Charlaine Harris - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

All this I knew about Franklin. All this, and now much more.

I probably wasn’t particularly silent as I stole across his backyard and up to his back door. But in that cold, who had their windows open to hear? I was shivering as I tried the back door knob, just for the hell of it. Of course, the door was locked. Franklin’s car wasn’t there, so I assumed he and Miss Glitter were having a good time. I hoped it was real good, and that he’d stay the night. I had no plan to conceal the break-in, because I thought I’d be damned lucky to get in at all, much less try to be clever about it. So after an attempt or two with the screwdrivers, I just smashed a pane in the kitchen door window with my souvenir rock, which I popped back into my pocket. I reached in carefully and unlocked the door. It should have opened then, but it didn’t. Though my coat and sweatshirt gave my arm some protection, I became worried that the glass remaining in the frame would cut me as I prodded around inside, trying to discover what was still holding the door.

Finally I risked using my flashlight. With my face pressed against an upper pane and flashing the light up and down the inside of the door, I discovered at long last that Franklin had put a sliding bolt at the top of the door. The moment I saw it, I switched the flashlight off.

I was too short to reach the sliding bolt.

I took a few deep breaths and poked through with the longest screwdriver. I stood on tiptoes. I closed my eyes to concentrate. The tip of the screwdriver finally touched the knob of the bolt. With every bit of stretch I could summon, I pushed the bolt back.

I had to crouch down and shake for a minute when the door finally yielded. I took a deep breath, stood, and entered.

This is dumb, this is dumb, my more intelligent side was insisting as I stepped inside. Get out.

But I didn’t listen. I examined the kitchen as carefully as I could by flashlight. Then, through the dining room, the hutch full of an impressive array of gleaming silver. Then into the living room, color-coordinated to a depressing degree in creamy shades, with cranberry wallpaper. The fireplace across the room was flanked on either side by windows, and matching sofas faced each other in front of them. My flashlight flicked over the furniture, the gleaming hardwood floor, and the marble fireplace. And came back to the fireplace.

The vases were on the mantle. I caught my breath at the sheer gall of it. Placed as carefully as if they were legitimate, they looked lovely on either end, with a dried-flower arrangement in between. If they’d been stashed in a closet, they’d have seemed much more suspicious. I walked up the alley formed by the two sofas to examine them more closely. These were the right ones. I remembered the pictures of rivers and valleys that had so entranced me as a child.

Hah! I could feel myself smiling in the dark, though the insistent pulse in my brain kept telling me, This is dumb, this is dumb.

And it was, too, because just then Franklin turned on the light.

“I didn’t hear you pull up,” I said lamely after I swung around to face him.

“That’s obvious,” he said. “I saw a light dancing around in my living room from two blocks away, so I left my car parked on the street.” If he’d seen me through the open curtains, someone else could, too, I thought hopefully. Franklin reached out one arm casually and pressed a button.

Behind me I heard the curtains electronically swish shut.

Of all the damned gadgets.

We stood looking at each other. I was wondering what happened next. Maybe he was, too.

“Why on earth did you do this?” he said almost wearily. The handsome face drooped on its elegant bones. He tossed his overcoat over the back of the sofa as though he were about to sit in his favorite chair and open the newspaper. Instead, he pulled a long, thin scarf from his overcoat pocket.

“Oh, you just carry one with you now? Just in case you run across someone who needs killing?” The words popped out before my brain could censor them.

“Tonia,Lee was a piece of trash, Roe,” he said coldly. “But she was clever enough to spot some things in my house that she shouldn’t have. She was willing enough to keep quiet for some-exotic-rolls in the hay. Unusual places. Being tied up. Tonia Lee liked that kind of thing. But I got tired of obliging.” I pictured him sitting at the foot of the bed while Tonia Lee was tied to it, talking to her while methodically folding her clothes, Tonia Lee knowing all the while that she was going to die. “A piece of trash,” he repeated.

He wasn’t slotting her in a social class or giving a character assessment. He was dismissing her as nonhuman, inconsequential. On a par, perhaps, with a mole that was making ridges in his lawn. It made me sick.

“What about Idella?” I asked involuntarily.

“She was so easy to get to bed after I’d finally convinced her to just go out with me. I was glad I’d gone to the trouble of overcoming her scruples at dating a man with my reputation with women, because when I needed her to put back that key, it wasn’t hard at all to persuade her. I told her it would ruin my business if I had to tell the police I’d been in the house with Tonia Lee’s body. I told her I’d had an anonymous call that I should hurry over to the Anderton house, that the caller said it was Idella who was hurt there. How could Idella refuse to help me after that?” He raised his eyebrows mockingly. “Obviously, someone wanted to frame me for Tonia Lee’s death, someone who knew I’d go rushing to help Idella. It was after she had time to think that she became difficult. She sensed-some implausibility. She was scared of being single, scared of being alone; but she became even more scared of me,” said the man who was quite happy with being alone because he was so fond of himself.

“And me?”

“You’re a little different,” he conceded. “But now you know about me, and no one else does. No one else even suspects. Why did you have to do this?”

“Why’d you have to come home? I thought you were all set for the night.”

“Oh, Dorothy?” He actually thought for a moment. “You know,” he said almost musingly, “I just couldn’t be bothered.”

He stepped toward me. I glanced at the front door, since Franklin was between me and the back door. The front door was locked and had a similar bolt at the top. I would take seconds reaching it, and more seconds stretching up to the bolt. There was no way. The doorway to my left was shut, but it might be a coat closet, for all I knew. And probably was, because right by it was an ornately carved openwork umbrella stand, appropriately holding a fancy umbrella with a long ferrule.

“I had to do this,” I began, moving slowly to my left around the end of the sofa, compelling him with all my will to watch my face and not my feet, “because tomorrow the police were going to get Martin.”

“Martin-oh, the new boyfriend. The reason you wouldn’t go out with me.” His voice held a mild interest as he came closer. “Why are you edging left, Roe?”

I pulled the umbrella from the stand. “Because I hope to hurt you some before you hurt me.” I gripped it determinedly with both hands, pointing the sharp ferrule in his direction.

He laughed. He really did. Wrapping the scarf around both hands in a practiced move, he held out the taut length so I could admire the shine of the blue silk. “This is Terry’s scarf. I think I’ll leave it on you so maybe they’ll think Terry killed you because Eileen had the hots for you. What a hoot.”

Ha ha. “Martin will kill you for this,” I said with absolute assurance.

“Your latest honey? I think not.”

And before this could go any further, I charged at him with all my strength and yelled as loud as I could, which was pretty damn loud.