Poppy Done to Death

"Yes, she was next on the list after Poppy."

"And she's so energetic."

"All that exercise. She has to do something to keep busy, since she doesn't work, I guess."

"I'm glad Avery isn't a doctor. They're gone so much. Swimming is lots better than eating when you're lonely, like I do." Melinda cast a disparaging eye down at her own somewhat-rounded stomach.

"You look great to me."

"Well, I can hardly fit into the size I was wearing before I had Charles," Melinda said frankly. She was punching buttons on the phone. "I have to check in at home."

I was left staring at a wedding picture of John David and Poppy. I tried to imagine maintaining a marriage so screwed up that the partners would not be interested in each other's infidelity. My mother had certainly cared when my father had been unfaithful. Boy, had she cared! Though they would never have fought in front of me, I'd been a teen, and I'd been aware of the thick tension in our house.

I recalled John David crying that morning in the motel room, and I tried to grasp what people could do to each other short of killing each other. In the background, I heard Melinda's voice as she talked to her baby-sitter, her laughter as the girl probably passed along something cute Marcy had said.

My mind wandered back to the previous Monday, the day of Poppy's death. My phone call from her, our conversation. How irritated Melinda and I had been with our sister-in-law.

Our drive over to Swanson Lane, my march into the house. The unlocked front door.

I wondered if Poppy usually kept it locked, or if her mother had surprised her by just walking in. My eyes opened wide as I considered this new idea. Why had Sandy picked that particular time to try to retrieve the letter? It had been dated a year and half ago. That meant that when Poppy had been pregnant, she had demanded that letter from her father in exchange for—what? Marvin's never seeing his grandchild? Poppy wouldn't have known then that she'd have a boy.

Okay, back to the basic memory, I told myself. The front door had been open. I had walked in. I had called up the stairs. I had walked up the stairs. The shower had been dry, so I'd known Poppy had been out of it for a while. The room had been neat; the bed had been made. The closet door had been shut. I could even picture my feet moving downstairs in those shoes, my favorites. Then I'd seen Moosie, right? (Who was still missing, incidentally. I made a mental note to check on that.)

The cat had stropped my ankles, then run ahead of me into the kitchen. I'd felt the cold air keenly, the closer I got to the back of the house. When I'd come into the kitchen and looked over the breakfast bar to my left, I'd seen the glass door open.

I hadn't been able to see Poppy's body until I'd come around the end of the breakfast bar with its high stools. There was Poppy's body, sprawled on the floor. She lay half in and half out the door, partially on the rug under the dining table, partially on the linoleum. I'd heard Cara splashing in the pool. I'd looked out into the backyard, over Poppy's body, and seen the concrete around Poppy's own pool dotted with darker water stains. Looked down again at Poppy, horribly dead, her hands ... I had to gulp back my nausea.

Could Sandy Wy

The older I got, the less I seemed able to understand or predict the behavior of those around me. Instead of gaining wisdom, so that people seemed simpler, I learned more about the complexity of human nature.

"So, what do you think?" Melinda's voice made me jump.

"I think that we've probably found everything there is to find," I said. "I may be wrong, and if I am, there'll be hell to pay. We didn't find anything of Arthur's, for example, and we know he was one of Poppy's lovers. Maybe that means he was already here, searching. Maybe he's the one who trashed the bedroom. Maybe he just wouldn't let her photograph him, or he was too alert for her to risk taking some little memento. Or maybe that black underwear was his." Melinda and I wore matching expressions of disgust as we considered that.

"You sure he wasn't the one in the, you know, the picture with Poppy?" She carefully found something else to look at while I tried to remember. It wasn't that Arthur had looked awful naked—quite the contrary—but I just couldn't remember. There hadn't been anything outstanding in the pertinent department.

"I just don't know," I said finally, and Melinda nodded. "To return to our original subject, I just don't think Poppy would have risked hiding anything really awful down here in the more or less public rooms. Not only might John David have found it but also she'd have realized Chase would be walking very soon. And there were other people in and out. Baby-sitters and friends, and other lovers even. I think we've found it all, or very close to all."

"But are we comfortable with stopping now? Just letting the chips fall where they may?"

Melinda was sitting opposite me, her thin hands folded together. I tried to pretend I had some energy. I sat up straight.

"Yes, I think so," I said, not sounding sure at all.

"You're right," Melinda said more decisively. She was sure enough for the two of us. "I think she put everything, um, naughty up in their room, where she could keep a close eye on it, and I think we've found everything. I can't imagine another hiding place in that room. We looked everywhere."

"No, we didn't."

"What?"

"We didn't look in the needlepoint cushion of that chair."

Melinda knew instantly what I meant. She was out of the kitchen and up the stairs in that smooth, unhurried stride that made her look so efficient. She was back in a moment, cushion in hand.

She handed it to me, and I looked it over. Poppy had done the needlepoint for the top of the flat cushion herself. I have no craft ability whatsoever, so I couldn't have told you what kind of pattern it was, but the design was thistles on a cream background. The top was shaped like a large pancake to match the round seat of the chair. The bottom of the cushion was covered in a sage green silky material. It had turned out real pretty. Now we were about to deface it.

"I feel bad about this," I said, hesitating over the pretty thing. A dead woman's hands had crafted this, and I was reluctant to begin. I wriggled the padding in a sort of wave motion, and I felt something rustle inside the cushion.

"Oh hell, there's something in there," I told Melinda.

We looked at each other with a kind of despair. I felt dirty outside because of all the dust we'd stirred up in the corners of the bedroom—though that had been easy enough to clean up—and I felt dirty inside because of all the dirt we'd discovered in Poppy's life—which wasn't easy to dispose of at all. It was a neat parallel, and it made me sick. I never wanted to know this much about another human being, I decided. People needed their secrets. My mother had always told me that ignorance is dangerous, but the way I felt now, ignorance would be true bliss.

Melinda said, "I can sew it shut if we just cut a thin slit."

The sharpest knife we could find glided easily into the sage green material. Melinda held the cushion absolutely flat and still while I enlarged the opening. Melinda's fingers were far longer than mine, so she assumed the task of extraction. Tweezed between her long forefinger and middle finger, the piece of paper hissed like a snake against the silk as she drew it out.

I unfolded the paper with as much terror as if it had been an actual reptile.

It was the results of a DNA test. "A paternity test," I told Melinda. "It looks like Poppy took two samples in to be tested against Chase's DNA. She paid for it up front, cash. Get this—it was ordered by Dr. Stuart Embler." I looked at Melinda significantly, then returned my attention to the letter. "She told them—well, I can't figure out exactly what she told them, but subject A was not the father, and Subject B was."