Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,63

T. (Bubba) Sewell, whom I’d met in a professional capacity, would be home from the Capitol for the weekend, and he and Lizanne were also going to the realtors’ banquet, she told me. In fact, Bubba was the speaker.

“Are you two engaged?” I asked. “That’s what someone told me, but I wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Lizanne smiled. She had a habit of that. She was stunningly beautiful, and no slave to the bone-thin convention of female figures. She was just right. “Oh, I expect we are,” she said.

“Someone’s finally going to walk you down the aisle,” I marveled. Men had tried for years to marry Lizanne and she would have none of it, the world being the unfair place it is.

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll get married in a church,” Lizanne demurred. “I haven’t been in one since Mamma and Daddy died, and I don’t expect to go. I believe Bubba sees that as my only drawback, a politician’s wife not going to church.”

There was no possible response, and Lizanne didn’t expect any. I felt like someone who was walking over a familiar sunny beach, only to discover that it had changed into quicksand.

“I hear you’ve been dating that new man at Pan-Am Agra,” Lizanne said after a few minutes. Lizanne heard everything.

“Yes.”

“He coming with you tonight?”

I nodded until a sharp exclamation from Benita reminded me to hold still.

“I’ll be glad to meet him; I’ve heard a lot about him.”

I didn’t know if I wanted to hear or not. “Oh?” I said finally.

“He’s got everyone out there shivering in their shoes. There’s evidently been a lot of slack and some thieving, and he was sent in to be the man to get everything straight. He’s firing and moving around people and looking into everything.”

Lizanne reached back and turned off her dryer, lifting the hood to reveal a head covered with large rollers. She patted them to make sure her hair was dry, took one down experimentally, nodded. “Janie, I’m done,” she called to the beige-and-blue-uniformed beautician drinking a cup of coffee in the back of the shop. The phone rang, and Janie answered it. It was for Benita, one of her children with a household emergency, and with an exclamation of impatience, she ran to take the call. I noticed the whole time she talked, she worked on her hair with a comb she picked up from the counter; if Benita was standing, she was working on hair.

“I have a friend at the police station,” Lizanne said casually, standing by my chair and looking into my mirror. “Jack Burns—your good buddy, Roe—has decided that since no one has been killing realtors until now, the murderer must be someone new to town. Some of the detectives don’t agree, but since they questioned Jimmy Hunter and let him go, all kinds of people have been pressuring the chief of police to find someone else. Jimmy Hunter’s parents have got lots of friends in this town, and the arrest of someone else would take the suspicion off Jimmy for good. So I hear the police are going to make an arrest soon in the murders of those two women. They’re probably going to be taking someone in for questioning tomorrow.”

My eyes met Lizanne’s in the mirror. She was giving me a message. But I had to decipher it.

“My goodness, Lizanne Buckley!” exclaimed Benita, coming back at that inopportune moment. “Who told you that?”

“Little bird,” Lizanne said laconically, and wandered off to her beautician’s station, where she began to remove her own rollers, tossing them in one of the wheeled bins. Janie drained her cup and unhurriedly began helping Lizanne, whose easygoing attitude seemed to rub off on people. I remembered Bubba Sewell’s slow good-ole-boy manner and his sharp brain and decided (in a remote corner of my own brain) that he and Lizanne would make a most interesting couple.

But mostly I was trying to figure out what Lizanne had meant.

We’d been talking about Martin. Then she’d talked about the arrest. Surely she didn’t mean the police suspected Martin?

She had been letting me know Martin was going to be arrested. At the least, taken in and questioned.

I stared at the mirror as two spots of color rose to stain my cheeks. I was gripping the padded arms of the swivel chair with undue force.

“Honey, are you cold?” Benita asked. “I can sure turn up the heat.”

“Oh. No, I’m fine, thanks.”

Ridiculous. This was ridiculous.

The police had been wrong once. They were