“Mom, I’m going to go to my place.”

“Why, sure, Aurora. Are you okay? And poor Donnie Greenhouse… I wonder if they’ve called him yet.”

“Mother, what you have to worry about, right now, is how that key got back on your key board. Someone at Select Realty put it there. The police are going to be all over your office asking questions just as quick as quick can be.”

“You definitely have a mind for crime,” Mother said disapprovingly, but she was thinking fast. “It’s that club you were in, I expect.”

“No. I was in Real Murders because I think that way, I don’t think that way because I was in the club,” I said mildly. But she wasn’t listening.

“Before I go back,” said Mother suddenly, “I was thinking I should ask Martin Bartell and his sister-I can’t believe a woman that age is answering to ‘Barby’-” This from a woman with a name like Aida. “-I should get them over to the house for dinner tomorrow night. Why don’t you and Aubrey come?”

“Oh,” I said limply, horrified at the prospect. How was I going to excuse myself-“Mom, this guy I just met, well, if we see each other again, we just may have at it on the floor”?

My mother, usually so sharp, did not pick up on my turmoil. Of course, she had a few more things on her mind.

“I know you have to ask Aubrey first, so just give me a call. I really think I should make some gesture to try to make up to them-”

“For showing them a house with a dead realtor in it?”

“Exactly.”

Suddenly my mother realized that the Anderton house was going to be impossible to move, at least for a while, and she closed her eyes. I could see it in her face, I could read her mind.