Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,17
of buying.
She’d be right across the street from Lynn and Arthur and their baby.
Aubrey would drop me and fall in love with this organ-playing widow with the cute little girl.
No, I was being paranoid.
No, I was being realistic.
“Mrs. Kaye,” Idella’s sweet voice said, just in the nick of time. “I’m so sorry, we have to rearrange our appointment to see the house again.”
“Oh, and I had my aunt keep Elizabeth just so I could see it by myself!” Emily Kaye said, regret and accusation mingling in her voice.
I was battling a tide of rage and self-pity that had torn through me with the force of a monsoon. And I would rather have died than for Emily Kaye to notice that anything was wrong with me.
“Why don’t you just go ask Detective Smith if you could run over for a half hour and show the house to Mrs. Kaye?” I suggested to Idella, who was looking distressed at her client’s disappointment. My voice rang a little hollow in my ears, and I felt my expression probably didn’t match my concerned words, but I was doing the best I could.
“I’ll do that,” Idella said with unaccustomed decision. “Excuse me just a second.”
“Oh, thanks,” Emily told me with a warm sincerity that made me want to throw up. “I hated to ask Aunt Cile to keep Elizabeth this morning. I don’t want her to think I moved here just to have a free babysitter!”
“Think nothing of it,” I answered with equal sincerity. I wanted to get out of that room so badly my feet were itching. Any minute I was going to slap the tar out of Emily Kaye.
And why? I asked myself as I gave her a final, civil nod and glided off down the hall to Mother’s office. Because, I answered myself angrily, Emily Kaye was going to get married, she would marry Aubrey, and even if I didn’t want to marry him, I would once again be left. I knew I was being childish, I knew there was nothing logical about my feeling, and still I couldn’t help it. This was not my finest hour.
It was time for one of my pep talks.
It is better not to be married than to be married unhappily.
Women do not need to be married to have rich, fulfilled lives.
I didn’t want to marry Aubrey anyway, and I probably wouldn’t have accepted if Arthur Smith had asked me. (Well, yes I would, but it would’ve been a mistake.)
All relationships fail until you find the right one. It’s inevitable.
The failure of a relationship to lead to marriage does not mean you are unworthy or unattractive.
Having told myself all this, I recited the list again.
By the time Mother returned to her office, I’d completed the circuit three times. Mother was not in the best of humor, either. She was fuming about the disruption of the office, about being questioned again by the police, about the nerve of Tonia Lee, turning up dead in a Select Realty listing. Of course, she didn’t use those words, but that was the gist of her diatribe.
“Oh, listen to me!” she said suddenly. “I can’t believe I’m going on like this, and a woman I know is probably lying on a table somewhere waiting to be autopsied.” She shook her head at her own lack of empathy. “We’ll just have to put up with all this. I wasn’t crazy about Tonia Lee, God knows, but no one should have to go through what she must have.”
“You did tell Lynn about the thefts?”
“Yes. I let her draw her own conclusions. I’d already told her about the vases missing from the Anderton house. So I went on and told her about the pilfering that’s been going on. Of course, it’s more than pilfering. Someone in our little group of realtors is seriously dishonest.”
“Mom, have you happened to think that Tonia Lee found out who stole the stuff from the houses? That maybe that was why she got killed?”
“Yes. Of course. I hope the thefts had nothing to do with the murder.”
“That would mean that a realtor is the killer.”
“Yes. Let’s just drop the subject. We don’t know anything. It was probably one of Tonia Lee’s conquests that did her in.”
“Probably. Well, I’m going to go home as soon as Lynn talks to me.”
“You don’t have a feel for the business, do you?” Mother said reluctantly.
“I don’t think so,” I said with equal regret.
She reached across her desk and patted my hand, surprising me for