Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (11 page)

I noticed that Janie was staying away from me, which made me happy. I figured she wasn’t as oblivious as she seemed. Perry came in to begin his work hours, and he gave me a pat on the shoulder.

“Sorry about Poppy,” he said. Perry had had a troubled life, but he seemed to have found his foothold now. To my surprise, I’d become his buddy, especially since his recent acknowledgment of his sexual orientation. I felt a little uncomfortable in the role, but I was so happy for Perry—and for his mother, Sally—when I watched his attitude grow more positive and cheerful, his demeanor more confident, I became resigned to assuming it.

“Had a great date last night,” he said casually but very quietly.

“Local?”

“Yes,” he said. “We went to the movies.”

We talked about the film they’d seen, without Perry telling me his date’s name. That was the norm in our conversations.

About fifteen minutes later, Perry’s mom showed up. My friend Sally, who had always been incredibly put together, was beginning to look older. Although her hair color had once been easy to accept as natural, now that seemed increasingly unlikely. I didn’t think she’d gained weight, but what she had was redistributing. She’d saved up for a face-lift, much to my surprise, but I had to wonder if she’d been to the right doctor. Her face looked smooth all right.

But somehow, her skin didn’t look like real skin.

Well, bless her heart. Sally had had a hard life, and she was doing her best.

“Son,” she said coldly, looking at Perry.

“Hey, Mom,” he said.

Uh-oh, trouble in paradise.

Sally asked me if I was ready to go to lunch. It was about 11:15, early for lunch.

“I didn’t know we had a date,” I said. “I called you to ask you out for your birthday, but we didn’t ever get to set a date and time.” Sally stared at me blankly. I became flustered. “Did I just forget? I can’t believe it! I don’t think I’ve ever just out-and-out forgotten a lunch date before.” I rummaged around in my memory, trying to dredge up any conversation I’d had recently with Sally.

“Didn’t we set up lunch for today when we talked yesterday?” Sally looked as surprised as I was.

“Sally, we didn’t talk yesterday.” I was sure of that. “I called you at work. You weren’t at your desk. I left a voice-mail message.”

“Of course we talked,” Sally said. She looked more upset than the situation warranted. “I called you here, and you told me we would go to lunch on Tuesday, that you had something you wanted to tell me.”

“Sally, that was weeks ago,” I said, finally recalling the conversation. “That was right after I’d bought the new house, and I wanted to tell you I was moving.”

Sally looked angry and frightened.

I turned to look at Perry, just because I had to put my eyes somewhere, and I couldn’t bear to look at Sally. What on earth was happening?

Perry’s face gave me a big hint.

“But today would be great,” I said brightly. “Just let me go get my purse. I’ll bet you did call, and I just got so upset with everything that’s been happening to my family that I got all mixed up. You know me,” I babbled on, walking rapidly back to the employee lounge. “I can’t keep anything straight to save my soul.”

I had planned on going home to lay eyes on my brother. I didn’t think it was such a great idea, leaving him by himself all day. I wondered if I could combine two events in one.

I got my purse from my locker and went back out to the checkout desk, to find Sally glaring at Perry, who was looking miserable and defiant.

“I guess you know my son thinks he’s gay,” Sally said to me after we got in my car.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“I must have been a terrible mother. I guess I shouldn’t have divorced Steve. Or maybe Paul.”

Sally had been married to both Allison brothers. I’d hardly known Steve, but Paul had been a mine of emotional problems.

“No, I think you did the right thing there,” I said, trying to sound calming and positive. This wasn’t easy. “And I think you tried as hard as you could to be a good mother. Perry being gay doesn’t mean you were a bad mother.”

“I got him through the emotional problems and the drug abuse,” she said plaintively. “It seems to me it ought to be time for him to settle down like everyone else.”

I was speechless. Since Perry had discussed the orientation he’d finally revealed to himself, I had been wondering if maybe his emotional upheavals and substance abuse had been attempts to obscure it from himself. I had no idea what to say to Sally.

“Perry’s a good guy,” I told her. “He’s well into adulthood, and he has to make his own life.

You know he loves you.”

Those were true things. I wasn’t sure that they all tied together, but Sally seemed to gain some comfort.

She began to talk about other topics, and everything Sally said was absolutely lucid and intelligent. I began to wonder if that episode in the library had really happened.

I invited Sally in to meet my brother, and she looked over the house with interest while I talked to Phillip.

“That Pascoe guy called again,” Phillip said. My brother seemed to be getting a little restless, which was what I had feared. He’d caught up on his sleeping and eating, he’d watched television and answered the phone, and now boredom was setting in.

I thought hard while I sat there, supposedly studying the list of callers. Phillip had spiky, tight handwriting, but it was legible after you’d looked at it for a minute.

I got out the Lawrenceton phone book and looked up a number I’d called several times before, but always in an official capacity. Josh Finstermeyer answered the phone, which was lucky for me.

“Josh, this is Ms. Teagarden,” I began.

“I don’t have a single overdue book!” Josh said anxiously. “I swear!”

“I know that,” I said, trying not to sound irritable. “I have a favor to ask. If your mother doesn’t have anything for you to do today, that is.” Parental tasks took precedence over anything else.

“No, ma’am, my mom’s at work anyway,” Josh said. He sounded curious.

“You have a car, right?” He’d just earned the right to drive by himself.

“Yes, ma’am.” Now he was even more curious. The good thing about Josh, whom I’d known from birth, was that he was a voracious reader. The bad thing was that he forgot to return books. We’d had our ups and downs.

“My brother is here with me, and I need to send him shopping,” I told Josh. “I have to go back to work, so I was hoping you could take Phillip to the grocery store and to Wal-Mart. And if there’s anything on at the Global you haven’t seen already, that would be okay, too.”

“So who’s paying?” Josh was nothing if not businesslike.

“Gas money and movie money.”

“Done. How old is this dude?”

“He’s fifteen,” I said.

“He’s not weird looking, right?” Obviously, Josh wanted to know if Phillip was going to be an embarrassment.

“Not at all,” I said gravely. “In fact, you might want to bring your sister.” Josh had a twin sister, Jocelyn, called Joss. She wasn’t much of a reader, unlike her brother, but she had seemed okay when she was in the library doing research for school.

“Okay. When?”

“Anytime. You know where I live? On McBride?”

“Yes, ma’am. Where’s your brother from?”

“The Los Angeles area,” I said grandly.

“Oh. Cool.”

“So I’ll leave him the money.”

“Gotcha.”

Of course Phillip had been listening to my conversation, and he seemed half-excited and half-scared at the idea of spending the rest of the afternoon with kids his own age who didn’t know him. I could understand that. But I knew what Phillip was capable of—taking off cross-country alone—and I wanted him busy. I peeled some money out of my purse, and while Sally and Phillip talked about southern accents, I worked on a grocery list.

After Phillip vanished into the bathroom to spruce himself up, Sally and I made sandwiches from the cold-cut tray, which had enough processed meat and cheese for maybe ten people. I rummaged in the refrigerator for mayonnaise, mustard, and pickles; meanwhile, Sally was being complimentary about Phillip’s manners and looks. We had a pleasant conversation while we ate, though it was strangely nonspecific. I noticed that Sally said things like “my boss” for Macon Turner, whom I knew well, and “last week” instead of Wednesday or Thursday. But this was hardly conclusive. I was just thinking maybe I had imagined Sally’s earlier reality blip, when she said, “I really ought to be getting back to work.” We had put all the food away, and I fished my keys out of my purse.

“Okay,” I said. I needed to be getting back to work, too. “Where’s your car?”

Sally’s face went blank.

For a moment, I thought she just didn’t understand me. “I mean, is it at the newspaper, or did you drive down to the library?” I asked.

For one horrible moment, Sally looked frightened.

“Oh, just take me back to the library,” she said with a nonchalance assumed so swiftly and smoothly that I almost didn’t catch that moment. If my back had been turned, I would have swallowed her act.

Sally really didn’t know where her car was.

I had taken a circuitous route to make sure Sally’s car was indeed at the library. It was, and I dropped her off right by it with some relief. I watched her unlock it and climb in the driver’s seat. I wondered what to do, and then I realized that it wasn’t up to me to do anything. This situation was Perry’s responsibility, and all I could do was be a friend to him so he could talk if he needed to.

I patted him on the shoulder when I passed him in the employees’ lounge, and he looked up at me and nodded, a short, jerky nod of acknowledgment.

“I made an appointment with Dr. Zelman for her next week,” he said. “She tries to cover it up, and she’s pretty good at it, but it’s getting worse and worse.”

There really wasn’t anything else to say.

The two remaining hours of work flew by. There were lots of people coming in and out, lots of computer use, and the book order to complete. When it was time for me to clock out, I was actually glad. There were so many ways for me to go, I couldn’t pick one.

My plans for the rest of the afternoon took an unexpected turn when I went to the employee parking lot and found Bryan Pascoe leaning on my car. His office was within easy walking distance of the library; it was in the old, ambience-laden, inconvenient Jasper Building, which also held Cartland Sewell’s office. So it had been easy for Bryan Pascoe to get where he was.

The question was why he was there.

“Ms. Teagarden,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Pascoe,” I said, and even I could hear the question clearly in my voice. It was a relief not to have to tilt my head back to look Bryan Pascoe in the eyes.

He held out his hand, and I shook it. He had fine bones. “Please call me Bryan,” he said politely.

“Bryan,” I murmured, and retrieved my hand. “Aurora,” I said after a moment.

He nodded.

“My brother, Phillip, said you tried to call me? I would have returned your calls.” I wanted to be sure Bryan Pascoe marked the fact that he was pushing.

“Yes, but I wanted to talk to you face-to-face.”

“All right,” I said hesitantly when he’d been at a full stop for a long moment. “Did you want to go to your office?”

“Can we walk around the block? I’ve been shut in my office all day.”

It was brisk, but not truly cold. “Certainly,” I said after an uncertain pause. What the heck was going on here? “My legs are short, I don’t go at a very quick pace.” Robin always seemed to be two paces ahead of me. Thinking about Robin instantly made me feel bad.

“Your legs are fine,” he said, again catching me off balance, and off we went.

“Has something come up about John David?”

“Of course I’ve talked to Miss Burns. For the moment, she backs up John David a hundred percent. She says he was doing legal work for her.”

I glanced sideways at Bryan, and he smiled at me. He had gleaming white teeth. “She’s been drawing up her will, she says,” Bryan added in an absolutely neutral way.

“If Poppy were alive, Romney Burns’d need it.” I found myself smiling back.

“That’s interesting. Did you see your sister-in-law as a jealous woman?”

I mulled that over. “I don’t think she would have wanted to be humiliated, if John David decided to divorce her, or something about his little relationships became flagrant. Like him taking Romney to the company Christmas party, or something like that,” I said finally. “I guess that’s different from being gut-jealous.”

“How do you feel about that?” the lawyer asked.

I felt like that was a strange question.

I stopped and faced him. Luckily, we were on the sidewalk by the side of the little downtown movie theater, and no one was going in or out at the moment.

“What difference does that make?” I could feel my eyebrows drawing together in a frown.

“Personal curiosity,” he said.

“I don’t know why you want to know.” But I could see no reason to refuse to tell him, either.

“I thought it was really. . . distasteful,” I said, selecting the mildest word that would fit.

“Though I’m not an angel myself, for sure.”

“Why are you giving me your opinion in such a tentative way? You don’t have to attach disclaimers.”

“I don’t know you. For all I know, you cheat on your wife every day,” I said bluntly. “I hate to sound holier-than-thou.”

“Why did you call me yesterday?”

“John David thought of you. You’re the best, I hear.”

“I am, Aurora.”

I felt like I was missing something here. “I’m glad to know you’re so confident,” I said a little dubiously.

“I was glad to hear your voice on the phone yesterday. I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time.”

“You think I’ve done something illegal?”

“No, I want to date you.”

“I thought you were married, Bryan,” I said, genuinely astonished. Come to think of it, he had mentioned “ex-wife” yesterday.

“I was, for five years. We got divorced over a year ago.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, feeling like he’d just smacked me in the head with a dead fish, or something equally startling. “Well, Bryan, I’m real flattered, but I’ve been dating Robin Crusoe.”