Poppy Done to Death E-Book

Charlaine Harris

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Aurora Teagarden
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 347

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the books that inspired True Blood on HBO and Midnight, Texas on NBC, Poppy Done to Death forms the basis of Reap What You Sew, an Aurora Teagarden movie on the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel Aurora Teagarden, mild-mannered librarian, has spent her entire life in the same small Georgia town. Along with her sister-in-law Poppy, Roe has finally earned a coveted spot in the Uppity Women, an exclusive group that does more than flower arranging. But Poppy is a no-show on their induction day. Roe stops by Poppy's house to find out why and is shocked to discover Poppy dead on the kitchen floor, and it's not by accident. There's no lack of suspects, since both Poppy and her husband were unfaithful. Even the detective in charge of the case, Roe's former lover Arthur Smith, has a past with Poppy. As if that weren't enough, Roe has rekindled a relationship with another old flame and things are moving fast, with plans to meet his mother at Thanksgiving. She's also acquired an unexpected house guest: her half-brother, who's run away from his parents' home in California. Balancing her personal life while looking into Poppy's murder isn't easy, but Roe is determined to give it -- and Poppy -- her best effort. And when Roe discovers that the crime scene has been ransacked, she knows someone is desperate to hide a secret. Roe will have to dig through Poppy's life to uncover the truth and bring the killer to justice. Poppy Done to Death is the engaging eighth installment of the Aurora Teagarden mysteries by #1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris. The series has been adapted into film for Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY CHARLAINE HARRIS

GUNNIE ROSE

An Easy Death

A Longer Fall

The Russian Cage

MIDNIGHT, TEXAS

Midnight Crossroad

Day Shift

Night Shift

STANDALONE WORKS

Small Kingdoms and Other Stories*

Dancers in the Dark*

Layla Steps Up*

The Layla Collection: Dancers in the Dark and Layla Steps Up*

Sweet and Deadly*

A Secret Rage*

THE AURORA TEAGARDEN MYSTERIES

Real Murders*

A Bone to Pick*

Three Bedrooms, One Corpse*

The Julius House*

Dead Over Heels*

A Fool and His Honey*

Last Scene Alive

Poppy Done to Death*

All the Little Liars

Sleep Like a Baby

THE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE SERIES

Dead Until Dark

Living Dead in Dallas

Club Dead

Dead to the World

Dead as a Doornail

Definitely Dead

All Together Dead

From Dead to Worse

Dead and Gone

Dead in the Family

Dead Reckoning

Deadlocked

Dead Ever After

A Touch of Dead

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion

After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse

THE LILY BARD MYSTERIES

Shakespeare’s Landlord

Shakespeare’s Champion

Shakespeare’s Christmas

Shakespeare’s Trollop

Shakespeare’s Counselor

THE HARPER CONNELLY SERIES

Grave Sight

Grave Surprise

An Ice Cold Grave

Grave Secret

THE CEMETERY GIRL MYSTERIES, co-written with Christopher Golden

Pretenders

Inheritance

Haunted

ANTHOLOGIES, co-edited with Toni L. P. Kelner

Many Bloody Returns

Wolfsbane and Mistletoe

Death’s Excellent Vacation

Home Improvement: Undead Edition

An Apple for the Creature

Games Creatures Play

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

About the Author

POPPY DONE TO DEATH

Copyright © 2003 by Charlaine Harris.

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2016 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios.

eISBN: 978-1-625672-16-2

Acknowledgments

My thanks for the advice of wonderful people like John Ertl, Kate Buker, the Reverend Gary Nowlin, and Michael Silverling. I may not have always used their information and advice correctly, but that fault is only mine. Special thanks to Ann Hilgeman and all the other real Uppity Women.

Prologue

I paid almost no attention at all to the last conversation I had with my stepsister-in-law, Poppy Queensland. Though I liked Poppy—more or less—my main feeling when she called was one of irritation. I was only five years older than Poppy, but she made me feel like a Victorian grandmother, and when she told me she was going to foul up our plans, I felt very . . . miffed. Doesn’t that sound grumpy?

“Listen,” said Poppy. As always, she sounded imperative and excited. Poppy always made her own life sound more important and exciting than anyone else’s (mine, for example). “I’m going to be late this morning, so you two just go on. I’ll meet you there. Save me a place.”

Later, I figured that Poppy called me about 10:30, because I was almost ready to leave my house to get her, and then Melinda. Poppy and Melinda were the wives of my stepbrothers. Since I’d acquired my new family well into my adulthood, we didn’t have any shared history, and it was taking us a long time to get comfortable. I generally just introduced Poppy and Melinda as my sisters-in-law, to avoid this complicated explanation. In our small Georgia town, Lawrenceton, most often no explanation was required. Lawrenceton is gradually being swallowed by the Atlanta metroplex, but here we still generally know all our family histories.

With the portable phone clasped to my ear, I peered into my bathroom mirror to see if I’d gotten my cheeks evenly pink. But I was too busy thinking that this change of plans was inexplicable and exasperating. “Everything okay?” I asked, wondering if maybe little Chase was sick, or Poppy’s hot-water heater had exploded. Surely only something pretty serious would keep Poppy from this meeting of the Uppity Women, because Poppy was supposed to be inducted into the club this morning. That was a big event in the life of a Lawrenceton woman. Poppy, though not a native, had lived in Lawrenceton since she was a teen, and she surely understood the honor being done her.

Even my mother had never been asked to be an Uppity Woman, though my grandmother had been a member. My mother had always been deemed too focused on her business. (At least that was how my mother explained it.) I was trying awful hard not to be even a little bit smug. It wasn’t often I did anything that made my successful and authoritative mother look at me admiringly.

I think my mother had worked so hard to establish herself—in a business dominated by men—that she didn’t really see the use in lobbying to join an organization made up mostly of homemaking women. Those were the conditions that had existed when she plunged into the workforce to make a living for her tiny family—me. Things had changed now. But you were tapped to join Uppity Women before you were forty-five, or you didn’t join.

What did it take to be an Uppity Woman? The qualifications weren’t exactly spelled out. It was more like they were generally understood. You had to have demonstrated strong-mindedness, and a high degree of resilience. You had to be intelligent, or at least shrewd. You had to be willing to speak out, though that was not an absolute requirement. You couldn’t have any big attitude about what you were: Jewish, or black, or Presbyterian. You didn’t have to have money, but you had to be willing to make an effort to dress appropriately for the meetings. (You would think an organization that encouraged independent women would be really flexible about clothing, but such was not the case.)

You didn’t have to be absolutely Nice. The southern standard of niceness was this: You’d never been convicted of anything, you didn’t look at other’s women’s husbands too openly. You wrote your thank-you notes and were polite to your elders. You had to take a keen interest in your children’s upbringing. And you made sure your family was fed adequately. There were sideways and byways in this “nice” thing, but those were the general have-tos. Poppy was teetering on the edge of not being “nice” enough for the club, and since there had been an Uppity Woman in the forties who’d been just barely acquitted of murdering her husband, that was really saying something.

I shuddered. It was time to think of the positive.

At least we didn’t have to wear hats, as Uppity Women had in the fifties. I would have drawn the line at wearing a hat. Nothing makes me look sillier, whether I wear my hair down (because it’s long and really curly and wavy) or whether I wear it up (which makes my head look huge). I was glad that the Episcopal church no longer required women to wear hats or veils to Sunday service. I would have had to look like an idiot every week.

I’d been mentally digressing, and I’d missed what Poppy said. “What? What was that?” I asked.

But Poppy said, “It’s not important. We’re all fine; I just have to take care of something before I get there. See you later.”

“See you,” I said cheerfully. “What are you wearing to the meeting?” Melinda had asked me to check, because Poppy had a proclivity toward flamboyance in her clothing taste. But I could hardly make Poppy change outfits, as I’d pointed out to Melinda. So I’m not sure why I stretched the conversation out a little more. Maybe I felt guilty for having tuned her out, however briefly; maybe it would have made a difference if I’d listened carefully.

Maybe not.

“Oh, I guess I’ll wear that olive green dress with the matching sweater? And my brown heels. I swear, I think whoever invented panty hose was in league with the devil. I won’t let John David in the room when I’m putting them on. You look like an idiot when you’re wiggling around, trying to get them to stretch enough.”

“I agree. Well, we’ll see you at the meeting.” She wasn’t even dressed yet, I noted.

“Okay, you and Melinda hold up the family banner till I get there.”

That felt strange, but almost good, having a family banner to hold up, even though my inclusion was artificial. My long-divorced mother, Aida Brattle Teagarden, had married widower John Queensland four years ago. Now Melinda and Poppy were her daughters-in-law, married to John’s two sons, Avery and John David. I liked all of the Queenslands, though they certainly were a diverse group.

Probably John’s oldest son, Avery, was my least favorite. But Melinda, Avery’s wife and mother of their two little Queenslands, was becoming a true friend. At first, I had tended to prefer Poppy, of my two new step in-laws. She was entertaining, bright, and had an original and lively mind. But Melinda, much more prosaic and occasionally given to dim moments, had improved on acquaintance, while Poppy and the way she lived her life had begun to give me pause. Melinda had matured and focused, and she’d broken through her shyness to express her opinions. She was no longer so intimidated by my mother, either. Poppy, who didn’t seem to be scared of anything, took chances, big chances. Unpleasant chances.

So, while I enjoyed Poppy’s company—she could have made the Devil laugh—I held part of myself away from her, afraid of the intimacy that would make her loss even more painful. Frankly, I figured she and John David would divorce within the next year or so.

What actually happened was much worse.

Chapter One

Melinda sat next to me at the table nearest the door. We’d kept a chair open for Poppy the whole meeting, but she’d never shown up. The room was full of Uppity Women, and they’d all turned to look at us when Poppy’s name had been called and we’d had to say she wasn’t there. The other Uppities saw a very short woman in her mid-thirties with a ridiculous amount of brown hair and a wonderful pair of green-rimmed glasses, and a taller, very slim, black-haired woman of the same age, who had a narrow and agreeable face. (I was the shorter of the two.) I am sure all the Uppities who could see that far noticed that we had matching expressions, compounded of social smiles and grim eyes. I, personally, planned to rake Poppy over the hottest coals I could find. The president of Uppity Women, Teresa Stanton, was giving us a basilisk glare.

“Then we’ll continue the meeting with our book discussion,” Teresa said, her voice clipped and businesslike. Teresa, aggressively well groomed, had that chin-length haircut that swings forward when you bend your head, as she did now to check the agenda. Her hair always did what it was told, in sharp contrast to mine. I was sure Teresa’s hair was scared not to mind.

Melinda and I sat through the book discussion in mortified silence, but we tried to look interested and as though we were thinking deep thoughts. I don’t know what Melinda’s policy was, but mine was to keep silent so I wouldn’t draw any more attention. I looked around the room, at the circular tables filled with well-dressed, intelligent women, and I decided that if none of them had ever been disappointed by a relative, they were a lucky bunch. After all, a woman hadn’t shown up for a big-deal, high-pressure social engagement. Surely that was not such a rarity.

I muttered as much to Melinda, between the book discussion and lunch, and she widened her dark eyes at me. “You’re right,” she said instantly, sounding relieved. “We’ll go by and see her after this is over, though. She can’t do this to us again.”

See? Even Melinda was taking it personally, and she’s much more well balanced than I.

We scooted out of the dining room as quickly as we politely could after Teresa had dismissed the meeting. But we were waylaid by Mrs. Cole Stewart, who inquired in her deep southern voice where Poppy was. We could only shake our heads in ignorance and mutter a lame excuse. Mrs. Cole Stewart was seventy-five, white-haired, and all of a hundred pounds, and she was absolutely terrifying. From her affronted stare, we clearly received the message that we were being charged with guilt by association.

When we got to my Volvo, Melinda said, “We’re going over there and have a few words with her.”

I didn’t say no. In fact, I’d never considered any other course of action. “Oh, yeah,” I said grimly. I was so focused on having a few choice words with Poppy that I couldn’t enjoy the clear, chilly November day, and November is one of my favorites. If we passed anyone we should have waved at, we never noticed it.

“It isn’t as if she does a lot of work around the house,” Melinda said suddenly, apropos of nothing. But I nodded, understanding the extended thought. Poppy didn’t work outside the home anymore, she had one baby, and she didn’t even take very good care of the house, though she did take good care of the baby. She should have been able to manage what was on her plate, as my mother would have put it.

As I’d half-expected, when we got to Poppy’s and saw that her car was still parked in the carport, Melinda quailed. “You go in there, Roe,” she said. “I’m liable to get so mad, I might mention a whole lot of other things besides the topic at hand.”

We exchanged a meaningful glance, the kind that encompassed a whole conversation.

I swung my legs out of the car. I noticed something on the ground by my feet, two long straps of embroidered cloth.

“Oh crap,” I said, glad only Melinda was there to hear me. I tossed them into the car for Melinda to look at, and I marched to the front door. I was mentally loaded for bear. “Poppy!” I called as I turned the doorknob of the front door of the house. The door opened. Unlocked. Since by now I knew Poppy had already had company that morning, I was not so startled by this.

I stepped into the foyer and called again. But the house was quiet. Moosie, Poppy’s cat, came to see what was happening. Moosie was a pale sylph compared to my huge feline basketball, Madeleine. The cat meowed in an agitated way and ran from hall to kitchen and back again. I’d never seen Moosie act so jittery. He was Poppy’s pampered pet, a declawed half Siamese she’d adopted from the animal shelter. Moosie was not allowed out the front door, only out the sliding glass back door, which led into a backyard enclosed all the way around with a six-foot-high privacy fence. After Moosie stropped my ankles a couple of times, I registered the fact that the sensation was sticky. I looked down and saw that my hose were stained.

“Moosie, what have you been into?” I asked. Several unpleasant possibilities crossed my mind. The cat began cleaning himself vigorously, licking at the dark patch on his side. He didn’t seem hurt or anything, just, well, catty. “Where’s Poppy?” I asked. “Where’s your momma?” I know that’s disgusting, but when you’re alone with animals, you get that way.

Poppy and John David actually had a human child, Chase, as well as the cat, but they’d had the cat longer.

“Hey, Poppy!” I yelled up the stairs. Maybe she’d gotten in the shower after her visitor left. But why would she? Even for Poppy, missing such an important engagement was very unusual. And if she’d been up to her usual shenanigans . . . I had to press my lips together to hold in my anger.

I stomped up the stairs, yelling Poppy’s name the whole time. She’d missed Uppity Women, and she’d missed lunch, and, by golly, I wanted to know why.

The master bedroom looked as though she’d just stepped out. The bed was made and her bathrobe was tossed across the foot of the bed. Poppy’s bedroom slippers, the slide-in kind, were in a little heap on the floor. Her brush was tossed down on her dressing table, clogged with red-gold hair.

“Poppy?” I said, less certainly this time. The bathroom door was wide open, and I could see the shower enclosure. The wall was dry. It had been quite awhile since Poppy had showered. I could see my reflection in the huge mirror that topped the two sinks, and I looked scared. My glasses were sliding down my nose, which is a very insignificant feature of my face. I’d worn the green-rimmed ones today to offset my bronze-colored jacket and tobacco brown sheath, and I took a little moment to reflect that autumn colors were really my best.

Well, I could think about myself any old time, but right now I needed to be searching. I went back down the stairs faster than I’d gone up. Melinda, waiting out in my Volvo, would be wondering what had happened to me. I, however, was wondering why the central heating was roaring away on this cool but moderate day, and why I was feeling a draft of chilly air despite the heating system’s best attempts.

I muttered a less ladylike word under my breath as I strode farther down the entrance hall to the kitchen, though striding is a moot word to use when you’re four eleven. Moosie wove in and out between my ankles and darted ahead when it suited him. The kitchen was a mess; although big and bright, it was scattered with dishes and crumbs and pieces of mail and baby bottles and car keys and the St. James Altar Guild schedule—a normal kitchen, in other words. To my left, dividing the room in half, was a breakfast bar. On the other side of it was a family dining table, positioned by the sliding glass doors so Poppy and John David could look outside while they ate. A mug of coffee was on the breakfast bar. It was full. I laid my finger against the side of it. Cold.

Over the top of the breakfast bar, I could see that the sliding glass door was open. This was the source of the intruding cool air. A sharp-edged wind from the east was gusting into the kitchen.

My scalp began to prickle.

I stepped through the narrow passage between the end of the breakfast bar and the refrigerator and looked to my right. Poppy was lying on the floor just inside the open sliding glass door. One of her brown pumps had fallen off her narrow foot. Her sweater and skirt were covered in blotches.

A spray of blood had dried on the glass of the doors.

I could hear a radio playing from the house behind Poppy’s. The tune wafted over the high privacy fence. I could hear someone splashing through the water of a pool: Cara Embler, doing her laps, as she did every day, unless her pool was actually frozen. Poppy, who had laughed about Cara’s adherence to such an uncomfortable regimen, would never laugh again. The processes of life and living, continuing in the houses all around us, had come to dead stop here in this house on Swanson Lane.

Moosie sat by Poppy’s pathetic, horrible body. He said, “Reow.” He pressed against her side. His food bowl, on a mat by the breakfast bar, was empty.

Now I knew how Moosie’s fur had gotten stained. He’d been trying to rouse Poppy, maybe so she would feed him.

Suddenly, I had to escape from that suburban kitchen with its horrible secret. I flew out of the house, slamming the front door behind me. I had a fleeting impulse to scoop up Moosie, but taking charge of him was too much for me at that second. I dashed down the sidewalk to the curb, where Melinda was waiting. I was making the “phone” signal as I hurried, little finger and thumb pointing to mouth and ear, respectively. Melinda had turned on the cell phone by the time I got to her car.

“Nine one one,” I said, gasping for breath. Melinda gave me a sharp look, but she punched in the number as I’d asked and then passed the phone to me. Did I mention that Melinda has a ton of good sense?

“The nature of your emergency?” said a distant voice.

“I’m at Eight-oh-eight Swanson Lane,” I said. “This is Aurora Teagarden. My sister-in-law has been killed.”

I never did remember the rest of that conversation. When I was sure they were coming, I pressed the button that ended the conversation, and I began to try to explain to Melinda.

But instead, I flashed on the deep wounds on Poppy’s hands, wounds incurred when she was defending her life, and I leaned over to avoid the car, my dress, and the phone while I threw up.

* * *

For the sixth or seventh time, I explained very carefully why Melinda and I had gone to Poppy’s house. Because the city police made the house off-limits instantly, Melinda and I drove right down to the police station, and from there I called my mother at Select Realty, her agency. It was a difficult conversation, over my cell phone in a public place, but one that had to be completed. Her husband, John, had had one heart attack already. Mother was terrified of another, and the news about his favorite daughter-in-law might trigger one. Mother was right to worry about that, and she thought of a few more things to worry her before we’d finished our conversation.

“Who’ll tell John David?” Mother asked. “Tell me it doesn’t have to be John.” John David was John’s second son, and the husband of the late Poppy.

“Where is he, Mother? Do you know?” The police had been asking me that quite persistently. If John David wasn’t at his company headquarters in Atlanta, I didn’t know where he’d be. He’d been a pharmaceuticals salesman for the first few years of his marriage, but recently he’d gotten a job at company headquarters in the Public Relations division. John David had always been good at turning an attractive face to the world.

“John David? He’s at work, I guess. Two o’clock on a Monday afternoon, where else would he be?”

“Do you have that phone number and address handy?”

I could hear little efficient sounds as Mother wheeled through her Rolodex. She rattled off a number, and I wrote it on a scrap of paper and handed it to the policewoman sitting across the desk. “That’s the same number,” the detective said, and I nodded.

“Will they let you go tell him?” Mother asked.

“I think the police will tell John David,” I said. “If they can find him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I already gave them that number. The police called, and the people there told the police that John David left work early today. Before noon.”

“Then where could he be?”

“I guess they’d like to know that, too,” I said, figuring a number of other shoes were about to drop.

After an appreciable pause, my mother said, “That would kill John.” Another pause: I could practically hear her thinking. “Aurora, I’ve got to go, before he hears about this some other way. You know someone’s bound to call the house and tell him there are a lot of police cars around John David’s house. Wait! Roe, where’s the baby?”

My face must have changed dramatically, because the detective stood up abruptly, sending her chair skidding a couple of feet.

“I don’t know where the baby is,” I said numbly. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about Chase, who was only eleven months old. “I don’t know. Maybe Melinda . . .” I swiveled on the hard chair, looking for my remaining sister-in-law. The next instant, I was on my feet. The detective said something, but I didn’t listen as I searched for Melinda, my heels click-clacking on the linoleum floor.

She was in a cubicle with Detective Arthur Smith, whom I knew all too well. I stuck my head in. “Roe?” she said, already apprehensive.

“Where’s the baby? Where’s Chase?”

She looked at me blankly. “Why, John David dropped him off at my house this morning. My sitter is keeping my two and Chase, so Poppy and I . . .” And then her face crumpled all over again.

I hotfooted it back to the telephone, which I’d stupidly left on the desk. “Chase is at Melinda’s,” I told my mother. I was limp with relief. “Evidently, John David took him over there this morning.”

“So John David was in town this morning. At least we know that.” My mother had already absorbed Chase’s safety and was moving on to other ramifications. “Listen, Roe, you’ve got my cell-phone number.” I had it all right, tattooed on my brain. “Call me the minute you know where John David is. I’ve got to get to your stepfather.”

I thought my mother was a wee bit affected in calling John my stepfather, and she did on every possible occasion. After all, I’d been in my early thirties when John, a widower, had married Mother. He’d been a friend of mine before he’d dated my mother, and I felt a mixture of different obligations and attitudes toward John. I certainly never addressed him as “Stepdad.”

I hung up and faced the woman who’d been taking my statement. Her name was Cathy Trumble, and I’d never met her before. Detective Trumble was stocky and graying, with an easy-care curly hairdo and sharp, pale eyes behind rimless glasses. She was a real professional, I guess; I had no clue as to how she felt about the information I was giving her—the death of Poppy Queensland, my brother-in-law’s absence—or anything at all. It was like talking to a piece of stainless steel.

“How come you don’t have a cubicle?” I asked. I had been wandering off in my own mental world while Detective Trumble was typing into a computer, and she was a little nonplussed by my question. The Sparling County Law Enforcement Center housed the sheriff’s office, the town police, and the jail. In the world of SPACOLEC, detectives got their own little space with head-high carpeted dividers.

“I just got hired,” she explained. She seemed startled into answering the question.

I recalled Sally Allison’s story in the paper about the county having to increase its law-enforcement budget because of increased population, which had led directly to increased crime. Okay, Detective Cathy Trumble was the result. “Where do you live?” I asked, trying to be sociable. With a mother who made a living in real estate, it was a question that was second nature.

“And you had planned this lunch date with your sisters for how long?” she asked pointedly.

Okay, we weren’t going to be best friends.

“They’re my sisters-in-law, sort of once removed,” I said for what felt like the millionth time. “We’ve been planning to go to the Uppity Women together for a month. Melinda just joined three months ago, and I’ve been a member for about half a year.”

“And Poppy?”

“Oh, she’d gone as our guest twice. But today she was going to be inducted. Somebody had died to let her in,” I explained.

The clear eyes fixed me in their stare. I felt like I’d been caught in the headlights. “Somebody had died?” she said.

For the first time, I regretted not being questioned by Arthur. “Well, to get in Uppity Women—it’s really the Uppity Women’s Reading and Lunch Club, but everyone calls it Uppity Women—you have to fill a vacancy, because the bylaws limit membership to thirty,” I told Cathy Trumble. “You have to be nominated, and if they vote yes, you get on the list. The list is limited to five. Then when a member dies, the top person on the list replaces that member. Etheline Plummer died for me.”

“I understand,” Detective Trumble said unwillingly. She looked a little dazed.

“So when Linda Burdine Buckle died two weeks ago,” I said, “it was Poppy’s turn.” I patted at my cheeks with a soggy Kleenex.

“What do Uppity Women do?” Detective Trumble asked, though she sounded as though she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Well, we talk about local politics and then we decide how we’re going to handle local issues. We have representatives at every city council meeting and school board meeting, and they give reports to the club. We decide whom we’re going to back in the primaries, and how we’re going to do it. And then we have a book we’ve all read that we discuss, and then we eat lunch.”

This didn’t seem extraordinary to me, but Trumble gave a kind of sigh and looked down at her desk. “So, you have a political agenda, and a literary agenda, and a social . . .”

I nodded.

“You all read, what? Like from the Oprah Book Club? Like The Lovely Bones?”

“Um, no.”

“Well, what was this month’s book?”

“The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Economic Currents in the Southeast. By a professor at the University of Georgia? She was supposed to come down to speak to us about it, but she got the flu.” I had read every word, but it hadn’t been easy.

The look Trumble gave me would have frozen a pond. “Could you just tell me what you’ve been doing, say last evening and this morning?” Detective Trumble asked, her voice hard despite the thinnest overlay of courtesy.

“Last night won’t do you any good,” I said, surprised she’d even tack that on. “She wasn’t killed till this morning.”

“How do you know that?” Trumble leaned forward, her eyes sharp and intent.

“About twenty different ways. First off, I talked to her this morning. Then, her clothes. She was wearing the right clothes.”

“‘The right clothes’?”

“For the meeting. Poppy usually dressed a little extreme for Lawrenceton, and Melinda and I warned her that she had to look like Missy Matron for this crowd, at least till they got to know her. So I wanted to check on what she was planning on wearing. And she told me. And it was the outfit I found her in.”

Trumble nodded. Good. This was the kind of fact she liked.

“So, this morning, I got up at six-thirty, showered, had coffee, read the paper, got a phone call from Melinda.” I inclined my head toward the cubicle where Arthur was “interviewing” Melinda. “We talked for maybe five minutes. I got dressed. Then I called the vet to make an appointment for my cat, and I called Sears because the ice maker on my refrigerator is acting up, and I called work to find out when I could pick up my schedule for this month, and I called my friend Sally to ask her out for her birthday.”

Detective Trumble was gaping at me. “You made all those calls this morning?”

“Well, yes. It’s my phone-call morning.”

“Your ‘phone-call morning.’ ”

Gosh, she seemed big on repetition. “Yes, my phone-call morning. I don’t go to work till the afternoon on most Mondays, so I make all my phone calls early. I have a list.”

She shook her head slightly, as if she were shaking off raindrops. “Okay,” she said. “So, when would you estimate these phone calls were finished?”

“Let’s see. The vet opens at eight-thirty, so I probably began around then.” Though I found it hard to believe, I again wished I were being questioned by Arthur. He knew Lawrenceton, and he knew me, and he would not make such heavy weather out of this. “You know, they don’t want to see Madeleine, so making the appointment takes awhile. The new receptionist is better about it than the old one, though.”

“Madeleine.”

I am not a ditz—at least I don’t think I am; I just daydream a lot—so I was getting a wee bit tired of feeling like an airhead. “My cat. Madeleine. Had to go to the vet.”

“Your cat’s a real handful?” Comprehension was dawning. Perhaps she was a cat owner. I thought of Moosie, and wondered who was watching him. He wasn’t supposed to go out of the house. I was willing to bet the police had let him out. I was mad at myself for not telling them Moosie had been declawed before Poppy adopted him, so he wasn’t an outdoors kind of cat. I explained to the detective. To my surprise, she called the house right away.

When she hung up, she looked concerned. “Our team searching the house says none of them has seen a cat.”

“Oh no. That’s awful. That cat is declawed; he can’t make it outside that fence.”

“I’ll have the patrol cars look out for him, and I’ll alert the pound in case anyone brings him in. Give me a description before you leave. Now, let’s get back to this morning. You said your sister-in-law called you later, after you’d finished making all your phone calls?”

“Yes. The phone rang while I was getting ready to go. Poppy said Melinda and I should go on ahead, that she’d meet us there.”

“And she gave no reason for this?”

“No.” I hesitated. “She said there was something she had to take care of, and she sounded as though it was something unexpected, but other than that, no.” There’d been the moments of my inattention, but that was for my conscience alone, not for Detective Trumble’s consumption. Nothing could be done about it now. “She just said there was something she had to take care of,” I repeated.

Arthur came out of his cubicle and beckoned to Detective Trumble, who pushed up from her desk and met him on middle ground. Possibly she thought I couldn’t hear her because I was rooting around in my purse.

“Is this a fair example of a southern belle?” she murmured to my former boyfriend. I glanced up, to see her tilting her head toward me.

“Aurora?” Surprise made him a little louder than he’d intended.

“She’s a moron. Her brains are scattered over several miles of bad road.”

“Then she’s hiding something,” he said flatly.

Darn that Arthur.

I saw Melinda leaning out of Arthur’s cubicle, making little gestures at me behind his back. So far, the new detective hadn’t caught sight of Melinda, but she would soon. I shook my head violently then pasted a sweet smile on my face as Arthur leaned to one side to fix me with a glare. The minute my lips moved, I realized a sweet smile was wildly inappropriate, and I wiped my face clean, trying to come up with an expression that wouldn’t be worse.

Arthur made his way through desks and chairs on the way to Trumble’s area, and even I could read the reluctance in his gait. His whole demeanor was that of a man who’d just quit smoking but was obliged to tour the Marlboro factory.

The Marlboro factory would be me.

I should have been pleased, because God knows I’d hoped for years Arthur would get over his confused feelings about me, and he definitely had. I just didn’t know why I had to be categorized as “bad” in the process. Possibly this was a childish thought and I would be ashamed of it later. I hoped so.

“What are you up to?” he asked without preamble.

“My sister-in-law got killed, Arthur. I’m not ‘up to’ anything.”

“Uh-huh. Anytime you pull that fluff-headed southern eccentric routine, you’re putting out a smoke screen. I take this real serious, Roe. There’s no give in this.”

I considered my options. I looked over at Melinda again. I shrugged. She looked relieved. I was taking the burden of concealment away from her.

“We found something in the driveway when we were sitting and waiting,” I said. I looked up. Why on earth couldn’t Arthur sit down in Detective Trumble’s seat, so I wouldn’t have to strain like this? I looked down at my hands clasped on my purse, rotated my head to ease my neck.

“What did you find?”

“Ah, a baby pacifier.”

“Whose was it?” Arthur asked, his voice quite gentle. I could believe he wasn’t mad until I looked back up at him.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You’re sure.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Your sister-in-law Melinda saw it, too.”

“Yes.”

“And you agreed not to tell us?”

“No,” I protested. “We just don’t know for sure whose it was.”

“I think you have a real good idea.”

This was the part that was impossible to explain. I tried to think of how to get around it. I had a stroke of genius—at least it seemed to be at that moment. “It’s just a Binky,” I said. I pulled it out of my purse and handed it to Arthur.

He turned it over and over in his fingers. It was a blue Binky, and there were millions just like it.

“It could even be her baby’s,” he said. “Maybe it fell out of one of the family cars.”

Melinda had left the cubicle and inched closer to hear all this, and she looked profoundly relieved. Arthur was fairly irritated to see her when he turned around. He sighed. “Do you confirm this, Mrs. Queensland?” he asked. Melinda nodded.

“That’s where we found it. It could have come from anywhere. Roe just picked it up on her way into the house because she assumed it was Chase’s.”

Bless Melinda’s heart. I couldn’t have done better myself.

Then Melinda almost ruined it by shooting me a triumphant glance that practically screamed, But there’s more that we’ve concealed! I felt as if my purse were smoking, the contents were so hot.

“If that’s all, Detectives, we need to go to our family,” I said quickly. “Melinda’s got the baby at her house with her kids, and we have to see to John, and Avery will want to know all about it.”

“Where will you be going? In case we need to talk to you again?” Arthur was nothing if not tenacious.

“We’ll be going to my house first, to check in on the kids and the babysitter,” Melinda said briskly. She was glad to be back on familiar ground, where she knew what was what and she could be her normal efficient self. “Then we’ll go over to John and Aida’s house, I’m sure. You have Roe’s cell number and mine, and the house numbers, so we’d like to hear as soon as possible if you find out anything.”

The next thing I knew, we were in the parking lot of the SPACOLEC complex, and Melinda and I were hugging each other and crying. This was unprecedented, and maybe we were both a little relieved when we separated to dig in our purses for tissues.

“They’ll find out,” Melinda said.

“Yes, they will. But at least it won’t have been us who told them.”

“I don’t know why that makes me feel better,” Melinda said, giving a few hiccupping sobs, “but it does. You know if that Arthur Smith finds out we’re lying, he’ll make it hard on us, and Avery will never forgive me.”

I nodded grimly. If Melinda thought Avery was the most frightening thing facing her, she’d never seen my mother angry.

“What should we do with them?”

I pulled the cloth straps out of my purse and glared at them. They were cute as the dickens. They’d been embroidered by Poppy, who was fond of needlework, for the sons of Cartland (“Bubba”) Sewell and my friend Lizanne. The boys, Brandon and Davis, were now—well, Brandon was a toddler, and Davis was sitting up. The straps, which snapped into a circle, were designed to run through the plastic loop on a pacifier, so when the baby dropped the pacifier, it wouldn’t fall to the floor. You could run the strap around the baby’s neck, or around the brace of a car seat, or whatever. Brandon’s had his name and little bunnies embroidered on it, while Davis’s had footballs and his initials. Lizanne had loved them when Poppy had given them to her; I remembered the day she’d opened the little package. And I’d found them on the ground in Poppy’s driveway. Melinda and I exchanged a long glance, and I stuffed them back into my purse.

I drove to Melinda and Avery’s house, trying to be extra careful, because I was all too aware of how dazed I was. I waited out in the driveway while Melinda ran in to check on the kids, tell the babysitter what had happened, and change shoes. Highly polished flats replaced the pumps she’d been wearing. I liked Melinda more and more as I spent time with her, and not the smallest reason was her practical nature.

“Where’s Robin?” she asked as we parked in front of my mother’s house.

“He’s in Austin,” I explained. “He got nominated for some award, so he’s going to the mystery writers’ convention where they give it out. He asked me if I wanted to go, but . . .” I shrugged. “The convention’s over, but he’s doing some signings on the way back. He should be home on Wednesday, in time to pick up his mother at the airport.”

“You didn’t want to go with him?” she asked shyly. My relationship with Robin Crusoe, fiction and true crime writer, was new enough that the family was delicate about making any assumptions.

“I kind of did,” I said. “But he was going to be with a lot of people he knows really well, and I haven’t been with him very long.”

She nodded. You had to have a pretty firm footing in a relationship to be dragged into a massive “meet the friends” situation. “Still, he asked,” she said.

It was my turn to nod. We both knew what that meant too.

* * *

That was our last pleasant moment for the rest of the day. Our sister-in-law had died a terrible death, a violent death, and John David still hadn’t been located. Poppy’s parents had to be called, which awful job Avery agreed to undertake. All the Queensland men were tall and attractive. Avery was certainly the most handsome CPA in Lawrenceton, but his personality did not live up to his face, which could have been devilish if there’d been any spark in it. Avery was one of those men always described as “steady,” which is what you want in an accountant, of course. He was the older brother, and had been a year ahead of me in high school. Instead of playing football like John David, Avery had played tennis; instead of being elected class president, Avery had been editor of the school paper. He’d added to the local gene pool by marrying Melinda, who’d grown up in Groton, a few miles away.