Read Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse for Free Online Page B

people’s homes, and he likes to have a woman who isn’t his wife with him. Who knows what’s going through his head?”
    “How long has Jimmy been doing this?” I was fascinated with this bizarre behavior on the part of my friend’s husband. “Does Susu know?”
    “I don’t have any idea. How would any of us tell her? On the other hand, it does seem strange that gossip hasn’t informed her that her husband is house-hunting. But as far as I know, she’s never said anything. You were close to Susu in high school, weren’t you, Roe?”
    I nodded. “But we don’t see each other much nowadays.” I forbore from adding that that was because Susu was always ferrying her children somewhere or involved in some PTA activity. I was having trouble picturing thick-featured Jimmy Hunter, still broad-shouldered and husky as he’d been in his football days but now definitely on the heavyweight side, wandering dreamily through houses he didn’t want to buy.

    “If it’s not the House Hunter,” Patty suggested, “maybe Tonia Lee’s murder has something to do with the thefts.”
    This caused an even greater reaction than Patty’s first suggestion. But this reaction was different. Dead silence. Everyone looked upset. Beside me, Idella rubbed her hands together, and her pale blue eyes brimmed with tears.
    “Okay,” I said finally, “fill me in on this. The real estate business in this town just seems to be full of secrets, these days.”
    Mother sighed. “It’s a serious problem, not something like the House Hunter, whom we more or less treat as a joke.” She paused, considering how to proceed.
    “Things have been stolen from the houses for sale for the past two years,” Eileen said bluntly.
    Even Debbie Lincoln was roused by this. She slid her eyes sideways at Eileen.
    “In houses just listed by a particular realtor? In houses that have just been shown by one realtor every time?” I asked impatiently.
    “That’s just the trouble,” Mother said. “It’s not like—say, the refrigerator vanished every time Tonia Lee showed a house. That would make it clear and easy.”
    “It’s small things,” Mackie said. “Valuable things. But not so small a client could slip them into a pocket while we were showing the home. And even though the property might be listed with one realtor, of course we let any other realtor show it—that’s the way you have to be in a town this size. We all have to cooperate. We all leave a card when we show a house, whether the owner’s home or not . . . you know the procedure. If only we’d gotten the multiple-listing system, we could use lockboxes. None of this would have happened.”
    What he meant was, none of the police station routine would have happened to him, because he wouldn’t have had to take a key to the Anderton house. Tonia Lee would be just as dead, presumably. Mother was in favor of paying for one of the multiple-listing services most of the Atlanta area towns used, but the smaller realtors in town—particularly the Greenhouses—had balked.
    “And it was never the same people, never, any more than coincidence could explain,” Mother was saying. “I don’t think the houses had been shown by the same person—or to the same person—before the items were missed, any time.”
    “You all borrow keys back and forth,” I said.
    The realtors nodded.
    “So anyone could have them copied and use them at his or her leisure.”
    Again, glum nods all around.
    “So why haven’t I read about this in the paper?”
    Distinctly guilty looks.
    “We all got together,” Eileen said. “Us, Select Realty; Donnie and Tonia Lee, Greenhouse Realty; Franklin Farrell and Terry Sternholtz, Today’s Homes; even the agency that deals mostly in farms, Russell & Dietrich, because we had shown some of the farmhouses.”
    “City people who want to say they own property in the country,” Mother told me, raising her eyebrows in derision.
    “And what happened at the meeting?” I asked