Poppy Done to Death

Chapter Six

I was fit company for neither man nor beast.

It was already late afternoon, and I suggested to Bryan that we wait until the next morning to find the gas station that had issued the receipt. That way, I pointed out, probably the same attendant would be on duty-if you could talk about attendants being on duty at gas stations anymore, which was doubtful. I could tell that for about a half cent, Bryan would take the receipt and ask the questions all by himself. I tried to impress on him how dimly I would view such behavior.

I drove Bryan back to his office, then stopped by my mother’s to check on the well-being of my extended family. Melinda and Avery were at their house, and Poppy’s baby was with them, just as Melinda had predicted. John David was sitting in a morose heap in Mother’s den. Across from him was Arthur Smith.

What was he doing? Obviously, he was still on the case, which I found incomprehensible. Granted, Lawrenceton is a smallish town, and the police force is probably pretty stretched, especially considering murders are not the norm in our town. But you would think, even in Lawrenceton, the chief of police would remove the deceased’s former lover from the list of investigating officers in a homicide case. No one had whispered in his ear yet, I presumed.

“Can you think of any reason someone might have broken into your home?” Arthur was asking. “Do you know of any particular hiding place your wife used, for important papers or-?” This was certainly a quick response to Bryan’s phone call.

“No,” John David interrupted. “No, Poppy had nothing to hide.”

My mother was standing at the kitchen counter, reading the heating instructions on the casserole Teresa had brought by that afternoon. I knew the writing at a glance. When John David made his amazing statement, my mother’s eyebrows flew up, expressing exactly the same incredulity as mine did. If John David believed what he was saying, he was a fool. If he believed he was fooling anyone else about Poppy’s true character, he was also a fool.

I drifted around the counter so I could stand across from my mother. She was, as always, perfectly groomed, but she looked weary and worried.

“The bad thing is,” she said in a low conversational tone, “that Poppy was a lot of good things, too, but no one’s thinking about that.”

“It does seem as though the, ah, negative side of her character is probably what got her killed,” I said. “But I agree, Poppy had a lot that was good in her. She was intelligent, she was entertaining, she loved Chase-oh, did she love that baby-and she was willing to work hard on projects she believed in.” There were a lot of people with better reputations than Poppy’s, but it would be hard to think of so much good to say about them, I realized.

“Have you had a falling-out with Robin?” Mother asked. The question was so abrupt and so out of character for her that I hesitated before answering.

“Yes,” I said. “He didn’t call me to tell me he’d gotten back early from his book tour, and he was flirting with Janie Spell-man.”

“Flirting,” my mother said, her voice blank.

“Yes,” I replied, feeling my cheeks redden. “Practically holding hands.”

“In the library?”

“Yes, in the library!”

“Where nothing could possibly happen, under the eyes of a dozen people.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Maybe Janie wanted to flirt a little. You’re not the only woman in the world who finds Robin attractive, Roe. Maybe Robin felt like flirting back, just a little. Did he ask her out? Did he kiss her? Did he tell you he didn’t want to see you any more?”

“No.”

“Did you give him a chance to talk to you about it?”

“No.”

“Have I miscounted the days, or did he not cut short his tour to get back to you early?”

“Yes.” I felt embarrassment creep up my cheeks in a red tide.

“Um, um, um.” My mother shook her head. “That evil, evil man. He’s been mistreating you so badly, I may have to slap him.”

“Okay, you made your point.”

“I’d have thought you would know the difference, after that one.” Mother nodded toward the den. She meant Arthur, not John David. Mother would never forgive Arthur for humiliating me so publicly. He could save ten kids from drowning and foil a dozen bank robberies, and she’d still loathe him. It was kind of nice, having someone that firmly on your side, no matter how mistaken she might be.

After I’d spoken to John and patted his hand and seen for myself that he was better today than yesterday, I left without speaking to John David or Arthur, who were still deep in conversation.

On the short drive home, I thought about what Poppy might have hidden. If it could have been in a shoe box, obviously it was something small. Would Poppy have blackmailed anyone? I thought not, even as disillusioned as I was about her proclivities. But something she had had in her keeping had scared the hell out of someone. Perhaps the searcher had found the item in the upstairs bedroom, perhaps not.

So, we had a mysterious gas station receipt, a murdered woman, a philandering lawyer, a philandering husband, a past lover or three, a searcher, and a detective who shouldn’t be on the case at all.

I wasn’t surprised at all to walk into my house and find my brother and Robin waiting for me. They turned almost-accusing eyes to watch me come into the room. They’d been watching football. What a surprise.

“Hello,” I said, keeping my voice cool. “How long have you been back, Phillip?”

“About thirty minutes. Robin was waiting for you.”

“Out in the driveway?”

“Yes.” Phillip had clearly switched his allegiance, based on his thirty minutes of renewed acquaintance with Robin. “In the cold.”

“Was I expecting you, Robin?” I sure didn’t remember inviting him over. I made an effort to draw my righteous indignation back around me. Robin had a key, but I suppose he hadn’t felt welcome to use it.

“Um, no. I was just hoping I could talk to you. I missed you.”

“Let’s go in the office. Phillip, did you eat? Do you need anything?”

“Josh and his sister took me to a Pizza Hut,” he said. “I’m stuffed. Robin, the Broncos are ahead by seven!”

“I’ll be back,” Robin assured him. He glanced sideways at me and added, “I think.”

We trailed down the little hall to the office, a wonderful room lined with bookshelves. Robin had been working over here quite a bit, since he had a neighbor working the four-to-midnight shift at Pan-Am Agra, and this neighbor got up at nine o’clock expressly to tune his truck.

And before I’d even moved into the house, right here on the rug, Robin and I had… I blocked the thought.

We sat in the two wing-backed chairs after Robin had pulled his around to face mine.

“Tell me what all this is about,” he said. He didn’t look angry, or guilty. He looked determined.

I was too grown-up to keep hugging my grievance.

“Robin, I’ve been up to here”-I made a gesture across my throat-“with the infidelity of Poppy and John David. I hate cheating anyway, and the last two days have just been full of it. So when I saw Janie flirting with you, and you flirting back, I just got… very angry.” It still troubled me to think of the wave of unreasoning anger that had swamped me. When I stood back and looked at it from a distance, that huge rage just seemed… odd.

“Janie is a cute girl. But she’s a girl, and she’s ready to flirt with anyone. Being rude to Janie would be like being mean to a fuzzy puppy.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“All right, I flirted back.”

I raised the other eyebrow.

“You’re a woman,” Robin said firmly. “Jane’s a girl. I’m way too old for Janie. I wouldn’t know what to do with her even if I was interested.”

I had nothing left to raise, so I tried a skeptical sneer.

“Okay, I flirted back a lot.” Robin looked down at his big hands. “When I go on tour, my ego inflates, and I was nominated for the Anthony, and I was thinking big thoughts about myself.”

I waited.

“But now I’m regrounded.” He looked up at me directly.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“So what you’re saying is…”

“I’m supposed to make a mission statement?”

“It would help.”

“I’m not planning on seeing anyone else.”

“Bryan Pascoe asked me out,” I said, though actually Bryan had actually just indicated that sometime in the future he wanted to ask me out. However, I couldn’t think of a way to turn that into a concrete statement.

“Are you going to go?” Robin’s face was all shut down. “I don’t know Bryan Pascoe. He might be the guy for you.”

I thought about that. “He’d be more in the category of a fixer-upper,” I said. “I think it might be safer to say that I only want to date you right now.”

Robin seemed bigger suddenly, as if he’d been holding himself in a smaller space than he normally occupied.

“I like your brother,” he said. “He seems like a pretty independent young man.”

“He’s definitely feeling his new manliness,” I said. I lowered my voice and told Robin about the two girls Phillip had hitched a ride with on the last leg of his journey, and the condoms I’d found in his wallet.

“Better he have them and use them than not have them and need them,” Robin said wisely. “Maybe he was just carrying them because he wanted to need them.”

I worked that through. It was an interesting idea. “What I’m hoping is that he didn’t buy them after the fact,” I admitted. “I mean, maybe he had sex and enjoyed it and then thought, Gee, if I’m going to have some more, I better be prepared.”

“I’ll try to find out, in a very manly way,” Robin said. “If you have to work tomorrow, I’ll take Phillip out to eat or over to my apartment or something.”

“Sounds good. I don’t have to work, but I’m supposed to go to a gas station tomorrow with Bryan Pascoe.”

“An original first date,” Robin said.

“Not a date. A clue.” I told Robin about the receipt I’d found on the floor, and then I told him about what had happened to the upstairs of John David and Poppy’s house.

“That’s mysterious,” Robin said. “The house wasn’t broken into?”

“No, and that makes it even stranger. I unlocked the front door for the Scene Clean guy myself. The sliding glass door uses the same key. It was locked, too, or at least I guess it was. Zachary Lee just had to turn the latch inside and open it while he was cleaning. I never thought to check to see if it was locked to begin with. I never asked him, after he showed us the state of the upstairs.”

“So the patio door may have been unlocked all along.”

“Well, it might have been left unlocked by whoever rifled through the upstairs. I’m sure the police wouldn’t have left the back door unlocked. If I were breaking in, I’d pick the back door. You wouldn’t even have to show your face on Swanson Lane. You could creep through the Emblers’ backyard, and Cara is on the phone in her home office half the time. You’d have to check to make sure she wasn’t using the pool. Her husband’s hardly ever home. You’d just have to make sure the dogs were shut up in the house.

“Or, if you didn’t mind a higher risk of being seen, you could cross Poppy’s front yard and enter the back by the patio gate to the side of the house. The point is, once you’re in the backyard, the privacy fence is so high, you’re practically invisible.”

“Didn’t you say Dr. Embler had spent time with Poppy?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“But not recently.”

“You’re saying that passions would have had time to cool?”

“I would think so. I mean, even if Cara had discovered her husband’s little fling with Poppy, she had to know by now that it meant nothing, in terms of consequences in her own life.”

I felt that we’d left my brother by himself long enough, so we moved back to the family room, to find him asleep on the couch, with the game still blaring.

I managed to wake Phillip up enough to send him to his own room. He stumbled off, mumbling that he’d see me in the morning. Robin and I were left looking at each other.

“Would you like to stay the night?” I asked, just as Robin said, “So, can I stay awhile?”

We laughed a little, but then he put his arms around me, and it wasn’t time for laughing anymore.