All She Wrote

by Josh Lanyon

  “Tell me about Poppy,” J.X. asked, probably to distract me—much like the sheriffs do with their mortally wounded deputies in all those old westerns.

  “She’s…different. I couldn’t really get a fix on her. Apparently her husband died in some kind of accident last year and left her a bundle. I don’t think she likes men.”

  “You mean—”

  “No. I think she’s heterosexual, I think she just dislikes men. I think she’s got a lot of aggressions for whatever reason.” I described the story she’d contributed to the group for him.

  “Wow.”

  “That was, in varying degrees, kind of the reaction of everyone else in the group. In fact, I think she made Nella sick to her stomach. Literally. The story is pretty graphic. Nella’s story had a lot of violence too, but it was all lyrical and symbolic. Poppy’s approach was what you might call cut and dried.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yep. That was my reaction reading it.” I hoped he hadn’t noticed how hard I was breathing. My shoulder was aching like a sonofabitch. Why had I thought making like Scott heading for the South Pole was such a grand scheme? I was beginning to think I’d end this expedition the same way.

  “Is there any conjecture her husband’s death wasn’t an accident?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t come up over the finger sandwiches and tea. She did make a weird comment when Sara was critiquing her story. I forget the exact wording, but Sara said something like the protagonist of Poppy’s story would never have the nerve to commit murder, and Poppy answered to the effect that it went to show how little Sara knew.”

  “Hmm.”

  I knew what that noncommittal hmm meant. I said, “It’s not what she said—well, it is partly what she said—but it was kind of the tone too. Like she let her anger get the better of her. And Victoria cut in right away, as though she was trying to keep Poppy from saying something damaging.”

  “You think Poppy killed her husband and Victoria knows about it?”

  “Maybe. I realize Victoria could have merely been trying to keep Poppy from saying something stupid. She does present all the symptoms of terminal open-mouth-insert-foot disease.” I added, “If Poppy did murder her better half, I don’t see her killing herself out of remorse.”

  “But there might be other things going on that you’re not aware of. Financial problems, legal problems, health problems.”

  “True.”

  “Did you want to stop and rest for a few minutes?”

  “God yes.”

  His laugh was not unkind as he brushed snow off a flat-topped rock that provided a natural bench.

  After I saw Victoria’s farmhouse I had to revise my idea about possible motives for murder. It was one of those cute, rambling places that provide the domestic centerpiece of films like Bringing Up Baby or Christmas in Connecticut. I’d have killed for a place like that: old stone and dormer windows, Dutch doors and gingerbread trim. Lamps shone in welcome from behind the mullioned windows.

  There was no front porch, only a stoop beneath the white-frosted overhang. We—okay, I—staggered up the single step and hammered at the wooden surface half-concealed by the enormous evergreen wreath.

  The door swung open and Victoria gazed at us in open surprise.

  “Chris!”

  “Hi there. We were…er, out walking.” As cover stories went, it wasn’t much, but you have to work with the tools you have. In my case, hypothermia and blisters.

  “Did you lose your way?”

  I heard the small sound J.X. made behind me, but I ignored it. “How’s Poppy? Is she still staying with you?”

  “Well, yes. But…” Her gaze veered from me to J.X. and back to me again. Reluctantly, she stepped back, holding the door wide. “Poppy’s feeling much better. Come in, both of you. You must be freezing.”

  The interior of the house lived up to the promise of the exterior: big rooms with open beamed ceilings, built-in bookshelves, old-fashioned wallpaper, comfortable chintz-covered furniture.

  Victoria led us straight through to the front room where a fire was burning in the grate.

  “I can’t believe that you’re out hiking after just getting out of the hospital.”

  “I didn’t realize how far it was.” That, at least, was the gospel truth.

  “How are things over at the house? Is Anna feeling any better?”

  “She’s better, yes. Still weak, though.”

  “Weak?” Victoria sounded puzzled. “Well, of course it was a shock, and Anna was very fond of Nella.”

  I stopped walking and J.X. halted short of crashing into me. “Then you don’t know?”

  “Know what?” Victoria turned to face me. If she was faking it, she was a better actress than me. Er, than I’d expected.

  In the wide room beyond her I could see Poppy. She lay on a long blue chintz sofa, her broken leg propped on pillows. She looked pretty comfy, all things considered. She was staring wide-eyed at us over the top of Vogue magazine.

  “Sara Mason is dead,” I said. “The whole house was struck with food poisoning last night. Sara had it the worst.”

  The magazine in Poppy’s hand slipped and crashed onto the table, knocking her coffee mug and sandwich plate to the floor.

  The two of them stared at us in open horror.

  “I thought you knew,” I said. “It didn’t dawn on me that you might not.” If I’d realized, I might have tried to break it more gently, though admittedly this did give us better opportunity to examine their reactions.

  Victoria seemed to gather herself. “We’ve had the TV off all day. I don’t listen to the radio and we haven’t used our laptops since…” She cleared her throat. “No one called us.”

  “It’s still pretty chaotic over there with the police and all.”

  “Police,” they echoed.

  “You said food poisoning.” Poppy’s tone was accusing.

  “Did I?”

  “Yes.” That was J.X. Always a stickler for accuracy, that guy.

  “I guess I did. I don’t think the police have determined the exact substance used, except that whatever it was, it was probably administered through the wine we had at dinner last night.”

  “Wine?” Victoria whispered right before she fell over in a dead faint.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As you might imagine, J.X. is much better at scraping damsels in distress off the carpeting than yours truly. Even not counting the injured shoulder and bad back.

  He scooped up Victoria practically before she hit the ground, well within the five-second rule. If she’d been a potato chip, he could have still eaten her. Not something I particularly wanted to contemplate.

  Poppy was squawking as she hauled herself off the sofa and hopped out of the way. J.X. replaced her with Victoria who was already coming around all twitchy and fluttery.

  “Where am I?” she breathed, gazing bewilderedly up at the ring of faces surrounding her.

  Poppy ignored her—and with dialog like that, I couldn’t blame her. “Is it true? Sara’s dead? Poisoned?”

  “It’s true that she’s dead. She appears to have been poisoned. I really can’t say more than that.”

  “No, you can’t.” J.X. gave me a stern look. But if he’d had views on what I should or shouldn’t say, he should have expressed them earlier. Like during our journey through the Northwest Passage.

  “When did it happen?”

  “She died during the night. We don’t know anything else. Not for sure,” I added conscientiously.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone want to kill Sara? I mean sure, she was a snotty, cold bitch—”

  “Poppy,” moaned Victoria.

  Poppy shut up.

  “No love lost, huh?” I asked.

  “I didn’t like her, no. But I didn’t kill her. How could I? Why would I?”

  “Sara wasn’t the intended victim. Anna was the intended victim.”

  They exchanged distressed looks. Victoria made more of those
protesting noises. Poppy said nothing.

  “Wait a minute,” J.X. intervened. “This is all supposition. We don’t know that it wasn’t food poisoning; let alone who the intended victim might have been.”

  “It wasn’t food poisoning if the problem was with the wine.”

  “We don’t know that for a fact yet either. You’re jumping the gun, Kit.”

  “It had to be the wine. That’s the only thing all of you had that I didn’t.”

  Victoria said faintly, “I brought Anna a bottle of red wine when I arrived for the weekend seminar.”

  Neither of us had an immediate answer to that.

  Poppy said finally, “Oh.”

  “Where did the wine come from?” J.X. asked.

  Victoria put a hand to her forehead. “I bought it.”

  J.X. and I asked at the same time, “Where?”

  “I-I don’t remember.”

  “When did you buy it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t even drink wine,” Poppy said.

  Victoria lowered her hand and shot Poppy a look that would have shut anyone else up. Not Poppy.

  “Well? You don’t drink wine.”

  “It was a gift. I didn’t plan on drinking it.”

  “Then you must have only recently bought it. How can you not remember where?”

  Victoria looked outraged. “Shut up, Poppy.”

  “Do you have a receipt?” J.X. asked.

  “No.”

  As I regarded her unhappy, angry face, a thought occurred. “Was the wine a gift to you?”

  Score. I could tell by her red face. Regifting. You gotta love it.

  “Who gave you the wine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I could see by Poppy’s expression that she and I were finally in agreement on something. “Why are you protecting this person?” I demanded. I really couldn’t follow her logic. “You’re probably next on her list.”

  “Kit.”

  “But she could be in danger herself.” Assuming she hadn’t bought and poisoned the wine and then concocted this story as a cover. J.X. was shaking his head.

  “I don’t know who gave me the wine. I swear.” Victoria sat up in her earnestness. “I never knew. I got it at Christmas in a Secret Santa gift exchange.”

  “A what?” J.X. and I shared looks.

  Poppy explained, “It’s where a bunch of people exchange names anonymously and buy each other cheapo Christmas presents they’d be otherwise embarrassed to purchase. Victoria’s always participating in that kind of thing.”

  I asked, “Don’t you find out who your Secret Santa is after you exchange gifts?”

  Victoria nodded.

  “Then you must know—”

  She was shaking her head. “No. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The name tag must have fallen off. I never knew who gave the wine to me. I belonged to two different Secret Santa exchanges last year. It could have been someone from either group.”

  I looked at J.X. He said, “Can you make a list of everyone who took part in the two gift trades?”

  “Why should she?” That was, predictably, Poppy. She hopped over to one of the wide chintz-covered chairs and lowered awkwardly to the fat cushions. “What authority do you two have to start butting into this? Isn’t this for the police to dig into?”

  “Anna asked for our help.” I could feel J.X.’s gaze. I ignored it. Anna was the queen bee in this circle, and the only person likely to thwart her wishes was, in my opinion, the person who wanted her dead. And even that person was unlikely to openly oppose Anna.

  “I don’t have anything to hide.” Victoria lost what little color she’d regained. “I’ll make the list. I can’t believe that there was anything wrong with the wine. That would mean…” She stopped, swallowed, gazed at us all with wide, stricken eyes.

  “You were the actual target,” I said.

  It pretty much took any pretense at social out of our social call.

  “We never did get a chance to question Poppy.” J.X. and I were back in our bedroom at the main house. He sat on the side of the bed tugging at his boots while I paced up and down.

  He muttered, “It’s moot, don’t you think?”

  “What is?” I stopped pacing.

  We’d ended up calling for a ride back—I’d had to cry uncle, an elderly uncle, it felt like—and admit I wasn’t up to another long walk through the snow. Luke had retrieved us in a rattletrap of a station wagon.

  Initially it had seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity to question Luke, but he wasn’t the chatty type. He had responded to all attempts to initiate conversation with grunts—when he bothered to respond at all. Short of an unvarnished interrogation, which we had neither time nor authorization for, there was no way to casually interview him.

  I’d spent the entire drive gazing at the back of his head, staring at the rumpled Fabio-like mane while commenting fruitlessly on the weather and the road and life in general in a vain attempt to draw Luke out. J.X. had, unhelpfully in my opinion, gazed out the window at the white landscape bumping and bouncing by as the station wagon hit every snow-covered pothole and rock in the dirt road.

  Anyway, Luke wasn’t a major concern for me anymore. The police would surely investigate Luke more thoroughly than we could. I was now convinced that the lead to follow was Victoria’s mysterious bottle of wine.

  On that score at least, J.X. had seemed of the same mind. “I don’t know about you, but Poppy didn’t strike me as particularly depressed.” He tossed his left boot to the side of the bed.

  I absently considered that discarded boot. It seemed, I dunno, sort of territorial the way he tossed his belongings around my room. Granted, it was his room too. That was the whole idea of sharing a room. But I wouldn’t have been so comfortable so fast.

  I said automatically, “Plus, it’s hard to believe that if Poppy was involved she’d be so…indiscreet. If I’d killed someone, I don’t think I’d go out of my way to point out how much that person needed killing.”

  J.X. shrugged. “The genius mastermind criminal is pretty much a myth. The average bad guy—or girl—is a lot more likely to be found trying to audition for America’s Dumbest Criminals.”

  I snorted. “Either way, this anonymously gifted bottle of wine has to be significant.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe about it. Either Victoria has been the target all along, or Victoria is the killer.”

  Hands locked around his right boot, he tipped his head, studying me. “Slow down, Kit. First, we don’t know that the poison—well, to start with, we don’t know that poison was involved—but if poison was used, we don’t know that it came from Victoria’s bottle of wine. We have no idea what bottle of wine was used last night. Secondly—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that in the midst of someone trying to kill Anna, there are these two totally random accidents. That’s just—it’s just impossible to believe. It’s…bad fiction. These things have to be connected.”

  “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

  I gave him a look of disgust.

  “Okay, okay. But I find it equally hard to believe that someone is trying to knock off both Anna and Victoria.”

  He had me there. It did seem unlikely. I sighed. “I know. The car accident and the anonymous bottle of wine couldn’t have been aimed at Anna, which means Victoria had to be the target—which is almost harder to believe than the idea of Victoria as a cold-blooded murderess willing to wipe out entire dinner parties to achieve her ends. No pun intended.”

  J.X. was grinning, though I failed to see what was so amusing him.

  “Yes?” I inquired shortly.

  “I don’t know. It’s just…you’re cute when you’re all worked up.” He pulled off his boot and tossed it over with the other.

  “Do you mind focusing here?”

  He stretched out on the bed, propping his head on his hand. “Why don
’t you lock the door?”

  “Huh?”

  “We’ve got a couple of hours before dinner. Why don’t we have a nap together and see what…transpires?”

  I put my hands on my hips and scowled forbiddingly at him. My disapproval seemed to sail right past him. He smiled at me, his teeth very white against the outline of his beard. It was an appealing smile, I admit.

  “You’re not taking this seriously enough.”

  “Honey, the police are involved now. Our role is primarily moral support for Anna. If you want to bat theories back and forth, I’m fine with that, but—” A wide yawn cut him off. I had a front-row view of his epiglottis before he continued, “I’m running short of sleep. As are you. Why don’t we discuss this lying down?”

  “Hmph!” I replied.

  J.X.’s smile went still wider—and seemingly whiter. “Come on, Kit. Relax for a few minutes.”

  I was very tired. I’d been tired before the two-mile hike to Victoria’s. I probably hadn’t had more than three hours sleep the night before. And not a restful three hours at that. The mere idea of kicking my shoes off and lying down was seductive—let alone the idea of lying down in J.X.’s brawny arms.

  I went to the door and locked it. Returning to the bed, I tugged one-handedly at my own boots.

  He raised his head. “You want some help?”

  “No.” I couldn’t help the note of irritation. I’ve never been good at needing help, let alone asking for it. I finally got my boots off and flopped back on the tapestry coverlet.

  J.X.’s hand closed on my good shoulder. “You’re so far away. C’mere. Get comfortable.”

  I groaned, but moved with a great deal of wincing and flinching. I felt best on my back with a pillow bracing my injured shoulder, but even that wasn’t comfortable. I was supposed to wear the damned sling for a minimum of six weeks and thinking of that put me in a horrible mood.

  J.X. watched the production, still smiling. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Terrible. How’s the stomach?”

  “Much better.”

  I sighed, settling down next to J.X. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me closer, and despite the fact that my mending collarbone was not happy with that particular position, there was great comfort in resting in his arms. He leaned his face against mine. His lips were soft, so soft against my jaw. I could feel his eyelashes flickering against my skin, feel his warm breath.