Three Bedrooms, One Corpse(9)

“You’re—excuse me, you’re a widow?”

“Yes,” she said briskly, to get quickly over a painful subject. “Ken died last year in a car wreck, and it was hard to live in Macon after that. I don’t have any family there, we were there just because of his job . . . but I do have an aunt, Cile Vernon, here in Lawrenceton, and she heard there was a teacher’s job available at the kinder- garten here, and I was lucky enough to get it. So now I’m house-hunting for a little place for Elizabeth and me.” “Well, you came to the right Realtor,” I said, trying to brighten up the conversation and not give way to my deep suspicions. I had a feeling that if I looked over

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~ Charlaine Harris ~

Emily Kaye’s shoulder, I would see the writing on the wall for my relationship with Father Aubrey Scott. “Yes, Mrs. Yates is so nice. I’m really looking seri- ously at a little house on Honor right by the junior high school. It’s just a couple of blocks from the kinder- garten, and there’s a preschool for my little girl nearby, too. Of course, I’d really like to quit work and stay home with Elizabeth,” she said wistfully. That writing got darker and darker. Sure she would. And to top it all off, that was my house, the house I’d inherited from Jane Engle, she was thinking of buying. She’d be right across the street from Lynn and Arthur and their baby.

Aubrey would drop me and fall in love with this organ-playing widow with the cute little girl. No, I was being paranoid.

No, I was being realistic.

“Mrs. Kaye,” Idella’s sweet voice said, just in the nick of time. “I’m so sorry, we have to rearrange our appointment to see the house again.”

“Oh, and I had my aunt keep Elizabeth just so I could see it by myself!” Emily Kaye said, regret and ac- cusation mingling in her voice.

I was battling a tide of rage and self-pity that had torn through me with the force of a monsoon. And I would rather have died than for Emily Kaye to notice that anything was wrong with me.

“Why don’t you just go ask Detective Smith if you could run over for a half hour and show the house to Mrs. Kaye?” I suggested to Idella, who was looking distressed at her client’s disappointment. My voice rang a little hollow in my ears, and I felt my expression

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probably didn’t match my concerned words, but I was doing the best I could.

“I’ll do that,” Idella said with unaccustomed deci- sion. “Excuse me just a second.”

“Oh, thanks,” Emily told me with a warm sincerity that made me want to throw up. “I hated to ask Aunt Cile to keep Elizabeth this morning. I don’t want her to think I moved here just to have a free babysitter!” “Think nothing of it,” I answered with equal sincer- ity. I wanted to get out of that room so badly my feet were itching. Any minute I was going to slap the tar out of Emily Kaye.

And why? I asked myself as I gave her a final, civil nod and glided off down the hall to Mother’s office. Because, I answered myself angrily, Emily Kaye was going to get married, she would marry Aubrey, and even if I didn’t want to marry him, I would once again be left. I knew I was being childish, I knew there was nothing logical about my feeling, and still I couldn’t help it. This was not my finest hour.

It was time for one of my pep talks.

It is better not to be married than to be married un- happily.

Women do not need to be married to have rich, ful- filled lives.

I didn’t want to marry Aubrey anyway, and I proba- bly wouldn’t have accepted if Arthur Smith had asked me. (Well, yes I would, but it would’ve been a mistake.) All relationships fail until you find the right one. It’s inevitable.

The failure of a relationship to lead to marriage does not mean you are unworthy or unattractive.

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~ Charlaine Harris ~

Having told myself all this, I recited the list again. By the time Mother returned to her office, I’d com- pleted the circuit three times. Mother was not in the best of humor, either. She was fuming about the dis- ruption of the office, about being questioned again by the police, about the nerve of Tonia Lee, turning up dead in a Select Realty listing. Of course, she didn’t use those words, but that was the gist of her diatribe. “Oh, listen to me!” she said suddenly. “I can’t be- lieve I’m going on like this, and a woman I know is probably lying on a table somewhere waiting to be au- topsied.” She shook her head at her own lack of empa- thy. “We’ll just have to put up with all this. I wasn’t crazy about Tonia Lee, God knows, but no one should have to go through what she must have.” “You did tell Lynn about the thefts?”

“Yes. I let her draw her own conclusions. I’d already told her about the vases missing from the Anderton house. So I went on and told her about the pilfering that’s been going on. Of course, it’s more than pilfer- ing. Someone in our little group of Realtors is seriously dishonest.”

“Mom, have you happened to think that Tonia Lee found out who stole the stuff from the houses? That maybe that was why she got killed?”

“Yes. Of course. I hope the thefts had nothing to do with the murder.”

“That would mean that a Realtor is the killer.” “Yes. Let’s just drop the subject. We don’t know anything. It was probably one of Tonia Lee’s conquests that did her in.”

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“Probably. Well, I’m going to go home as soon as Lynn talks to me.”

“You don’t have a feel for the business, do you?” Mother said reluctantly.

“I don’t think so,” I said with equal regret. She reached across her desk and patted my hand, surprising me for the second time today. We are not touchers.

“Excuse me,” Debbie Lincoln said from the door- way. “That woman wants you, Miss Teagarden.” “Thanks,” I said. I retrieved my purse from the floor and fluttered my fingers at my mother. “See you tomor- row night, Mom, if not sooner.”

“Okay, Aurora.”

That night, after I’d taken my shower and wrapped myself up in a warm robe, something that had been picking at the edges of my mind finally surfaced. I looked up a number in the little Lawrenceton phone book and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Gerald, this is Roe Teagarden.”

“My goodness, girl. I haven’t seen you in a year, I guess.”

“How are you doing, Gerald?”

“Oh, pretty well. You know, don’t you, that I’ve re- married?”

“That’s what I heard. Congratulations.” “Mamie’s cousin Marietta came to help me clean out her stuff after Mamie—died, and we just hit it off.”

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~ Charlaine Harris ~

“I’m so glad, Gerald.”

“Is there anything I can do for you, Roe?” “Listen, I heard a name today and I’m trying to pin a case to it. Think you can help me?”

“I’ll sure give it a shot. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any true crime. Mamie getting killed kind of made my interest in crime fade . . .”

“Of course. I’m being so stupid calling you . . .” “But lately I’ve thought about taking it up again. So what’s your question?”

“You were always our walking encyclopedia in Real Murders, Gerald. So here’s the question. Emily Kaye?” “Emily Kaye . . . hmmmm. A victim, not a killer, I remember that right off the bat.”

“Okay. American?”

“Nope. Nope. English . . . early this century, 1920s, I think.”

I kept a respectful silence while Gerald rummaged through his mental attic of old murder cases. Since Ger- ald was an insurance salesman, his interest in wrongful death had always seemed rather natural. “I got it!” he said triumphantly. “Patrick Mahon! Married man who killed and cut up his mistress, Emily Kaye. There were pieces of her all over the holiday cot- tage he’d rented; he’d tried several methods to dispose of the body. He’d bought a knife and saw before he’d gone down to the cottage, so the jury didn’t believe his excuse that she’d died accidentally. Let me flip open this book, Roe. Okay . . . his wife, who’d thought he was fooling around, found a ticket to retrieve a bag from the train station . . . and in the bag was a woman’s bloodstained clothing. She told the police, I

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believe. So they backtracked Mahon and found the body parts. That what you needed to know?” “Yes, thank you, Gerald. I appreciate your help.” “No trouble at all.”

The early Emily Kaye was certainly a far cry from the present-day Emily. I couldn’t imagine the Emily I knew going to a cottage for an illicit vacation with a married man.

So a little niggling point had been settled. I knew where I’d heard the name.

But there was no one I could share this fascinating bit of information with, no one who would appreciate it. For the second time in one day, I regretted the dis- banding of Real Murders. Call us ghouls, call us just plain peculiar, we had had a good time with our admit- tedly offbeat hobby.

What had happened to the members of our little club? Of the twelve, one would go on trial soon for multiple murder, another had committed suicide, one had been murdered, one had been widowed, one had died of natu- ral causes, one had been arrested for drug trafficking (Gifford’s unusual lifestyle had finally attracted the wrong attention), one was in a mental institution . . . on the other hand, LeMaster was still busy and prosperous with his dry-cleaning business, presumably, though I hadn’t seen him since Jane Engle’s funeral. John Queens- land had married my mother. Gerald had remarried. Arthur Smith had gotten married. And I . . . It seemed LeMaster Cane and I were the only ones who were basically unchanged in life condition in the eighteen months or so since Real Murders had had its last meeting.