Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death (14 page)

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.

Robin was sitting on the side of the bed, pulling the sleeves of his shirt back through the right way when I opened my eyes. I reached over and trailed my fingers down his long, bare back, making him shiver.

“Morning,” I said, my voice still hazy with sleep.

He turned and bent to kiss me.

“Morning, Roe.”

His hair looked like a haystack. He hadn’t put on his glasses yet, and his eyes were blue and soft. He looked good enough to eat.

“Are you in a particular hurry?” I asked.

“Just wanted to get out of the way before your company wakes up,” he said.

Oh hell. I’d forgotten all about Phillip’s presence in my house, to say nothing of the Wynns. I gave a big, windy sigh.

“I’ll come get him about eleven-thirty, after I’ve worked a few hours, and take Phillip to lunch.” Robin stroked my hair back from my face. “You know, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

“You’re going to eat here, right?”

“We planned that, didn’t we? Remember, my mother’s flying in this afternoon?”

I pulled a pillow over my head. I didn’t want to think about meeting Robin’s mother for the first time on a national holiday, when food was the main focus of the day. I wasn’t that confident of my cooking.

I’d just have to suck it up and act like a woman.

“She wasn’t planning on flying in and cooking, I hope?” I asked, just to make sure, not wanting to start out beholden to the woman.

“No, I told her I had made plans for us.” Robin looked hopeful. “What can I bring?”

I laughed and pulled the pillow away. “Oh, okay, I guess I’m up to it. Let me think. I picked up a turkey breast at the store the other day, thank God. I thought a whole turkey would be too much for just us. So that leaves sweet potatoes, peas, rolls, and cranberry sauce. And dessert.”

“I can get rolls and the peas,” Robin offered helpfully. “And I can bring some wine.”

“That’s good. Okay, I’ll get the sweet potatoes and fix them, and the cranberries, and I’ll make a pie or two. That’ll work out.”

“What about your mother and her family?”

“I don’t know what on earth they’re going to do. I think Melissa and Avery are going to Melissa’s parents, and I guess they’ll take their kids and the baby with them. John David will probably go to my mother’s, whatever she’s up to doing. They have enough food there to last them through the winter, I think.” When I’d been at the house this afternoon, the refrigerator had been full to overflowing.

“You’d better check. Maybe your folks could come over here for a glass of wine after dinner?”

“You want my mother to meet your mother,” I said, suddenly getting his drift.

“Yes.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. “Oh. Okay.” I looked anywhere but at Robin. “Um, how long is your mom staying?”

“Until Monday,” he said. “I’ll bet by then she’ll be ready to leave. In fact, she’ll be anxious.”

“I’m glad she’s got other children besides you,” I said, laughing.

“She loves all of us, but she’s most comfortable in her own home with her dogs, and her buddies,” he said.

A plaintive meow outside the door told me that Madeleine was waiting for her breakfast. She wasn’t used to the bedroom door being closed.

“I have to go feed the Mongol horde,” I said, making myself get up from the warm bed and pull on a bathrobe. It was an effort, because I wasn’t feeling so great. An overload of emotion?

I was a little achy, a little tired.

“I’ll call you later today,” he said. “After I feed Phillip and plumb his darkest depths, I’ll go get my mother at the airport. Then we’ll talk about tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” I said, thinking of all the things I had to do today. I had to run the strange errand with Bryan Pascoe. I was supposed to work for a few hours. I had to go to the grocery store again. I wanted to spend some brain time thinking of what could have been hidden in Poppy’s closet, something so valuable that it was worth breaking into the murdered woman’s house before it had even been cleaned of her blood.

And, most of all, I needed to talk to Lizanne, who had been outside Poppy’s house the day she was killed.

Melinda and I had kept silent about Lizanne’s presence at Poppy’s that day, and we’d struggled with our decision for all of thirty seconds. Both of us believed that there was simply no chance at all that Lizanne had stabbed Poppy. But we did need to talk to her about why she’d been there. I guess I had a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt that needed to be erased by hearing Lizanne tell me, in person, what had happened that day.

I called Melinda to ask her to go with me. She was very busy, as you can imagine, but she agreed to go. She wanted to hear what Lizanne had to say as much as I did.

The yard had not been put to bed for winter at the sprawling ranch Cartland had bought when his practice had begun flourishing. The flower beds needed weeding and more mulch, and the grass hadn’t gotten its final mowing. Someone had given up just a little too soon. A fenced-in area was strewn with little kids’ toys, bright plastics that would crack in the coming cold. But the smell of corn bread rolled out of the back door when Lizanne answered our knock.

“Come in,” Lizanne said placidly, her arms full of baby. “Let me just pop Brandon in his playpen, and Davis is already taking a nap. Then I can get the corn bread out of the oven, and we can talk.”

Melinda and I came in cautiously; I thought we were both taken aback by Lizanne’s casual air. She had to know why we were there.

Brandon was deposited in his playpen with absolutely no fuss, and he sat up and watched with interest as his mother, still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever known, despite having popped out two babies in almost instant succession, slid a pan of corn bread out of the oven and set it on top to cool.

“For the dressing,” Lizanne explained, poking it with a finger to test its doneness. I figured that might be a sign of nerves; she certainly didn’t need to tell us that. In a bassinet against the wall, Davis gave a little sound and went back to sleep.

“Do you fix yours in a separate pan or in the bird?” Melinda was serious when she asked this burning question. Melinda had been on the quest for the perfect dressing for the past two years.

“Both. There isn’t enough, if you just stuff the turkey. And I put some sausage in.”

Melinda’s eyes lighted up with interest, and she began to talk apples, oysters, and chestnuts.

They might have been sitting there for an hour, talking food, if I hadn’t interrupted.

“Listen, Lizanne, we found the straps.”

“Oh.” She looked quite unsurprised. “Why didn’t you give them to the police? You should have.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Well, I was getting tired of Bubba going out at night and making these silly excuses,”

Lizanne said. She would never call her husband Cartland, not in a million years.

“So, you confronted Poppy?”

“I was ready to.” I watched Lizanne’s hands, long and thin, clench into fists. “I didn’t get the chance. She never came to the door. And the kids got hungry, and they started crying. I couldn’t stand to have anything of hers, so I took the pacifier straps and threw them down in the driveway so she’d know what I thought of her. And I came on home.”