Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,2

place just mine, with no memories and no nerve-racking neighbors.

I had to laugh as I pictured myself eating tuna fish and Cheez-Its in the Anderton dining room.

I heard a car crunch up the semicircular gravel drive. The Bartells were arriving in a spotless white Mercedes. I stepped out onto the large front porch, if you can call a stone-and-pillars edifice a porch, and greeted them with a smile. The wind was chilly, and I pulled my wonderful new fuzzy brown jacket around me. I felt the wind pick up my hair and toss it around my face. I was at the top of the front steps looking down at the Bartells as he helped his wife from the car. Then he looked up at me.

Our eyes met. After a startled moment I blinked and collected myself.

“I’m Aurora Teagarden,” I said, and waited for the inevitable. Sure enough, sleek, dark Mrs. Bartell sniggered before she could stop herself. “My mother is delayed, which she very much regrets, and she asked me to meet you here so you could begin looking. There’s so much to see in this house.”

There, I’d done my mother proud.

Mr. Bartell was about five ten, forty-fiveish, prematurely white-headed, with a tough, interesting face, and wearing a suit even I could tell was a major investment. His eyes, which I was trying hard to avoid, were the lightest brown I’d ever seen. “I’m Martin Bartell, Miss Teagarden,” he said in an unaccented Voice of Command, “and this is my sister, Barbara Lampton.”

“Barby,” said Barbara Lampton with a girlish smile. Ms. Lampton was maybe forty, broad in the beam but camouflaging it very skillfully, and not altogether happy at being in Lawrenceton, Georgia, pop. 15,000.

I raised my eyebrows only very slightly (after all, my mother wanted to sell this house). A Barby was laughing at an Aurora? And she wasn’t Mrs. Bartell, after all. But was she really his sister?

“Nice to meet you,” I said neutrally. “Now, I’m not really showing you this house, I’m not a licensed realtor, but I do have the fact sheet here in case you have any questions, and I am familiar with the layout and history of the house.”

So saying, I turned and led the way before Martin Bartell could ask why this was any different from showing the house.

“Barby” commented on the marble-topped table and the silk flowers, and I explained about the furniture.

To the right of the foyer, through a doorway, was a very sizable formal living room and a small formal dining room, and to the left the same space was divided into two large rooms, a “family room” and a room that could be used for just about anything. Martin Bartell examined everything very carefully and asked several questions I was quite unable to answer, and a few I was.

I was careful always to be looking down at the fact sheet when he turned to ask me something.

“You could use this back room for your gym equipment,” Barby remarked.

So that was where the athletic movement and the muscles came from.

They wandered farther back and looked through the kitchen with its informal dining nook, then into the formal dining room, which lay between the kitchen and the living room.

Was his sister going to live with him? What would he do in a house this large? He would need a maid, for sure. I tried to think of whom I could call who might know of a reliable person. I tried not to picture myself in one of those “French maid” outfits sold in the back of those strange confession magazines. (A junior-high girl left one in the library one time.)

All the time we were walking and looking, I kept in front of him, behind him, anywhere but facing him.

Instead of taking the kitchen stairs, I maneuvered Martin Bartell and Barby back to the main staircase. I had always loved that broad staircase. I glanced at my watch. Where was Mother? The upstairs was really the climax of the house, or at least I’d always thought so, and she should be the one to show it. Mr. Bartell seemed content with me so far, but having me instead of Mother was like having hamburger when you’d been promised steak.

Though I had a very strong feeling Martin Bartell didn’t think so.

This was turning out to be a complicated morning.

This man was at least fifteen years older than I, belonged to a world I hadn’t the faintest inkling of, and was silently bringing to