Three Bedrooms, One Corpse(6)
~ Three Bedrooms, One Corpse ~
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in the bed together . . . Mother was right, it looked like a seduction scene, not a hasty rape, even though the leather thongs might indicate force. My first thought had been consensual kinky sex. But maybe Mother and I were both factoring in Tonia Lee’s known reputation for infidelity. When I suggested this to Mother, she agreed.
“Anyway, I’m sure Mackie is not involved,” she said staunchly. “I like him a lot, he’s a hard worker, and for the year he’s been here, he’s been totally honest and aboveboard. Besides . . . he is too smart to put the key back.”
After we’d hung up, I wondered about that. Why had the Anderton house key been put back on the hook so mysteriously? That key had enabled us to enter and find the body.
I thought a number of interesting questions de- pended on the answer to that riddle.
The office meeting ought to be stimulating. I ate an apple and a leftover chicken breast while flip- ping through Jane Engle’s copy of The Murderers’ Who’s Who. I read the entries for some of my favorite
cases and wondered if an updated edition would include our local murderous duo whose dreadful but brief career had made national headlines; or perhaps our only other claim to fame might rate an entry, the disappearance of an entire family from a house outside of Lawrenceton. That had been—what?—five or six years ago. My familiarity with old murder cases was my mother’s despair. Now, since the disbandment of the Real Murders club, I had no one to share it with. I sighed over spilt milk.
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~ Charlaine Harris ~
After putting my dishes in the dishwasher, I glumly mounted the stairs to get ready for the meeting. For one thing, I had to brush all the cat hairs off my skirt. Mother’s office building, with its soothing gray and blue carpeting and walls, peaceful prints, and comfortable chairs, exuded calm and profitable effi- ciency. That was Mother’s essence, and she and the of- fice designer had captured it when they renovated the building. Mother had insisted on a conference room, for staff meetings. Every Monday every Realtor work- ing for Mother had to attend this meeting. She’d planned to expand, and the room was still more than large enough for the whole staff.
I saw with interest that one of John Queensland’s daughters-in-law had been brought in to answer the phones and take messages while Mother held the meet- ing. I knew my stepfather’s sons and their wives only slightly, and as I nodded to Melinda Queensland, I tried to figure out what my relationship to her was. Stepsister-in-law? It looked to me as if I was going to be a stepaunt in a few months, but Melinda had had several miscarriages and I wasn’t going to ask. Melinda was sitting at Patty Cloud’s desk, which of course was not only orderly but also decorated with a tidy plant and a picture in an expensive frame. Patty’s desk faced the front door, and her underling, Debbie Lincoln, had a desk at right angles to it, in effect form- ing the start of the corridor down to the conference room and Idella’s and Mackie’s offices. In the square created by two walls and the desks, firmly screwed to
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the wall behind Patty, was the key board, a large peg- board striped with labeled hooks. The more popular letters of the alphabet claimed two or even three hooks. A person of even the feeblest intelligence could figure out the system in seconds, and every other agency in town had something similar.
I snapped out of my study of the key board to find that Melinda was waiting for me to acknowledge her, and her smile was growing strained as I stared at the wall behind her. I gave her a brisk nod and started down the hall to the conference room. I was in time to sit at Mother’s left, a chair left vacant deliberately for me, I presumed. All the Realtors expected me to inherit this business from Mother, and saw my presence in the office this week as the first step in my becoming second-in-command.
This was far from true. I had quit my job at the li- brary on a whim, and I already regretted it more than I ever would have believed possible. (Of course, even re- gretting it mildly was more than I ever would have be- lieved possible.)
Idella Yates, a frail-looking fair woman in her mid- thirties, divorced with two children, slid into the chair at the end of the table and put a briefcase on the table in front of her as if building a barrier between herself and the room. Her short straight hair was the color of dead winter grass. Eileen Norris bustled in, carrying a large stack of papers and looking abstracted. Eileen was Mother’s second-in-command, the first Realtor Mother had hired after she’d gone out on her own. Eileen was big, brassy, loud, and cheerful on the sur- face; underneath, she was a barracuda. Patty Cloud, the
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~ Charlaine Harris ~
receptionist/secretary, groomed to a tee, had perched her bottom dead in the center of the chair next to Idella’s. Patty, who was maybe all of twenty-four, baf- fled and irritated me far more than she should have. Patty worked hard at being perfect, and she had damned near succeeded. She was always helpful on the phone, always turned out high-quality work, never for- got anything, and never, never came to work in any- thing frumpy or out of style or even wrinkled. She was already studying for her Realtor’s license. She would probably pass at the top of her group.
Patty’s underling, Debbie Lincoln, was a rather dim and cowed girl right out of high school. She was a full- figured black with hair expensively corn-rowed and decorated with beads. Debbie was quiet, punctual, and could type very well. Other than that, I knew little about her. At the moment she was sitting quietly by Patty with her eyes on her hands, not chatting back and forth like the others.
Eileen finally got settled, and we all looked at Mother expectantly. Just as she opened her mouth, the confer- ence room door opened and in came Mackie Knight. His dark round face looked strained and upset, and he responded to our various exclamations with a wave of his hand. He collapsed into a chair by Eileen with obvious relief, automatically adjusting his tie and run- ning a hand over his very short hair.
“Mackie, I thought I was going to have to send a lawyer down to the station to get you out!” “Thanks, Mrs. Queensland. You were going to be my one phone call,” he said. “But they seem to believe, at least for the moment, that I didn’t do it.”
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“What did happen yesterday?” Eileen asked. We all leaned forward to listen.
“Well,” Mackie began wearily, telling a story he’d obviously told several times already, “the phone rang here five minutes after Patty went home for the day, and I was standing out in the reception room talking to Roe, so I answered it.”
Patty looked chagrined that she hadn’t worked late the day before.
“It was Mrs. Greenhouse, and she said she had an appointment to meet a client to show him the Anderton house. She had forgotten to come by earlier to get the key—if anyone happened to be leaving our office soon, could they bring it by? She was worried she’d miss her client if she left to come to our office.” “She didn’t name the client?” Mother asked. “No name,” Mackie said firmly. “She did say ‘he,’ I’m almost positive.”
Idella Yates, beside me, shuddered and clutched her arms as if she were feeling a chill. I think we all did; Tonia Lee, making arrangements to meet her own death.
“Anyway, this is the part the police have the most trouble with,” Mackie continued. “What I did, instead of driving up and leaving the key and going on home . . . I went home first, put on my jogging clothes, and went out for my run. I stuck the key in the pocket of my shorts and stopped on my run to hand it to Mrs. Green- house. That only made maybe seven to ten minutes’ dif- ference in the time I actually got there, and it suited me better. To tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t so excited about doing her work for her. No one here would be that
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~ Charlaine Harris ~
sloppy. When I got there, she was at the house by herself. If anyone else was there, I didn’t see him. Hers was the only car. It was parked in the back, outside the kitchen, so that was the door I went to.”
“Why does that seem funny to the police?” Mother asked. “It doesn’t seem odd to me.”
“They seem to think that I ran instead of driving my car so no one would identify my car as being in the drive- way, later. They said a woman living across the street from the Anderton house, she was waiting for her daugh- ter to get home from spending a week out of town. So she was sitting in her front room, looking out the window, and reading a book, for the best part of two hours . . . the daughter had had a flat on the interstate, turns out. This woman might have missed a person on foot, but not a car.”
“What about the back door?” Eileen asked. “The people who live behind the Andertons were watching TV in their den with the curtains open, since they knew no one was in the Anderton house. They told the police that they saw Tonia Lee’s car pull up when it was still daylight, but fading fast. One woman got out. They sat watching TV and eating in their den while they watched, and no other car ever pulled up. They figured someone else had come to the front door. They did see Tonia Lee’s car pull out after dark, way after dark, but of course they couldn’t see who was in it. They were pretty interested, someone being in the house for that long; they thought someone might really be thinking of buying.” We all mulled that over for a minute.