“I always loved Poppy. I got mad at her a lot. She was a woman with a lot of secrets,” he said, his voice just as low and controlled. “But I loved her. Just not the way you think people ought to love. You’re such a straight arrow. Life has no spice unless you have adventures.” He even smiled, just a faint one, but a smile nonetheless.
If my hands had been free at that moment, I might have tried to throttle him. “You’re right,” I said, so furiously that Chase whimpered. “I don’t understand. I’ll never understand.” I fought to keep my voice under control. “I am really glad you’re taking care of Chase. But it is beyond my comprehension, how you and Poppy could live like you did.”
“She was a complicated woman. She had some bad breaks when she was in her early teens,” John David said. “I would have liked it if we’d been different, I swear I would. I didn’t set out to be… like I am. But we made a pattern, and it was one that let us live together, and I thought it would be okay.”
It was like we had both taken a little truth serum. I had never imagined having such a conversation. But it was actually kind of refreshing to openly acknowledge their fractured marriage.
“So,” I began, then paused. “You both always knew? When the other was seeing someone else?”
He nodded, and I felt my mouth twist with distaste. Abruptly, I was nauseated by the idea of such a union, and baffled by the point of it.
The baby was getting heavier and heavier. I got up very slowly and carefully and placed him in the bassinet that had been set up by the bed. Whether John David had brought it from the house or the motel had rolled it in, I didn’t know, but I was glad it was there so I could put Chase down without my back positively breaking.
“John David,” I said very softly, looking down at the sleeping child, “who do you think killed her?”
“I think maybe it was her mother,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I’d hate to think Sandy would do something like that, but you don’t know that family. Let me tell you, any sick pattern you think Poppy and I had, she learned it from her own mom and dad. She’d never get into details, but she never wanted them here. She’d be pretty open about everything else.”
“She talked about the other men?”
“Arthur most of all. He was always obsessive about her. I think it’s pretty damn peculiar that the police chief has Arthur on the case, unless Arthur’s persuaded him he’s found a possible suspect. Arthur kind of transferred all those feelings he had about you to Poppy. He even talked to Poppy about you, all the time at first.”
This was more than I wanted to know.
“And then there were others.”
I shook my head. “I can’t understand.”
“She used them, you know,” he said. He leaned forward, his hands between his knees. I wondered if he’d be able to build a healthy relationship with anyone after this. “They were always some use to her. Or after it was over, she made them useful in some way.”
“What about you?” I asked, not able to think about Poppy anymore. “Is that the way you picked your… friends?”
“No.” He shrugged, “I just wanted something simple.” After a minute, I realized that he was crying, and I patted him on the shoulder, gave him a little peck on the forehead, and left to search his house.
“We could have hired someone to do this,” Melinda said. We were standing in the middle of the chaos in what had once been a perfectly ordinary suburban home.
“Yes,” I agreed. “We could have. But whatever’s hidden here, it’s us that needs to find it.” Ungrammatically and inelegantly as I’d put it, Melinda’s dark eyes widened as she considered what I’d said.
She nodded. “Whatever it is.”
“It’s not going to be easy. The Wynns would have found it, if it were easy. And when we do find it, no one needs to see it but us.”
“The police?”
“We’ll see.”
“So we’re like detectives?” Melinda smiled weakly. “Well, that’s a new role for me. I already have so many hats, I can’t wear them all at one time.”
“Hey, we’re more than detectives,” I said, trying to make my voice bracing and hearty. “We’re Uppity Women.”
“So we are.”
By 10:30, we were putting books back on the shelves in the study. We dusted the books first, since neither of us was capable of reshelving anything that needed a run-over with a rag. And we checked each book for enclosures, too.
Nothing fell from the pages, no matter how hard we shook. The desks were absolutely normal, too. Melinda and I were neat and methodical in our search. We didn’t talk much at first, because we were intent on what we were doing, and because we were trying to move quickly.
Melinda balked after forty minutes. “It’s not the work I mind,” she said abruptly; “it’s the fact that you think we ought to judge whether or not the police get whatever we find.”
“You know that Arthur Smith was Poppy’s lover?”
She nodded.
“You want him to decide whether or not something’s relevant?”
“I’ve been wondering…” she said after a moment. “I’ve been wondering if Arthur didn’t actually… If he might…”
“You think Arthur might have killed Poppy?” I was shocked, but not as shocked as I might have been. “He’s got an obsessive personality,” I admitted. “He’s got lots of know-how.” Who was better qualified to be a murderer than a policeman?
I dusted the same book (a pharmaceutical dictionary of John David’s) over and over as I thought about Arthur. “But you know, Melinda… their affair was long over. If he’d still been involved with her, I would say it might even be likely.” I thought some more, trying to picture Arthur knocking on Poppy’s glass door.
“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to picture that any longer. “But that’s why I think we need to talk about just burning whatever we find. However, first, we’ve got to find something.”
After an hour and a half, we had the office picked up, dusted, vacuumed, and searched. We had found absolutely nothing besides the usual detritus of any home filled with busy people. Poppy had an overdue bill from Davidson’s that I knew I should bring to John David’s attention (it had gotten stuck to another paper with some jelly), and she hadn’t sent in her latest book club notice, so I put that on top of the little pile of due bills so John David would see it first.
The most exciting thing Melinda had found was one of a pair of earrings that Poppy had been trying to find for a month or more. I remembered her telling us, in her dramatic way, how she would just cry if she didn’t find the missing earring. We cried a little ourselves when Melinda held it up.
Figuring John David wouldn’t mind, we got some sliced ham out of the refrigerator and made sandwiches, in the process throwing out some leftovers that were obviously way past their prime. Cleaning out the refrigerator hadn’t been high on Poppy’s priority list. I took the first full garbage bag out the sliding glass door to the large garbage can Poppy kept there. After I tossed it in, I breathed in the clear, chilly air for a minute. My lungs felt dusty from all the books. Standing there looking at the back fence jogged a memory. I turned back into the kitchen and looked around. Yes, there on the counter was a radio. I examined it to locate the on button, then punched it. The music that came into the room, admittedly on the loud side, was not the classical or jazz music I usually heard on NPR, but a classic rock station based in Lawrenceton.
Well, there was another puzzle. Lizanne had said that when she’d approached the gate to the backyard, she’d heard the radio playing loudly, loudly enough to obscure the voices at Poppy’s back door. And that was when Poppy must have been murdered. But Poppy’s radio wasn’t on NPR.