Three Bedrooms, One Corpse - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,9

about this.

Also something terribly exciting, the other half admitted.

The phone rang just as I was about to go through my whole thought cycle again.

“Roe, are you all right?” Aubrey was so concerned it hurt me.

“Yes, Aubrey, I’m fine. I guess my mother called you.”

“She did, yes. She was very upset about poor Mrs. Greenhouse, and worried about you.”

Maybe that wasn’t exactly what Mother had been feeling, but Aubrey put the nicest interpretation on everything. Though he was certainly not naive.

“I’m all right,” I said wearily. “It was just a tough morning.”

“I hope the police can catch whoever did this, and do it fast,” Aubrey said, “if there’s someone out there preying on lone women. Are you sure you want to go into this real estate business?”

“No, actually I’m not sure,” I said. “But not because of Tonia Lee Greenhouse. My mother has to carry a calculator all the time, Aubrey.”

“Oh?” he said cautiously.

“She has to know all about the current interest rate, and she has to be able to figure out what someone’s house payment will be if he can sell his house for X amount so he can put that down on the next house, which costs twenty thousand dollars more than the house he has ...”

“You didn’t realize that was involved in house-selling?” Aubrey was trying hard to sound neutral.

“Yes, I did,” I said, trying equally hard not to snap. “But I was thinking more of the house-showing part of it. I like going into people’s houses and just looking.” And that was the long and short of it.

“But you don’t like the nuts and bolts part,” Aubrey prompted, probably trying to figure out if I was nosy, childish, or just plain weird.

“So maybe it’s not for me,” I concluded, leaving him to judge.

“You have time to think about it. I know you want to do something—right?” My being completely at liberty, except for the nominal duty of listening to any complaints that might arise from the townhouse tenants in Mother’s complex, made Aubrey very uneasy. Single women worked full-time, and for somebody other than their mothers.

“Sure.” He was not the only one who found the concept of a woman of leisure unsettling.

“Did your mother mention her plan for tomorrow night to you. Oh, damn. ”The dinner at her house?“

“Right. Did you want to go? I guess we could tell her we had already made other plans.” But Aubrey sounded wistful. He loved the food Mother’s caterer served. “Caterer” was a fancy term for Lucinda Esther, a majestic black woman who made a good living “cooking for people who are too lazy,” as she put it. Lucinda also got extra mileage out of being a “character,” a factor of which she was fully aware.

Oh, this was going to be awful. And yet, maybe it would clear the air in some way.

“Yes, let’s go.”

“Okay, honey. I’ll pick you up about six-thirty.”

“I’ll see you then,” I said absently.

“Bye.”

I said good-bye and hung up. My hand stayed on the receiver.

Honey? Aubrey had never called me an endearment before. It sounded to me as if something was happening with Aubrey ... or maybe he was just feeling sentimental because I’d had a very bad experience that morning?

Suddenly I saw Tonia Lee Greenhouse as she had been in that huge bed. I saw the elegant matching night tables flanking the bed. I could see the strange color of Tonia Lee’s body against the white sheets, the red of the dress folded so peculiarly at the foot of the bed. I wondered where Tonia Lee’s shoes were—under the bed?

And speaking of missing things—here a thought hovered on the edge of my mind so insistently that my eyes went out of focus as I tried to pin it down. Missing things. Or something at least not included in my mental picture of the bed and surrounding floor. The night tables ...

There it was. The night tables. My mental camera zoomed in on their surfaces. I picked up the phone and punched in seven familiar numbers.

“Select Realty,” said Patty Cloud’s On-the-Ball voice.

“Patty, this is Roe. Let me speak to my mother if she’s handy, please.”

“Sure, Roe,” said Patty in her Warm Personal voice. “She’s on another line—wait, she’s off. Here you go.”

“Aida Queensland,” said my mother. Her new name still gave me a jolt.

“When you first listed the Anderton house,” I said without preamble, “think about going in the bedroom with Mandy.”

“Okay, I’m there,” she said after a moment.

“Look at the night tables.”

A few seconds of