Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,11
and she and the office designer had captured it when they renovated the building. Mother had insisted on a conference room, for staff meetings. Every Monday every realtor working for Mother had to attend this meeting. She’d planned to expand, and the room was still more than large enough for the whole staff.
I saw with interest that one of John Queensland’s daughters-in-law had been brought in to answer the phones and take messages while Mother held the meeting. I knew my stepfather’s sons and their wives only slightly, and as I nodded to Melinda Queensland, I tried to figure out what my relationship to her was. Stepsister-in-law? It looked to me as if I was going to be a stepaunt in a few months, but Melinda had had several miscarriages and I wasn’t going to ask.
Melinda was sitting at Patty Cloud’s desk, which of course was not only orderly but also decorated with a tidy plant and a picture in an expensive frame. Patty’s desk faced the front door, and her underling, Debbie Lincoln, had a desk at right angles to it, in effect forming the start of the corridor down to the conference room and Idella’s and Mackie’s offices. In the square created by two walls and the desks, firmly screwed to the wall behind Patty, was the key board, a large pegboard striped with labeled hooks. The more popular letters of the alphabet claimed two or even three hooks. A person of even the feeblest intelligence could figure out the system in seconds, and every other agency in town had something similar.
I snapped out of my study of the key board to find that Melinda was waiting for me to acknowledge her, and her smile was growing strained as I stared at the wall behind her. I gave her a brisk nod and started down the hall to the conference room. I was in time to sit at Mother’s left, a chair left vacant deliberately for me, I presumed. All the realtors expected me to inherit this business from Mother, and saw my presence in the office this week as the first step in my becoming second-in-command.
This was far from true. I had quit my job at the library on a whim, and I already regretted it more than I ever would have believed possible. (Of course, even regretting it mildly was more than I ever would have believed possible.)
Idella Yates, a frail-looking fair woman in her mid-thirties, divorced with two children, slid into the chair at the end of the table and put a briefcase on the table in front of her as if building a barrier between herself and the room. Her short straight hair was the color of dead winter grass. Eileen Norris bustled in, carrying a large stack of papers and looking abstracted. Eileen was Mother’s second-in-command, the first realtor Mother had hired after she’d gone out on her own. Eileen was big, brassy, loud, and cheerful on the surface; underneath, she was a barracuda. Patty Cloud, the receptionist/secretary, groomed to a tee, had perched her bottom dead in the center of the chair next to Idella’s. Patty, who was maybe all of twenty-four, baffled and irritated me far more than she should have. Patty worked hard at being perfect, and she had damned near succeeded. She was always helpful on the phone, always turned out high-quality work, never forgot anything, and never, never came to work in anything frumpy or out of style or even wrinkled. She was already studying for her realtor’s license. She would probably pass at the top of her group.
Patty’s underling, Debbie Lincoln, was a rather dim and cowed girl right out of high school. She was a full-figured black with hair expensively corn-rowed and decorated with beads. Debbie was quiet, punctual, and could type very well.
Other than that, I knew little about her. At the moment she was sitting quietly by Patty with her eyes on her hands, not chatting back and forth like the others.
Eileen finally got settled, and we all looked at Mother expectantly. Just as she opened her mouth, the conference room door opened and in came Mackie Knight.
His dark round face looked strained and upset, and he responded to our various exclamations with a wave of his hand. He collapsed into a chair by Eileen with obvious relief, automatically adjusting his tie and running a hand over his very short hair.
“Mackie, I thought I was going to have to send a lawyer down to