Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,41
said slowly, “but it makes good sense. Poor Idella.” Mackie shook his head in disbelief. “She sure had been acting funny lately, almost apologetic, every time I talked to her.”
“She knew you didn’t kill Tonia Lee, Mackie. I think she knew who did, or suspected.”
We both sat and thought for a while, and then my mother came to the door and asked gently if she could speak to me for a moment.
“Mackie,” she said as I got up to leave his office, “you went to church after Idella left the office? Or before?”
“Before. She was still in her office when I walked out the door. I said good-bye to her.”
“Oh, thank God. You’re in the clear, then.”
“Yes, I think I am.” Mackie was having a hard time with conflicting emotions.
Lynn was waiting in Mother’s office.
“I hear you had an interesting conversation with Idella at Beef ‘N More,” she said.
I thought Lynn was bluffing, but I’d intended telling her what Idella had said anyway, vague though it was. The only person who could have told Lynn that I’d talked to Idella at lunch was Sally Allison, and Sally didn’t know what Idella had said to me. No, I wasn’t being fair to Sally .. . there was Terry Sternholtz.
I told Lynn all about Idella’s and my little bathroom tête-à-tête. We went over and over it while my mother listened or worked quietly. I wondered why I was sitting here instead of going down to the police station. I told Lynn, frontward and backward and upside down, every little nuance of Idella’s apparent fight with Donnie Greenhouse, her flight to the women’s room, my halfhearted attempt to help her, her few comments to me, and her departure from the restaurant. My next glimpse of her at the office, my brief conversation with her here, the exchange with an unknown person she’d had over the telephone, and her statement that she was going to go to Emily Kaye with my counteroffer. Then how I’d found her at the empty house.
By the time Lynn was satisfied she’d gotten everything out of me she could get, I was heartily sorry I’d spoken to Idella at the restaurant. Sometimes good impulses backfire.
“Go talk to Donnie Greenhouse,” I said irritably. “He was the one who upset her, not me.”
“Oh, we will,” Lynn assured me. “In fact, someone’s talking to him right now.”
But Donnie Greenhouse, who’d let Tonia Lee stomp on him for so long, would not yield an inch to the police. He called my mother while I was still in her office and told her triumphantly he hadn’t given Paul Allison the time of day.
“He told Paul that no matter what Roe Teagarden said Idella told her, he and Idella had discussed nothing more than business and Tonia Lee’s funeral.” My mother’s famous eyebrows were arched at their most skeptical.
“He might as well wear a sign that says ‘Please Kill Me. I Know Too Much,’ ” I said.
“Donnie doesn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain, but I didn’t think he was this dumb,” Mother said. “And why he’s doing it, instead of telling the police all he knows, I cannot fathom.”
“He wants to avenge Tonia Lee himself?”
“God knows why. Everyone knows she made his life hell on wheels.”
“Maybe he always loved her.” Mother and I pondered that separately.
“I personally don’t think a rational person with a sense of self-preservation could continue to love under such a stream of abuse as that,” my mother said.
I wondered if she was right. “So Donnie’s not rational and has no sense of self-preservation,” I said. “And what about Idella? Evidently the call she got in her office was from someone she suspected might be the killer. And yet she apparently agreed to meet this person in an empty house. Doesn’t that sound like she loved whoever it was?”
“I just don’t love that way,” said Mother finally. “I loved your father until he was unfaithful.” This was the first time she’d ever said one word to me about her marriage with my father. “I loved him, in my opinion, very deeply. But when he hurt me so much, and things weren’t going well otherwise, it just killed the love. How can you keep on loving when someone lies to you?” She really could not understand it.
I didn’t know, with my limited experience, if my mother just had an extraordinarily strong sense of self-preservation, or if the world was full of irrational people.