Free Death at a Fixer-Upper by Sarah T. Hobart

house, where she was talking on a cell phone. She ended the call as I approached. “Thank you for your patience,” she said, shaking my hand. “These initial visits can be a bit tedious for the layperson.”
    “No problem. I suppose we should head back to the office to write up the offer.”
    “Whoa. Not so fast. I need to extrapolate the data and run it by my partners. It’s an attractive proposition, but let’s not be hasty.” She smiled. “You seem like a competent agent, but you can’t tell me every showing leads to an offer.”
    I felt a little nonplussed. “Of course not. I didn’t mean to presume. It’s just that there’s been a lot of buzz about this property. Three offers are in already.”
    She waved off the other offers. “Ms. Turner, my experience in this business has taught me that if it’s meant to be the Fates have a way of clearing a path. I’ll be in touch.” She nodded briskly and started down the driveway, staggering a little on the rough terrain.
    I stared after her, hoping I hadn’t put her off by being overeager. Then I glanced at my watch. I had an hour to kill before the next showing, and I needed to deliver Richard Ravello’s offer to Hartshorne & Associates and find a bathroom, not necessarily in that order. I started down the lane at a jog to retrieve my car, figuring I’d catch up to Loretta tottering along on her heels, but I never passed her.

Chapter 6
    Hartshorne & Associates was the middle suite in a newly constructed commercial building off Bertoli Lane, across the street from Foggy Mist Hydroponics. The building was two stories of moss-green stucco trimmed in dark red, with a square of newly rolled sod laid in front to break up a sea of pavement. A few dispirited shrubs protruded through hillocks of mulch, so recently planted they still sported the tags from the nursery. A dermatologist took up the entire upper floor, while Muy Buena Mexican Cantina and a low-cost spay-and-neuter clinic occupied the units on either side of the realty office.
    I pushed open a glass door and entered a dimly lit work space crowded with desks. The carpet was a tightly looped Berber in a neutral gray, outgassing wafts of formaldehyde that mingled with the scents of cat urine and corn chips fried in hot lard. The walls were painted pale yellow and hung with oversized prints of Monopoly deeds: Park Place, Pennsylvania Avenue, Marvin Gardens. As a kid, I’d always claimed the little Scottie as my game piece and tried to buy up the railroads, picturing a life as carefree as a hobo’s. Funny how things turn out.
    A woman looked up from a desk in the back. “Can I help you?”
    “I’m looking for Lois Hartshorne.”
    “You found her. What can I do for you?”
    I passed two desks on the way to Lois’s, complete with phones and computers but lacking any marks of personality, like photographs or children’s drawings. Lois Hartshorne was a big raw-boned woman nearing sixty, with iron-gray hair permed into whimsical ringlets that were incongruous with her square jaw and hard eyes. She wore a pastel peach suit that did nothing to soften her impression as a former prison matron turned real estate agent. Her sentences were delivered in a low baritone without inflection, so that even the questions came out as statements.
    I introduced myself and waited for her to shower me with abuse, as she had on the phone, but she seemed to have forgotten all that. She accepted the Ravello offer without comment, extracted a file from a stack on her desk, and dropped the offer inside. She glanced at me, apparently surprised I was still standing there. “Something else?”
    Relief that she tolerated my presence made me garrulous. “Where are all your associates today?”
    “I’m currently associate-free. Why? Thinking of making a change?” She looked right through me with her gimlet eyes.
    “You never know. Maybe.” Through the walls I could hear strains of marimba music, punctuated by the yowls of tomcats