Pushing Up Daisies

CHAPTER 35

The party broke up shortly after Margery hit the deck and Richard whisked her away. The absence of our hosts gave us all license to leave and begin the business of serious gossiping in the privacy of our homes.

Lucy and I took our postmortem to the Paradise Diner. Jon Chappell had disappeared into the crowd when Margery fainted, and it was a good thing. I was ready to tear him a new one.

“Leave it to you to stare at a guy’s pockmarks. What the hell was he doing snooping around my house and scaring Anna half to death?”

“This is the world in which we live. I bet he poked through your garbage, too.”

Lucy was eyeing that morning’s scones. “You don’t want to eat those,” I said under my breath. With that glowing recommendation, she got up, put two on a plate as if she worked there, and came back to the booth. Pete, the cook, was in love.

“Well, the air was certainly humming. And we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the Anna incident. What an asshole.”

“Y Seсor Felix?”

“Nothing. Still in Mexico, I guess. I’ll give him one more day before he goes on the DNR list-do not resuscitate. For all I know, that entire playboy story was something he lifted from a Mexican soap opera. I thought he’d at least come back for Hugo’s sake.”

“Too bad. I had high hopes there.”

“For…?”

“Why not? He’s handsome and possibly rich. And you didn’t seem to want him. Stranger things have happened.”

“Which leads me to Margery Stapley,” I said, dropping the subject of Felix.

“What do you think really knocked the old girl off her feet?” Lucy said, working on her second scone. “I wonder if they got that on video. It could be, like, Wedding Bloopers, only Senior Bloopers.”

“I bet it had something to do with the older guy that came in just as O’Malley was leaving. The one in the denim shirt and tweed jacket. He had a familiar face. Did you notice him?”

“Just barely. Who’d you think it was?”

“This is probably crazy, but I thought it might be William Peacock, Dorothy’s long- lost brother,” I answered. “I’ve been looking at so many old pictures of Dorothy, I thought I saw a resemblance.”

The swinging doors from the restrooms flapped against each other, and I felt someone standing over my shoulder.

“That’s a damn good guess,” Gerald Fraser said, sliding into the booth next to Lucy. “That was William. He was a teenager when he left. No one knew why.”

“You think William found out that the woman he thought was his sister was really his sister’s lover?” I asked.

“It’d be hard to keep it from him, once he got to that age. At the time, people thought he was just looking for adventure-too young to have been in the war, too old to stay home with his spinster sisters.”

“And he never came back?”

“I couldn’t say. Hillary recognized him right away, though, from all the pictures the sisters had.”

He glanced quickly out the front door, and only then did I notice Hillary sitting in her Lexus.

“I’m gonna try to see him in the next couple of days. Care to join me when I do?” Gerald asked.

“Say when.”

Gerald said good night and took off.

Lucy licked her index finger, picking up the last few crumbs from the plate. “At least someone’s getting lucky to night.”