Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (16 page)

“I understand that Cartland Sewell has a cast-iron alibi,” he said out of the blue. Bryan sounded as if that were a bad thing, and since he was representing John David, I guess it was.

The more viable suspects, the better, particularly for my brother-in-law.

“I’m glad for Lizanne’s sake,” I said. I know this was dumb of me, but I hadn’t realized I ought to tell Bryan what had happened with Lizanne the day of Poppy’s murder. Now I told him in as few words as possible. After questioning me closely about the probable time of all the events Lizanne had described, the lawyer lapsed back into a silence that I chose to characterize as thoughtful.

The Cadillac was so comfortable and the heat so effective, I was nearly drowsy by the time we reached the Grabbit Kwik. Bryan came around the car to open my door just as I was about to open it myself, so I held still and let him. This world is so devoid of courtesy, I never mind receiving a little, even if it’s misplaced.

He offered me his hand, and I took that, too. I was wearing off-white pants, a fuzzy blue sweater, and blue suede moccasins, so I didn’t have to worry about getting out of the car modestly. He gave a little pull, and up I popped, just like a cork.

The outside of the Grabbit Kwik was like any other convenience store/gas station along any highway. Grabbits are all painted a bright green, and this one had all its tawdry Christmas regalia in place. It had probably been up since the Halloween ghosts and pumpkins had come down. The concrete outside the door was dirty, but the glass doors were gleaming. We were the only customers at the moment, which I chose to regard as a good sign.

Inside, everything was as you’d expect, too—the racks of junk food and the refrigerated cases of drinks, the raised counter, the woman in the red smock behind the cash register. Her hair was a construction of elaborate and rigid ringlets, and she was generously round. Her heavily lined eyes looked like raisins sunk in gingerbread dough.

“Can I help you folks?” she asked cheerfully. On a tiny television behind her, a talk show was in progress.

Bryan produced a card immediately and introduced himself. She told him her name was Emma McKibbon and that she’d worked there two years. Her eyes flicked over to me curiously, but Bryan didn’t include me in this dialogue. He’d been so absolutely correct and polite up to now; it made me as curious as Emma apparently was. But there must be a reason, so I kept quiet.

The woman’s face looked really familiar, though, and I kept examining her, hoping I’d make the connection.

Bryan was asking her if there was any way she could remember a particular customer who’d come by two days before, and Emma confirmed that she’d been right there behind the counter on Monday. But Emma was wary of Bryan, for whatever reason—maybe just because he was an affluent white male. Watching her face seal itself off, I had a sinking feeling that any information we could have gathered was being chucked down a well inside the clerk.

“We were pretty busy that morning, same as always on Monday,” she said grudgingly. “Let me see the receipt, but I ain’t holding out much hope.”

I pulled the receipt out of my pocket and handed it to her. As our eyes met, a little
click
sounded in my ears. “Emma!” I said. “You were three years behind me in high school, right?”

“I sure was,” she said, relieved to track down her own elusive memory. “I’m Jane’s sister—

Jane Pocket she was then.”

“Oh, sure. How is Jane?”

“Well, she’s gotten married twice now, and she has four kids in school and another one on the way. I have two myself. I married Dante McKibbon right after we graduated. My girls;— one’s in high school, and the other’s in junior high.”

“Oh, how nice,” I said, smiling as brightly as I could.

“Now, you still live in town, don’t you? I’m sure I saw you at the store last month.”

“I do. I have a house over on McBride.”

“You married?”

A black pit opened abruptly, right in front of me, and I took a deep breath, gathered my composure, and stepped right over it. “I’m a widow,” I said, maintaining my smile.

“Oh, too bad! You got any babies?”

“No, I’m all on my lonesome,” I said.

Emma obviously regarded this as the worst of all possible situations and cast around in her brain desperately for something upbeat to say to me. “Well, you look great,” she told me. “You don’t look a day older than you did when you graduated. Those kids’ll put the years on you, for sure.”

Bryan opened his mouth, but I got in there first. I knew what I was doing now. “You remember my mom?” I asked. Emma nodded. No one forgot my mother. “She married John Queensland, John David’s dad? I know you remember John David.” He would be a little younger than Emma, but he’d had a lot of success on the football field, and that would have made his name more familiar.

“Oh, sure,” Emma said, relieved to be on a different topic. “That John David, he speaks every time he comes in here.”

“Oh, he gets his gas here?” I leaned on the counter, as if I had all the time in the world.

“Sometimes,” she said. “He was in here the other morning, the morning you were asking about, unless I’m real confused. But I think it was early, not at the time on this receipt. This says ten-twenty-two, and he always comes in before eight, on his way to Atlanta.”

“You remember Bubba?”

“Which one?” she said with a big laugh, and I had to laugh right along with her. “You mean the big black Bubba who played center on the football team, or the Chinese Bubba who was so smart, or that Bubba who’s a lawyer in town?”

“Lawyer Bubba.”

“He comes in here, too, but not so often,” she said, thinking back. “He’s always in a hurry, don’t talk to me.”

“You remember Poppy?”

“Yeah, I hear she’s dead.”

“Yeah. She married John David.”

“Yeah, after they fought all through high school. Were you in the cafeteria that day she slapped him upside the head?”

“I had already graduated, but I heard about it.”

“She didn’t hold back none, either. She let him have it. Maybe that’s why somebody killed her, she mighta whomped on them like that.”

“Her mom and dad are here,” I said.

“Yeah, her dad is that preacher,” Emma said. “My mama used to clean house for them. I was over to see Mama the other day when the radio said that about Poppy. My mama said, ‘Like father, like daughter, I guess.’ ”

“Oh my gosh,” I said, “did he make pass at your mother?” I am sure I looked as disgusted as I felt. Somehow, you’re always a child when you hear about the peccadilloes of those who represented authority to you when you were young.

Emma looked sardonic. “He don’t like my skin tone,” she said, as if adding another mark against Marvin Wynn’s tally of bad taste. “But all those woman who came to him for counseling, you can bet a bunch of them got more than prayers. Especially the really young ones.”

“Ew,” I said, and Emma laughed.

“I like a man with more meat to him than that,” she said. “His wife is like that, too, all thin and bony. Now
she
was in here Monday around the right time, and I was surprised, because I hadn’t seen that woman in a coon’s age. Did they move back into town?”

I leaned more heavily against the counter, suddenly weak.

Bingo. What the hell had Sandy Wynn been doing anywhere in the vicinity? I stuffed that thought away for later examination. I hoped that no one else would come in, since we were on such a roll. “Well, I won’t take up too much more of your time. I know you’re at work. I don’t know if you remember this, but I have a brother.”

She looked puzzled.

“He’s a half brother. You may not recall that my mom was divorced when I was pretty young?”

“I knew something happened, since he wasn’t around anymore.”

“Yeah, well, my dad remarried, so I have this brother, Phillip, who lives in California. He just hitchhiked over here to see me, and he met these girls along the way.”

“I can’t believe he got here alive,” Emma said frankly.

“Me either. It was dumb, but he’s a kid.” I shrugged. “Anyway, he may have been here that morning, Monday morning. The car he was in stopped here for gas. It would have been my brother—he’s about as tall as this lawyer here—and two girls, both older than he is.” I dredged my memory. “He says they were in a green Impala.” Though Phillip had told me he’d caught a bus into Lawrenceton, I thought it would be unfair of me not to check on him, too.

“Can’t remember,” Emma said after she’d turned it over in her head. “So many kids, and if they’re that young and white, I don’t know ‘em, so I just don’t recall.”

“Thanks for taking the time to help,” I said. “I enjoyed talking to you. You tell Jane I said hello, okay? And Dante.”

“Sure will,” Emma said. She smiled, but she also looked at me as though she was sorry for me.

Well, I just had to swallow that. I kept my smile steady, and Bryan and I left the store after he’d asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee, then bought me one and paid for it.

He handed me into the car as ceremoniously as he’d gotten me out of it, and I found that was a tiny bit tiresome. But I was glad to sink back into the leather seat and feel the heat blowing around me as we started back to town.

“That was a stroke of luck.” I was thinking of Emma’s face as it was now, trying to picture the way it had been in our high school days. I was thanking my lucky stars I’d remembered the woman, since she was a few years younger. In high school, that makes a big difference.

“That was very smooth,” Bryan said, interrupting what I suddenly realized had been a long silence.

“Smooth? What?”

“Your questioning. Are you sure you don’t want to be a lawyer? Or maybe join the police force?”

“I’m sure,” I said, smiling. He’d sounded almost miffed, but I was going to ignore that. I had a feeling Bryan was unhappy because his own questioning had proved unproductive. “If you know someone, it’s just easier to ask the right questions.”

“So. Mrs. Wynn was there, Bubba may have been, although probably not, John David was there earlier, and she couldn’t remember your brother,” Bryan summarized.

“That’s about it.”

“Sandy Wynn.” He shook his head, looking as stunned as I felt.

“Yes. She’s so—well, she seemed so devastated when they came to my house Monday night.

I could have sworn all that grief was genuine.”

“But it’s hard to understand how she could have just skipped telling the police she’d been in the area that morning.”

“Yes, of course. Well, maybe Emma made a mistake.” I’d heard older women complain before that young people seemed to regard them as interchangeable. Maybe Emma had seen another thin, fit older woman and identified her mentally as Poppy’s mom, after she’d heard Poppy had been killed. That would be natural. But Emma had sounded so certain, and she had struck me as a good observer. And after all,
someone
had dropped that receipt on my floor.

“What are you going to do about Mrs. Wynn?” I asked. “Will you talk to her yourself, or will you sic Arthur on her?”

Bryan looked gloomy. “I should tell the police,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “I wonder if she was the visitor Poppy was expecting, the reason she didn’t ride to Uppity Women with you.”

“Mrs. Wynn’s phone records would show if she’d phoned Poppy,” I said hesitantly. “Would Poppy’s phone record show incoming calls as well as outgoing? Can you look at those?”

“After the police have ... if they arrest John David, I can. Other than that, I haven’t any legal right to see them. They’re John David’s records, too. He could request them, give me permission. . . . I’ll think about it.”

We were silent during the rest of the drive. I guess both of us had plenty to think about. But I don’t think we were pondering the same things.

By the time I got back to my house, Phillip was home and more than willing to help me unload the groceries—so he could find out what I’d gotten that he wanted to eat. I’d seen about half the people I knew dashing frantically through the grocery store, and all of them looked as scatterbrained as I felt, but I hadn’t been so frantic that I’d forgotten to buy some snack stuff.

I told Phillip he was going to help me cook, and he stared longingly at the television before he agreed.

“How was your lunch with Robin?” I asked.

“We had ham sandwiches,” Phillip said, which was not exactly the information I was after.

“He’s pretty cool,” Phillip added almost grudgingly after I’d put away the contents of one bag.

“We had a long talk about stuff. The only dumb thing about him is his name.”

“I’m glad you two are getting along,” I said. I was very curious to hear Robin’s account of their conversation.

“You gonna marry him?”

It would be beyond coy to pretend I’d never thought of it. “If he asks me, I’ll think about it,” I said.

“You could ask him.”

Hmmm. “No,” I said. “I just don’t think I could do that.” Though I was a raving liberal compared to 50 percent of the people I knew in Lawrenceton, I knew asking Robin to marry me was way beyond my possibility level, even though I was now an Uppity Woman.

“Chicken,” Phillip said fondly.

“Yep,” I said. “That’s me. Oh, by the way, I found a gas receipt on the floor Monday night.

Did your friend stop for gas on her way into Lawrenceton?”

His face turned red just at the mention. “No,” he said. “We stopped for gas in Rome.

Remember, I took a bus into Lawrenceton.”

Phillip had no reason to lie, and he’d never known Poppy. I had enough confirmation to drop him from my list. Though Emma had narrowed the list down, I needed to talk to the other people who might have dropped the receipt. I wanted to hear their stories with my own ears.

Opening the refrigerator, I poked the turkey breast with an anxious finger. It was close to being thawed. I got the package of ready-made piecrust out so it could be reaching room temperature, then took the pecans out of the freezer for the pecan pie. I handed my little brother a recipe for pumpkin pie and a can of pumpkin. “Put all of this stuff in there,” I said. I got everything required out of the cabinet and put it in a clump on the counter. I pulled out my little electric mixer and a mixing bowl and set them on the counter by his stuff. “There you go,” I said briskly. I turned on both of my ovens, yanked two pie plates out of the cabinet, and patted the piecrusts into place. Then I threw together the pecan pie.