Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (25 page)

“Yeah, he’s over at our place, too. He’s asking questions about baby care and what to do when. I feel like a big fat traitor, coming here to ask Aubrey if we should tell.”

“It seems to me this was your idea,” I said somewhat indignantly. I sure had better ways I could spend my morning, what was left of it.

“I know, I just... I guess I didn’t foresee how complicated this would be. Emotionally.”

“Well, we’re here now,” I said, acting ungracious and grumpy. I started down the sidewalk to the outside entrance to Aubrey’s office, which was at the back of the church.

Aubrey seemed maybe a little less than delighted to be seeing us on a Saturday morning, since Saturday and Monday were his days off. Well, tough. We had a major moral dilemma.

Realizing I was definitely in a truculent mood, I advised myself to put the brakes on.

Catch more flies with honey, I reminded myself, glancing around to make sure that reminder had been given mentally rather than out loud. Since Aubrey and Melinda were discussing the Altar Guild rotation, I was pretty sure I was in the clear.

“Aubrey,” I said rather sharply. “Melinda and I have run into a problem.”

We began to explain.

Thirty minutes later, Melinda and I were leaving Aubrey’s office, none the wiser. I had considered Aubrey pretty much unflappable, but I found I’d been wrong. Aubrey seemed to be as confounded as we were, and his parting words had been that he planned to pray about the problem and hope God would give him guidance. He had raised more questions than we already had. How could we be sure
either
of the samples had come from John David? (That one floored us.)

“This is extremely serious,” Aubrey said. “We should not do anything in a hurry. I tend to think you should turn this piece of paper over to the police. If Poppy was putting pressure on the father of her son, he might have reacted with violence. But let me think another day.”

Waiting for God to give us guidance seemed as good a course as any.

The only resolution I’d formed was that it would not be me who told John David what we’d discovered. No sir.

I dropped by to see my mom and John. They certainly seemed in better spirits now that the plans for the funeral were definite. Mother was just buzzed at the idea of finally having something to do, at some conclusion having been reached. True, Poppy’s murderer had not been named, but at least the family could go through the ritual of burying her. John, she said, had just returned from the funeral home, where he’d gone with John David to select a casket and make all the arrangements with the funeral director.

“I offered to go with them, and so did Avery,” Mother said. She was wearing a blouse and skirt featuring a lot of dark blue, and she looked as neat and elegant as always, but the sun coming through the window hit her squarely in the face and I noticed, as if for the first time, that my mother was getting an enlarged network of tiny wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She was still impressively attractive, and I was sure she always would be, but there was no denying that age had laid its hand on her.

“I was glad to go with my son,” said John very quietly. “John David was with me when I ordered his mother’s casket. Avery was too upset that day. Of course, I never thought I’d have to return the favor. Poppy was so young, so full of life.”

She had been. She had looked forward to every day of her existence, at least over the past few years. I was willing to bet on that.

No matter what her faults, she had been robbed. So had John David and Chase.

I said good-bye without telling Mother about my father’s phone message. I’d have to tell her sooner or later, but right now, until I knew what I was supposed to do with Phillip, I thought I’d just keep Dad’s marital problems to myself.

“I guess it would look bad if I went out to the club for round of golf,” John said longingly as I paused in the doorway. My mother patted his hand.

“I don’t think there would be anything wrong with that,” she said, and I wondered again at my mother’s late-in-life love affair. “You need to get out of the house, and the funeral is two days away. The exercise will do you good, if you bundle up.”

“You’re nagging,” John said fondly.

I smiled but tried to hide it. “I have to be going,” I said. “I left Phillip at home, busy doing a job for me.”

“I’ll talk to you soon,” Mother said automatically.

“I’m sure you will.” I smiled openly.

I was thinking of Madeleine on the way home. Though I felt temporarily wept out, I was grieving about the old orange cat. I had spent a lot of years with Madeleine, as many years as Jane Engle had had with her. I remembered how cute Madeleine’s kittens had been, and I wondered how many grandchildren she had. Probably great- and great-great grandchildren, come to think of it.

That reminded me of Cara’s call about Moosie. It wasn’t right that Poppy’s cat should be in the care of a neighbor, not when I could take the cat in until John David could get back on his feet. After all, I had a fenced-in backyard and cat food, though possibly my fence was low enough for Moosie to leap over, claws or not.

To get to Cara’s house, which faced onto the street parallel to Swanson, I had to drive past Poppy’s house once again. To my extreme irritation (I didn’t seem to be able to be moderate about anything these days), Arthur’s car was parked in front of the house.

This was tacky, to say the least. After all, the house had been released to John David, and he and Chase might arrive at any moment to resume living in it again. John David couldn’t stay in a motel forever, and now that the initial shock of Poppy’s death had passed, he might be ready to return to his very clean home.

I parked behind Arthur’s car in the driveway and marched up to the front door. I still had the key I’d borrowed from John David, and I opened the door and went in.

“Arthur!” I bellowed.

He appeared at the head of the stairs, looking considerably startled.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, surprising even myself.

“I’m the detective in charge of the investigation into the death of the home owner,” he said evenly. “I have a right to be here.”

“Now that you’ve given John David the green light to move back in? I don’t think so,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

“Are you jealous because I came to love Poppy rather than you?” Arthur asked as he came down the stairs. I remembered that yesterday I had wondered if I should be afraid of this man, and I’d had a friend with me then.

“No, I’m not jealous of Poppy, especially over your affections. I think Poppy loved life, but I think she lived it badly. I don’t think she ever appreciated what she had, or what she could do with it.”

Arthur stood right in front of me, looking down at me, and he was maybe a little puzzled.

“What could Poppy have wanted that she didn’t have?” he asked.

Smarter lovers, for one thing.

“Poppy could have wanted stability, but instead she created instability. She could have wanted to heal from the badness in her past, but instead she clung to the ... the emotional problems that caused her to live so... dangerously.” Maybe I sounded a tad pompous.

“She was wonderful,” Arthur said, unbelievingly. “She was smart, and she was funny, and she was pretty. Like you.”

“But unlike me, she liked to sneak,” I said bluntly. “Unlike me, she liked multiple partners.

This isn’t about how great I am in contrast to Poppy. This is about you letting go of a dream of Poppy, a Poppy who never really existed. You can’t afford to pin her down this tightly, Arthur.

Let her go, so you can look for who killed her.”

I wondered how much sleep Arthur had been getting. He was definitely on the smelly side, and he certainly needed a shave. That curly pale hair was dirty, and his shirt was rumpled.

“Was it you who searched the house after she died, Arthur? The one who searched her bedroom?”

“I think it was Bubba Sewell,” Arthur said. “He seemed awfully concerned with how long the house would be off-limits to the family. I don’t know what he was looking for.”

I did. “She didn’t take pictures of you?” I said, unwisely.

“Pictures? What the hell are you talking about?”

“When were you with her? It’s been almost two years, right?” I’d just had the worst idea in the world. I was wondering if you added Chase’s age, plus nine months . . .

“Less than that,” he said, and my heart sank. Arthur was a candidate for Chase’s father.

“Oh, well, doesn’t make any difference,” I said bracingly. “What were you actually doing here today, Arthur? Were you just mooning around, or were you working on the investigation?”

Poppy must have had a higher regard for Arthur than for the others, but I wasn’t up to explaining to Arthur why that was so.

“A little of both,” Arthur said. His voice was mild, which was a relief. “I’ve been talking to Sandy Wynn. She called Poppy that day, said she was coming to talk to her. She admits she was here the morning Poppy was murdered.”

“Did she do it?”

“She says that when she got here, Poppy was already dead.”

“Where did she park her car? Did anyone see her car?”

“The woman across the street. Almost everyone on this street goes to work in the morning, but this woman, the one who also described the Sewells’ van, incidentally, was home with the runs that morning. In between trips to the bathroom, she sat in her living room and watched television, with the front curtains open. She didn’t get a good look at Lizanne, but a better one at Sandy. She picked her picture out of a photo array. Sandy parked down the street, in the driveway of a house for sale, and walked up to Poppy’s.”

“Why would she do that if she didn’t plan on doing something bad?”

“She planned on talking Poppy into giving her something, something that belonged to Marvin Wynn. Of course, thanks to you and Melinda, we know what that thing is—the letter. Sandy broke down when I showed it to her. She said Poppy forced Marvin to write that letter by threatening to tell John David and the rest of the world what Marvin had done when Poppy was a teenager. Poppy swore that if Marvin would write such a letter, she’d never tell. He did what she demanded, but as time went on, Marvin regretted it more and more. He began to lose sleep, and slide into depression. Sandy got scared for him.”

“Why would Poppy do such a thing, stay silent? Why wouldn’t she tell? Why make any bargain? He was in the wrong, and she was so young.”

“Her word against his. No evidence. Poppy was in her thirties, way beyond her teens. Nothing would have come of it.”

“Nothing but the ruin of his reputation,” I pointed out. “No matter if it came to court or not, Poppy would have ruined him forever. Plenty of people would have believed her.”

“But it would have ruined her, too, in the process. At the very least, it would have made her life, and John David’s and the baby’s, very painful for a few months.”

I mulled that over. “So this way, with her demanding he write the letter, he could believe she’d never tell, and she could believe he’d never make passes at young girls again?”

“I guess that was Poppy’s thinking.”

“Do you believe Sandy? Do you believe she didn’t kill Poppy?”

“Yes. She was too stricken to think about stepping over Poppy’s body to search for the letter that morning. I believed her when she said it just didn’t occur to her. She did her best to get the letter back once Poppy was dead, but I don’t believe she killed Poppy for it. I think she did walk to the gate in the front of the fence when Poppy wouldn’t come to the door, which Sandy says was then locked.”

But it hadn’t been locked when I tried it. I was getting more and more confused.

“So she walked over to the fence at the side of the house, came in the gate, and walked around to the sliding glass doors,” I said. “And there she saw Poppy’s body?”

“Yes. She says she cried for a while, then left the way she’d come, and drove back home. By the time she got there, she was hearing from us here that Poppy was dead. She and Marvin packed up and returned to Lawrenceton. She never told Marvin where she’d been.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, trying not to get sidetracked by my rush of disgust at having put them up in my house. “So, Sandy leaves, the front door is locked, and she doesn’t have the letter.

Then Lizanne comes?”

“No, Lizanne came first. She, too, knocked on the front door, got no answer, went to the fence and heard a quarrel, heard Poppy’s radio, decided she couldn’t ream Poppy out, not with someone else here. She threw something onto the ground.” Here Arthur gave me a very sharp look. “Something that later vanished. And then she left. Then Sandy walked up, left within five minutes. Then you and Melinda came, and you found the front door open.”

I had a sudden idea, and I walked down the little hall to the kitchen. It was in better shape than it had been when we arrived yesterday. Melinda and I hadn’t searched it, but we had straightened it and cleaned the counters and stovetop. Poppy’s little radio still sat on the counter, though now it was dustless.

I pressed a button to turn it on, and when the music came on, I looked at Arthur expectantly.

“What?” he said. His voice sounded quite businesslike, brisk. He’s back to being himself, I thought.

“When Lizanne described her experience here that day, the day Poppy died, she said she’d walked to the fence.” I gestured to my left, which was where the gate in the fence was at the front. “She said the music was so loud, she couldn’t hear what the voices were saying, but she said the music was classical, that the radio was broadcasting NPR. This radio isn’t on a classical station. I checked it the other day. So if we assume that the person Poppy was talking to was the person who killed her, and Poppy therefore didn’t survive after that visit to change radio stations, then it wasn’t Poppy’s radio that was on.”

I walked around the breakfast bar and looked out the sliding glass door. Arthur came to stand beside me. We exchanged glances.

“It was Mrs. Embler’s radio,” he said.

“I’m guessing it was. What did she tell you about that morning?”

“Just that she swam as usual. Didn’t hear or see anything out of the ordinary. Not too surprising, considering the fact that she was wearing a swimming cap and the radio was on, and there’s a privacy fence in between the houses.”