Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,40
Norris slid to the floor in a dead faint.
Of course, there wasn’t a phone in the Westley house. I had the sudden feeling I was on an island in the middle of a populous stream. I hated to leave Eileen alone in the dark and silence with Idella’s corpse, but I had to get help. There was a car at the house to the right of the Westleys‘, the helpful flashlight revealed, and I knocked on the screen door.
A toddler answered, in a red-checked shirt and overalls. I couldn’t tell if it was a little boy or a little girl. “Could I speak to your mommy?” I said. The child nodded and left, and after a moment a young woman with a towel around her hair came to the door.
“I’m sorry, I’ve told Jeffrey not to answer the door, but if I don’t hear the doorbell in time, he zooms to it,” she said, making it clear she thought that very clever of Jeffrey. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Aurora Teagarden,” I began, and her face twitched before the polite lines reasserted themselves. “I need you to call the police for me. There’s been a—an accident next door at the Westley house.”
“You’re really serious,” she said doubtfully. “No one should be in that house, it’s for sale.”
“I promise you I am serious. Please call the police.”
“All right, I will. Are you okay, yourself?” she asked, terrified I would ask to be let into her home.
“I’m fine. I’ll go back over there now if you’ll call.” I had the distinct feeling that she would much rather have gone back to washing her hair and forgotten that I’d knocked.
“I’ll call right now,” she promised with sudden resolution.
So I went back over to the cold black house next door. Eileen was stirring around but still out of it. I gripped the flashlight defensively as I crouched next to her on the nasty brown carpet, and stared dully at a dead beetle while I waited for the police.
At least Jack Burns didn’t show up. I would rather have been in a locked room with a pit bull than have faced Sergeant Burns at that moment. He had regarded me with baleful mistrust ever since we’d come across each other during the Real Murders investigation. He seemed to think I was the Calamity Jane of Lawrenceton, that death followed me like a bad smell. If I’d been Jonah, he’d have thrown me to the whale without a qualm.
Lynn Liggett Smith seemed to take my presence as a matter of course. That was almost as disturbing.
Eileen came out of her faint, we were allowed to tell the little we knew, and then I drove a shaken Eileen back to the office. My mother had already been called by the police, so she had waited there. Eileen went to Mother’s office in a wobbly parody of her usual brisk trot. There were lights on down the hall. I slid into the client chair in Mackie Knight’s office. With considerable astonishment, Mackie put down the paperwork he was doing.
“What’s happening, Roe?”
“Have you been here all afternoon, Mackie? Till now?” I saw by the clock on the office wall that it was already seven.
“No. I just came back after spending all afternoon at church and eating supper at home with my folks. Just as my mom put her lemon meringue pie in front of me, I remembered that I didn’t have all the papers ready for the Feiffer closing tomorrow morning.” There was lemon meringue smeared on a Styrofoam plate and a used plastic fork on a corner of his desk.
“Was anyone else at your folks‘?”
“Yeah, my minister. What’s this about?”
“Idella was just killed.”
“Oh, no.” Mackie looked sick. “Where?”
“At the empty Westley house.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” I hadn’t seen a weapon, but Idella’s coat had been covering her throat. The poor light hadn’t been reliable, but I’d thought her face had had the same funny tone as Tonia Lee’s. “Maybe strangled.”
“The poor woman. Who’s told her kids?”
“I guess the police. Or maybe whoever she left the kids with while she worked.”
“And I couldn’t have done it!” Mackie said, the penny finally dropping. “I’ve been with someone every blessed minute, except driving time from my folks’ back here.”
“Maybe this wasn’t planned as well as Tonia Lee’s murder.”
“You think Tonia Lee was killed at the time she was killed and the place she was killed because there would be a lot of available suspects.”