Charlaine Harris - Poppy Done to Death

Arthur gathered himself, glancing up at us, then back to the sprawling handwriting. I couldn’t read him, had no idea what he was thinking. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

“There was something about her,” he said.

Melinda looked at me in consternation. Though she’d known about Arthur and Poppy, this sudden wistful admission from the cop in charge of the investigation threw her completely.

“Listen, Arthur,” I said as gently as I could. “Maybe someone else should be in charge of this case. What about that Cathy Trumble? She seemed real able.”

“She didn’t know Poppy like I did,” Arthur said. “I know the chief would take me off the case if he knew I’d been involved with Poppy, but I’m the best investigator on the force, and I have to find out who did this to her. She was the most exciting, the most wonderful… I never dreamed anyone could be as wonderful as you were, Roe, but Poppy was something extraordinary.”

Melinda gave me a horrified stare. I could feel my cheeks flame red, and I turned my hands palm up. What could I say? For years after he’d dumped me (to marry Lynn, and then divorce her), Arthur had thought he loved me. For years he’d turned up at odd moments in my life, his eyes begging me to take him back. He’d never shown that level of devotion when we were dating, when it would have been appropriate and welcome.

Maybe that was the way it had worked with Poppy, too. He’d gotten hooked on her when she’d moved on to someone else.

“We were together when she shopped for that rug downstairs, the one that had all her blood on it,” he said, almost conversationally. “She told me that every time she looked at it, she thought of me. We had sex on it.”

That definitely fell into the category of “More than I want to know.”

“But she switched to someone after you, Arthur,” I said. “Who was it?”

“She told me,” Arthur said, “long ago… She told me that when she was inducted into the Uppity Women, she was going to make sure I got a promotion. Chief of detectives is coming up. Jeb Green’s gotten a better job in Savannah. Poppy told me my career would take off. She promised me so much, and gave me so little.”

She’d told Cartland she’d help him progress in state government. He’d been so besotted with her, he’d been willing to leave his wife and children. Poppy had been trying to be a total package: illicit lover, career advancer, wife, mother, suburban queen. I wondered if I’d ever known the real woman. What had she been like when she was alone?

“We never really knew her,” Melinda said to me. She sounded as sad as I felt. She hooked her dark hair behind her ears and gave Arthur a determined look. “Listen, Detective Smith. We don’t want to hear any more about you and Poppy. What we want is to know what to do about the letter. And we want to know what you’re going to do about her mother.”

Arthur seemed to jerk himself out of the pool of reminiscence he’d fallen into. “What about her mother?” he asked. “Does this have something to do with the messages Bryan Pascoe has been leaving at the station?”

“If you returned your phone calls, you could have picked her up already,” I said, angry and somehow hurt by all Arthur’s unwelcome revelations. I explained about the gas station receipt, about the attendant’s memory of the day Poppy had been murdered.

“I’ll go find out.”

Arthur left in a hurry, determined to track down the Wynns and interrogate them. After he’d gone, Melinda and I had to gather ourselves back together for a few minutes. We were quite shaken by Arthur and his odd behavior.

“Even if it was Sandy Wynn who killed Poppy, and that part of it gets wrapped up,” Melinda said, “we still have to finish this job.” She waved her hand at the bedroom, still considerably out of order.

“You’re right. John David shouldn’t find this stuff.” I stuck the plastic ID tag into my pocket to dispose of later with heavy scissors. I ripped the fellatio picture and the frank snap of Cartland Sewell into tiny bits and flushed them down the toilet. Neither of us wanted to give those to Arthur. I didn’t know how I was ever going to look Bubba in the face again, as it was. “That wasn’t the same person,” I told Melinda as the picture bits disappeared. “In both those pictures. Different guys.”

“Oh? I guess I didn’t compare.” She gave me a lopsided smile.

“Well, the one in the close-up picture was a lot, ah, bigger in diameter than Cartland’s.”

“Think of knowing that about someone,” Melinda said, and, amazingly, she giggled. “You know, Avery is my one and only. Pretty rare in this day and age, huh?”

I nodded respectfully. My own list was quite short, but it did have more than one name on it. “I can’t understand anyone letting Poppy take pictures,” I said. “I’m feeling pretty much on the naive side, too. It seems like common sense would tell the man that such a thing could only lead to trouble. You can deny and deny-but if the other person has a picture, denials are pretty useless.”

“Avery and I sure wouldn’t do that,” Melinda said. “And I can’t see the point. I know what he looks like. He knows what I look like. What’s the point of taking pictures? Just something for the kids to find and bring out in the middle of a dinner party, right?”

“That’s my opinion, too. I just don’t get it.”

“Maybe we’re just too middle-class?”

I laughed. “Maybe so, Melinda. Maybe so.”

I called my house to see if Phillip had returned. When he didn’t answer, I called the Finstermeyers and got Josh’s mom, Beth.

“We were just trying to call you,” she said. “Listen, would it be all right if I took the boys Christmas shopping with me? The Bodine mall is having all kinds of after-Thanksgiving sales, and with these two guys for bodyguards, I thought I might come out of it alive. I’d have them back by seven or eight tonight.”

“Sure, that’s fine with me.” Phillip seemed to be really clicking with Josh. I felt quite pleased about that. “Um, could I speak to Phillip for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Hey, Sis.” Phillip’s voice was deeper and more relaxed than I remembered it.

“Listen, Phillip, do you have enough money for a trip to the mall?”

“Well, I am sort of broke.”

“On your way out of town, why don’t you swing by Poppy’s house-Mrs. Finstermeyer will know where that is-and I’ll spot you some cash.”

“Thanks!” Phillip sounded quite enthusiastic. “Oh, and Roe? When I went to your house to get my coat, I saw you had a few messages on the answering machine. I didn’t listen to them, because I was in a big hurry.”

“Thanks back at you,” I told him. “I’ll check them before too long.”

In a few minutes, I’d handed Phillip the entire contents of my billfold, and Melinda and I went back to work.

Two hours later, we were tired and rumpled. Melinda had started sneezing from breathing so much dust. And we had found only one more memento, a stained male bikini. When I held it up, Melinda said, “I don’t even want to think about that.” I could not have agreed more. I dropped the shiny black thing right into the garbage bag-the third one we’d filled with the odd trash that everyone accumulates. Melinda and I were just not capable of returning 1998 sales slips, old tissues, and outdated catalogs to their original places, especially since we had no idea where those places had been.

We lifted the bare mattress and the box spring, we checked under the bed, and we shifted all the furniture slightly. We looked over, under, and inside everything.

After a vacuuming and a final look around, Melinda and I agreed that the bedroom was cleaner and more orderly than it had been before someone came into the house on Tuesday. For our grand finale, we remade the bed. The police had taken the linens to the lab.