Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,7
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 at her eyes with a tissue. She’d waited until she was outside 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 handkerchief, 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 shivering. 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 professional 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 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 Donnie 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 tomorrow 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—”
“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.”