“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 followed her and her flashlight into the kitchen… nothing 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 running 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 bedspread. 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 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 flashlight revealed, and I knocked on the screen door.
A toddler answered, in a red-checked shirt and overalls. 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 have gone back to washing her hair and forgotten that I’d knocked.
“I’ll call right now,” she promised with sudden resolution.
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 regarded me with baleful mistrust ever since we’d come across each other during the Real Murders investigation. 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 considerable astonishment, Mackie put down the paperwork he was doing.
“What’s happening, Roe?”
“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.”
“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 tкte-а-tкte. 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 Greenhouse, her flight to the women’s room, my halfhearted 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 everything out of me she could get, I was heartily sorry I’d spoken to Idella at the restaurant. Sometimes good impulses 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, someone’s talking to him right now.”