Charlaine Harris - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

“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.

Chapter Thirteen

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.”