Beside me Idella Yates sighed. She picked up her briefcase and pushed back her chair. I turned to make some remark and suddenly realized Idella had been crying silently, something I have never mastered. I caught her eye as she dabbed at her cheeks with a handkerchief.
“Stupid,” she said bitterly. Feeling rather puzzled, I watched her leave the room. If Idella and Tonia Lee had been friends, it would have surprised me considerably. And Idella’s reaction seemed a little extreme otherwise.
I made my own exit wondering where I would wait for my turn with Lynn. My mother’s office, I decided, and started down the hall.
A young woman was standing in the reception area. I vaguely recognized her as I went through on my way to the left-hand corridor that led to Mother’s office.
“Miss Teagarden?” she said hesitantly. I turned and smiled with equal uncertainty.
“I believe I met you at the church last week,” she said, holding out a slim hand. I jogged my memory.
“Oh, of course,” I said, none too soon. “Mrs. Kaye.”
“Emily,” she said, smiling.
“Aurora,” I told her, and to her credit, her smile barely faltered.
“Do you work here?” she asked. “At Select Realty?”
“Not really,” I confessed. “It’s my mother’s agency, and I’m trying to find out a little more about how the business works.” That was close enough to the truth.
Emily Kaye was at least five inches taller than I, no great feat. She was slim and small-breasted and dressed in a perfect suburban sweater and skirt and low-heeled shoes… and her purse matched, too. Her jewelry was small, unobtrusive, but real. Her hair was golden brown and tossed back from her face in a smooth, well-cut mane.
“Did you like the church?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, and Father Scott is so nice,” she said earnestly.
Huh?
“He is so good with children,” she went on. “My little girl, Elizabeth, just loves him. He promised he’d take her to the park soon.”
He what?
All my senses went on full alert.
“You’re so lucky,” she said.
My stare must have made her a bit nervous.
“To be dating him,” she added hastily.
So she’d been doing some research. I was thinking a number of things, so many that it would have taken a long time to have completed each thought.
Aubrey loved children? Aubrey had already visited his new parishioner and invited her little girl to the park?
“You play the organ, don’t you?” I said thoughtfully.
“Oh, yes. Well, not very well.” She was lying through her teeth, I just knew it. “I did play for the church in Macon.” Suspicion confirmed.
“You’re-excuse me, you’re a widow?”
“Yes,” she said briskly, to get quickly over a painful subject. “Ken died last year in a car wreck, and it was hard to live in Macon after that. I don’t have any family there, we were there just because of his job… but I do have an aunt, Cile Vernon, here in Lawrenceton, and she heard there was a teacher’s job available at the kindergarten here, and I was lucky enough to get it. So now I’m house-hunting for a little place for Elizabeth and me.”
“Well, you came to the right realtor,” I said, trying to brighten up the conversation and not give way to my deep suspicions. I had a feeling that if I looked over Emily Kaye’s shoulder, I would see writing on the wall for my relationship with Father Aubrey Scott.
“Yes, Mrs. Yates is so nice. I’m really looking seriously at a little house on Honor right by the junior high school. It’s just a couple of blocks from the kindergarten, and there’s a preschool for my little girl nearby, too. Of course, I’d really like to quit work and stay home with Elizabeth,” she said wistfully.
That writing got darker and darker. Sure she would.
And to top it all off, that was my house, the house I’d inherited from Jane Engle, she was thinking of buying.
She’d be right across the street from Lynn and Arthur and their baby.
Aubrey would drop me and fall in love with this organ-playing widow with the cute little girl.
No, I was being paranoid.
No, I was being realistic.
“Mrs. Kaye,” Idella’s sweet voice said, just in the nick of time. “I’m so sorry, we have to rearrange our appointment to see the house again.”
“Oh, and I had my aunt keep Elizabeth just so I could see it by myself!” Emily Kaye said, regret and accusation mingling in her voice.
I was battling a tide of rage and self-pity that had torn through me with the force of a monsoon. And I would rather have died than for Emily Kaye to notice that anything was wrong with me.
“Why don’t you just go ask Detective Smith if you could run over for a half hour and show the house to Mrs. Kaye?” I suggested to Idella, who was looking distressed at her client’s disappointment. My voice rang a little hollow in my ears, and I felt my expression probably didn’t match my concerned words, but I was doing the best I could.
“I’ll do that,” Idella said with unaccustomed decision. “Excuse me just a second.”
“Oh, thanks,” Emily told me with a warm sincerity that made me want to throw up. “I hated to ask Aunt Cile to keep Elizabeth this morning. I don’t want her to think I moved here just to have a free babysitter!”
“Think nothing of it,” I answered with equal sincerity. I wanted to get out of that room so badly my feet were itching. Any minute I was going to slap the tar out of Emily Kaye.
And why? I asked myself as I gave her a final, civil nod and glided off down the hall to Mother’s office. Because, I answered myself angrily, Emily Kaye was going to get married, she would marry Aubrey, and even if I didn’t want to marry him, I would once again be left. I knew I was being childish, I knew there was nothing logical about my feeling, and still I couldn’t help it. This was not my finest hour.
It was time for one of my pep talks.
It is better not to be married than to be married unhappily.
Women do not need to be married to have rich, fulfilled lives.
I didn’t want to marry Aubrey anyway, and I probably wouldn’t have accepted if Arthur Smith had asked me. (Well, yes I would, but it would’ve been a mistake.)
All relationships fail until you find the right one. It’s inevitable.
The failure of a relationship to lead to marriage does not mean you are unworthy or unattractive.
Having told myself all this, I recited the list again.
By the time Mother returned to her office, I’d completed the circuit three times. Mother was not in the best of humor, either. She was fuming about the disruption of the office, about being questioned again by the police, about the nerve of Tonia Lee, turning up dead in a Select Realty listing. Of course, she didn’t use those words, but that was the gist of her diatribe.
“Oh, listen to me!” she said suddenly. “I can’t believe I’m going on like this, and a woman I know is probably lying on a table somewhere waiting to be autopsied.” She shook her head at her own lack of empathy. “We’ll just have to put up with all this. I wasn’t crazy about Tonia Lee, God knows, but no one should have to go through what she must have.”
“You did tell Lynn about the thefts?”
“Yes. I let her draw her own conclusions. I’d already told her about the vases missing from the Anderton house. So I went on and told her about the pilfering that’s been going on. Of course, it’s more than pilfering. Someone in our little group of realtors is seriously dishonest.”
“Mom, have you happened to think that Tonia Lee found out who stole the stuff from the houses? That maybe that was why she got killed?”
“Yes. Of course. I hope the thefts had nothing to do with the murder.”
“That would mean that a realtor is the killer.”
“Yes. Let’s just drop the subject. We don’t know anything. It was probably one of Tonia Lee’s conquests that did her in.”