Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (13 page)

“I was reminding Cara that she was next on the list.”

The day after Poppy had died.

Teresa was not Ms. Sensitive, but this was callous, even for her. We all regarded her in a long moment of silence.

“What?” she said.

“The circumstances take most of the zest out of becoming an Uppity Woman,” Cara said finally, looking past Teresa’s shoulder as she spoke. “Give me a call to let me know the time and place. If you leave it on my machine, I’ll write it down. I can’t remember anything if you tell me away from a pad and pencil.”

“I know how that is,” Teresa agreed. “I live by my Day Planner.” She was quite oblivious to her offense.

“Who on earth is that?” Cara asked. She, too, had caught a glimpse of Zachary Lee in his space suit.

Bryan took on the duty of explaining, What a long day it had been. And there was more to come. But I roused myself to ask Cara if she’d seen Moosie.

“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” she promised. “He’s a cute cat. I personally don’t believe in declawing, but I know the rationale was that declawing would keep him from climbing the fence and wandering the neighborhood. I guess Poppy’s heart was in the right place.”

“She didn’t have Moosie declawed,” I told her. “She adopted him like that. He was in the animal shelter. Just give me a call if you catch sight of him. I know John David would like to know Moosie is safe.” If John David had had a chance to think about the cat at all: In his place, I wasn’t sure I would.

Cara excused herself and went back to her side of the fence. Before she left, she glanced once more at Zachary Lee, who’d opened the sliding door to clean its runners.

“You know,” Teresa said in the hushed voice you reserve for passing along scandal, “Stuart Embler used to drop by to see Poppy before he headed home, at least before Poppy had the baby.”

I hadn’t heard Cara splashing in the water, and I hoped she was not standing right on the other side of the fence, listening. To my relief, I heard her dogs barking as she slid open her own glass patio door. They were welcoming her back into the house with rapture, it sounded like.

Maybe I should get a dog, I thought. Then I thought about what Madeleine would do to a dog, and I canceled the idea.

Bryan had a certain amount of distaste in his face as he looked at his former wife, but he also looked interested. “I wonder where Stuart was yesterday around eleven,” he said.

“That should be easy enough to find out. But I’d be extremely surprised if Stuart had anything to do with this. His affair with Poppy was stale, and he wouldn’t care if there was a little scandal anyway. Cardiologists can call the shots. I mean, if you had a sick heart, and this guy was the best chance of your surviving, would you care if you heard he’d had an extramarital roll in the hay?”

I could see Teresa’s point.

“By the way, Aurora, speaking of extramarital affairs,” Teresa began, and my eyes fixed on her. “Rumor has it that you saw someone leaving this house yesterday as you pulled up.”

How the hell had such a story started making the rounds?

“I’ll bet it was a man. Or the wife of some man she’d been carrying on with.” Teresa’s face was avid.

“No,” I said, my voice as cold as a Tastee-Freez Coke slush. “That is not true.”

“Well, my goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was hitting a nerve. We all figured you’d about got this solved.”

I don’t think I blinked at all as I glared at her.

Bryan said, “Isn’t there somewhere you need to be, Teresa?”

She stopped dead, her mouth open.

“You’ve come by, you’ve given your condolences, and you’ve gotten some suggestions of ways the Uppities can help. I’m sure you have another errand or appointment?”

“I do need to stop by the store, and phone the committee members,” she said slowly. Her face was red. “Good-bye, Aurora.”

Gosh, I just
loved
seeing Teresa upbraided. Not the most pleasant side of my character, I’m afraid. “Good-bye,” I said politely and distantly, and Bryan stood as Teresa did, then opened the gate to the front yard for her.

“She can’t help it, you know,” he said when he sat in the chair beside mine.

“I realize that she has many fine qualities.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“She runs the Uppity Women smooth as a whistle,” I told him. “She’s organized and focused, and we do a lot of good under her leadership.”

“I was married to her. I know just how organized and focused she can be.”

“You said you’ve been divorced for a year?” Was it tacky to mention that?

“She married Shorty Stanton about seven months ago.”

“He works at one of the banks, right?”

“He’s the president of Southern Security,” Bryan said a little dryly.

“Oh.”

“Yes, big money.”

I forbore remarking that Bryan himself couldn’t be hurting for a healthy cash flow, unless he had a secret vice like gambling or drugs.

“Tell me about the car.” His voice was quiet.

I stared at the crouching, dim figure of the crime-scene cleaner. He was working on the glass again now. I considered and discarded several responses.

“I didn’t see any car,” I said very carefully. “But I did find evidence that someone had been here before we got here.”

“You know who it was,” Bryan said.

I looked at him sideways. “No wonder you have such a good reputation as a lawyer.”

“It’s deserved, I promise you. Who was it?”

“I can’t tell you that right now.”

“Do you care more about this person than about your sister-in-law?”

“Yes.”

That took him aback, but the lawyer rallied.

“You don’t trust me?”

“I told you about the receipt,” I remarked mildly. “And I’ll tell you something else.”

He turned his hand palm up, meaning, Give.

“Someone’s been in the house since yesterday.”

“This house?” He pointed at it, startled.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“The upstairs curtains are closed. They were open yesterday when I was up there.”

Bryan stared at the curtains in the master bedroom as if they could tell him why they were pulled together. “Maybe the police closed them last night, so no one could see what they were doing,” he suggested.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

Bryan seemed to give up. “Let’s go check it out. I believe the man is telling you he’s finished.”

In fact, Zachary Lee had emerged from the house, unsuited, looking cheerful as ever. “I’ve got the rug rolled up and in my van; here’s a receipt,” he said. “I’m going to take it back to the shop and work on it. Everything else is done. You’ll need to call a regular housecleaning service to get everything else back to normal.”

I could feel that little frown of confusion contracting my brows. “Excuse me?”

“The upstairs. I went up to clean up the fingerprint powder.”

“What about the upstairs?” I cast a sideways glance at Bryan.

“This wasn’t a homicide during a burglary?”

“You had better show us what you mean,” Bryan said.

This time, I walked through every room of the ground floor, and it all looked normal.

Upstairs, though, was a different story. The room that had received the most attention was the master bedroom. Everything was tossed around, as if a demented child had had a field day.

“It didn’t look like this when you found the body?” Bryan asked, his eyes missing nothing.

“No, it looked like a home.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Surely the police wouldn’t do this?”

“They would take the bedding to check for evidence,” Bryan said. And they had. “But they wouldn’t do this.” Drawers were pulled out of the chest of drawers, the dressing table, the lingerie chest, the jewelry chest. Poppy’s side of the small walk-in closet was demolished. Out-of-season shoes had been dumped from their neat stack of boxes, and a set of stacked cubes that had held sweaters had been disassembled and lay strewn on the floor.

This was horrible. I felt like Poppy had been violated all over again.

I told myself instantly that this was a dumb reaction. What I was seeing was just a rummage through her things, not nearly as bad as sinking a knife into her, for goodness sake! But the invasiveness of it... I thought of how much I would hate someone going through my personal stuff, and I had to sit down abruptly on the needlepoint-covered stool that was intended to occupy the kneehole of the dressing table.

Bryan did a big production number about how I was feeling—asking if he should call the paramedics (which horrified me considerably) and muttering various things about how terrible a shock I had sustained. He had called the police already, so I let him run on for a bit. Was he trying to impress me with his empathy, with his regard for me as a delicate southern flower? I was a pretty wilted blossom, if so.

I wished Robin were there. Then I slapped myself mentally. No point wishing for that. He was flirting with Janie.

Anger stiffened my spine once more.

I was fit company for neither man nor beast.

It was already late afternoon, and I suggested to Bryan that we wait until the next morning to find the gas station that had issued the receipt. That way, I pointed out, probably the same attendant would be on duty—if you could talk about attendants being on duty at gas stations anymore, which was doubtful. I could tell that for about a half cent, Bryan would take the receipt and ask the questions all by himself. I tried to impress on him how dimly I would view such behavior.

I drove Bryan back to his office, then stopped by my mother’s to check on the well-being of my extended family. Melinda and Avery were at their house, and Poppy’s baby was with them, just as Melinda had predicted. John David was sitting in a morose heap in Mother’s den. Across from him was Arthur Smith.

What was he doing? Obviously, he was still on the case, which I found incomprehensible.

Granted, Lawrenceton is a smallish town, and the police force is probably pretty stretched, especially considering murders are not the norm in our town. But you would think, even in Lawrenceton, the chief of police would remove the deceased’s former lover from the list of investigating officers in a homicide case. No one had whispered in his ear yet, I presumed.

“Can you think of any reason someone might have broken into your home?” Arthur was asking. “Do you know of any particular hiding place your wife used, for important papers or—

?” This was certainly a quick response to Bryan’s phone call.

“No,” John David interrupted. “No, Poppy had nothing to hide.”

My mother was standing at the kitchen counter, reading the heating instructions on the casserole Teresa had brought by that afternoon. I knew the writing at a glance. When John David made his amazing statement, my mother’s eyebrows flew up, expressing exactly the same incredulity as mine did. If John David believed what he was saying, he was a fool. If he believed he was fooling anyone else about Poppy’s true character, he was also a fool.

I drifted around the counter so I could stand across from my mother. She was, as always, perfectly groomed, but she looked weary and worried.

“The bad thing is,” she said in a low conversational tone, “that Poppy was a lot of good things, too, but no one’s thinking about that.”

“It does seem as though the, ah, negative side of her character is probably what got her killed,” I said. “But I agree, Poppy had a lot that was good in her. She was intelligent, she was entertaining, she loved Chase—oh, did she love that baby—and she was willing to work hard on projects she believed in.” There were a lot of people with better reputations than Poppy’s, but it would be hard to think of so much good to say about them, I realized.

“Have you had a falling-out with Robin?” Mother asked. The question was so abrupt and so out of character for her that I hesitated before answering.

“Yes,” I said. “He didn’t call me to tell me he’d gotten back early from his book tour, and he was flirting with Janie Spell-man.”

“Flirting,” my mother said, her voice blank.

“Yes,” I replied, feeling my cheeks redden. “Practically holding hands.”

“In the library?”

“Yes, in the library!”

“Where nothing could possibly happen, under the eyes of a dozen people.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Maybe Janie wanted to flirt a little. You’re not the only woman in the world who finds Robin attractive, Roe. Maybe Robin felt like flirting back, just a little. Did he ask her out? Did he kiss her? Did he tell you he didn’t want to see you any more?”

“No.”

“Did you give him a chance to talk to you about it?”

“No.”

“Have I miscounted the days, or did he not cut short his tour to get back to you early?”

“Yes.” I felt embarrassment creep up my cheeks in a red tide.

“Um, um, um.” My mother shook her head. “That evil, evil man. He’s been mistreating you so badly, I may have to slap him.”

“Okay, you made your point.”

“I’d have thought you would know the difference, after that one.” Mother nodded toward the den. She meant Arthur, not John David. Mother would never forgive Arthur for humiliating me so publicly. He could save ten kids from drowning and foil a dozen bank robberies, and she’d still loathe him. It was kind of nice, having someone that firmly on your side, no matter how mistaken she might be.

After I’d spoken to John and patted his hand and seen for myself that he was better today than yesterday, I left without speaking to John David or Arthur, who were still deep in conversation.

On the short drive home, I thought about what Poppy might have hidden. If it could have been in a shoe box, obviously it was something small. Would Poppy have blackmailed anyone?

I thought not, even as disillusioned as I was about her proclivities. But something she had had in her keeping had scared the hell out of someone. Perhaps the searcher had found the item in the upstairs bedroom, perhaps not.

So, we had a mysterious gas station receipt, a murdered woman, a philandering lawyer, a philandering husband, a past lover or three, a searcher, and a detective who shouldn’t be on the case at all.

I wasn’t surprised at all to walk into my house and find my brother and Robin waiting for me.