that you saw someone leaving this house yesterday as you pulled up.”
How the hell had such a story started making the rounds?
“I’ll bet it was a man. Or the wife of some man she’d been carrying on with.” Teresa’s face was avid.
“No,” I said, my voice as cold as a Tastee-Freez Coke slush. “That is not true.”
“Well, my goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was hitting a nerve. We all figured you’d about got this solved.”
I don’t think I blinked at all as I glared at her.
Bryan said, “Isn’t there somewhere you need to be, Teresa?”
She stopped dead, her mouth open.
“You’ve come by, you’ve given your condolences, and you’ve gotten some suggestions of ways the Uppities can help. I’m sure you have another errand or appointment?”
“I do need to stop by the store, and phone the committee members,” she said slowly. Her face was red. “Good-bye, Aurora.”
Gosh, I just
“She can’t help it, you know,” he said when he sat in the chair beside mine.
“I realize that she has many fine qualities.”
He raised one eyebrow.
“She runs the Uppity Women smooth as a whistle,” I told him. “She’s organized and focused, and we do a lot of good under her leadership.”
“I was married to her. I know just how organized and focused she can be.”
“You said you’ve been divorced for a year?” Was it tacky to mention that?
“She married Shorty Stanton about seven months ago.”
“He works at one of the banks, right?”
“He’s the president of Southern Security,” Bryan said a little dryly.
“Oh.”
“Yes, big money.”
I forbore remarking that Bryan himself couldn’t be hurting for a healthy cash flow, unless he had a secret vice like gambling or drugs.
“Tell me about the car.” His voice was quiet.
I stared at the crouching, dim figure of the crime-scene cleaner. He was working on the glass again now. I considered and discarded several responses.
“I didn’t see any car,” I said very carefully. “But I did find evidence that someone had been here before we got here.”
“You know who it was,” Bryan said.
I looked at him sideways. “No wonder you have such a good reputation as a lawyer.”
“It’s deserved, I promise you. Who was it?”
“I can’t tell you that right now.”
“Do you care more about this person than about your sister-in-law?”
“Yes.”
That took him aback, but the lawyer rallied.
“You don’t trust me?”
“I told you about the receipt,” I remarked mildly. “And I’ll tell you something else.”
He turned his hand palm up, meaning, Give.
“Someone’s been in the house since yesterday.”
“This house?” He pointed at it, startled.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“The upstairs curtains are closed. They were open yesterday when I was up there.”
Bryan stared at the curtains in the master bedroom as if they could tell him why they were pulled together. “Maybe the police closed them last night, so no one could see what they were doing,” he suggested.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
Bryan seemed to give up. “Let’s go check it out. I believe the man is telling you he’s finished.”
In fact, Zachary Lee had emerged from the house, unsuited, looking cheerful as ever. “I’ve got the rug rolled up and in my van; here’s a receipt,” he said. “I’m going to take it back to the shop and work on it. Everything else is done. You’ll need to call a regular housecleaning service to get everything else back to normal.”
I could feel that little frown of confusion contracting my brows. “Excuse me?”
“The upstairs. I went up to clean up the fingerprint powder.”
“What about the upstairs?” I cast a sideways glance at Bryan.
“This wasn’t a homicide during a burglary?”
“You had better show us what you mean,” Bryan said.
This time, I walked through every room of the ground floor, and it all looked normal. Upstairs, though, was a different story. The room that had received the most attention was the master bedroom. Everything was tossed around, as if a demented child had had a field day.
“It didn’t look like this when you found the body?” Bryan asked, his eyes missing nothing.
“No, it looked like a home.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Surely the police wouldn’t do this?”
“They would take the bedding to check for evidence,” Bryan said. And they had. “But they wouldn’t do this.” Drawers were pulled out of the chest of drawers, the dressing table, the lingerie chest, the jewelry chest. Poppy’s side of the small walk-in closet was demolished. Out-of-season shoes had been dumped from their neat stack of boxes, and a set of stacked cubes that had held sweaters had been disassembled and lay strewn on the floor.
This was horrible. I felt like Poppy had been violated all over again.
I told myself instantly that this was a dumb reaction. What I was seeing was just a rummage through her things, not nearly as bad as sinking a knife into her, for goodness sake! But the invasiveness of it… I thought of how much I would hate someone going through my personal stuff, and I had to sit down abruptly on the needlepoint- covered stool that was intended to occupy the kneehole of the dressing table.
Bryan did a big production number about how I was feeling-asking if he should call the paramedics (which horrified me considerably) and muttering various things about how terrible a shock I had sustained. He had called the police already, so I let him run on for a bit. Was he trying to impress me with his empathy, with his regard for me as a delicate southern flower? I was a pretty wilted blossom, if so.
I wished Robin were there. Then I slapped myself mentally. No point wishing for that. He was flirting with Janie.
Anger stiffened my spine once more.
Chapter Six
I was fit company for neither man nor beast.
It was already late afternoon, and I suggested to Bryan that we wait until the next morning to find the gas station that had issued the receipt. That way, I pointed out, probably the same attendant would be on duty-if you could talk about attendants being on duty at gas stations anymore, which was doubtful. I could tell that for about a half cent, Bryan would take the receipt and ask the questions all by himself. I tried to impress on him how dimly I would view such behavior.
I drove Bryan back to his office, then stopped by my mother’s to check on the well-being of my extended family. Melinda and Avery were at their house, and Poppy’s baby was with them, just as Melinda had predicted. John David was sitting in a morose heap in Mother’s den. Across from him was Arthur Smith.
What was he doing? Obviously, he was still on the case, which I found incomprehensible. Granted, Lawrenceton is a smallish town, and the police force is probably pretty stretched, especially considering murders are not the
