Free Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse by Charlaine Harris Page A

modest home was surrounded by cars. I recognized Franklin Farrell’s Lincoln parked right in front, and several more cars looked familiar, though I am not much of a one for remembering cars. Franklin Farrell’s was the only powder blue Lincoln in Lawrenceton, and had been the subject of much comment since he’d bought it.
    Donnie Greenhouse was right inside the door. He looked white and stunned and yet somehow—exalted. He took my hand, the one that wasn’t balancing the pie, and pressed it with both of his.
    “You are so kind to come, Roe,” he said with doleful pleasure. “Please sign the guest book.”
    Donnie had been handsome when Tonia Lee had married him seventeen years before. I remembered when they’d eloped; it had been the talk of the town, the high-school-graduation-night elopement that had been “so romantic” to Tonia Lee’s foolish mother and “goddamned stupid” to Donnie’s more realistic father, the high school football coach. Tonia Lee seemed to have worn Donnie thin. He’d been a husky football player when they’d married; now he was bony and looked undernourished in every way. Tonia Lee’s horrible death had given Donnie a stature he’d lacked for a long time, but it was not an attractive sight. I was glad to get my hand back, murmur the correct words of condolence, and escape to put the pie in the kitchen, which was already full of more homemade food than Donnie had eaten in the past six months, I’d have been willing to bet.
    The cramped little kitchen, which had probably been ideal for Tonia Lee, a minimalist cook, was full of Tonia’s mom’s church buddies, who seemed to be mostly large ladies in polyester dresses. I looked in vain for Mrs. Purdy herself and asked a couple of the ladies, who suggested I try the bathroom.
    This seemed a bit odd, but I made my way through the crowd to the hall bathroom. Sure enough, the door was open and Helen Purdy was seated on the (closed) toilet, dissolved in tears, with a couple of ladies comforting her.
    “Mrs. Purdy?” I said tentatively.
    “Oh, come in, Roe,” said the stouter of the two attendants, whom I now recognized as Lillian Schmidt, my former co-worker at the library. “Helen has cried so hard she’s gotten herself pretty sick, so just in case, we came in here.”
    Oh, great. I made my face stick to its sympathetic lines and nervously approached Helen Purdy.
    “You saw her,” Helen said pitifully, her plain face soggy with grief. “How did she look, Aurora?”
    A vision of Tonia Lee’s obscenely bare bosom flashed through my head. “She looked very”—I paused for inspiration—“peaceful.” The bulging eyes of the dead woman, staring blankly out from her posed body, looked at me again. “At rest,” I said, and nodded emphatically to Helen Purdy.
    “I hope she went to Jesus,” wailed Helen, and began crying again.
    “I hope so, too,” I whispered from my heart, ignoring the wave of doubt that washed unbidden through my mind.
    “She never could find peace on earth, maybe she can find it in heaven.”
    Then Helen just seemed to faint, and I backed hastily out of the little bathroom so Lillian and her companion could work over her.
    I saw one of the local doctor’s nurses in the family room and told her quietly that Helen had collapsed. She hurried to the bathroom, and feeling that I’d done the best I could, I looked around for someone to talk to. I couldn’t leave yet—I hadn’t been there quite long enough, my inner social clock told me.
    I spied Franklin Farrell’s head of thick gray hair over the heads crowding the room, and
    “excuse me’d” over to him. Franklin, a spectacularly tan and handsome man, had been selling real estate since coming to Lawrenceton thirty or more years before.
    “Roe Teagarden,” Franklin said as I reached his side, giving every appearance of great pleasure. “I’m glad to see you, even though I’m sorry it’s here, on such a sad occasion.”

    “I’m sorry it’s