Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,19

time lay like a wasteland before me. I didn’t want to think about the dinner party tonight, didn’t want to feel again the alternating apprehension and attraction Martin Bartell aroused in me.

So I scolded myself out of bed, down the stairs, and popped an exercise video into the VCR after switching on the coffeepot. I stretched and bent and hopped around obediently, grudging every necessary minute of it. Madeleine watched this new part of my morning routine with appalled fascination.

Now that I was thirty, calories were no longer burning themselves off quite so easily. Three times a week my mother, clad in gorgeous exercise clothes, went to the newly opened Athletic Club and did aerobics. Mackie Knight, Franklin Farrell, and Donnie Greenhouse, plus a host of other Lawrencetonians, ran or biked every evening. I’d seen Franklin’s cohort, Terry Sternholtz, out “power walking” with Eileen. My mother’s new husband was a golfer. Almost everyone I knew did something to keep her muscles in working order and her body in the proper shape. So I’d succumbed to the necessity myself, but with little grace and less enthusiasm.

At least I felt I’d earned my coffee and toast, and my shower was a real pleasure afterward. While I was drying my hair, I decided that today I’d start looking at houses seriously. I needed a project, and finding a house I really liked would do. Jane’s books and the few things from her house I’d wanted to keep were stacked in odd places around the town-house, and I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. Mother had hinted heavily that Jane’s dining room set would be welcome in her third bedroom for a short time only.

Of course, I’d have to go through Select Realty, and I didn’t think I ought to have Mother showing me around. Eileen, Idella, or Mackie? Mackie could use the vote of confidence, I reflected, standing bent at the waist with my hair hanging down so I could dry the bottom layer. But though I didn’t have anything against Mackie, I never had been too crazy about him, either. I didn’t think it was because he was black or because he was male. I just wasn’t that comfortable with him. On the other hand, Eileen was smart and sometimes funny, but too bossy. Idella was sweet and could leave you alone when you needed to think, but she was no fun at all.

After a moment’s consideration, I chose Eileen. I phoned the office.

Patty said she wasn’t in.

I looked up Eileen’s home number and punched it with an impatient finger.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Eileen, please?”

“May I tell her who’s calling?”

“Roe Teagarden.” Who the hell was this? Eileen’s personal home secretary? On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly my business.

Eileen finally came on the line.

“Hi, Eileen. I’ve decided to start moving on finding a house of my own. Can you show me some, pretty soon?”

“Sure! What are you looking for?”

Oh. Well, four walls and a roof ... I began speaking as I thought. “I want at least three bedrooms, because I need a room for a library. I want a kitchen with some counter space.” The townhouse was definitely deficient in that department. “I want a large master bedroom with a very large closet.” For all my new clothes. “I want at least two bathrooms.” Why not? One could always be kept pretty for company. “And not lots of traffic.” For Madeleine, who was weaving around my ankles, rumbling her rough purr.

“What price range do you have in mind?”

I was still talking to an investment banker about what I would have to live on if I didn’t use any of Jane’s capital. But I could buy the house outright and then invest the rest, or I could put the money from the sale of Jane’s house down on the new place ... I let all this swirl around in my head, and then an answer popped to the top of my brain, like the answer popping up to the window of a fortune-telling ball.

“Okay,” Eileen said. “Seventy-five to ninety-five gives us some room. There are quite a few for sale in that range since Golfwhite closed its factory here.” Golfwhite—which, logically enough, manufactured golf balls and other golfing accessories—had closed its Lawrenceton factory and moved all its people who were willing to move to the larger factory in Florida.

“I don’t really need anything awfully big or important-looking,” I told Eileen, assailed by sudden doubts.

“Don’t worry, Roe. If you don’t like it, you don’t have