Charlaine Harris - Poppy Done to Death

“Are you jealous because I came to love Poppy rather than you?” Arthur asked as he came down the stairs. I remembered that yesterday I had wondered if I should be afraid of this man, and I’d had a friend with me then.

“No, I’m not jealous of Poppy, especially over your affections. I think Poppy loved life, but I think she lived it badly. I don’t think she ever appreciated what she had, or what she could do with it.”

Arthur stood right in front of me, looking down at me, and he was maybe a little puzzled. “What could Poppy have wanted that she didn’t have?” he asked.

Smarter lovers, for one thing.

“Poppy could have wanted stability, but instead she created instability. She could have wanted to heal from the badness in her past, but instead she clung to the… the emotional problems that caused her to live so… dangerously.” Maybe I sounded a tad pompous.

“She was wonderful,” Arthur said, unbelievingly. “She was smart, and she was funny, and she was pretty. Like you.”

“But unlike me, she liked to sneak,” I said bluntly. “Unlike me, she liked multiple partners. This isn’t about how great I am in contrast to Poppy. This is about you letting go of a dream of Poppy, a Poppy who never really existed. You can’t afford to pin her down this tightly, Arthur. Let her go, so you can look for who killed her.”

I wondered how much sleep Arthur had been getting. He was definitely on the smelly side, and he certainly needed a shave. That curly pale hair was dirty, and his shirt was rumpled.

“Was it you who searched the house after she died, Arthur? The one who searched her bedroom?”

“I think it was Bubba Sewell,” Arthur said. “He seemed awfully concerned with how long the house would be off-limits to the family. I don’t know what he was looking for.”

I did. “She didn’t take pictures of you?” I said, unwisely.

“Pictures? What the hell are you talking about?”

“When were you with her? It’s been almost two years, right?” I’d just had the worst idea in the world. I was wondering if you added Chase’s age, plus nine months…

“Less than that,” he said, and my heart sank. Arthur was a candidate for Chase’s father.

“Oh, well, doesn’t make any difference,” I said bracingly. “What were you actually doing here today, Arthur? Were you just mooning around, or were you working on the investigation?” Poppy must have had a higher regard for Arthur than for the others, but I wasn’t up to explaining to Arthur why that was so.

“A little of both,” Arthur said. His voice was mild, which was a relief. “I’ve been talking to Sandy Wynn. She called Poppy that day, said she was coming to talk to her. She admits she was here the morning Poppy was murdered.”

“Did she do it?”

“She says that when she got here, Poppy was already dead.”

“Where did she park her car? Did anyone see her car?”

“The woman across the street. Almost everyone on this street goes to work in the morning, but this woman, the one who also described the Sewells’ van, incidentally, was home with the runs that morning. In between trips to the bathroom, she sat in her living room and watched television, with the front curtains open. She didn’t get a good look at Lizanne, but a better one at Sandy. She picked her picture out of a photo array. Sandy parked down the street, in the driveway of a house for sale, and walked up to Poppy’s.”

“Why would she do that if she didn’t plan on doing something bad?”

“She planned on talking Poppy into giving her something, something that belonged to Marvin Wynn. Of course, thanks to you and Melinda, we know what that thing is-the letter. Sandy broke down when I showed it to her. She said Poppy forced Marvin to write that letter by threatening to tell John David and the rest of the world what Marvin had done when Poppy was a teenager. Poppy swore that if Marvin would write such a letter, she’d never tell. He did what she demanded, but as time went on, Marvin regretted it more and more. He began to lose sleep, and slide into depression. Sandy got scared for him.”

“Why would Poppy do such a thing, stay silent? Why wouldn’t she tell? Why make any bargain? He was in the wrong, and she was so young.”

“Her word against his. No evidence. Poppy was in her thirties, way beyond her teens. Nothing would have come of it.”

“Nothing but the ruin of his reputation,” I pointed out. “No matter if it came to court or not, Poppy would have ruined him forever. Plenty of people would have believed her.”

“But it would have ruined her, too, in the process. At the very least, it would have made her life, and John David’s and the baby’s, very painful for a few months.”

I mulled that over. “So this way, with her demanding he write the letter, he could believe she’d never tell, and she could believe he’d never make passes at young girls again?”

“I guess that was Poppy’s thinking.”

“Do you believe Sandy? Do you believe she didn’t kill Poppy?”

“Yes. She was too stricken to think about stepping over Poppy’s body to search for the letter that morning. I believed her when she said it just didn’t occur to her. She did her best to get the letter back once Poppy was dead, but I don’t believe she killed Poppy for it. I think she did walk to the gate in the front of the fence when Poppy wouldn’t come to the door, which Sandy says was then locked.”

But it hadn’t been locked when I tried it. I was getting more and more confused.

“So she walked over to the fence at the side of the house, came in the gate, and walked around to the sliding glass doors,” I said. “And there she saw Poppy’s body?”

“Yes. She says she cried for a while, then left the way she’d come, and drove back home. By the time she got there, she was hearing from us here that Poppy was dead. She and Marvin packed up and returned to Lawrenceton. She never told Marvin where she’d been.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, trying not to get sidetracked by my rush of disgust at having put them up in my house. “So, Sandy leaves, the front door is locked, and she doesn’t have the letter. Then Lizanne comes?”

“No, Lizanne came first. She, too, knocked on the front door, got no answer, went to the fence and heard a quarrel, heard Poppy’s radio, decided she couldn’t ream Poppy out, not with someone else here. She threw something onto the ground.” Here Arthur gave me a very sharp look. “Something that later vanished. And then she left. Then Sandy walked up, left within five minutes. Then you and Melinda came, and you found the front door open.”

I had a sudden idea, and I walked down the little hall to the kitchen. It was in better shape than it had been when we arrived yesterday. Melinda and I hadn’t searched it, but we had straightened it and cleaned the counters and stovetop. Poppy’s little radio still sat on the counter, though now it was dustless.

I pressed a button to turn it on, and when the music came on, I looked at Arthur expectantly.

“What?” he said. His voice sounded quite businesslike, brisk. He’s back to being himself, I thought.

“When Lizanne described her experience here that day, the day Poppy died, she said she’d walked to the fence.” I gestured to my left, which was where the gate in the fence was at the front. “She said the music was so loud, she couldn’t hear what the voices were saying, but she said the music was classical, that the radio was broadcasting NPR. This radio isn’t on a classical station. I checked it the other day. So if we assume that the person Poppy was talking to was the person who killed her, and Poppy therefore didn’t survive after that visit to change radio stations, then it wasn’t Poppy’s radio that was on.”