Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,74

bad?” I mumbled through thick lips. They also hurt. I was finding that a lot of things hurt as my adrenaline ebbed.

I heard a choked sound.

“I called the ambulance for you.”

“Why can’t I see, Martin?”

“He broke your glasses. They cut your face. Maybe your nose is broken. Maybe your arm, too.”

“Oh. My eyes okay?”

“They may be once the swelling goes down.”

“Did—I—kill him?” I was having some difficulty enunciating.

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“Tough guy,” I mumbled.

“Tough woman,” I thought he said. I would have snorted derisively if my face hadn’t hurt so badly.

“Hurts, Mar’in,” I commented, trying not to whine.

“Go to sleep,” he advised.

It was surprisingly easy to do.

Chapter Sixteen

RUBBER SOLES against tile. Trays banging against a metal cart. A voice over a public-address system.

Hospital sounds. I turned my head.

“You’re making a habit of this, Aurora,” my mother said sternly. “I don’t want to get one more call from the hospital in the middle of the night telling me my daughter’s been brought in beaten up.”

“I promise I won’t do it again,” I mumbled painfully.

“For a librarian, you are ... ” And her voice faded out. But when I was all there again, it was still going on. “John and I are not as young as we were, and we need our sleep, so if you could just get beaten up in the daytime . . .” She was stomping around verbally, because ladies couldn’t just stomp around.

“Mother. Am I hurt bad?”

“You’re going to feel terrible for a while, but no, no permanent damage has been done. You may have some scarring around the eyes from the cuts your glasses caused, but it’s probably going to fade. By the way, I called Dr. Sheppard this morning to get a new pair made up. They had a record of what frames you ordered the last time, so they’ll be just like your other glasses. He promised he’d have them later today. To continue—the muscles and ligaments in your left arm are strained badly, but the bones aren’t broken. Your nose, however, is. Your lips are cut and swollen. Your whole face is black and blue. You look like hell on wheels. You have an engagement ring on your left hand.”

“... What?”

“He came in and put it on this morning—he got it right after the jeweler’s opened, he said.”

I couldn’t lift my arm to look. It was taped or bound somehow.

“You’re not supposed to use that arm for a while,” Mother said sharply. “Wait a minute. I’m going to push the button to raise the head of the bed.”

I opened my eyes cautiously and saw blurry pale blue walls and my mother’s arm. It really was daytime. Then as the angle of the bed moved, I was able to see down without shifting my head, which felt as if it might fall off if I did so. My pale left hand was sticking out of a sling, and on it, sure enough, glittered a diamond bigger than Lizanne’s.

Of course he would get one bigger than Lizanne’s.

“Where is he?” I mumbled through my swollen lips.

“He had to stay at the police station this morning, to talk about the man his foreman caught stealing last night, and about—Franklin.” My mother’s voice said the name reluctantly.

“There’s some doubt about Franklin’s bail hearing,” she went on more cheerfully, “because you hit him hard enough to put him in this hospital—right down the hall, with a policeman in there with him and his arm handcuffed to a bedrail.”

Franklin’s arm, not the policeman’s, I assumed.

“You hit him with a rock, I believe,” my mother said remotely.

“Vases,” I said urgently.

“Yes, they know those are the vases from the Anderton house. The senior Andertons had some pictures taken of their more valuable doodads and stored the pictures in their lockbox, and Mandy just now got around to opening the things she had shipped from Lawrenceton to Los Angeles. When the police here called her about the vases being missing, she mailed the pictures, and they arrived yesterday. There’s proof. They’ll nail that bastard.”

I’d never heard my mother say that particular word.

But I wondered if they could find proof to stick the murders to him. Besides what he’d said to me. I would have to appear in court. Again.

I heard a light knock, and my mother called, “Come in.”

“Oh,” she said rather stiffly. “All finished at the police station?”

Martin.

He murmured something to her.

“I’ll just leave for a minute to get a cup of coffee, since you’re here,” she said with assumed offhandedness.

The door