Charlaine Harris - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

I would be running so short on time I decided to put on everything but the actual dress before I left for my hair appointment. So I looked through my closets. I’d wear the dress I’d worn the year before. Martin hadn’t seen it, even if everyone else had, and I’d only worn it that once. It was green, and after simple long sleeves and a scoop neck, the bodice descended to a point in front, and the short skirt flounced out in gathers all around. I’d have to wear black heels… I needed some of those shiny lame-looking shoes that were so popular now, but I didn’t have the energy or time to go shopping. Black would have to do. I had a little black evening purse, too. So I put on the right bra and slip and hose, and a dress that buttoned down the front over them.

I hurried out to my car and started across town to my mother’s hairdresser. I’d looked up an address before leaving home, and I took a little detour. There was the Ulrich house, a three-bedroom ranch style in one of Lawrenceton’s prettier middle-class neighborhoods.

And there was a FOR SALE sign in the yard.

Chapter Fourteen

“HOW DO you want it done?” Benita asked briskly. It was clearly the end of a long day for her. Her own red hair was wild and dark at the roots, and the beige-and-blue uniform all the operators at Clip Casa wore was rumpled and-well, hairy.

“Could you do it like this?” I’d spent my waiting time leafing through professional magazines.

“Yes,” Benita said briefly after a thorough look at the enigmatically smiling model, and set to work.

It was one of those hairdos with the braid miraculously inside-out. French braiding, I thought it was called. I’d never understood how that was done, and now it was about to be accomplished on my very own head. In the picture the model’s hair wasn’t pulled back tightly but puffed around her face. The length of hair at the base of the neck was also braided, and the model had a ribbon around the end. I had no fancy bows, but Benita had some for sale, including a gold lame one I thought would be pretty. I didn’t know if Martin would like the hairstyle, but it struck me as very fashionable.

Plus, it didn’t seem possible that my hair could come loose, as all too often happened when I put it up myself.

“Roe,” drawled a voice close by, and I recognized the apparition under the dryer as my beautiful friend Lizanne Buckley.

“I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” I said happily. “How are you doing?”

“Just fine,” said Lizanne in her slow sweet way. “And you?”

“Pretty good. What have you been doing?”

“Oh, I’m still down at the power company,” she said contentedly. “And I’m still dating our local representative.”

Lawyer J. T. (Bubba) Sewell, whom I’d met in a professional capacity, would be home from the Capitol for the weekend, and he and Lizanne were also going to the realtors’ banquet, she told me. In fact, Bubba was the speaker.

“Are you two engaged?” I asked. “That’s what someone told me, but I wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Lizanne smiled. She had a habit of that. She was stunningly beautiful, and no slave to the bone-thin convention of female figures. She was just right. “Oh, I expect we are,” she said.

“Someone’s finally going to walk you down the aisle,” I marveled. Men had tried for years to marry Lizanne and she would have none of it, the world being the unfair place it is.

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll get married in a church,” Lizanne demurred. “I haven’t been in one since Mamma and Daddy died, and I don’t expect to go. I believe Bubba sees that as my only drawback, a politician’s wife not going to church.”

There was no possible response, and Lizanne didn’t expect any. I felt like someone who was walking over a familiar sunny beach, only to discover that it had changed into quicksand.

“I hear you’ve been dating that new man at Pan-Am Agra,” Lizanne said after a few minutes. Lizanne heard everything.

“Yes.”

“He coming with you tonight?”

I nodded until a sharp exclamation from Benita reminded me to hold still.

“I’ll be glad to meet him; I’ve heard a lot about him.”

I didn’t know if I wanted to hear or not. “Oh?” I said finally.

“He’s got everyone out there shivering in their shoes. There’s evidently been a lot of slack and some thieving, and he was sent in to be the man to get everything straight. He’s firing and moving around people and looking into everything.”

Lizanne reached back and turned off her dryer, lifting the hood to reveal a head covered with large rollers. She patted them to make sure her hair was dry, took one down experimentally, nodded. “Janie, I’m done,” she called to the beige-and-blue-uniformed beautician drinking a cup of coffee in the back of the shop. The phone rang, and Janie answered it. It was for Benita, one of her children with a household emergency, and with an exclamation of impatience, she ran to take the call. I noticed the whole time she talked, she worked on her hair with a comb she picked up from the counter; if Benita was standing, she was working on hair.

“I have a friend at the police station,” Lizanne said casually, standing by my chair and looking into my mirror. “Jack Burns-your good buddy, Roe-has decided that since no one has been killing realtors until now, the murderer must be someone new to town. Some of the detectives don’t agree, but since they questioned Jimmy Hunter and let him go, all kinds of people have been pressuring the chief of police to find someone else. Jimmy Hunter’s parents have got lots of friends in this town, and the arrest of someone else would take the suspicion off Jimmy for good. So I hear the police are going to make an arrest soon in the murders of those two women. They’re probably going to be taking someone in for questioning tomorrow.”

My eyes met Lizanne’s in the mirror. She was giving me a message. But I had to decipher it.

“My goodness, Lizanne Buckley!” exclaimed Benita, coming back at that inopportune moment. “Who told you that?”

“Little bird,” Lizanne said laconically, and wandered off to her beautician’s station, where she began to remove her own rollers, tossing them in one of the wheeled bins. Janie drained her cup and unhurriedly began helping Lizanne, whose easygoing attitude seemed to rub off on people. I remembered Bubba Sewell’s slow good-ole-boy manner and his sharp brain and decided (in a remote corner of my own brain) that he and Lizanne would make a most interesting couple.

But mostly I was trying to figure out what Lizanne had meant.

We’d been talking about Martin. Then she’d talked about the arrest. Surely she didn’t mean the police suspected Martin?

She had been letting me know Martin was going to be arrested. At the least, taken in and questioned.

I stared at the mirror as two spots of color rose to stain my cheeks. I was gripping the padded arms of the swivel chair with undue force.

“Honey, are you cold?” Benita asked. “I can sure turn up the heat.”

“Oh. No, I’m fine, thanks.”

Ridiculous. This was ridiculous.

The police had been wrong once. They were wrong again. Of course they were wrong again, I told myself fiercely. The thefts. They’d begun long before Martin had moved here.

But the murders, of course, had begun after.

I remembered my mother wondering what on earth Martin was doing looking at such a large house. Logically, a bachelor would be looking at a smaller place, not a virtual mansion like the Anderton house. The police might think he’d made an appointment to see the Anderton house because he wanted his handiwork found. Martin had been in town some weeks before I met him, long enough to meet Tonia Lee and Idella. Tonia Lee, who would go to bed with almost anyone, would undoubtedly have licked her chops when she met Martin. Idella, wispy, palely pretty, and lonely, would have been thrilled to meet someone who could pay such close and flattering attention to her.