Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (22 page)

I can’t describe what a shock it was to see a picture of someone I knew performing a sex act.

In this floral suburban bedroom, the picture was even more obscene than it would have been if I’d chanced upon it in a magazine.

“I wonder who it is,” I said once when I could speak. “I mean, possibly this is some loving record of her and John David?”

“Oh, it
never
is!” Melinda said. She was absolutely outraged. “The Queensland brothers, I know from Avery, are both un-circumcised. This . . . individual, as you can see, is
not
.”

“At least she didn’t keep it as blackmail.” I was looking for reassurance. “I mean, you can’t tell who it is, and the thing itself looks pretty anonymous, doesn’t it? No big freckles, or, ah, anything unusual.”

Melinda looked at the picture again, her lips pursed with distaste. “No, just a regular old wienie,” she said.

We looked at each other and burst into laughter. “Look at it this way. You know it’s not Avery,” I said.

“And look at the hair. Couldn’t be Robin,” she pointed out.

True. Robin was redheaded all over, so to speak.

“I refuse to guess,” I said after one final inspection. “But whoever it is, we agree that John David should not see this.”

“Absolutely.”

“Where was it?”

“It was taped to the bottom of this little drawer.” Melinda pointed to Poppy’s jewelry box, which was filled to overflowing with inexpensive necklaces and earrings. There was a pullout drawer at the bottom, so you could lay your chains inside and they wouldn’t tangle. Melinda had pulled it all the way out and flipped it.

“Aren’t you smart to think of that!” I said admiringly.

Melinda looked modest.

“Well, no telling how much else we’ll find,” I said, unable to suppress a sigh. “I guess we’d better get back to work.”

The next find was mine. Taped into the lining of a spring coat Poppy had worn maybe twice a year was a letter. The letter was from the Reverend Wynn to Poppy. It was signed and dated. In the letter, he admitted he had had “relations” with Poppy when she was thirteen.

For a few minutes, Melinda and I could not even look at each other.

“Relations with a relation,” Melinda said in an effort to pull us out of our nauseated reaction.

She dropped that effort when it rang false. “Poor Poppy,” she said sadly.

“No wonder she was so wild,” I said. “No wonder she was so . . .”

“Promiscuous,” Melinda supplied.

“Yeah.”

“This is the nastiest thing I have ever read. I wonder why he wrote it?”

“I guess this was insurance,” I said, having thought it over for a minute or two. “Maybe this was her way of keeping him away from her kids. Keeping him out of her life. She must have told him she’d tell his bishop, or whoever stands in place of a bishop in the Lutheran church.” I made a mental note to check on that later.

“Do you think his wife knows about this?”

I started to deny that instantly. Then I reconsidered.

“She was searching,” I admitted. I told Melinda about the gas station receipt. “She could have come here that morning and questioned Poppy about it.”

“Then you’d have to assume she knows her husband did this to her daughter.” Melinda brandished the letter. “If she does, how can she live with him?”

“This is a question I can’t answer. Another one is, Would she have killed Poppy to conceal this? Bryan left a message for Arthur to call him back, so he could tell Arthur about the receipt.

Maybe Arthur already knows.”

We began a little pile.

I had to rethink Poppy’s character as I worked and searched.

My sister-in-law had shown me only the tip of the iceberg, as far as letting me know her true self. I had to realize that I had seen the better, but less complex, portion of Poppy’s personality.

Beneath had lain monsters.

We were determined to find everything. It was not conceivable that we would let anything slip by us, to fall into the hands of a stranger, or, worse yet, someone who knew Poppy. Sooner or later, John David would give away Poppy’s things to some local charity or to a friend. Or he’d search himself. He mustn’t see these—what? Souvenirs? Insurance policies? Totems?

Bubba Sewell would definitely never make representative, I decided when I found the picture of him buck naked on Poppy’s—and John David’s—bed. He was real excited, and hardly looked like a lawmaker. In a beige photo album, that picture was slid in behind a snap of Poppy and John David on vacation in Florida. Definitely done in an “Up yours, John David” moment.

“Idiot,” I muttered, and tossed it on the pile.

“Who’s that?” Melinda looked up from her examination of Poppy’s lingerie drawer.

“Cartland Sewell.”

Melinda shook her head in disgust, not even bothering to look at the picture. She continued with her search, and made the next discovery. She found an ID tag stuck in a rectangular Playtex box with a new bra—the kind of tag you clip to your lapel. The picture on it was of a bearded, thin man, who just happened to be Cara Embler’s heart surgeon husband. It was his hospital identification.

“I guess Stuart got it replaced,” Melinda said. “Her backdoor neighbor! Poppy had never heard about not fouling your own nest, I guess.”

“He’s one of John’s doctors,” I said.

“Daddy John?” This was Melinda’s pet name for John Queensland.

I nodded.

She sighed, a huge exhalation of exasperation. “I’m sorry, heart surgeons don’t get sex lives,”

she said. “Not with the daughters-in-law of their patients.”

“Who knows which came first, though, the heart attack or the affair? If you can term it an affair, that is. Maybe it was just a—you know.”

“Just a fling,” Melinda said.

That hadn’t been the word I was thinking of, but. . . Oh well.

“That’s right, we can’t know.” This actually made her feel better.

“What I’m wondering is, What’re we missing. If we’re finding this much, what did the other searchers find? Can there be stuff that’s worse?” We stared at each other, sunk in gloom.

And we heard a door open downstairs.

I don’t know how I looked, but Melinda’s dark eyes grew as wide and dark as tablespoons full of molasses.

“Who’s there?” called a deep male voice, and we could hear heavy footsteps as someone began ascending the stairs. “Aurora, are you all right? I saw your car.”

Melinda and I stared at the little pile, and, obeying an irresistible impulse, I sat on it.

We were perched side by side on the bed, looking guilty as hell, when Detective Arthur Smith came into the bedroom.

“What are you two doing?” he asked gently. He could tell he’d given us a scare.

“It’s okay for us to be here, right?” Melinda voice was high and squeaky.

“Yes, we told John David he could come back to the house anytime he wanted. But what are you doing?”

“We’re cleaning up,” I said, all too aware that I sounded just as nervous as my partner in crime. “Have you talked to Bryan Pascoe?” I wanted to change the subject.

“And you started with the study downstairs?” Arthur asked, ignoring my question. “Surely it didn’t look like that the other day?”

Arthur was far too observant. “No, no, it didn’t,” I gabbled. “The fact is ...” I looked at Melinda, desperately needing some help.

“The fact is,” Melinda said, glaring at me, “that Roe caught Poppy’s mom and dad going through everything Wednesday night, and she threw them out. So we had to clean up the study first.”

I hadn’t expected Melinda to tell the truth, and I’m sure my startled face told Arthur more than I wanted him to know.

He pulled over a chair that Poppy had placed in the corner of the room, a pretty little wooden chair with a bright needlepoint cushion, more of Poppy’s work. I hadn’t noticed it before, at least in the sense of imagining its possibilities, and I found myself planning to check out the cushion later.

Arthur plunked himself down in front of us, looking up at us as we perched awkwardly on the high antique bed. My legs were sticking out at an odd angle, and Melinda’s feet were just barely touching the floor.

“What explanation did they give?” he asked. His voice was reasonable, but his expression wasn’t. “And why didn’t you call me?”

“I wasn’t there,” Melinda said, maybe a little too quickly. Coward! “Sorry,” she muttered to me. “Can’t help it.”

“I came by with Bryan Pascoe,” I said. “We made them leave, but they sure weren’t about to tell us why they were here.”

“What do you think they were looking for?” Arthur asked.

Suddenly, I realized that Arthur had just come in the house without either of us admitting him. But we’d locked the door behind us. Would the police get to keep a key? Surely not, after the house had been re-opened to the family.

Arthur had a
key
. Though their affair was long over, he had a key, too.

For a brilliant red flash of a moment, I hated Poppy with all my heart. I looked at Arthur and wondered if I ought to fear him. Over the years, I had felt many things for Arthur: love, passion, anger, grief, annoyance, outrage, exasperation. But I had never thought I’d be frightened of him.

The tense silence stretched out unbearably.

“Roe—and you, too, Melinda—I did not kill Poppy. I was crazy about her, and she was about me, but it didn’t last. I never said anything to the chief, because I want to catch whoever killed her. I want to catch him myself. This is the last thing I can do for Poppy. I want to do it right.”

I looked at him doubtfully, but Melinda was convinced. She turned to me. “I think we should,” she said quietly.

“
No
,” I told her emphatically. The news would spread everywhere. John would be hurt by this knowledge; John David would be even more wounded. Sooner or later, the little bit of mortality that was Chase would know about it.

“We have to,” Melinda said, just to me.

I gave her a very dark look and eased off the bed. She took up the letter and handed it to Arthur. He put on a pair of reading glasses that he’d pulled from his breast pocket. As he read, we both watched him carefully. While he was busy, I slipped the two pictures into my pocket.

Melinda watched me and gave a tiny nod. Arthur would probably burst a blood vessel if he saw them. As it was, disgust twisted his lips as he read the words scrawled on the paper.

“Even her father,” he muttered.

“That wasn’t her fault,” Melinda said, instantly indignant. “For God’s sake, she was thirteen!”

Arthur gathered himself, glancing up at us, then back to the sprawling handwriting. I couldn’t read him, had no idea what he was thinking. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

“There was something about her,” he said.

Melinda looked at me in consternation. Though she’d known about Arthur and Poppy, this sudden wistful admission from the cop in charge of the investigation threw her completely.

“Listen, Arthur,” I said as gently as I could. “Maybe someone else should be in charge of this case. What about that Cathy Trumble? She seemed real able.”

“She didn’t know Poppy like I did,” Arthur said. “I know the chief would take me off the case if he knew I’d been involved with Poppy, but I’m the best investigator on the force, and I have to find out who did this to her. She was the most exciting, the most wonderful... I never dreamed anyone could be as wonderful as you were, Roe, but Poppy was something extraordinary.”

Melinda gave me a horrified stare. I could feel my cheeks flame red, and I turned my hands palm up. What could I say? For years after he’d dumped me (to marry Lynn, and then divorce her), Arthur had thought he loved me. For years he’d turned up at odd moments in my life, his eyes begging me to take him back. He’d never shown that level of devotion when we were dating, when it would have been appropriate and welcome.

Maybe that was the way it had worked with Poppy, too. He’d gotten hooked on her when she’d moved on to someone else.

“We were together when she shopped for that rug downstairs, the one that had all her blood on it,” he said, almost conversationally. “She told me that every time she looked at it, she thought of me. We had sex on it.”

That definitely fell into the category of “More than I want to know.”

“But she switched to someone after you, Arthur,” I said. “Who was it?”

“She told me,” Arthur said, “long ago . . . She told me that when she was inducted into the Uppity Women, she was going to make sure I got a promotion. Chief of detectives is coming up. Jeb Green’s gotten a better job in Savannah. Poppy told me my career would take off. She promised me so much, and gave me so little.”

She’d told Cartland she’d help him progress in state government. He’d been so besotted with her, he’d been willing to leave his wife and children. Poppy had been trying to be a total package: illicit lover, career advancer, wife, mother, suburban queen. I wondered if I’d ever known the real woman. What had she been like when she was alone?

“We never really knew her,” Melinda said to me. She sounded as sad as I felt. She hooked her dark hair behind her ears and gave Arthur a determined look. “Listen, Detective Smith. We don’t want to hear any more about you and Poppy. What we want is to know what to do about the letter. And we want to know what you’re going to do about her mother.”

Arthur seemed to jerk himself out of the pool of reminiscence he’d fallen into. “What about her mother?” he asked. “Does this have something to do with the messages Bryan Pascoe has been leaving at the station?”

“If you returned your phone calls, you could have picked her up already,” I said, angry and somehow hurt by all Arthur’s unwelcome revelations. I explained about the gas station receipt, about the attendant’s memory of the day Poppy had been murdered.

“I’ll go find out.”

Arthur left in a hurry, determined to track down the Wynns and interrogate them. After he’d gone, Melinda and I had to gather ourselves back together for a few minutes. We were quite shaken by Arthur and his odd behavior.

“Even if it was Sandy Wynn who killed Poppy, and that part of it gets wrapped up,” Melinda said, “we still have to finish this job.” She waved her hand at the bedroom, still considerably out of order.