Suddenly I saw Tonia Lee Greenhouse as she had been in that huge bed. I saw the elegant matching night tables flanking the bed. I could see the strange color of Tonia Lee’s body against the white sheets, the red of the dress folded so peculiarly at the foot of the bed. I wondered where Tonia Lee’s shoes were-under the bed?

And speaking of missing things-here a thought hovered on the edge of my mind so insistently that my eyes went out of focus as I tried to pin it down. Missing things. Or something at least not included in my mental picture of the bed and surrounding floor. The night tables…

There it was. The night tables. My mental camera zoomed in on their surfaces. I picked up the phone and punched in seven familiar numbers.

“Select Realty,” said Patty Cloud’s On-the-Ball voice.

“Patty, this is Roe. Let me speak to my mother if she’s handy, please.”

“Sure, Roe,” said Patty in her Warm Personal voice. “She’s on another line-wait, she’s off. Here you go.”

“Aida Queensland,” said my mother. Her new name still gave me a jolt.

“When you first listed the Anderton house,” I said without preamble, “think about going in the bedroom with Mandy.”

“Okay, I’m there,” she said after a moment.

“Look at the night tables.”

A few seconds of silence.

“Oh,” she said slowly. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I have to call Detective Liggett right away. The vases are missing.”

“She should check the formal dining room, too. There was a crystal bowl with crystal fruit in there that cost a fortune.”

“I’ll call her right away.”

We hung up at the same moment.

It had been years since I was at the Anderton house, but I still remembered how impressed I’d been that instead of tissues or bed lamps, Mandy’s parents had Chinese vases on their bedside tables. In her charming way, Mandy had bragged about how much those vases had cost. But she had never liked them. So when I realized they were gone, I didn’t for an instant think she’d had them packed up and shipped to Los Angeles. She would have left them to coax a buyer. Anyone who would have enough money to consider buying her parents’ house would not want to steal vases, right?