Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (2 page)

“Barby,” said Barbara Lampton with a girlish smile. Ms. Lampton was maybe forty, broad in the beam but camouflaging it very skillfully, and not altogether happy at being in Lawrenceton, Georgia, pop. 15,000.

I raised my eyebrows only very slightly (after all, my mother wanted to sell this house). A Barby was laughing at an Aurora? And she wasn’t Mrs. Bartell, after all. But was she really his sister?

“Nice to meet you,” I said neutrally. “Now, I’m not really showing you this house, I’m not a licensed realtor, but I do have the fact sheet here in case you have any questions, and I am familiar with the layout and history of the house.”

So saying, I turned and led the way before Martin Bartell could ask why this was any different from showing the house.

“Barby” commented on the marble-topped table and the silk flowers, and I explained about the furniture.

To the right of the foyer, through a doorway, was a very sizable formal living room and a small formal dining room, and to the left the same space was divided into two large rooms, a

“family room” and a room that could be used for just about anything. Martin Bartell examined everything very carefully and asked several questions I was quite unable to answer, and a few I was.

I was careful always to be looking down at the fact sheet when he turned to ask me something.

“You could use this back room for your gym equipment,” Barby remarked.

So that was where the athletic movement and the muscles came from.

They wandered farther back and looked through the kitchen with its informal dining nook, then into the formal dining room, which lay between the kitchen and the living room.

Was his sister going to live with him? What would he do in a house this large? He would need a maid, for sure. I tried to think of whom I could call who might know of a reliable person.

I tried
not
to picture myself in one of those “French maid” outfits sold in the back of those strange confession magazines. (A junior-high girl left one in the library one time.) All the time we were walking and looking, I kept in front of him, behind him, anywhere but facing him.

Instead of taking the kitchen stairs, I maneuvered Martin Bartell and Barby back to the main staircase. I had always loved that broad staircase. I glanced at my watch. Where was Mother?

The upstairs was really the climax of the house, or at least I’d always thought so, and she should be the one to show it. Mr. Bartell seemed content with me so far, but having me instead of Mother was like having hamburger when you’d been promised steak.

Though I had a very strong feeling Martin Bartell didn’t think so.

This was turning out to be a complicated morning.

This man was at least fifteen years older than I, belonged to a world I hadn’t the faintest inkling of, and was silently bringing to my attention the fact that for some time now I had been dating a minister who didn’t believe in premarital sex.

And before Father Aubrey Scott, I hadn’t dated anyone at all for months.

Well, I couldn’t keep them standing in the foyer while I reviewed my sex life (lack of). I mentally cracked a whip at my hormones and told myself I was probably imagining these waves of interest that washed over me.

“Up these stairs is one of the nicest rooms in the house,” I said determinedly. “The master bedroom.” I looked at Mr. Bartell’s chin instead of his eyes. I started up, and they followed obligingly. He was right behind me as I mounted the stairs. I took a few deep breaths and tried to compose myself. Really, this was
too stupid.

“There are only three bedrooms in this house,” I explained, “but all of them are marvelous, really almost suites. Each has a dressing room, a walk-in closet, and a private bathroom.”

“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” said Barby.

Maybe they really
were
brother and sister?

“The master bedroom, which is behind these double doors at the head of the stairs, has two walk-in closets. The blue bedroom is the door on the right end of the landing, and the rose bedroom is the one on the left. The extra door to the left is to a small room the Andertons used as a homework and TV room for the children. It would be a good office, or sewing room, or ...” I trailed off. The room was useful, okay? And it would be much more suitable for Martin Bartell’s exercise equipment than a downstairs, public, room. “The extra door to the right leads to the stairs that come up from the kitchen.”

All the bedroom doors were closed, which seemed a little odd.

On the other hand, the situation gave me a great dramatic moment. I turned both knobs simultaneously, swept open the master bedroom doors, and instantly moved to one side to give Mother’s clients an unobstructed view while I glanced back to get their reaction.

“Oh, my
God!”
said Barby.

It wasn’t what I’d expected.

Martin Bartell looked very grim.

Slowly and reluctantly, I turned to see what they were staring at.

The woman in the middle of the huge bed was sitting propped up against the headboard, with the white silk sheets pulled up to her waist. Her bare breasts shocked the eyes first; then her face, dark and swollen. The teased and disheveled black hair had been smoothed back to some semblance of normality. Her wrists, positioned at her sides, had some leather thongs around them.

“That’s Tonia Lee Greenhouse,” remarked my mother from behind her clients. “Aurora, please go make sure Tonia Lee is dead.”

That’s my mother. Always say “please,” even when you’re asking someone to check the vital signs of an obvious corpse. I had touched a dead person before, but it was not an experience I wanted to repeat. However, I had taken a step forward before a strong hand closed around my wrist.

“I’ll do it,” Martin Bartell said unexpectedly. “I’ve seen dead people before. Barby, go downstairs and sit in that big front room.”

Without a word, Barby did as she was told. The Voice of Command even worked on a sister.

Mr. Bartell, his shoulders stiff, strode across the wide expanse of peach carpet and leaned across the huge bed to put his fingers to the neck of the very deceased Tonia Lee Greenhouse.

“As you can tell, she’s definitely dead and has been for a while,” Mr. Bartell said matter-of-factly enough. His nose wrinkled, and I knew he was getting a much stronger whiff than I of the very unpleasant smell emanating from the bed. “Are the phones hooked up?”

“I’ll see,” said Mother briefly. “I’ll try the one downstairs.” She spoke as if she’d decided that on a whim, but when I turned to look at her, her face was completely white. She turned with great dignity, and as she went down the stairs, she began to shake visibly—as though an earthquake only she could feel was rocking the staircase.

My feet had grown roots into the thick carpet. Though I wished myself somewhere else, I seemed to lack the energy to take me there.

“Who was this woman?” asked Mr. Bartell, still bending over the bed but with his hands behind him. He was scrutinizing her neck with some detachment.

“Tonia Lee Greenhouse, half of Greenhouse Realty,” I said. It was a little surprising to hear my own voice. “She showed this house yesterday. She had to get the key from my mother’s office, but it was back there this morning.”

“That’s very remarkable,” Mr. Bartell said unemphatically.

And it surely was.

I stood there rooted, thinking how atypically everyone was behaving. I would have put money on Barby Lampton screaming hysterically, and she hadn’t squeaked after her first exclamation.

Martin Bartell hadn’t gotten angry with us for showing him a house with a corpse in it. My mother hadn’t ordered me to go downstairs to call the police, she’d done it herself. And instead of finding a solitary corner and brooding, I was standing stock-still watching a middle-aged businessman examine a naked corpse. I wished passionately I could cover up Tonia Lee’s bosom. I stared at Tonia Lee’s clothes, folded on the end of the bed. The red dress and black slip were folded so neatly, so oddly, in tiny perfect triangles. I brooded over this for some moments. I would have sworn Tonia Lee would be a tosser rather than a folder. And any dress subjected to that treatment would be a solid mass of wrinkles when it was shaken out.

“This lady was married?”

I nodded.

“Wonder if her husband reported her missing last night?” Mr. Bartell asked, as if the answer would be interesting, no more. He straightened up and walked back over to me, his hands in his pockets as though he were passing the time until an appointment.

My brain was not moving so very quickly. I finally realized he was doing his best not to touch anything in the room.

“I’m sure we shouldn’t cover her up,” I said wistfully. For once, I was wishing I hadn’t read so much true and fictional crime, so I wouldn’t know I was not supposed to adjust the corpse.

Martin Bartell’s light brown eyes looked at me very thoroughly. They had a golden touch, like a tiger’s.

“Miss Teagarden.”

“Mr. Bartell. .. ?”

His hand emerged from his pocket and moved up. I tensed as though I were about to be jolted by electricity. I lost the technique of staring at his chin and looked right at him. He was going to touch my cheek.

“Is the body in here?” asked Detective Lynn Liggett Smith from perhaps three feet away.

Downstairs, at least thirty minutes later, I had recovered my composure. I no longer felt as if I was in heat and would rip Martin Bartell’s clothes off any minute. I no longer felt that he, out of all the people in the world, had the power to look underneath all the layers of my personality and see the basic woman, who had been lonely (in one particular way) for a very long time.

In the “family room,” with my mother and Barby Lampton to provide protective chaperonage, I was able to collect all my little foibles and peculiarities back together and stack them between myself and Martin Bartell.

My mother felt obligated to hold polite conversation with her clients. She had introduced herself formally, gotten over her surprise on finding out that Mr. Bartell’s companion was his sister, not his wife, and had established the fact that Martin Bartell had received good impressions of Lawrenceton in the weeks he’d spent here. “It’s been a pleasant change of pace after the Chicago area,” he said, and sounded sincere. “Barby and I grew up on a farm in a very rural area of Ohio.”

Barby didn’t seem to enjoy being reminded.

He explained a little about his reorganization of the local Pan-Am Agra plant to my mother, a born manager, and I kept my eyes scrupulously to myself.

We waited for the police for a long time, it seemed. I heard familiar voices calling up and down the stairs. I’d dated Lynn Liggett’s husband, Arthur Smith (before they married, of course), and during our “courtship” I’d become acquainted with every detective and most of the uniforms on Lawrence-ton’s small force. Detective Henske’s cracker drawl, Lynn’s crisp alto, Paul Allison’s reedy voice . .. and then came the sound I dreaded.

Detective Sergeant Jack Burns.

I turned in my chair to group myself protectively with the other three. What were they talking about now? Martin Bartell had said he’d been at work every day of the three months he’d spent in Lawrenceton, and had invited Mother to tell him about the town. He couldn’t have asked anyone more informed, except perhaps the Chamber of Commerce executive, a lonely man who worked touchingly hard to persuade the rest of the world to believe in Lawrenceton’s intangible advantages.

I listened once more to the familiar litany.

“Four banks,” Mother enumerated, “a country club, all the major automobile dealerships, though I’m afraid you’ll have to get the Mercedes repaired in Atlanta.”

I heard Jack Burns shouting down the stairs. He wanted the fingerprint man to “get his ass in gear.”

“Lawrenceton is practically a suburb of Atlanta now,” Barby Lampton said, earning her a hard look from my mother. Most Lawrencetonians were not too pleased about the ever-nearing annexation of Lawrenceton into the greater Atlanta area.

“And the school system is excellent,” my mother continued with a little twitch of her shoulders. “Though I don’t know if that’s an area of interest—?”

“No, my son just graduated from college,” Martin Bartell murmured. “And Barby’s girl is a freshman at Kent State.”

“Aurora is my only child,” Mother said naturally enough. “She’s worked at the library here for what—six years, Roe?”

I nodded.

“A librarian,” he said thoughtfully.

Why was it librarians had such a prim image? With all the information available in books right there at their fingertips, librarians could be the best-informed people around. About anything.

“Now she’s thinking about going into real estate, and looking for her own home at the same time.”

“You think you’d like selling homes?” Barby said politely.

“I’m beginning to think maybe it’s not for me,” I admitted, and my mother looked chagrined.

“Honey, I know this morning has been a horrible experience—poor Tonia Lee—but you know this is not something that happens often. But I
am
beginning to think I’ll have to establish some kind of system to check on my female realtors when they are out showing a house to a client we don’t know. Aurora, maybe Aubrey wouldn’t like you selling real estate? My daughter has been dating our Episcopalian priest for several months,” she explained to her clients with an almost-convincing casualness.