Read Online Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse by Charlaine Harris - Free Book Online

definitely deficient in that department. “I want a large master bedroom with a very large closet.” For all my new clothes. “I want at least two bathrooms.” Why not? One could always be kept pretty for company. “And not lots of traffic.” For Madeleine, who was weaving around my ankles, rumbling her rough purr.
    “What price range do you have in mind?”
    I was still talking to an investment banker about what I would have to live on if I didn’t use any of Jane’s capital. But I could buy the house outright and then invest the rest, or I could put the money from the sale of Jane’s house down on the new place ... I let all this swirl around in my head, and then an answer popped to the top of my brain, like the answer popping up to the window of a fortune-telling ball.
    “Okay,” Eileen said. “Seventy-five to ninety-five gives us some room. There are quite a few for sale in that range since Golfwhite closed its factory here.” Golfwhite—which, logically enough, manufactured golf balls and other golfing accessories—had closed its Lawrenceton factory and moved all its people who were willing to move to the larger factory in Florida.
    “I don’t really need anything awfully big or important-looking,” I told Eileen, assailed by sudden doubts.
    “Don’t worry, Roe. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it,” she said dryly. “Let’s get a start tomorrow afternoon. I’ll see what I can get lined up in that time.”

    After I’d dressed in my lime-green blouse and navy blue pants and sweater, I had nothing better to do than drop in on my old friend Susu Saxby Hunter. The house she’d inherited from her parents was in the oldest part of Lawrenceton. The house had been built in the last quarter of the previous century, and had charming high ceilings and huge windows, negligible closets, and wide halls, a feature I was especially fond of for some reason. Wide halls are a great location for bookshelves, and Susu was wasting a whole lot of prime space, in my opinion. Of course, she had other things to worry about, I found out that morning. In a house the age of hers, the heating and cooling bills were extortionate, drafts were inescapable, curtains had to be custom-made because nothing was of standard size, and all the electric wiring had had to be replaced recently.
    To say nothing of the antiquated toilets and tubs that Susu had just replaced.
    “But you love this house, don’t you?” I said, sitting across from Susu at her “country pine”
    kitchen table. Susu’s kitchen was so heavily “country,” including a pie safe in the corner (lovingly refinished and containing no pies whatsoever), that you expected a goose to walk in with a blue bow around its neck.
    “Yes,” she confessed, putting out her third cigarette. “My great-grandparents built it when they were first married, and then my parents inherited and they redid it, and now I’m redoing it. I guess I always will be. It’s lucky Jimmy’s in the hardware business! The only thing it would be better if he did is if he were a licensed electrician. Or had a fabric store. Want some more coffee?”
    “Sure,” I said, reflecting I’d have to view the renovated bathrooms quite soon at this rate.
    “How’s Jimmy doing?”
    Susu didn’t look quite as happy as she had when discussing the house. “Roe, since we’ve been friends a long time, I’ll tell you .. . I’m not sure how Jimmy’s doing. He goes to work, and he works hard. He’s really built the business up. And he goes to Rotary, and he goes to church, and he coaches little -Jim’s baseball team in the summer. And he goes to Bethany’s piano recitals. But sometimes I have the funniest feeling . ..” Her voice trailed off uncertainly, and she stared down at her smoldering cigarette.
    “What, Susu?” I asked quietly, suddenly feeling a return of my high school affection for this bright, blond, plump, scared woman.
    “His heart’s not in it,” she said simply,