Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (2 page)

“Oh crap,” I said, glad only Melinda was there to hear me. I tossed them into the car for Melinda to look at, and I marched to the front door. I was mentally loaded for bear. “Poppy!” I called as I turned the doorknob of the front door of the house. The door opened. Unlocked.

Since by now I knew Poppy had already had company that morning, I was not so startled by this.

I stepped into the foyer and called again. But the house was quiet. Moosie, Poppy’s cat, came to see what was happening. Moosie was a pale sylph compared to my huge feline basketball, Madeleine. The cat meowed in an agitated way and ran from hall to kitchen and back again. I’d never seen Moosie act so jittery. He was Poppy’s pampered pet, a declawed half Siamese she’d adopted from the animal shelter. Moosie was not allowed out the front door, only out the sliding glass back door, which led into a backyard enclosed all the way around with a six-foot-high privacy fence. After Moosie stropped my ankles a couple of times, I registered the fact that the sensation was sticky. I looked down and saw that my hose were stained.

“Moosie, what have you been into?” I asked. Several unpleasant possibilities crossed my mind. The cat began cleaning himself vigorously, licking at the dark patch on his side. He didn’t seem hurt or anything, just, well, catty. “Where’s Poppy?” I asked. “Where’s your momma?” I know that’s disgusting, but when you’re alone with animals, you get that way.

Poppy and John David actually had a human child, Chase, as well as the cat, but they’d had the cat longer.

“Hey, Poppy!” I yelled up the stairs. Maybe she’d gotten in the shower after her visitor left.

But why would she? Even for Poppy, missing such an important engagement was very unusual.

And if she’d been up to her usual shenanigans ... I had to press my lips together to hold in my anger.

I stomped up the stairs, yelling Poppy’s name the whole time. She’d missed Uppity Women, and she’d missed lunch, and, by golly, I wanted to know why.

The master bedroom looked as though she’d just stepped out. The bed was made and her bathrobe was tossed across the foot of the bed. Poppy’s bedroom slippers, the slide-in kind, were in a little heap on the floor. Her brush was tossed down on her dressing table, clogged with red-gold hair.

“Poppy?” I said, less certainly this time. The bathroom door was wide open, and I could see the shower enclosure. The wall was dry. It had been quite awhile since Poppy had showered. I could see my reflection in the huge mirror that topped the two sinks, and I looked scared. My glasses were sliding down my nose, which is a very insignificant feature of my face. I’d worn the green-rimmed ones today to offset my bronze-colored jacket and tobacco brown sheath, and I took a little moment to reflect that autumn colors were really my best.

Well, I could think about myself any old time, but right now I needed to be searching. I went back down the stairs faster than I’d gone up. Melinda, waiting out in my Volvo, would be wondering what had happened to me. I, however, was wondering why the central heating was roaring away on this cool but moderate day, and why I was feeling a draft of chilly air despite the heating system’s best attempts.

I muttered a less ladylike word under my breath as I strode farther down the entrance hall to the kitchen, though
striding
is a moot word to use when you’re four eleven. Moosie wove in and out between my ankles and darted ahead when it suited him. The kitchen was a mess; although big and bright, it was scattered with dishes and crumbs and pieces of mail and baby bottles and car keys and the St. James Altar Guild schedule— a normal kitchen, in other words.

To my left, dividing the room in half, was a breakfast bar. On the other side of it was a family dining table, positioned by the sliding glass doors so Poppy and John David could look outside while they ate. A mug of coffee was on the breakfast bar. It was full. I laid my finger against the side of it. Cold.

Over the top of the breakfast bar, I could see that the sliding glass door was open. This was the source of the intruding cool air. A sharp-edged wind from the east was gusting into the kitchen.

My scalp began to prickle.

I stepped through the narrow passage between the end of the breakfast bar and the refrigerator and looked to my right. Poppy was lying on the floor just inside the open sliding glass door.

One of her brown pumps had fallen off her narrow foot. Her sweater and skirt were covered in blotches.

A spray of blood had dried on the glass of the doors.

I could hear a radio playing from the house behind Poppy’s.

The tune wafted over the high privacy fence. I could hear someone splashing through the water of a pool: Cara Embler, doing her laps, as she did every day, unless her pool was actually frozen. Poppy, who had laughed about Cara’s adherence to such an uncomfortable regimen, would never laugh again. The processes of life and living, continuing in the houses all around us, had come to dead stop here in this house on Swan-son Lane.

Moosie sat by Poppy’s pathetic, horrible body. He said, “Reow.” He pressed against her side.

His food bowl, on a mat by the breakfast bar, was empty.

Now I knew how Moosie’s fur had gotten stained. He’d been trying to rouse Poppy, maybe so she would feed him.

Suddenly, I had to escape from that suburban kitchen with its horrible secret. I flew out of the house, slamming the front door behind me. I had a fleeting impulse to scoop up Moosie, but taking charge of him was too much for me at that second. I dashed down the sidewalk to the curb, where Melinda was waiting. I was making the “phone” signal as I hurried, little finger and thumb pointing to mouth and ear, respectively. Melinda had turned on the cell phone by the time I got to her car.

“Nine one one,” I said, gasping for breath. Melinda gave me a sharp look, but she punched in the number as I’d asked and then passed the phone to me. Did I mention that Melinda has a ton of good sense?

“The nature of your emergency?” said a distant voice.

“I’m at Eight-oh-eight Swanson Lane,” I said. “This is Aurora Teagarden. My sister-in-law has been killed.”

I never did remember the rest of that conversation. When I was sure they were coming, I pressed the button that ended the conversation, and I began to try to explain to Melinda.

But instead, I flashed on the deep wounds on Poppy’s hands, wounds incurred when she was defending her life, and I leaned over to avoid the car, my dress, and the phone while I threw up.

For the sixth or seventh time, I explained very carefully why Melinda and I had gone to Poppy’s house. Because the city police made the house off-limits instantly, Melinda and I drove right down to the police station, and from there I called my mother at Select Realty, her agency.

It was a difficult conversation, over my cell phone in a public place, but one that had to be completed. Her husband, John, had had one heart attack already. Mother was terrified of another, and the news about his favorite daughter-in-law might trigger one. Mother was right to worry about that, and she thought of a few more things to worry her before we’d finished our conversation.

“Who’ll tell John David?” Mother asked. “Tell me it doesn’t have to be John.” John David was John’s second son, and the husband of the late Poppy.

“Where is he, Mother? Do you know?” The police had been asking me that quite persistently.

If John David wasn’t at his company headquarters in Atlanta, I didn’t know where he’d be.

He’d been a pharmaceuticals salesman for the first few years of his marriage, but recently he’d gotten a job at company headquarters in the Public Relations division. John David had always been good at turning an attractive face to the world.

“John David? He’s at work, I guess. Two o’clock on a Monday afternoon, where else would he be?”

“Do you have that phone number and address handy?”

I could hear little efficient sounds as Mother wheeled through her Rolodex. She rattled off a number, and I wrote it on a scrap of paper and handed it to the policewoman sitting across the desk. “That’s the same number,” the detective said, and I nodded.

“Will they let you go tell him?” Mother asked.

“I think the police will tell John David,” I said. “If they can find him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I already gave them that number. The police called, and the people there told the police that John David left work early today. Before noon.”

“Then where could he be?”

“I guess they’d like to know that, too,” I said, figuring a number of other shoes were about to drop.

After an appreciable pause, my mother said, “That would kill John.” Another pause: I could practically hear her thinking. “Aurora, I’ve got to go, before he hears about this some other way. You know someone’s bound to call the house and tell him there are a lot of police cars around John David’s house. Wait! Roe, where’s the baby?”

My face must have changed dramatically, because the detective stood up abruptly, sending her chair skidding a couple of feet.

“I don’t know where the baby is,” I said numbly. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about Chase, who was only eleven months old. “I don’t know. Maybe Melinda ...” I swiveled on the hard chair, looking for my remaining sister-in-law. The next instant, I was on my feet. The detective said something, but I didn’t listen as I searched for Melinda, my heels click-clacking on the linoleum floor.

She was in a cubicle with Detective Arthur Smith, whom I knew all too well. I stuck my head in. “Roe?” she said, already apprehensive.

“Where’s the baby? Where’s Chase?”

She looked at me blankly. “Why, John David dropped him off at my house this morning. My sitter is keeping my two and Chase, so Poppy and I...” And then her face crumpled all over again.

I hotfooted it back to the telephone, which I’d stupidly left on the desk. “Chase is at Melinda’s,” I told my mother. I was limp with relief. “Evidently, John David took him over there this morning.”

“So John David was in town this morning. At least we know that.” My mother had already absorbed Chase’s safety and was moving on to other ramifications. “Listen, Roe, you’ve got my cell-phone number.” I had it all right, tattooed on my brain. “Call me the
minute
you know where John David is. I’ve got to get to your stepfather.”

I thought my mother was a wee bit affected in calling John my stepfather, and she did on every possible occasion. After all, I’d been in my early thirties when John, a widower, had married Mother. He’d been a friend of mine before he’d dated my mother, and I felt a mixture of different obligations and attitudes toward John. I certainly never addressed him as “Step-dad.”

I hung up and faced the woman who’d been taking my statement. Her name was Cathy Trumble, and I’d never met her before. Detective Trumble was stocky and graying, with an easy-care curly hairdo and sharp, pale eyes behind rimless glasses. She was a real professional, I guess; I had no clue as to how she felt about the information I was giving her—the death of Poppy Queensland, my brother-in-law’s absence—or anything at all. It was like talking to a piece of stainless steel.

“How come you don’t have a cubicle?” I asked. I had been wandering off in my own mental world while Detective Trumble was typing into a computer, and she was a little nonplussed by my question. The Sparling County Law Enforcement Center housed the sheriff’s office, the town police, and the jail. In the world of SPACOLEC, detectives got their own little space with head-high carpeted dividers.

“I just got hired,” she explained. She seemed startled into answering the question.

I recalled Sally Allison’s story in the paper about the county having to increase its law-enforcement budget because of increased population, which had led directly to increased crime.

Okay, Detective Cathy Trumble was the result. “Where do you live?” I asked, trying to be sociable. With a mother who made a living in real estate, it was a question that was second nature.

“And you had planned this lunch date with your sisters for how long?” she asked pointedly.

Okay, we weren’t going to be best friends.

“They’re my sisters-in-law, sort of once removed,” I said for what felt like the millionth time.

“We’ve been planning to go to the Uppity Women together for a month. Melinda just joined three months ago, and I’ve been a member for a about half a year.”

“And Poppy?”

“Oh, she’d gone as our guest twice. But today she was going to be inducted. Somebody had died to let her in,” I explained.

The clear eyes fixed me in their stare. I felt like I’d been caught in the headlights. “Somebody had died?” she said.

For the first time, I regretted not being questioned by Arthur. “Well, to get in Uppity Women—it’s really the Uppity Women’s Reading and Lunch Club, but everyone calls it Uppity Women—you have to fill a vacancy, because the bylaws limit membership to thirty,” I told Cathy Trumble. “You have to be nominated, and if they vote yes, you get on the list. The list is limited to five. Then when a member dies, the top person on the list replaces that member. Etheline Plummer died for me.”

“I understand,” Detective Trumble said unwillingly. She looked a little dazed.

“So when Linda Burdine Buckle died two weeks ago,” I said, “it was Poppy’s turn.” I patted at my cheeks with a soggy Kleenex.

“What do Uppity Women do?” Detective Trumble asked, though she sounded as though she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Well, we talk about local politics and then we decide how we’re going to handle local issues.

We have representatives at every city council meeting and school board meeting, and they give reports to the club. We decide whom we’re going to back in the primaries, and how we’re going to do it. And then we have a book we’ve all read that we discuss, and then we eat lunch.”

This didn’t seem extraordinary to me, but Trumble gave a kind of sigh and looked down at her desk. “So, you have a political agenda, and a literary agenda, and a social. . .”

I nodded.

“You all read, what? Like from the Oprah Book Club? Like
The Lovely Bones
?”

“Um, no.”