Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,56
a stop and shook my hand.
“Susu told me you came by yesterday when everyone else was staying away,” he said gruffly. “Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” I asked inadequately. He’d been through such an ordeal.
“I will be,” he said, shaking his head slightly as though a fly were circling it. “It’s going to be hard getting over this feeling that everyone was against me, that everyone believed I’d done it, right off the bat.”
“Susu okay?”
“She’s tired, but she’s regrouping. We have a lot to talk about. I think we’ll leave the kids with their aunt and uncle for a while.”
“I hope everything—” I floundered. “I’m really glad you’re home,” I finally said.
“Thanks again, Roe,” he said, and wheeled away.
Seconds later I was in front of the Anderton house, its Select Realty sign still stuck forlornly in the yard, doomed to be frosted and snowed upon all winter and covered with the quick grass of spring and the weeds of summer, I was sure.
I didn’t think the Anderton house, or the little ranch-style where we’d found Idella, would sell anytime soon.
After all, these deaths hardly seemed to be the work of a random killer, striking where he could find a woman alone.
I wondered if anyone had seen a car at the house where Idella’d been found.
A client arriving by foot would have been unusual, even unnerving: especially to Idella, who’d already been made nervous by Tonia Lee’s death, who’d already heard that the police suspected someone of arriving at the Anderton house on foot . .. surely she’d have run screaming from the house instantly?
Yes, if it had been a random client who called to set up an appointments But not if it had been someone she knew, someone who said, maybe, “My run (or my bike ride) takes me by there, so I’ll see you at the Westley house,” or something of the sort. And what more impersonal place to kill than someone else’s empty house? You could just leave the body where it fell. The killer hadn’t had a chance to divert suspicion, hadn’t had the opportunity to move Idella’s car somewhere else; since it had been dusk, not dark, when Idella had been murdered, her car couldn’t have been moved without the driver being seen. Idella had had to be silenced quickly or she would have told what she knew ... and Donnie Greenhouse thought she knew who’d killed his wife.
There he was now, as if my thinking of him had conjured him up, alternately walking and jogging, dressed in ancient dark blue sweats. He was dangerously hard to see in the gathering dark. I could just make out the features of his face.
“Roe Teagarden,” he said by way of greeting. “What are you doing out tonight?”
“Walking, like everyone else in Lawrenceton.”
He laughed without humor. “Decided to join the crowd, huh? I come here every evening,” he said with an abrupt change in tone. “I come stand here while I’m out running. I think about Tonia Lee, about what she was like.”
This was weird.
A car went by, its headlights underlining the suddenly increasing darkness. I had a rather long walk home. I began to shift my feet uneasily.
“She was quite a woman, Roe. But you knew her. She was one of a kind.”
That was the absolute truth. I was able to nod emphatically.
“Everyone wanted her, and not just men, either; but she was my wife,” he told me proudly. His words had the feeling of a mantra he’d chanted over and over.
My scalp began to crawl.
“She’ll never cheat with anyone else again,” Donnie said with some satisfaction.
“Um, Donnie? Do you think it’s really that good for you to keep on coming over here?”
He turned to me, but I couldn’t see his face well enough to discern his expression.
“Maybe not, Roe. You think I should resist the temptation?” His voice was mocking.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “I think so. Donnie, why didn’t you tell the police what you and Idella talked about that day at the restaurant?”
“So that’s how they knew. Idella talked to you in the women’s room.”
“She told me you were saying you saw her car come out of your office parking lot.”
“Yeah. I was out looking for Tonia Lee. So I cruised by the office. Sometimes she would take people there if she couldn’t find anywhere else.”
“Was Idella driving?”
“I couldn’t tell. But it was her car. It had that MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT LCS bumper sticker.”