I loved it.
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The downstairs bathroom needed work. New tile, recaulking, a new mirror.
The downstairs bedroom would make a great li- brary.
The stairs were steep but not terrifying. The banister seemed quite solid.
The largest bedroom upstairs was very nice. I didn’t like the wallpaper too much, but that was easily changed. Again, the upstairs bath, which opened into the hall, needed some work. The other bedroom needed painting. The small room, usable as a store- room or sewing room, also needed painting. I could do that. Or better yet, I could have it done. “You look pretty happy,” Eileen observed. I had forgotten anyone else was there.
“You are actually considering buying this house,” she said slowly.
“It’s a wonderful house,” I said in a daze. “A little isolated.”
“Quiet.”
“A little desolate.”
“Peaceful.”
“Hmmm. Well, as far as price goes, it’s a bargain . . . and of course, there’s the little apartment over the garage that you can rent to whomever . . . that’ll help with the isolation, too.”
“Let’s see the apartment.”
So down the stairs and out the kitchen door we trooped. The flight of stairs up to the little second floor seemed sturdy enough; of course, this addition was only six years old. I followed Eileen up, and she un- locked the glass-paned door.
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It was really one large open area, the only sealed-off part being a bathroom at one end. The bathroom had a shower, no tub. The kitchen was just enough for one person to heat up a few things from time to time; the mother had gone over to the house for most of her meals. Some nice open shelves had been built in, and there were two closets. There was a window air condi- tioner, but no hint of how it had been heated. “A kerosene space heater is my guess,” Eileen said. “There shouldn’t be any problem in an area this size.” Perhaps I could rent this to a student at Lawrence- ton’s little Bible college or to a single schoolteacher. Someone quiet and respectable.
“I really like this,” I told Eileen unnecessarily. “I can tell.”
“But I need to think about it, of course.” “Of course.”
“I can afford it, and the repairs, and pay for it out- right. But it is stuck out of town, and I need to decide if that would make me nervous. On the other hand, I can practically see Mother’s house from here. And if you could find out who owns this field, I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t want to buy out here and then discover some- one was putting up a discount mall. Or a chicken farm.”
Eileen scribbled a note to herself.
I told myself silently that if any of these variables didn’t work out, I would hire an architect and have a house very similar to this one built from scratch. “And I’ll keep looking, too,” I told Eileen. “I just don’t want to see anything cramped.”
“Okay, you’re the boss,” Eileen said agreeably. It
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had grown dark enough for her to switch on the car lights as she turned around on the apron to the side of the garage to negotiate the long driveway. We went back to town in silence, Eileen obviously trying not to give me some good advice, I in deep thought. I really liked that house. “Wait a minute,” Eileen said, her voice sharp. I snapped out of my reverie.
“Look, that’s Idella’s car. But she’s not showing the Westley house today. My God, look at the time! I’m showing it in an hour to a couple who work different shifts all week. I’m going to need that key.” Eileen was seriously miffed. If I’d been just any client, she would have waited until she got me back to the office and then returned to or called the listing, but since I was part of the Realtor family, she felt free to vent in front of me. Eileen pulled into the driveway and swung out of her car with practiced ease. I got out, too. Maybe Idella would know if Emily Kaye had already responded to my counteroffer.
There was no client car parked by Idella’s. “The Westleys moved last week,” Eileen said, and opened the front door without knocking. “Idella!” she hooted. “I’m going to need this key in an hour, woman!” Nothing. All within was dark. We went in slowly. For once, Eileen seemed disconcerted.
Eileen called again, but with less expectation that she would be answered. The blinds and curtains were all open, letting in some light from the streetlamp one lot away. Eileen tried to flip on a light, but the electric- ity had been turned off.
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The house was very cold, and I pulled my coat tighter around me.
“We should leave and call the police,” I said finally. “What if she’s hurt?”
“Oh, Eileen! You know . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. “All right,” I said, bowing to the inevitable. “Do you have a flashlight in your car?”
“Yes, I do. I don’t know where my head is!” Eileen exclaimed, thoroughly angry with herself. She fetched the flashlight and swept its broad beam around the family room. Nothing but dust on the carpet. I fol- lowed her and her flashlight into the kitchen . . . noth- ing there. So, back past the front door and down the hall to the bedrooms. Nothing in the first one to the left. Nothing in the bathroom. By now, tears were run- ning down Eileen’s face and I could actually hear her teeth chattering.
Nothing in the second bedroom.
Nothing in the hall linen closet.
Idella was in the last bedroom. The flashlight caught her pale hair, and the beam reluctantly went back to her and stayed.
She was crumpled in a corner like a discarded bed- spread. Tonia Lee had been arranged, but Idella had just been dumped. No living person could have been lying that way.
I made myself step forward and touch Idella’s wrist. It was faintly warm. There was no pulse. I held my hand in front of her nostrils. No breath. I touched the base of her thin neck. Nothing.
You never know about people. I heard a slithery
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sound, and the flashlight beam played wildly over the walls as tough Eileen Norris slid to the floor in a dead faint.
Of course, there wasn’t a phone in the Westley house. I had the sudden feeling I was on an island in the middle of a populous stream. I hated to leave Eileen alone in the dark and silence with Idella’s corpse, but I had to get help. There was a car at the house to the right of the Westleys’, the helpful flash- light revealed, and I knocked on the screen door. A toddler answered, in a red-checked shirt and over- alls. I couldn’t tell if it was a little boy or a little girl. “Could I speak to your mommy?” I said. The child nodded and left, and after a moment a young woman with a towel around her hair came to the door. “I’m sorry, I’ve told Jeffrey not to answer the door, but if I don’t hear the doorbell in time, he zooms to it,” she said, making it clear she thought that very clever of Jeffrey. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Aurora Teagarden,” I began, and her face twitched before the polite lines reasserted themselves. “I need you to call the police for me. There’s been a— an accident next door at the Westley house.” “You’re really serious,” she said doubtfully. “No one should be in that house, it’s for sale.” “I promise you I am serious. Please call the police.” “All right, I will. Are you okay, yourself?” she asked, terrified I would ask to be let into her home. “I’m fine. I’ll go back over there now if you’ll call.” I had the distinct feeling that she would much rather
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have gone back to washing her hair and forgotten that I’d knocked.
“I’ll call right now,” she promised with sudden res- olution.
So I went back over to the cold black house next door. Eileen was stirring around but still out of it. I gripped the flashlight defensively as I crouched next to her on the nasty brown carpet, and stared dully at a dead beetle while I waited for
the police. At least Jack Burns didn’t show up. I would rather have been in a locked room with a pit bull than have faced Sergeant Burns at that moment. He had re- garded me with baleful mistrust ever since we’d come across each other during the Real Murders investiga- tion. He seemed to think I was the Calamity Jane of Lawrenceton, that death followed me like a bad smell. If I’d been Jonah, he’d have thrown me to the whale without a qualm.
Lynn Liggett Smith seemed to take my presence as a matter of course. That was almost as disturbing. Eileen came out of her faint, we were allowed to tell the little we knew, and then I drove a shaken Eileen back to the office. My mother had already been called by the police, so she had waited there. Eileen went to Mother’s office in a wobbly parody of her usual brisk trot. There were lights on down the hall. I slid into the client chair in Mackie Knight’s office. With consider- able astonishment, Mackie put down the paperwork he was doing.
“What’s happening, Roe?”
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“Have you been here all afternoon, Mackie? Till now?” I saw by the clock on the office wall that it was already seven.
“No. I just came back after spending all afternoon at church and eating supper at home with my folks. Just as my mom put her lemon meringue pie in front of me, I remembered that I didn’t have all the papers ready for the Feiffer closing tomorrow morning.” There was lemon meringue smeared on a Styrofoam plate and a used plastic fork on a corner of his desk. “Was anyone else at your folks’?”
“Yeah, my minister. What’s this about?” “Idella was just killed.”
“Oh, no.” Mackie looked sick. “Where?”
“At the empty Westley house.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” I hadn’t seen a weapon, but Idella’s coat had been covering her throat. The poor light hadn’t been reliable, but I’d thought her face had had the same funny tone as Tonia Lee’s. “Maybe strangled.” “The poor woman. Who’s told her kids?”
“I guess the police. Or maybe whoever she left the kids with while she worked.”
“And I couldn’t have done it!” Mackie said, the penny finally dropping. “I’ve been with someone every blessed minute, except driving time from my folks’ back here.”
“Maybe this wasn’t planned as well as Tonia Lee’s murder.”
“You think Tonia Lee was killed at the time she was killed and the place she was killed because there would be a lot of available suspects.”
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“Sure, don’t you?”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said slowly, “but it makes good sense. Poor Idella.” Mackie shook his head in disbelief. “She sure had been acting funny lately, almost apologetic, every time I talked to her.” “She knew you didn’t kill Tonia Lee, Mackie. I think she knew who did, or suspected.”
We both sat and thought for a while, and then my mother came to the door and asked gently if she could speak to me for a moment.
“Mackie,” she said as I got up to leave his office, “you went to church after Idella left the office? Or before?” “Before. She was still in her office when I walked out the door. I said good-bye to her.”
“Oh, thank God. You’re in the clear, then.” “Yes, I think I am.” Mackie was having a hard time with conflicting emotions.
Lynn was waiting in Mother’s office.
“I hear you had an interesting conversation with Idella at Beef ’N More,” she said.
I thought Lynn was bluffing, but I’d intended telling her what Idella had said anyway, vague though it was. The only person who could have told Lynn that I’d talked to Idella at lunch was Sally Allison, and Sally didn’t know what Idella had said to me. No, I wasn’t being fair to Sally . . . there was Terry Sternholtz. I told Lynn all about Idella’s and my little bathroom tête-à-tête. We went over and over it while my mother listened or worked quietly. I wondered why I was sitting here instead of going down to the police station. I told Lynn, frontward and backward and upside down, every little nuance of Idella’s apparent fight with Donnie
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Greenhouse, her flight to the women’s room, my half- hearted attempt to help her, her few comments to me, and her departure from the restaurant. My next glimpse of her at the office, my brief conversation with her here, the exchange with an unknown person she’d had over the telephone, and her statement that she was going to go to Emily Kaye with my counteroffer. Then how I’d found her at the empty house.
By the time Lynn was satisfied she’d gotten every- thing out of me she could get, I was heartily sorry I’d spoken to Idella at the restaurant. Sometimes good im- pulses backfire.
“Go talk to Donnie Greenhouse,” I said irritably. “He was the one who upset her, not me.” “Oh, we will,” Lynn assured me. “In fact, some- one’s talking to him right now.”
But Donnie Greenhouse, who’d let Tonia Lee stomp on him for so long, would not yield an inch to the police. He called my mother while I was still in her of- fice and told her triumphantly he hadn’t given Paul Al- lison the time of day.
“He told Paul that no matter what Roe Teagarden said Idella told her, he and Idella had discussed nothing more than business and Tonia Lee’s funeral.” My mother’s famous eyebrows were arched at their most skeptical.
“He might as well wear a sign that says ‘Please Kill Me. I Know Too Much,’ ” I said.
“Donnie doesn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain, but I didn’t think he was this dumb,”
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Mother said. “And why he’s doing it, instead of telling the police all he knows, I cannot fathom.” “He wants to avenge Tonia Lee himself?” “God knows why. Everyone knows she made his life hell on wheels.”
“Maybe he always loved her.” Mother and I pon- dered that separately.
“I personally don’t think a rational person with a sense of self-preservation could continue to love under such a stream of abuse as that,” my mother said. I wondered if she was right. “So Donnie’s not ra- tional and has no sense of self-preservation,” I said. “And what about Idella? Evidently the call she got in her office was from someone she suspected might be the killer. And yet she apparently agreed to meet this person in an empty house. Doesn’t that sound like she loved whoever it was?”
“I just don’t love that way,” said Mother finally. “I loved your father until he was unfaithful.” This was the first time she’d ever said one word to me about her mar- riage with my father. “I loved him, in my opinion, very deeply. But when he hurt me so much, and things weren’t going well otherwise, it just killed the love. How can you keep on loving when someone lies to you?” She really could not understand it. I didn’t know, with my limited experience, if my mother just had an extraordinarily strong sense of self- preservation, or if the world was full of irrational peo- ple.
“It seems from what I’ve read, and observed,” I said hesitantly, “that lots of people aren’t that way. They keep on loving, no matter what the hurt or cost.”
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“No self-respect. That’s what I believe,” my mother said crisply. She stared out her window for a moment, at the bare branches of the oak tree outside, which made a bleak abstract pattern against the gray sky. “Poor Idella,” she said, and a tear oozed down her cheek. “She was worth ten Tonia Lees, and she had children. She’d done so much for herself since her husband left her. I’d gotten pretty fond of her without ever getting really close to her.” Mother looked back at me. Our eyes met. “She must have been so frightened.” Then she shook herself. “I’ll have Eileen call Emily Kaye to find out if Idella’d actually gotten over there with your counterof- fer, honey. The police should let us have the papers in her car, soon. We can get on with the house sale, with Eileen or me taking Idella’s part. I’ll let you know.” I hadn’t been wor
ried about it at all. “Thanks,” I said, trying to look relieved. “I think I’ll go home now.” But I turned at her office door to say, “You know, I’ll bet money that Donnie doesn’t really know anything at all. If he does get killed, it’ll be over ab- solutely nothing.”
I was really glad I hadn’t agreed to meet Martin to- night. I needed a little time to get over this horror. Dri- ving home, I felt the impulse to call him nonetheless. But I shook my head. No telling what he was doing. Still try- ing to inspire Pan-Am Agra executives, eating supper with a client, working in his motel room on important papers. I hated him to find out how lonely I was, so soon. I kept thinking about Idella, her children, her death from love.
Chapter Nine
A
The next morning my best friend, Amina Day—now Amina Day Price—called me. I’d just pulled on my blue jeans, and I lay across the bed on my stomach to grab the phone.
“Hi, it’s me!”
“Amina,” I said happily, feeling my mouth break into a smile, “how are you?”
“Honey, I’m pregnant!”
“Ohmigod!”
“Yes! Really, really. The ring in the tube turned the right color this morning, and I lost my breakfast, too. So I’m home lying down.”
“Amina, I can’t believe it. What does Hugh say?” “He’s just thrilled. He’s ready to go out now and buy a car seat and a crib. I told him he better wait a while, my mother always told me it was bad luck to start getting ready too soon.”
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“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No, I have an appointment for next week with the obstetrician all the wives of Hugh’s partners go to.” Hugh is an up-and-coming lawyer in Houston. “I’m so glad for you,” I told her honestly. We talked for a while. Or, rather, I listened while Amina talked to me about the baby and what she wanted and didn’t want for this exceptional infant. “So what’s new with you?” she asked finally. “Well . . . I’m seeing someone.”
“Not the minister?”
“No, not anymore. This man—Martin—he’s the new plant manager at Pan-Am Agra.”
“Wo-wo. How old is he?”
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