Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (15 page)

“What were you going to say to her if she’d come to the door?” I asked out of sheer curiosity.

“I was going to remind her that since, at Bubba’s request, I quit my job after we got married, he is the boys’ and my sole support. I was going to point out to her that there are better fish in the sea than Bubba.”

Melinda and I exchanged glances. “What do you mean?” Melinda asked. Lizanne was measuring sugar into water to make cranberry sauce.

“Poppy was more serious about Bubba than she was about the other men,” Lizanne said after a long pause. “I don’t think she wanted to divorce John David and marry Bubba, but I don’t think she’d completely dismissed the idea, either. But she might have just been stringing him along. I don’t understand people like that.” Lizanne turned to us, a half-cup measure in her hand. Her face was white and disturbed. “She just didn’t seem to care whom she hurt. She would have what she wanted, and everyone else could just go to hell.”

Had Poppy really been that careless, that conscienceless? I had never crossed Poppy. I had never had anything she wanted. Melinda, I noticed, did not look shocked at all.

I was dismayed and a little mortified by my lack of acuity.

“So you just pulled up to the house ...” I said, hoping to prod her into a more complete account of her actions.

Lizanne poured a whole bag of cranberries into the pot. She was going to have a lot of sauce, and lot of dressing, too. I wondered how much company she was having. It reminded me that I needed to get home and start working in my own kitchen.

Lizanne, having given the berries a stir, turned back to face us. “You all want a drink of something?” she asked politely.

“No thanks,” we said in chorus. She laughed, and we all relaxed a little.

“I pulled up to the house, and the boys were in their car seats in the back of the minivan,” she said. “I knew Bubba was going to be giving a speech that day, out of town, so there wouldn’t be any danger of him driving by and seeing me. John David would be at work. I figured it would be a good time to talk to Poppy. I just wanted to let her know that I knew all about. . . them, and that I wasn’t going to divorce Bubba without as much stink as I could raise.” Lizanne said this with absolute sincerity. “I know Bubba thinks I’m dumb, and I am about some things.” And you could tell she didn’t care. “But I know how it’d look in the papers. Mother of twins, orphan of murdered parents, abandoned by her lawyer husband for another woman. And you know what else?”

A little stunned, Melinda and I shook our heads.

“The second I learned about this affair, I started taking the kids to church every single Sunday. I wasn’t so consistent before, but I haven’t missed a sermon in five months.

Wednesday nights, too. And Bubba hasn’t gone with me twice, I bet.”

Lizanne was going to use God as a character witness.

“
And
I go to the same Sunday school class as Terry Mc-Cloud.” Terry was another attorney in Lawrenceton. He was my mother’s lawyer, so he would be conservatively excellent. “I speak to Terry every Sunday. I make a point of it.”

By this time, I was gaping at the woman I’d thought I’d known. I didn’t know if I admired her or if I was horrified. I didn’t dare look over at Melinda.

“But I don’t really want to get a divorce,” Lizanne explained, never stopping her little tasks around the stove and sink. “I get along okay with Bubba, and we have everything we need. I’d have to go back to work if we got divorced, and I like being home with the boys.” She beamed over at Brandon, who smiled back. He seemed to have inherited his mother’s placid nature. “So I went to see Poppy, to try to talk some sense into her. I knew Poppy was at home because her car was in the garage. But she never came to the door.” Lizanne blew on a spoonful of cranberry sauce, then held it away to examine the color and consistency. “After a minute, I went over to the fence, thinking I’d go through the gate and knock on the sliding glass door on the patio.”

“And did you go into the backyard?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the kitchen chair.

“Oh, no,” Lizanne said, her voice once more serene. “There was already someone there, so I went back to the car.”

“There was someone there,” I repeated.

“Yes, I could hear them talking.”

“Them?” Melinda said in a croak.

“Yes, them. Poppy and someone else.”

“Who was it?” I felt as if the air in the kitchen were vibrating.

“Oh. I don’t know. The radio was on, so I couldn’t hear very well, but I could hear two voices, and the louder one was Poppy’s.”

“What did you do?”

“I went back and sat in the car. After about ten minutes, I went and knocked on the door again. But she still didn’t come. So after a little bit longer, I threw the straps out of the van and drove away.” Lizanne turned back to the stove and stirred.

“You heard her killer,” Melinda said.

“What?”

“You heard the voice of the person who killed Poppy,” I said.

“Oh, that’s . . .” On the verge of saying “ridiculous,” Lizanne stopped speaking, stopped moving. Her lips lost their color.

“I could have saved her,” Lizanne said finally. “I could have saved her life, and instead I went back to the van and sat.”

“Or,” I said, not liking the way her color had changed, “you could have gotten killed right along with her, and your children would have been left out in the van all by their lonesome selves.”

Lizanne sat down across the table from us. She looked positively punchy with shock.

“Oh,” she said, and that was all, but it spoke volumes.

I’d been sure that Lizanne wasn’t as hard-hearted as she’d been letting on, and I was right.

But she’d felt better when she’d acted tough.

“Could you make out who it was?” I asked after a pause to let Lizanne gather herself.

“No, I was so wrought up, and the radio was playing, and I was so angry . . .”

“Could you tell if the voice was a man’s or a woman’s?”

Lizanne’s large dark eyes focused on me. “Surely it must have been a man’s?”

“Look at how angry
you
were,” I said. “Do you think you were the only angry woman?”

“No, I reckon not,” she said. “I assumed at the time it was a man’s voice. Poppy’s radio was on so loud—she was listening to NPR, like my daddy used to. Remember, Roe?”

Truthfully, I didn’t remember what radio station Lizanne’s dad had listened to, though I remembered Arnie with great fondness. But I nodded anyway.

“So, I guess I’ll have to go to the police,” she said after a moment. “I mean, if I really did hear . . .”

“You ought to,” Melinda said, trying to make her voice gentle. Davis squawked, and Lizanne got up and handed him the pacifier that had fallen from his mouth. He resumed sucking and fell back to sleep. Brandon watched us as if we were performing in a soap opera. To my eyes, both children looked like little Bubbas. If Lizanne did divorce Cartland Sewell, his face was still going to be right in front of her for the next sixteen-plus years.

“I guess I wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they didn’t already know,” Lizanne said. I thought she was backing out of going to the police, but finally I decided she was thinking of having to tell the police that her husband was cheating on her. “The way things spread in a small town. Why did Bubba think he was fooling anyone?”

There were probably people in Lawrenceton who hadn’t known that Cartland Sewell and Poppy Queensland had been having an affair (me, for example). But while I told myself that I enjoyed juicy gossip as much as the next person, this wasn’t entirely true. Illnesses, inheritances, land transactions, job promotions—I was interested in all these bits of information. But sexual misdeeds, no, I didn’t want to hear about them. I only knew the cast of John David’s couch because Melinda had told me one afternoon when we were driving to Atlanta to shop, and I couldn’t get away.

“Do you want Arthur to come here?” I asked, trying to sound offhand.

“That would be good. I have a lot of cooking to do; plus, I don’t want to take the boys down to the police station,” Lizanne said. She brightened considerably. “Oh, do you think he would?”

“Yes, I bet so,” I said. Melinda handed me the phone, and I placed the call. Arthur didn’t sound very glad to hear from me, which I could understand. I explained as neutrally as I could.

As I expected, he was angry with me. “You knew all along that Lizanne had been there that day,” he said unequivocally. After all, that was the absolute truth.

“Well, we suspected.” I was trying to sound mild and intractable, but that’s hard to pull off. I just sounded stubborn.

“You’re lucky I don’t put you both in jail for obstructing an investigation.”

Melinda was leaning close enough to hear that, and she looked at me with alarm written large in her brown eyes. I shook my head. No way was Arthur going to do anything like that. “On the other hand,” I said, still trying for mild, “we happen to be over at Lizanne’s right now, and we happen to know she has some information for you.”

“Maybe I’ll just arrest her,” Arthur said. “She had plenty of reason to kill Poppy.”

“Well, if she loved her husband, that would be so. But that’s not the case,” I snapped. I had run out of mild. “Arthur Smith, you know a woman with two babies in her van is not going to go in and stab someone to death!”

“Still waters run deep,” Arthur said portentously.

“Still waters, my round rear end.” Now I was sounding like a real Uppity Woman. But as I thought twice, I looked at Lizanne’s placid and beautiful face, and read nothing there but polite interest in the outcome of my conference with the detective. Maybe Lizanne was deep water, and maybe she was only a shallow, still, pond. Either way, she was my friend.

“Are you coming?” I tried to sound more moderate.

He sighed, a deep and unhappy exhalation. “Yes, I am. But I’m going to pretend she called me herself, instead of you, and I want you and Melinda gone by the time I get there.”

“Okay,” I said unhappily. “Let’s try to make it a trade-off.” I didn’t want Lizanne to be alone for very long at all. She was having a tough time, and being alone might sap her good resolution to come clean.

“I’m bringing Trumble with me,” he said, and for a second I drew a blank. Then I remembered that was the name of the detective who’d interviewed me. “I’m leaving here in five minutes.”

So Melinda and I talked babies with Lizanne for the next ten minutes. That was easy for Melinda, but not for me. I’ve never had a baby, and I never will. The elderly OB-GYN I’d consulted in Atlanta had been pretty clear that the chances of me conceiving were infinitesimal.

I have a tilted womb (charming, huh?) and I don’t always produce eggs, which makes me feel like an inferior chicken.

I suppressed a familiar ache and listened with a smile to their swapped stories about teething, walking, crawling, and sleeping patterns. This is the small talk of women of a certain age, and not only was I getting past that age; I’d never learned the language.

I quit feeling sorry for myself when I passed Arthur and Cathy Trumble on the sidewalk to Lizanne’s front door, and reflected on how much I had to do between now and tomorrow. It was incredibly fortunate that I had to work only three hours today, and the library would be closed tomorrow and through the weekend for the Thanksgiving holiday.

When I pulled up to Melinda’s house, she persuaded me to come in for a minute and talk to John David. He didn’t want to go back to the house he’d shared with Poppy, cleaned or not, and he was taking very little care of his son. Melinda hadn’t spoken to him about it yet, but she was going to, she told me. “It’s not that I don’t care for the little guy; he’s cute as he can be,” she said, guilt written large on her face. “I just feel like I have enough to do.”

“Of course,” I agreed promptly, because to do less would have been insulting. I realized that no one had suggested that I should take Chase. And I realized that I was relieved. A couple of years before, I’d had the care of a baby, with absolutely no preparation or warning. Going into it cold was simply terrifying. “John David should be able to take care of his own son, especially if he hires a nanny,” I said cautiously.

“Avery could cope with the situation,” Melinda said. “He took as much care of Marcy as I did, when he was home . . . which wasn’t as much as I was, of course. And he was so excited when Charles was born!” Melinda’s face was transformed by a huge smile. “Avery’s a good dad,” she said, wrapping up a whole bundle of memories.

“I guess John David got a big bundle of charm but none of the moral fiber,” I said.

She considered. “I think he likes to do the right thing, as long as it’s not too much trouble.”

That summed up John David pretty accurately. But maybe we both would be proved wrong.

Melinda seemed relieved to get out at her own home, where she could follow her own normal round of activities. She’d deposited the children at Mother’s Day Out at the Methodist church so she could finalize the preparations for driving to her parents’ home for Thanksgiving, and she told me she was determined to go no matter what happened. “It’s been awful and tense the past few days,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that. “We don’t know when the funeral will be, because Poppy’s body hasn’t been released yet, and this is a good time to get away, at least for a day. The kids need some downtime.” I wasn’t sure who needed it more, but obviously Melinda was looking forward to seeing her family, and I wished her a happy day before leaving to put in my hours at the library.

It was absolutely dead at work. A few patrons dashed in to return books, and one or two checked out audiobooks for the long drives to holiday destinations. But no one was browsing, and precious few were even using the computers. I had no compunction at all about leaving a little early for my appointment with Bryan Pascoe.

Bryan drove a Cadillac, which surprised me. He was wearing a very nice suit, and he looked as though he’d gotten a haircut. When he held the car door open for me, I smelled his cologne.

It was something classic and masculine, like Old Spice—another surprise. I would have predicted a Mustang convertible, a Calvin Klein cologne, and bikini underwear. I couldn’t ask him about that, but I amused myself on our ride to the service station named on the receipt by trying to imagine a conversation in which that question would occur naturally.