Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,43

at the base of my spine when I walk into a house that’s not mine, that I can look at all I want. It’s like stepping into someone else’s life for a while. You can open the closets, and find out what they pay for electricity, and how many clothes they have, and how clean their furniture is ... I have had the best time since Hugh and I started looking for a house. I wish I could look at houses all the time. In fact, I thought about becoming a realtor instead of a legal secretary until I realized I’d have to get out in all kinds of weather and deal with jerks who didn’t know what they wanted . . . you know.”

“That’s interesting, Amina,” I said, and meant it.

“Of course, now we’re looking at bigger houses,” she added, and we were back on her favorite topic of the moment.

By the time we hung up, I’d agreed to be the baby’s godmother and Amina had urged me to hurry and marry Martin if we were going to anyway, so she could be a matron of honor before her stomach got too big.

I just laughed and said good-bye. It made me nervous to think of marriage and Martin in the same sentence, as if it were a jinx. I finished dressing, trying not to feel sorry for myself, only glad for Amina and Hugh.

I found myself wondering if Jimmy Hunter had been Idella’s lover. It would make perfect sense, given his househunting aberration, for him to pick a realtor as a lover. But how would that tie in with the things missing from houses listed with local realtors? Surely Jimmy hadn’t been lifting them while he toured the houses? He just couldn’t have, not without a realtor noticing. And it wasn’t always Idella who’d shown him around. Hadn’t someone at the meeting at Select Realty said the Greenhouses had always made sure Tonia Lee escorted him? Had something in Tonia Lee’s sharp nature punctured the balloon of Jimmy’s fantasy life as a house hunter, something so upsetting he’d killed her for it?

Jimmy Hunter drove a blue Ford Escort, and so had Idella. Maybe it had been Jimmy’s car Donnie Greenhouse had seen Wednesday night. Come to think of it, what had Donnie been doing out himself? It must have been after the presumed time of Tonia Lee’s death, which must have taken place before the neighbors to the rear of the Anderton place had noticed her car had gone. About the time of Tonia Lee’s death, Jimmy had been parked outside the Tae Kwon Doe studio waiting for his son.

I shook my head at myself while I peered in the mirror applying my makeup. I was just getting confused. I wasn’t going to speculate about depressing things anymore. I was going shopping to buy a dress to wear tonight. I was going to find out if Emily Kaye had accepted my counteroffer on the house on Honor. It would be nice and tidy to have that little chapter of my life closed, Jane’s house settled and all my things ready to put into a home I owned. And I thought of the Julius house again: the sun through the windows, the warm kitchen, the porch.

“You’d like it,” I told Madeleine, who was squinting at me doubtfully in the one pool of sunshine in my bedroom. She rolled on her back to invite me to tickle her stomach, and I obliged. We went downstairs together to change her water and fill her food bowl.

I called Mother’s office before I set out for my petite dress shop in Atlanta. Eileen said that the police had given her the contract for my house, signed by Emily Kaye. It had been in Idella’s car. The changes I had stipulated had been penciled in, and Emily herself had called that morning after she heard the news of Idella’s death, to confirm that she had agreed to the price and to my wanting the washer and dryer. So on my way out of town, I stopped by the office and signed the contract, too. And Jane’s house was on its way to becoming Emily Kaye’s house, having never really been my house at all.

I was willing to drive all the way into the city instead of going to Great Day, Amina’s mom’s store, because I wanted something that Amina called a “Later, Baby” dress. Amina had always been a dating specialist, one who picked her