Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,12
the station to get you out!”
“Thanks, Mrs. Queensland. You were going to be my one phone call,” he said. “But they seem to believe, at least for the moment, that I didn’t do it.”
“What did happen yesterday?” Eileen asked.
We all leaned forward to listen.
“Well,” Mackie began wearily, telling a story he’d obviously told several times already, “the phone rang here five minutes after Patty went home for the day, and I was standing out in the reception room talking to Roe, so I answered it.”
Patty looked chagrined that she hadn’t worked late the day before.
“It was Mrs. Greenhouse, and she said she had an appointment to meet a client to show him the Anderton house. She had forgotten to come by earlier to get the key—if anyone happened to be leaving our office soon, could they bring it by? She was worried she’d miss her client if she left to come to our office.”
“She didn’t name the client?” Mother asked.
“No name,” Mackie said firmly. “She did say ‘he,’ I’m almost positive.”
Idella Yates, beside me, shuddered and clutched her arms as if she were feeling a chill. I think we all did; Tonia Lee, making arrangements to meet her own death.
“Anyway, this is the part the police have the most trouble with,” Mackie continued. “What I did, instead of driving up and leaving the key and going on home ... I went home first, put on my jogging clothes, and went out for my run. I stuck the key in the pocket of my shorts and stopped on my run to hand it to Mrs. Greenhouse. That only made maybe seven to ten minutes’ difference in the time I actually got there, and it suited me better. To tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t so excited about doing her work for her. No one here would be that sloppy. When I got there, she was at the house by herself. If anyone else was there, I didn’t see him. Hers was the only car. It was parked in the back, outside the kitchen, so that was the door I went to.”
“Why does that seem funny to the police?” Mother asked. “It doesn’t seem odd to me.”
“They seem to think that I ran instead of driving my car so no one would identify my car as being in the driveway, later. They said a woman living across the street from the Anderton house, she was waiting for her daughter to get home from spending a week out of town. So she was sitting in her front room, looking out the window, and reading a book, for the best part of two hours . .. the daughter had had a flat on the interstate, turns out. This woman might have missed a person on foot, but not a car.”
“What about the back door?” Eileen asked.
“The people who live behind the Andertons were watching TV in their den with the curtains open, since they knew no one was in the Anderton house. They told the police that they saw Tonia Lee’s car pull up when it was still daylight, but fading fast. One woman got out. They sat watching TV and eating in their den while they watched, and no other car ever pulled up. They figured someone else had come to the front door. They did see Tonia Lee’s car pull out after dark, way after dark, but of course they couldn’t see who was in it. They were pretty interested, someone being in the house for that long; they thought someone might really be thinking of buying.”
We all mulled that over for a minute.
“I wonder why the police told you so much?” Patty asked.
Mackie shook his head. “I guess they thought they would pressure me into confessing or something. If I’d been guilty, it might have worked.”
“You run every night, you’ve always told us that, and I’ve often seen you. That’s not suspicious at all,” my mother said staunchly. We all murmured agreement, even Patty Cloud, who was none too fond of having to do work for a black man, I’d observed. Though having Debbie working for her didn’t seem to be a problem.
“Lots of people run or ride bikes in the evening,” Idella said suddenly. “Donnie Greenhouse does .. . Franklin Farrell does.”
Franklin Farrell was another local realtor.
“I bet it was Donnie,” Eileen said bluntly. “He just couldn’t stand Tonia Lee screwing around anymore.”