Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (19 page)

“I hope everything—” I floundered. “I’m really glad you’re home,” I finally said.

“Thanks again, Roe,” he said, and wheeled away.

Seconds later I was in front of the Anderton house, its Select Realty sign still stuck forlornly in the yard, doomed to be frosted and snowed upon all winter and covered with the quick grass of spring and the weeds of summer, I was sure.

I didn’t think the Anderton house, or the little ranch-style where we’d found Idella, would sell anytime soon.

After all, these deaths hardly seemed to be the work of a random killer, striking where he could find a woman alone.

I wondered if anyone had seen a car at the house where Idella’d been found.

A client arriving by foot would have been unusual, even unnerving: especially to Idella, who’d already been made nervous by Tonia Lee’s death, who’d already heard that the police suspected someone of arriving at the Anderton house on foot . .. surely she’d have run screaming from the house instantly?

Yes, if it had been a random client who called to set up an appointments But not if it had been someone she knew, someone who said, maybe, “My run (or my bike ride) takes me by there, so I’ll see you at the Westley house,” or something of the sort. And what more impersonal place to kill than someone else’s empty house? You could just leave the body where it fell. The killer hadn’t had a chance to divert suspicion, hadn’t had the opportunity to move Idella’s car somewhere else; since it had been dusk, not dark, when Idella had been murdered, her car couldn’t have been moved without the driver being seen. Idella had had to be silenced quickly or she would have told what she knew ... and Donnie Greenhouse thought she knew who’d killed his wife.

There he was now, as if my thinking of him had conjured him up, alternately walking and jogging, dressed in ancient dark blue sweats. He was dangerously hard to see in the gathering dark. I could just make out the features of his face.

“Roe Teagarden,” he said by way of greeting. “What are you doing out tonight?”

“Walking, like everyone else in Lawrenceton.”

He laughed without humor. “Decided to join the crowd, huh? I come here every evening,” he said with an abrupt change in tone. “I come stand here while I’m out running. I think about Tonia Lee, about what she was like.”

This was weird.

A car went by, its headlights underlining the suddenly increasing darkness. I had a rather long walk home. I began to shift my feet uneasily.

“She was quite a woman, Roe. But you knew her. She was one of a kind.”

That was the absolute truth. I was able to nod emphatically.

“Everyone wanted her, and not just men, either; but she was my wife,” he told me proudly.

His words had the feeling of a mantra he’d chanted over and over.

My scalp began to crawl.

“She’ll never cheat with anyone else again,” Donnie said with some satisfaction.

“Um, Donnie? Do you think it’s really that good for you to keep on coming over here?”

He turned to me, but I couldn’t see his face well enough to discern his expression.

“Maybe not, Roe. You think I should resist the temptation?” His voice was mocking.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “I think so. Donnie, why didn’t you tell the police what you and Idella talked about that day at the restaurant?”

“So that’s how they knew. Idella talked to you in the women’s room.”

“She told me you were saying you saw her car come out of your office parking lot.”

“Yeah. I was out looking for Tonia Lee. So I cruised by the office. Sometimes she would take people there if she couldn’t find anywhere else.”

“Was Idella driving?”

“I couldn’t tell. But it was her car. It had that MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT

LCS bumper sticker.”

“You can’t believe that Idella killed Tonia Lee.”

“No, Roe, I’ve never believed that. But I think she gave a ride home to whomever left Tonia Lee’s car at the office. And I think I know who that was.”

“You should tell the police, Donnie.”

“No, Roe, this is mine. My vengeance. I may take my time about it. But Tonia Lee would have wanted me to avenge her.”

I drew in a deep, cautious breath. The conversation could only go downhill from here. “It’s really dark, Donnie. I’d better go.”

“Yes, don’t get caught alone with someone you don’t know very well.”

I took a tiny step backwards.

“And don’t go into houses with strangers,” he added, and ran away, the measured thud of his Reeboks fading into the distance.

I headed in the opposite direction. I would have gone that way even if it hadn’t been the way home.

I walked back to the townhouse more quickly than I’d set forth. It was too dark to be out by now, and my brown coat rendered me invisible to cars. I hadn’t prepared very well for my walk, and I was unnerved by my encounter with Donnie. I pulled my keys out when I neared the back of my town-house—I’d automatically walked into the parking lot instead of going to my closer but seldom-used front door. The lighting back here was good, but I glanced around carefully as I approached my patio gate.

I caught a little movement, from the corner of my eye, back by the dumpster in the far corner of the lot.

There weren’t any strange cars parked under the porte cochere. All the vehicles belonged to residents. I stared into the dark corner where the dumpster squatted. Nothing moved.

“Is anyone there?” I called, and my voice was disgracefully squeaky.

Nothing happened.

After a long moment I very reluctantly turned my back, and moving quicker than I had on my walk, I raced through my patio and turned the key in the back door, closing and shutting it behind me with even greater rapidity.

The phone was ringing.

If the caller had been Martin, I probably would have told him how scared I was. But it was my mother, wanting to know the news about the police questioning of Jimmy Hunter. I talked with her long enough to calm down, carefully not mentioning why I was so breathless. I hadn’t really seen anything, and if I possibly
had
seen just a tiny movement, what I’d glimpsed was a cat prowling around the dumpster in search of mice or scraps. There was, it was true, a murderer at large in Lawrenceton, but there was no reason on earth to believe he or she was after me. I knew nothing, had seen nothing, and was not even in real estate.

But the feeling of being observed would not leave, and I wandered restlessly around the ground floor of the townhouse, making sure everything was locked and all the curtains and shades were drawn tight.

Finally, after telling myself several times in a rallying way that I was being ridiculous, I went upstairs to change. Even in the cold, I’d sweated during my walk. Normally, I would have taken a shower, but this night, I could not bring myself to step in the tub and close the shower curtain.

So I pulled on my ancient heavy bathrobe, a thick saddle blanket of a robe in green-and-blue plaid, the most comforting garment I have ever known.

It didn’t work its magic. I found myself scared to turn on the television for fear the noise would block out the sounds of an intruder. But nothing happened, all evening. I was caught up in some kind of siege mentality; I got a box of Cheez-Its and a diet Coke and holed up in my favorite chair, with a book I’d read many times, one of William Marshall’s Yellowthread Street series. But even his endearingly bizarre plotting could not relax me.

I wondered if men had evenings like this.

The time passed, somehow. I turned on my patio and front door lights, intending to leave them burning all night. I switched off the interior lights. I went from window to window, sitting in the dark and looking out. I never saw anything else; about one o’clock, I heard a car start up somewhere close and drive away. Though that could have signaled any number of things, perhaps none of them concerning me, I was able to sleep in fits and starts after that.

IT WAS RAINING Friday evening when Martin came to supper. He had barely shed his raincoat when he gathered me up in his arms.

“Martin,” I whispered, finally.

“Humm?”

“The water for the spaghetti is boiling over.”

“What?”

“Let me go put in the spaghetti so we can eat. After all, you need to build up your strength.”

Which earned me a narrow-eyed look.

I can never manage to get all the elements of a meal ready simultaneously, but we did eventually eat our salad and garlic bread and spaghetti with meat sauce. Martin seemed to enjoy them, to my relief. While we ate, he told me about his trip, which seemed to have consisted mainly of small enclosed spaces alternating with large enclosed spaces: airplane, airport, meeting room, dining room, hotel room, airport, airplane.

When he asked me what I’d been doing, I almost told him I’d sat up last night afraid of the bogey man. But I didn’t want Martin to think of me as a shaking, trembly kind of woman.

Instead, I told him about my walk, about the people I’d seen.

“And they all had a chance to kill Tonia Lee,” I said. “Any one of them could have walked up to the house in the dusk. Tonia Lee wouldn’t have been too surprised to see any one of them, at least initially.”

“But it had to have been a man,” suggested Martin. “Don’t you think?”

“We don’t know if she’d actually had sex,” I pointed out. “She was positioned to look like it, but we don’t have the postmortem report. Or she could have had sex, and then been killed by someone other than her sex partner.” Martin seemed to take this conversation quite matter-of-factly.

“That would assume a lot of traffic in and out of the Anderton house.”

“Doesn’t seem too likely, does it? But it could be. After all, the presence of a woman wouldn’t scare Tonia Lee at all. And Donnie Greenhouse said several very strange things last night.” I told Martin about Donnie’s remark that not only men had wanted Tonia Lee, and about his sighting of Idella’s car. But I didn’t say anything about Eileen and Terry; just because they were the only lesbians I knew about in Lawrenceton didn’t mean they were the only ones in town.

Aubrey would have been nauseated by this time.

“So what’s your assumption?” Martin asked.

“I think ... I think Tonia Lee learned who was stealing those things from the houses for sale. I think she was having an affair with whoever it was, or he—or she—seduced her when she asked him to come to the Anderton house to talk about the thefts. Maybe he asked her to meet him under the guise of having a romp in the hay there, when he meant to finish her all along. So they romp or they don’t, but either way he fixes it to look as if they had. I’m sure he planned it beforehand. He arrives by foot or bicycle, he kills Tonia Lee, he positions her sexually to make us think it’s just one of her paramours who got exasperated, he moves her car, he goes home, he somehow gets the key back to our key board. He thinks that that way no one will look for Tonia Lee for days, days during which all alibis will be blurred or forgotten or unverifiable. Maybe he returns the key in the few minutes Patty and Debbie are both out of the front room at the office.”

Martin had been listening quietly, thinking along with me. Now he held up his hand.

“No,” he said. “I think Idella must have put back the key.”

“Oh, my God, yes. Idella,” I said slowly. “That’s why he killed her. She knew who had had the key. She got it from whoever was at Greenhouse Realty.”

That made so much sense. Idella, crying at the staff meeting right after Tonia’s body was discovered. Idella, red-eyed and upset during the days after the killing.

“It must have been someone she was incredibly loyal to,” I murmured. “Why wouldn’t she tell? It would have saved her life.”

“She couldn’t believe it, she wouldn’t believe this person did it,” Martin said practically.

“She was in love.”

We stared at each other for a minute.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “That must have been it. She must have been in love.”

I thought of Idella after Martin fell asleep that night. Deluded in the most cruel way, Idella had died at the hands of someone she loved, someone of whom she could believe no evil, no matter how compelling the evidence. In a way, I thought drowsily, Idella had been like me . . .

she’d been alone for a while, coping with her life on her own. Maybe that had made her all too ready to trust, to depend. It had cost her everything. I prayed for her, for her children, and finally for Martin and me.

I must have coasted off into sleep, because the next thing I was aware of was waking. I woke up just a little, though; just enough to realize I’d been asleep, just enough to realize something unusual had roused me.

I could hear someone moving very quietly downstairs. Martin must be getting a drink and doesn’t want to disturb me—so sweet, I thought drowsily, and turned over on my stomach, pillowing my face on my bent arms. My elbow touched something solid.

Martin.

My eyes opened wide in the darkness.

I froze, listening.

The slight sound from downstairs was repeated. I automatically reached out to the night table for my glasses and put them on.

I could see the darkness much more clearly.

I slid out of bed as silently as I could, my slithery black nightgown actually of some practical use, and crept to the head of the stairs. Maybe it was Madeleine? Had I fed her before we came up to bed?

But Madeleine was in her usual night place, curled on the little cushioned chair by the window, and she was sitting up, her head turned to the doorway. I could see the profile of her ears against the faint light of the streetlamp a block north on Parson Road, coming in through the blinds.