Martin Bartell’s light brown eyes looked at me very thoroughly. They had a golden touch, like a tiger’s.

“Miss Teagarden.”

“Mr. Bartell…?”

His hand emerged from his pocket and moved up. I tensed as though I were about to be jolted by electricity. I lost the technique of staring at his chin and looked right at him. He was going to touch my cheek.

“Is the body in here?” asked Detective Lynn Liggett Smith from perhaps three feet away.

Downstairs, at least thirty minutes later, I had recovered my composure. I no longer felt as if I was in heat and would rip Martin Bartell’s clothes off any minute. I no longer felt that he, out of all the people in the world, had the power to look underneath all the layers of my personality and see the basic woman, who had been lonely (in one particular way) for a very long time.

In the “family room,” with my mother and Barby Lampton to provide protective chaperonage, I was able to collect all my little foibles and peculiarities back together and stack them between myself and Martin Bartell.

My mother felt obligated to hold polite conversation with her clients. She had introduced herself formally, gotten over her surprise on finding out that Mr. Bartell’s companion was his sister, not his wife, and had established the fact that Martin Bartell had received good impressions of Lawrenceton in the weeks he’d spent here. “It’s been a pleasant change of pace after the Chicago area,” he said, and sounded sincere. “Barby and I grew up on a farm in a very rural area of Ohio.”

Barby didn’t seem to enjoy being reminded.

He explained a little about his reorganization of the local Pan-Am Agra plant to my mother, a born manager, and I kept my eyes scrupulously to myself.

We waited for the police for a long time, it seemed. I heard familiar voices calling up and down the stairs. I’d dated Lynn Liggett’s husband, Arthur Smith (before they married, of course), and during our “courtship” I’d become acquainted with every detective and most of the uniforms on Lawrence-ton’s small force. Detective Henske’s cracker drawl, Lynn’s crisp alto, Paul Allison’s reedy voice… and then came the sound I dreaded.