns said genially. “Ole Tonia Lee looked pretty bad. I’m sure sorry you all ran into this, you being new and all.”

  “This could have happened anywhere,” Martin said. “I’m beginning to think being a real estate agent is a haz- ardous occupation, like being a convenience-store clerk.” “It certainly does seem so,” Jack Burns agreed. He was wearing a hideous suit, but I’ll give him this much credit—I don’t think he cared a damn about what he wore or what people thought about it.

  “Now, Mr. Bartell, I believe you touched the de- ceased?” he continued.

  “Yes, I walked over to make sure she was dead.” “Did you touch anything on the bed?”

  “No.”

  “On the table by the bed?”

  “Nothing in the bedroom,” Martin said very defi- nitely, “but the woman’s neck.”

  “You notice it was bruised?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know she was strangled?”

  “It looked like it to me.”

  “You have much experience with this kind of thing?”

  “I was in Vietnam. I’ve had more experience with wounds. But I have seen one case of strangulation be- fore, and this looked similar.”

  “What about you, Mrs. Lampton? You go in the room?”

  “No,” Barby said quietly. “I stayed on the landing outside. When Miss Teagarden opened the doors, of course I saw the poor woman right away. Then my

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  brother told me to go downstairs. He knows I don’t have a strong stomach, so of course it was better for me to go.”

  “And you, Mrs.—Queensland?”

  “I came up the stairs just after Aurora opened the bedroom doors. I actually saw her swing them open from downstairs after I started up.” Mother explained about the Thompsons and her delegation of me to open the house for the Bartells. “Excuse me, Mr. Bartell and Mrs. Lampton.”

  “You’re his sister,” Jack Burns said, as if trying to get that point quite clear. He swung his baleful gaze on poor Barby Lampton.

  “Yes, I am,” she said angrily, stung by the doubt in his voice. “I just got divorced, my only child’s in col- lege, I sold my own home as part of the divorce settle- ment, and my brother invited me to help him house-hunt down here out of sheer kindness.” “Of course, I see,” said Jack Burns with disbelief written on every crease in his heavy cheeks. Martin Bartell’s hair might be white, but his eye- brows were still dark. Now they were drawn together ominously.

  “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Greenhouse, Roe?” Jack Burns had switched his questioning abruptly to me.

  “I haven’t seen Tonia Lee to speak to in weeks, and then it was only a casual conversation at the beauty parlor.” Tonia Lee had been having a dye job and a cut, and I’d been having one of my rare trims. She had tried the whole time to find out how much money Jane Engle had left me.

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  “Mr. Bartell, had you contacted Mrs. Greenhouse about looking at any homes?” Jack Burns shot the question at the Pan-Am Agra manager as though he would enjoy beating the answer out of him. What a charmer.

  I could see Martin taking a deep breath. “Mrs. Queensland here is the only Realtor I have contacted in Lawrenceton,” he said firmly. “And now, if you’ll ex- cuse me, Sergeant, my sister has had enough for this morning, and so have I. I have to get back to work.” Without waiting for an answer, he got up and put his arm around his sister, who had risen even faster. “Of course,” Burns said smoothly. “I’m so sorry I’ve been holding you all up! You just go on, now. But please, folks, keep everything you saw at the scene of the murder to yourselves. That would help us out a whole bunch.”

  “I think we’ll be going, too,” my mother said coldly. “You know where we’ll be if you need us again.” Jack Burns just nodded, ran a beefy hand over his thinning no-color hair, and stood with narrowed eyes watching us leave. “Mrs. Queensland!” he called when Mother was almost out the door. “What about keys to this house?”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot . . .” And Mother turned back to tell him about Mackie Knight and the key, and I walked out into the fresh chill of the day, away from the thing in the bedroom upstairs and the fear of Jack Burns.

  And right into Martin Bartell.

  Over his shoulder I saw Barby was in the front seat of the Mercedes and buckled up already. She was dabbing

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  at her eyes with a tissue. She’d waited until she was out- side to shed a few tears; I admired her control. I felt a sympathetic tear trickle down my own face. One way or another, the morning had been a dreadful strain. I was looking at a silk tie in a shade of golden olive, with a white stripe and a thin sort of red one. He wiped the tear from my face with his handker- chief, carefully not touching me with his fingers. “Am I imagining this?” he asked very quietly. I shook my head, still not meeting his eyes. “We have to talk later.”

  I couldn’t speak, for once in my life. I was terrified of seeing him again; and I would rather have shaved my head than not see him again.

  “How old are you? You’re so tiny.” “I’m thirty,” I said, and finally looked up at him. He said after a moment, “I’ll call you.” I nodded, and walked quickly over to my car and got in. I had to sit for a moment so I could stop shiver- ing. Somehow I had his handkerchief clutched in my hand. Oh, that was just great! Maybe he had an old high school letter jacket I could wear? I was mad at my hormones, upset about the awful death of Tonia Lee Greenhouse, and horrified at my own perfidy toward Aubrey Scott.

  There was knock on my window that made me jump.

  My mother was bending, gesturing for me to roll the window down. “I’ve never met Jack Burns in his pro- fessional capacity before,” she was saying furiously, “and I pray I never do again. You told me he was like that, Aurora, but I couldn’t quite credit it! Why, when I

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  sold him and his wife that house, he was just so polite and nice!”

  “Mom, I’m going to go to my place.”

  “Why, sure, Aurora. Are you okay? And poor Don- nie Greenhouse . . . I wonder if they’ve called him yet.” “Mother, what you have to worry about, right now, is how that key got back on your key board. Someone at Select Realty put it there. The police are going to be all over your office asking questions just as quick as quick can be.”

  “You definitely have a mind for crime,” Mother said disapprovingly, but she was thinking fast. “It’s that club you were in, I expect.”

  “No. I was in Real Murders because I think that way, I don’t think that way because I was in the club,” I said mildly. But she wasn’t listening. “Before I go back,” said Mother suddenly, “I was thinking I should ask Martin Bartell and his sister—I can’t believe a woman that age is answering to ‘Barby’—” This from a woman with a name like Aida. “I should get them over to the house for dinner tomor- row night. Why don’t you and Aubrey come?” “Oh,” I said limply, horrified at the prospect. How was I going to excuse myself—“Mom, this guy I just met, well, if we see each other again, we just may have at it on the floor”?

  My mother, usually so sharp, did not pick up on my turmoil. Of course, she had a few more things on her mind.

  “I know you have to ask Aubrey first, so just give me a call. I really think I should make some gesture to try to make up to them—”


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  “For showing them a house with a dead Realtor in it?”

  “Exactly.”

  Suddenly my mother realized that the Anderton house was going to be impossible to move, at least for a while, and she closed her eyes. I could see it in her face, I could read her mind.

  “It’ll sell sooner or later,” I said. “It was too big for Mr. Bartell anyway.”

  “True,” she said faintly. “The house on Ivy Avenue would be more appropriate. But if the sister is going to live with him, the separate bedroom suites would have been great.”

  “See you later,” I said, starting my car. “I’ll call you,” she told me.

  And I had no doubt she would.

  Chapter Two

  A

  An hour after I’d gotten home I began to feel like myself again. I’d huddled wrapped in an afghan, with Madeleine the cat purring in my lap (an effective tranquilizer), while I watched CNN to feed my mind on impersonal things for a while. I was in my favorite brown suede-y chair with a diet drink beside me, com- fortable and nearly calm. Of course, Madeleine was getting cat hairs all over the afghan and my lovely new dress; I’d had to resist the impulse to change into blue jeans when I got home. I still felt my new clothes were costumes I was wearing, costumes I should doff when I was really being myself.

  I’d had Madeleine neutered after I’d given away the last kitten, and the scar still showed through her shorter tummy hair. She had quickly adjusted to the switch from Jane’s house to the townhouse, though she was still angry at not being let outside.

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  “A litter box will just have to do until I find a house with a yard,” I told her, and she glared at me balefully. I’d calmed down enough to think. I pushed the off button on the remote control.

  I was horrified at what had happened to Tonia Lee, and I was trying very hard not to picture her as I’d last seen her. It was far more typical of Tonia Lee to re- member her as she’d been at the beauty shop during our last conversation—her hair emerging glossy dark from the beautician’s curling iron, her long oval nails perfectly polished by the manicurist, her brain trying to frame an impolite query politely, her dissatisfied face momentarily intent on extracting information from me. I was sorry she’d had such a dreadful end, but I’d never liked the little I knew of Tonia Lee Greenhouse. Over and above being tangentially connected to her nasty death, I had a personal situation on my hands, no doubt about it. What had happened—and what was go- ing to happen—between me and Martin Bartell? I should call Amina, my best friend. Though she lived in Houston now, it would be worth the long- distance daytime call. I peered at the calendar across the room by the telephone in the kitchen area. Today was Thursday. The wedding had been five weeks ago. . . . Yes, they should have gotten back from the cruise and the resort at least two weeks ago, and Am- ina wouldn’t go back to work until Monday. But if I called Amina, that would be validating my feeling.

  So what was this feeling? Love at first sight? This didn’t seem to be centered around my heart, but some- where considerably lower.

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  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 se- riously 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 de- voted 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 Chris- tians (though I was certainly not a very good one), nei- ther of us drank more than the occasional glass of wine, and we both liked reading and popcorn and go- ing to the movies. He enjoyed kissing me; I liked being kissed by him. We were fond of each other and re- spected 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 li- brarian.

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  But I hated to do anything fast and drastic. Aubrey deserved better than that. My het-up feelings for Mar- tin Bartell might disappear as suddenly as they’d ap- peared. 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 ad- mitted.

  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 be- cause 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

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  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 lib- erty, except for the nominal duty of listening to any complaints that might arise from the townhouse ten- ants 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.

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  Lucinda also got extra mileage out of being a “charac- ter,” 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 senti- mental 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 won- dered 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 men- tal 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.

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  “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.”