Three Bedrooms, One Corpse(24)

“He may be going through a hard time, Susu. He may even need therapy or something. But I really don’t think Jimmy ever killed anyone.”

“I’d better get down there. Thanks for coming by, Roe. I just kind of gave up.”

“Sure,” I said, not feeling noble at all. “Of course, if he did do it, I’ll never want to see you again,” she said with a tiny smile.

“I know.”

She’d never been as dumb as she liked to seem. Iwas getting back into my car when suddenly I real- ized that this was the morning of Tonia’s funeral. An- other unpleasant task. I looked at my watch. I had

thirty minutes. I raced back to the townhouse, dashed up the stairs, tore off my clothes and pulled on my win- ter black dress, loose and long with a drop waist. No time to bother with a slip; no time to pull on panty

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~ Charlaine Harris ~

hose. I rummaged through the closet and got my black boots. The dress needed a necklace or scarf or some- thing, but there simply wasn’t time, and my earrings would just have to do. I yanked on my coat and ran to the car.

The Flaming Sword of God Bible Church was a rec- tangular cement-block building painted white, with a parking lot of ruts and dust. A cold wind whistled straight through my clothes as I got out of my car. I pulled my coat tighter around me with one hand and held my hair out of my face with the other. I gusted into the little church along with the chilly wind. The parking area had been crowded, and the church was jammed to capacity. I’d seen a television news truck outside, parked in the rear along with the hearse, and the camera crew was in the church. I was willing to bet Donnie was responsible for that. There was no place to sit; every pew was jam-packed with solid Lawrenceto- nians in their winter coats. I hovered at the back, trying to spot a dark corner. My mother’s basilisk glare found me anyway. Of course, she’d arrived on time, and was seated decorously in the middle of the church, along with the other members of the staff of Select Realty. They were all there except Debbie Lincoln, who pre- sumably was manning the phone at the office. For a moment I looked for Idella, before I remem- bered.

The coffin was sitting at the front of the church. I was thankful it was closed. It was covered with a pall of red carnations, and the sharp scent of the flowers carried through the chilly air. There was no organ, but a pianist was playing something subdued and doleful,

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maybe “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The minister en- tered from a door by the altar. He was a plain young acne-scarred man, with eyebrows and lashes so light they were almost invisible. He clutched a Bible, and he had on a cheap dark suit, white shirt, and black tie. There was a shifting on all the hard pews. I recognized Mrs. Purdy down at the front, wearing navy blue and pearls. Beside her, Donnie’s white face stood out over a suit of unrelieved black.

“Let us bow our heads in prayer,” the minister in- toned. His voice was unexpectedly rich. I did so, un- easily aware that a member of the camera crew was eyeing me with speculation. I began to edge away as un- obtrusively as possible. I was afraid I had been recog- nized. The cameras had caught me before, when the Real Murders deaths had taken place. Surely no one would approach me until the service was over. The cam- eraman had poked the reporter, a very young woman I recognized faintly from the very few times she’d been on the air. He was whispering in her ear, and she was star- ing in my direction. My name had not been in the news- paper accounts of Tonia Lee’s death, thank God, at least as far as I knew.

I had a hard time concentrating on the sermon, which from the snatches I caught seemed to be a com- bination of “She is at peace now, whatever her life and last moments were like” and “We must forgive the erring human who has strayed so far from God . . . Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” The congregation seemed to meet this last idea with some resistance at first, but by the time the minister ended, heads were nodding in agreement. I hadn’t caught the man’s name,

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but this preacher seemed to be a man of some persua- sion.

The whole thing seemed to go by quickly, what with one thing and another. The pallbearers assembled and began to carry out the coffin, with some head-nods and murmurs among them to coordinate the lifting. Every- one rose, and the piano began to mourn again. For the last time, Tonia Lee left a house of the living. The cam- era crew became busy filming this, and I managed to work my way down the line of pews until I was even with the one where the Select Realty crowd was situ- ated. After allowing enough time for the coffin to be loaded into the hearse, which I’d heard pulling around to the front door, the minister gave a closing prayer, doleful and fervent, and the congregation began to file out to their cars. All I had to do was whisper to Mother that the cameraman had recognized me, and the Select Realty staff closed around me. I managed to get to Mother’s car thus camouflaged, and squeezed in with Mother, Eileen, Patty, and Mackie, who had stood out in the Flaming Sword of God Bible Church like a chocolate drop on a wedding cake.

I hadn’t planned on going to the cemetery, but it seemed as though I had to.

None of us talked much on the ride to Shady Rest. I was thinking of how soon we’d be doing this again, whenever Idella was buried. Eileen was still washed out and subdued from our experience Sunday. Mackie was always quiet in a social setting, at least in one involving whites. For all I knew, he sang solo in the choir at the African Methodist Episcopal church.

Mother was grim about the news crew. Patty was

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upset by the funeral itself. “I’ve never been to one be- fore,” she explained, and I wondered if she’d only come to this one because my mother had assumed she would.

I looked around the crowd at the gravesite. Under the green tent, in the front row of folding chairs, sat Mrs. Purdy and Donnie and a thin-lipped woman I rec- ognized as Donnie’s older sister. Tonia Lee’s aunt and cousins sat behind them.

The chilly wind whipped among the mourners, making the tent awning flap and the red pall ripple. It brought tears to eyes that otherwise wouldn’t have shed any. Franklin Farrell, his gray hair for once ruf- fled, was standing at the back of the crowd, looking a little bored. Sally Allison was there in a neat dark gray suit, her tan eyes flickering over the assemblage. Lil- lian, my former co-worker, had ended up with her face to the wind and was blinking furiously and shivering. Lynn Liggett Smith, muffled in a heavy brown coat, was scanning the crowd with sharp eyes. At least the graveside service was short. It helped that Donnie had decided to play the dignified widower rather than opting for histrionics. He contented himself with throwing a single red rose on the coffin. Mrs. Purdy burst into sobs at this romantic gesture, and had to be consoled with patting and hugging during the re- mainder of the service. I thought perhaps she was the only person there who genuinely regretted the ending of Tonia Lee’s life.

On our subdued ride back to the church, where Mother dropped me off by my car, I found myself wondering how Susu and Jimmy were getting along.

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~ Charlaine Harris ~

I looked at my watch. It was almost time to meet Martin. I looked dreadful. Standing still in the cold had drained all color from my face, and my hair had been whipped around until it looked like a long dust mop. In the rearview mirror, I looked at least five years over my age. I pulled some lipstick out of my purse and put it on. I did have a brush, so I tried to tame my hair. I was marginally more presentable when I got through. The Athletic Club was a fairly new enterprise in Lawrenceton. Built only a couple of years before, it of- fered memberships to businesses and individuals. It featured weight rooms, exercise classes, and racquet- ball courts, plus a sauna and whirlpool. My mother took aerobics classes there. I explained to the dismay- ingly fit woman at the front desk—she was wearing orange-and-pink-striped spandex and had her hair in a ponytail—that I was meeting Martin Bartell, and she told me he was still playing racquetball on the second court. “You can watch if you climb those stairs,” she said helpfully, pointing to the easily visible stairs five feet to her left.

Sure enough, one side of the second-floor hall was faced with Plexiglas that overlooked the racquetball courts. The other side had ordinary doors in an ordi- nary wall, and from behind one of them I could hear shouted instructions (“Okay! Now BEND!”) to an ex- ercise class, backed by the deep-bass beat of rock mu- sic. The first racquetball court was empty, but in the second court the only sounds were the rebound of bod- ies and the ball from the walls, and the grunts of im- pact. Martin was playing killer racquetball with a man about ten years younger than he, and Martin was play-

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ing with a single-minded will and determination that gave me pause. In the five or six minutes they played, I learned a lot about Martin. He was ruthless, as I’d sensed. He was a man who could push the edge of fair play, staying just on the good side. He was a little frightening.

Was it possible this man, this pirate, was content to be an executive of an agricultural company? There was a barely contained ferocity about Martin that was ex- citing and disturbing. I’d already known he was a com- petent, forceful, and decisive man, a man who made his mind up quickly and kept it made. Now he seemed more complicated.