Three Bedrooms, One Corpse(31)

“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.

194

~ Charlaine Harris ~

“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 politi- cian’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 re- minded 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, lift- ing 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

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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 de- cided 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 ques- tioned Jimmy Hunter and let him go, all kinds of peo- ple 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 mur- ders 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 wan- dered 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.

196

~ Charlaine Harris ~

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 sus- pected 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 wrong again. Of course they were wrong again, I told myself fiercely. The thefts. They’d begun long before Martin had moved here.

But the murders, of course, had begun after. I remembered my mother wondering what on earth Martin was doing looking at such a large house. Logi- cally, a bachelor would be looking at a smaller place, not a virtual mansion like the Anderton house. The po- lice might think he’d made an appointment to see the Anderton house because he wanted his handiwork found. Martin had been in town some weeks before I met him, long enough to meet Tonia Lee and Idella. Tonia Lee, who would go to bed with almost anyone, would undoubtedly have licked her chops when she met Martin. Idella, wispy, palely pretty, and lonely, would have been thrilled to meet someone who could pay such close and flattering attention to her.

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Of course, that was what the police might think. I shut my eyes.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” Benita was asking with concern.

“I’m fine,” I lied automatically. “Are we about fin- ished?”

“Just about. Do you like it?”

“It’s different,” I said, startled enough to peek out from under my personal black cloud. “Gosh, I don’t look like me.”

“I know,” said Benita proudly. “You look very sleek and sophisticated. Just beautiful.”

“Gee,” I said slowly. “I do.”

“All you need to do is go home and put on your dress and some lipstick, and you’ll be ready to step out.”

I did need lipstick. And I needed some spine, too, I decided grimly. I wasn’t going to let these black thoughts overwhelm me. I knew Martin, on some level, knew him thoroughly.

I thought.

I paid Benita handsomely, and went home to slide into my green flouncy dress and put on some lipstick. I’m going to go and have a good time, I told myself. I’m going with a handsome, sexy man who considers me absolutely necessary. He might have wanted to kill nasty Sam Ulrich last night, but he wouldn’t have killed Tonia Lee and Idella. Absolutely not.

At least my inner turmoil wasn’t showing on the outside. When I looked in my bathroom mirror to put on my bronzy lipstick, I looked just as good as I had in the beauty shop.

198

~ Charlaine Harris ~

I almost wished I’d polished my nails, but that would have been absolutely out of character; and with my hair put up, I hardly knew myself, as it was. Instead of bustling around thinking of something to do, I sat on the ottoman in front of my favorite chair, my current book lying neglected on the table beside it. I decided to pop the dress on at the last second. It hung on the bathroom door, looking festive and fancy, mocking me. I stared into space and thought about Martin gone, Martin in jail, Martin on trial. He was as necessary to me as he said I was to him. When the doorbell rang, it actually surprised me. I pulled off my robe, pulled the dress over my head, and zipped it up in record time. I slid my feet into my high- heeled pumps and pulled myself together to answer the door, wondering vaguely why everything looked so funny.

Martin took in a deep breath when I opened the door. He looked down at me with some unreadable emotion.

“Do I look all right?” I asked, suddenly anxious. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes.”

“Do you like the hair?” I asked nervously when he still stared.

“Yes . . . very much.” He finally stepped in so I could close the door against the cold. He was wearing a black overcoat, and his white hair was strikingly attrac- tive.

Once again I had the unsettling feeling that he was grown up and I wasn’t.

“Where are your glasses?”

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “that’s why everything looked

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so funny.” In some relief, I found them on the little table beside my chair and popped them on. “I tried contact lenses,” I told him defensively, “but I’m one of those people who can’t wear them. They just drove me crazy.”

“I’m glad you wear glasses.”

“Why?”

“So no one else can see you with them off,” he said, and bent to give me a kiss on the cheek. His finger traced the line of my neck. I shivered. My fears abated now that I was with him. When I was close to him, I felt that Martin would not let himself be arrested. “Come look in the bathroom mirror,” he suggested. “What?”

“Just for a minute; come with me.”

“Is my hair coming down?” My hands flew up. “No, no,” Martin said, and smiled.

So into the bathroom we went, and I looked at my- self in the mirror, Martin’s face rising neatly above mine in the reflection. He pulled off his gloves, and his hand went into a pocket.

Suddenly I realized I should be absolutely terrified. But if he wanted to kill me, he would. I took a deep breath, looking steadily at his eyes in the mirror, and from his pocket he pulled a little gray velvet box and set it on the counter. Gently and expertly he removed my earrings, plain gold balls, and opening the velvet box, he extracted gorgeous amethyst-and-diamond earrings and with no fumbling at all fixed them in my ears. “Oh, Martin,” I said, stunned. I felt as if I’d put on my brakes at the edge of a precipice.