An Accidental Woman (23 page)

Heather spotted her immediately. After a quick glance around, she came over and slipped into the chair. She put her elbows on her knees, leaning close. Poppy did the same, giving them an element of privacy.

“I know,” Poppy began, because she had seen that quick search of the room and the flicker of disappointment. “I'm not Micah. I'm sorry.”

Heather seemed resigned. “I figured he was working, but when they said someone was here, I was hoping . . .”

“He's been washing all weekend. I think he's planning to lay tubing this week. He wants to be ready when the sap starts to flow. First run's always the best.”

“I should be there. Are Missy and Star helping?”

“No. I think he needs to be alone.”

“But he can't do it alone. Well, I guess this part he can handle. Has he called Camille about the paperwork?”

“I don't know.”

“She knows everything, Poppy. Make him do it. Tell me about Missy and Star.”

“They were with me yesterday. They slept over last night with Emma and Ruth. Today they're at the mountain with Marianne.”

“They must hate me.”

“They love you. But they don't understand all this. None of us do. That's why I'm here. Talk to me, honey. Tell me what happened.”

Heather's eyes glazed over.

“No no no,” Poppy whispered, grabbing her hands. “Don't
do
that. It doesn't help. When you tune out, you hurt yourself and everyone else. Talk to me.
Talk
to me. You and me, we could always do that. Way back, when Micah first asked you to be a nanny for the girls, we discussed it, remember? We went back and forth, pros and cons. We agreed that if
you'd wanted a career, you'd have been better staying at Charlie's, but you really, really wanted to take care of the girls. Remember? I could see that. And then when things heated up between Micah and you? I could see how you felt. And then when it happened, you told me, because you needed to know it was okay, and you knew you'd get a fair answer from me, and I gave you one. So why can't you trust me that way now?”

“There's no point,” Heather whispered.

Poppy whispered back a desperate, “Why
not?”

“Oh, Poppy. Did you ever wish you could live your life over—just go back and do things different from how you did them the first time around?”

“All the time. You know that. One ride on a snowmobile—thirty minutes—and everything changed. I'd give
anything
to do those thirty minutes over again.”

“But you can't. All you can do is go on.”

“That's what you always said. We both did. We said it over and over again, trying to convince ourselves that was the only way to go. Only maybe it isn't.”

“It is.”

“Heather. They're going to try you for murder. Whether you're Lisa or not—”

“I'm not Lisa.”

“—they'll take you back to California and put you on trial. They're out for blood. You could be totally innocent, but unless you give Cassie something to work with, you'll be convicted. So then there won't
be
any going on. It'll all have been bravado on our part. Nothing more.”

“I'm not Lisa,” Heather repeated.

Poppy looked down. She gave Heather's hands a squeeze. “Is that because it would be too painful to be Lisa?” When Heather didn't answer, she looked up. “Then is it too painful being
Heather,
to talk about what she went through before Lake Henry?”

Heather shot back, “Is it too painful being Poppy?”

Poppy had known the question would come. This was one of the things that had haunted her through the night. She welcomed the chance to air it, actually
needed
that chance. Even with all that was happening,
all she didn't understand, she trusted Heather more than anyone else to listen without passing judgment.

Is it too painful being Poppy?

“Being the Poppy I was? Yes. It is. She did some things wrong, and that brings pain. There's pain, too, in good stuff that's lost.”

“Like?”

“Her spirit. Her daring. Her
energy.
She was on the go all day, every day. I don't know where she'd have been today—maybe in another part of the country or the world, or maybe in Lake Henry in spite of it all—but she was fun. She was also difficult. And defiant. And foolish, and a lot of that's really hard to think about. But my situation's different from yours. For me, the past is done. Everyone knows I was born and raised here. No one's coming after me with handcuffs. Besides, if something happened to me, no one would be the worse for it. I don't have a Micah, and I don't have a Missy or a Star. They
need
you.”

With a tiny tremor, Heather sat straighter. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she sat back.

“So maybe it comes down to punishment,” Poppy suggested. “Something happened in your life, something so bad you can't talk about it. You could have married Micah and had more kids, only you didn't. Were you punishing yourself for whatever it was that happened before?”

For a minute, there were only low murmurs from the rest of the room. Then Heather asked, “Don't you do that?”

“Punish myself? How?”

“By limiting what you do.”

“I do what I want. I accept what I can't do.”

“But do you ever want to chance it? To take that little risk?”

“Like how?”

Heather gave her a you-know-how look. “Like with a man. Aren't you curious?”

“About what?” Poppy asked, whispering again. “Sex? I had it. I had plenty of it before the accident.”

“That was then.”

“I have a full life. I'm not looking for more.” To make her point, she said, “Take Griffin. He's back in town.”

Heather's eyes went wide. “He is? When did he come?” As quickly as excitement had flared, it died. “Oh. He wants to write about me.”

“No. He says he just wants to help. He has contacts that none of us have.” Poppy nearly told her about the pictures of Lisa, but something held her back. “And there are other kinds of help. He's at my house right now answering the phones, so that I can be here. But do I want to go to dinner with him? No. I'm home with the phones tonight, and having dinner with Lily and John tomorrow, then Tuesday night you all are over.” Of course, Heather wouldn't be over this week. She might not be over this month. In fact, her absence could drag on longer, much longer.

“I love our group,” Heather wailed softly.

“Then help us. Help us help you.”

She looked torn. Tentatively, she asked, “Where are Griffin's contacts?”

Poppy felt a glimmer of hope. “All over. He has a network. If there's someone you need to find, or documents, or relatives—he's good at this.”

“There'd be a price. There's always a price.”

“He's rich. He doesn't need money.” She couldn't quite get herself to tell Heather that Griffin's brother was the one who had tracked her down, which would ensure his doing everything for nothing. But the time seemed right for the other. “He has pictures. Pictures of Lisa. Looking at them is the most amazing thing. You can understand why someone made this mistake.”

Heather sat very still. Her eyes had gone wide; they held Poppy's without blinking. Then, without taking a breath, she opened her mouth and, soundlessly, formed three words. Before Poppy could react, before she could even wonder if she'd read those words right, Heather was up out of the chair, across the room, and out the door.

He enjoyed the other calls, too. Now that he was playing backup for Poppy Blake, people didn't shun him—or, in this instance, hang up on him. They asked where Poppy was and when she would be back. They asked who
he
was and knew precisely, once he gave his name. They asked why he had come, how long he was staying, and whether he was dating Poppy, and he answered in good humor, because the questions weren't one-sided. From the postmaster, Nathaniel Roy, who called to say that Poppy hadn't picked up her mail since Tuesday, he learned that she regularly read
Newsweek, People,
and the Patagonia catalog, which was no surprise, and
Martha Stewart Living,
which was. From the masseuse, he learned that she had a full-body massage every week, usually on Monday afternoons, though she wanted to change it this week, and if Griffin was interested, the menu included not only Swedish massage, but reflexology, hydromassage, and conditioning body scrubs. He learned that the logs in Poppy's woodbin were replenished every week by the same man who plowed her road, that she had played the trumpet in junior high to the chagrin of her mother, who thought the trumpet was boyish and encouraged her to play the flute, and that every summer, she completed the cross-lake swim that was a Fourth of July tradition in town.

He also learned that she hadn't dated anyone special since Perry Walker. Two people told him that, and if they wouldn't talk about Perry, that was fine. Griffin had already learned a bit about him, though none of it from Poppy.

Between calls, he plugged in his computer and logged on to the Web. He checked his e-mail and found nothing urgent, so he went right on to his search for his sister. It was something he did often, a pastime of sorts, a puzzle that he simply kept at, over and over again. Though separated by seven years, Cindy and he were the two youngest of the siblings. A bond between them stemmed from that. Griffin hadn't been any more able to keep her from leaving home than the others had, but he felt her loss more keenly—and he was the only one to whom she sent notes. They came few and far between, forwarded to him by his publisher du jour, and there was never a return address. What there was—always—was a New York postmark with a zip code that fell within a digit of the family brownstone.

That was deliberate, Griffin knew. He didn't believe for a minute that she was in New York, but guessed that she had friends who visited there and mailed her notes. Since tracing her from these was impossible, he had to settle for the solace of what she said—that she was alive and well and drug-free.

He had a theory. She was a talented poet—a
disturbed
poet, some said, but Griffin had always felt too much loyalty to say that. If she was clean and thinking clearly, she would sell her work when she needed money.

The crime, of course, was that she did have a trust fund. She could have access to it—could have all the money she wanted—if she told the family of her whereabouts. The fact that she should have to scrounge for money ate at Griffin.

That said, she wasn't without means. She would write. Poems, short stories, whatever. He was convinced of it.

So while Ralph Haskins followed more conventionally clever PI channels, Griffin regularly searched the archives of three dozen magazines that printed the kinds of pieces he knew she could write. He searched the names of contributors and plugged in some of his own. He didn't try Cynthia Hughes; she wouldn't use that, because Ralph would pick it up.
Nor would she use any variation of James, the brother who had given her drugs. Rather, Griffin typed in other appropriate possibilities. Most had to do with their mother, Rebecca, with whom Cindy had always had a love-hate relationship.

So there was Rebecca Hughes, and Rebecca Russell, their mother's maiden name. Elizabeth Russell was their maternal grandmother, and Elizabeth Casey, her maiden name. Griffin always tried Hugh Piper, taken from their father's name, and combinations of their brother's names, like Randi Griffin and Alexa Peters. On a given day, if he had time, he would try a bunch of others that might evoke a childhood memory.

This day he didn't have that time, so he simply ran the usual names, got the usual “no matches,” and logged off. Then he spread his working papers over the desk and put in a call to Prentiss Hayden. He had been prepared to talk as if he was heavily into the bio. Prentiss nixed that, though, by launching into a spirited, “My telephone says this call is from New Hampshire. I should have figured it out sooner. You're up there, aren't you?”

“Sure am,” Griffin said nonchalantly. “Quiet places are great for writing.”

“Hah. You're up there for the DiCenza case. Who's the article for this time?”

“There's no article. I just happen to know people here, and it is a good place to write.”

“While you snoop around,” the senator said, but he sounded more interested than annoyed. “Are you learning anything interesting? There's lots of talk down here. Give me something to share, so I'll sound like I still have an iron or two in the fire.”

“I don't have much to share. We're waiting this out, just like the rest of the country.”

“Everybody's speculating here, and not about nice things. It's all ridiculous, of course, idle minds that have nothing better to do. As long as you're not wasting your time on it. Did you get the information you needed from my army buddies?”

“I did.” Griffin had told him that several weeks before. “I've incorporated
it into the body of the chaper on the war. I'm still worried about the other issue, though.”

“What's it like up there?” Prentiss asked deliberately. “Pretty town?”

“You bet.” Another call lit up the board. “I'm going to have to run, Senator. I'll get back to you, okay?”

He took the next call. It was a local one and easily dispatched. When it was done, he returned the Hayden papers to his briefcase, not at all disappointed to put it off for another day.

What did disappoint him was Victoria. She wouldn't sit on his lap. He whistled softly. He promised her treats. He made kissing sounds. He patted his thighs. He lifted her once and actually set her there, but she bounded back down and sashayed to the sofa with her tail in the air. She walked carefully around it, still mapping her space, he guessed. Once she jumped onto the cushions, the top third of that tail was the only thing he could see from the desk. It moved down the sofa. In time, it stopped, twitched, lowered. When he dared peek over the sofa back, she was curled in a ball in the corner directly opposite the fire. It was Poppy's spot, to judge from the chenille blanket on which Victoria so contentedly lay.

Poppy's spot. Poppy's cat. Griffin had lost out on that one.

Satisfied in an odd kind of way, he gave the phone bank several minutes to blink. When the buttons remained dark, he adjusted the headset for comfort and used one of Poppy's lines to make a credit card call of his own. Ralph Haskins answered after a single ring.

“Bad time?” Griffin asked.

“Nah,” Ralph said. “I'm doin' surveillance. But I don't have much to tell you, or I'd have called you myself. I'm running into stone walls.”

“As in stonewalling?”

“You got it, Red. I don't know whether the senator's people made a recent round or whether the directive is still in effect from fifteen years ago, but I'm talking to people who knew Rob and knew Lisa, and they won't say a thing. They claim that they don't remember, or that it was too dark to see, or that they were way on the other side of the party on the night Rob died, which was pretty much what they told the police at the time.”

“But I thought there were witnesses saying Lisa threatened Rob.”

“There were. I've tracked down three of those, and they all have similar stories. They didn't hear words. They saw anger and pushing.”

“By Lisa?”

“That's what they say.”

Griffin was dismayed. “If no one heard words, how could they say she was trying to extort him?”

“It's the family who claims that. They say there were phone calls to Rob in the days before she ran him down.”

“That's hearsay.”

“Nope. The family claims Rob told them directly, or so the record reads. The family won't answer my calls. I did find another ER appearance. It was in a clinic near Stockton. She used an assumed name and paid in cash, but after the murder, the staff was sure Lisa and that girl were one and the same.”

“What name did she use?” Griffin asked, figuring it would be too much to ask that Lisa had used the name Heather Malone.

“Mary Hendricks,” said Ralph.

“M. H., rather than H. M. Is that a coincidence?”

“I don't know. Could be. Lisa and Mary have the exact same blood type, type A. The Feds say Heather does, too, but they're not making much of that. Forty percent of Americans have type A blood.”

“So what made her go to the clinic near Stockton?”

“A pair of broken ribs.”

Griffin swore softly. “Do we know Rob did it?”

“She wasn't seeing anyone else. So when I mentioned this second ER visit to one of the DiCenza people, I was told that Lisa was a troubled young woman who was a pathological liar with a history of self-inflicted wounds.”

“That could be true,” Griffin thought aloud. “Or it could be that Lisa had a legitimate reason to fear for her life. I wish I knew her side of the story.”

“So do the Feds, which brings me to another piece of news. Someone on the local FBI team played college football with Rob. He didn't have much good to say about the guy. So, okay. Maybe he has an ax to grind. Maybe he resented the DiCenza privilege and power. But he flat-out said
Rob was rough on girls. He said he'd witnessed one ugly incident where the girl might have been hurt if a group of them from the team hadn't pulled Rob off.”

“Do his higher-ups in the FBI know about this?”

“Yes. They told him to keep his mouth shut.”

“To forget it?”

“No. Just to wait. That could be the same thing.”

“I'm surprised he told you.”

Ralph's voice held a smile. “Yeah, well, he's second-generation FBI, and I helped his old man once. You know how it is, Red. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.”

And since Griffin's family had scratched Ralph Haskins' back to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, Griffin felt comfortable asking, “What about the other? Anything there?”

Ralph's tone went from smug to humble. “Nothing. She's smart as a whip. Always was. I remember when I was over at the house and she used to sit there hanging on my every word. I'd think of
Moonlighting
or
Remington Steele,
and I'd picture her growing up to do something like that. I figured neither of those women had anything over our Cindy.” He made a self-deprecating sound. “She's a clever one. Right from the start, she covered her tracks. Becoming invisible isn't rocket science. A little ingenuity, and it's done. I wouldn't put it past her to be watching me doing the looking all this time.”

Griffin thought of Heather Malone, with her lovely life in a bucolic town and no past to speak of. He imagined Cindy living like that somewhere. “So how do we find her?” he asked. His own little searches were coming up empty.