The Julius House Page 0,4

Flocken, sight unseen. We returned to town for lunch, after which Mary Anne excused herself to recheck the afternoon's appointments. I sat alone in the waiting room and fretted about seeing the right property. Even after that, maybe he wouldn't sell to me. I got up to look in the mirror on the wall above a tiny decorative table, a little closer to Mary Anne's office. My hair, which leads its own life, was escaping from the bun in a tightly waving chestnut nimbus. I began repair work. If I listened really hard, I found, I could make out Mary Anne's words. "So I'll bring her out this afternoon, Inez, if you're ready. No, she doesn't wear funny clothes or anything like that. She's tiny, and young, and she's wearing a suit that cost a mint..."

Damn! I should have gone and picked out something at WalMart. "... but she's very polite and not at all weird. A real southern accent, you-all!"

I winced.

"No, I don't think the pastor would mind," Mary Anne said persuasively. "This group evidently doesn't drink, smoke, or believe in having guns. They can only have one wife. It sounds pretty respectable, and if they're off in the country by themselves... well, I know, but she has the money, it seems ....kay, see you in a little while."

Mary Anne strode out of her office with a bright face and a sheaf of papers on the various places we'd see this afternoon. My heart sank down to join my spirits.

It was a long afternoon. I learned more about agriculture in mideastern Ohio than I ever wanted to know. I met many nice people who really wanted to sell their farms, and felt sorry for most of them, victims of our economic times. But I couldn't afford all those farms.

By four o'clock I'd toured everything Mary Anne Bishop had lined up. There were three more places to see the next morning. I was pretending to consider seriously two of the properties we'd looked at, but found sufficient fault with them to make her eager for tomorrow. We were pretty sick of each other by the time I got in my rental car, which had been parked at her office all day. I'd tried a couple of times to steer her conversation toward the years Martin had been growing up here, but she'd never mentioned the Bartells, though she and her husband were both natives of the town.

I missed Martin dreadfully.

I was almost through with my paperback, so when I saw a bookstore on my way back to the motel, I pulled into its parking lot with happy anticipation. Any place books are massed together makes me feel at home. It was a small, pleasant shop in a little strip with a dry cleaner's and a hair salon. A bell over the door tinkled as I went in, and a gray-haired woman on a stool behind the cash register looked up from her own paperback as I paused just inside the door, savoring the feeling of being surrounded by words. "Do you want anything in particular?" she asked politely. Her glasses matched her hair, and she was wearing, unfortunately, fuchsia. But her smile was wonderful and her voice was rich.

"Just looking. Where are your mysteries?"

"Right wall toward the rear," she said, and went back to her book. I had a happy fifteen or twenty minutes. I found a new James Lee Burke and an Adam Hall I hadn't read. The true crime section was disappointing, but I was willing to forgive that. Not everyone was a buff, like me. The woman rang up my books with the same cheerful live-and-let-live air. Without thinking at all, I asked her where Cindy's Flowers might be. "Around the corner and one block down," she said succinctly, and reopened her book.

I started my rental car and hesitated for maybe thirty seconds before going to Cindy's Flowers instead of the Holiday Inn.

It looked like a prosperous place on the outside, with a very pretty Easter-decorated front window. I powdered my nose and inexplicably took the pins out of my hair and brushed it out before I left the car. The front of the store held displays of both silk flowers and live plants, and some samples of special arrangements for weddings and funerals. There was a huge refrigerator case, a small counter for paying. The large work area in the back was almost totally open to view. Two women were working there. One, an artificial blond