An Accidental Woman Read online

  Chapter Ten

  Griffin had fun playing the role of telephone operator. Having been on the other end of the line enough times when he had called for information on Lake Henry and Poppy had blown him off, he did it now to others with flair. Three media calls came, and he was cordial but firm; Lake Henry had nothing to say on the matter of Heather Malone.He enjoyed the other calls, too. Now that he was playing backup for Poppy Blake, people didn’t shun him—or, in this instance, hang up on him. They asked where Poppy was and when she would be back. They asked who he was and knew precisely, once he gave his name. They asked why he had come, how long he was staying, and whether he was dating Poppy, and he answered in good humor, because the questions weren’t one-sided. From the postmaster, Nathaniel Roy, who called to say that Poppy hadn’t picked up her mail since Tuesday, he learned that she regularly read Newsweek, People, and the Patagonia catalog, which was no surprise, and Martha Stewart Living, which was. From the masseuse, he learned that she had a full-body massage every week, usually on Monday afternoons, though she wanted to change it this week, and if Griffin was interested, the menu included not only Swedish massage, but reflexology, hydromassage, and conditioning body scrubs. He learned that the logs in Poppy’s woodbin were replenished every week by the same man who plowed her road, that she had played the trumpet in junior high to the chagrin of her mother, who thought the trumpet was boyish and encouraged her to play the flute, and that every summer, she completed the cross-lake swim that was a Fourth of July tradition in town.

  He also learned that she hadn’t dated anyone special since Perry Walker. Two people told him that, and if they wouldn’t talk about Perry, that was fine. Griffin had already learned a bit about him, though none of it from Poppy.

  Between calls, he plugged in his computer and logged on to the Web. He checked his e-mail and found nothing urgent, so he went right on to his search for his sister. It was something he did often, a pastime of sorts, a puzzle that he simply kept at, over and over again. Though separated by seven years, Cindy and he were the two youngest of the siblings. A bond between them stemmed from that. Griffin hadn’t been any more able to keep her from leaving home than the others had, but he felt her loss more keenly—and he was the only one to whom she sent notes. They came few and far between, forwarded to him by his publisher du jour, and there was never a return address. What there was—always—was a New York postmark with a zip code that fell within a digit of the family brownstone.

  That was deliberate, Griffin knew. He didn’t believe for a minute that she was in New York, but guessed that she had friends who visited there and mailed her notes. Since tracing her from these was impossible, he had to settle for the solace of what she said—that she was alive and well and drug-free.

  He had a theory. She was a talented poet—a disturbed poet, some said, but Griffin had always felt too much loyalty to say that. If she was clean and thinking clearly, she would sell her work when she needed money.

  The crime, of course, was that she did have a trust fund. She could have access to it—could have all the money she wanted—if she told the family of her whereabouts. The fact that she should have to scrounge for money ate at Griffin.

  That said, she wasn’t without means. She would write. Poems, short stories, whatever. He was convinced of it.

  So while Ralph Haskins followed more conventionally clever PI channels, Griffin regularly searched the archives of three dozen magazines that printed the kinds of pieces he knew she could write. He searched the names of contributors and plugged in some of his own. He didn’t try Cynthia Hughes; she wouldn’t use that, because Ralph would pick it up.Nor would she use any variation of James, the brother who had given her drugs. Rather, Griffin typed in other appropriate possibilities. Most had to do with their mother, Rebecca, with whom Cindy had always had a love-hate relationship.

  So there was Rebecca Hughes, and Rebecca Russell, their mother’s maiden name. Elizabeth Russell was their maternal grandmother, and Elizabeth Casey, her maiden name. Griffin always tried Hugh Piper, taken from their father’s name, and combinations of their brother’s names, like Randi Griffin and Alexa Peters. On a given day, if he had time, he would try a bunch of others that might evoke a childhood memory.

  This day he didn’t have that time, so he simply ran the usual names, got the usual “no matches,” and logged off. Then he spread his working papers over the desk and put in a call to Prentiss Hayden. He had been prepared to talk as if he was heavily into the bio. Prentiss nixed that, though, by launching into a spirited, “My telephone says this call is from New Hampshire. I should have figured it out sooner. You’re up there, aren’t you?”

  “Sure am,” Griffin said nonchalantly. “Quiet places are great for writing.”

  “Hah. You’re up there for the DiCenza case. Who’s the article for this time?”

  “There’s no article. I just happen to know people here, and it is a good place to write.”

  “While you snoop around,” the senator said, but he sounded more interested than annoyed. “Are you learning anything interesting? There’s lots of talk down here. Give me something to share, so I’ll sound like I still have an iron or two in the fire.”

  “I don’t have much to share. We’re waiting this out, just like the rest of the country.”

  “Everybody’s speculating here, and not about nice things. It’s all ridiculous, of course, idle minds that have nothing better to do. As long as you’re not wasting your time on it. Did you get the information you needed from my army buddies?”

  “I did.” Griffin had told him that several weeks before. “I’ve incorporatedit into the body of the chaper on the war. I’m still worried about the other issue, though.”

  “What’s it like up there?” Prentiss asked deliberately. “Pretty town?”

  “You bet.” Another call lit up the board. “I’m going to have to run, Senator. I’ll get back to you, okay?”

  He took the next call. It was a local one and easily dispatched. When it was done, he returned the Hayden papers to his briefcase, not at all disappointed to put it off for another day.

  What did disappoint him was Victoria. She wouldn’t sit on his lap. He whistled softly. He promised her treats. He made kissing sounds. He patted his thighs. He lifted her once and actually set her there, but she bounded back down and sashayed to the sofa with her tail in the air. She walked carefully around it, still mapping her space, he guessed. Once she jumped onto the cushions, the top third of that tail was the only thing he could see from the desk. It moved down the sofa. In time, it stopped, twitched, lowered. When he dared peek over the sofa back, she was curled in a ball in the corner directly opposite the fire. It was Poppy’s spot, to judge from the chenille blanket on which Victoria so contentedly lay.

  Poppy’s spot. Poppy’s cat. Griffin had lost out on that one.

  Satisfied in an odd kind of way, he gave the phone bank several minutes to blink. When the buttons remained dark, he adjusted the headset for comfort and used one of Poppy’s lines to make a credit card call of his own. Ralph Haskins answered after a single ring.

  “Bad time?” Griffin asked.

  “Nah,” Ralph said. “I’m doin’ surveillance. But I don’t have much to tell you, or I’d have called you myself. I’m running into stone walls.”

  “As in stonewalling?”

  “You got it, Red. I don’t know whether the senator’s people made a recent round or whether the directive is still in effect from fifteen years ago, but I’m talking to people who knew Rob and knew Lisa, and they won’t say a thing. They claim that they don’t remember, or that it was too dark to see, or that they were way on the other side of the party on the night Rob died, which was pretty much what they told the police at the time.”

  “But I thought there were witnesses saying Lisa threatened Rob.”

  “There were. I’ve tracked down three of those, and they all have similar stories. They didn’t hear words. They saw anger and pushing.”

 
“By Lisa?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Griffin was dismayed. “If no one heard words, how could they say she was trying to extort him?”

  “It’s the family who claims that. They say there were phone calls to Rob in the days before she ran him down.”

  “That’s hearsay.”

  “Nope. The family claims Rob told them directly, or so the record reads. The family won’t answer my calls. I did find another ER appearance. It was in a clinic near Stockton. She used an assumed name and paid in cash, but after the murder, the staff was sure Lisa and that girl were one and the same.”

  “What name did she use?” Griffin asked, figuring it would be too much to ask that Lisa had used the name Heather Malone.

  “Mary Hendricks,” said Ralph.

  “M. H., rather than H. M. Is that a coincidence?”

  “I don’t know. Could be. Lisa and Mary have the exact same blood type, type A. The Feds say Heather does, too, but they’re not making much of that. Forty percent of Americans have type A blood.”

  “So what made her go to the clinic near Stockton?”

  “A pair of broken ribs.”

  Griffin swore softly. “Do we know Rob did it?”

  “She wasn’t seeing anyone else. So when I mentioned this second ER visit to one of the DiCenza people, I was told that Lisa was a troubled young woman who was a pathological liar with a history of self-inflicted wounds.”

  “That could be true,” Griffin thought aloud. “Or it could be that Lisa had a legitimate reason to fear for her life. I wish I knew her side of the story.”

  “So do the Feds, which brings me to another piece of news. Someone on the local FBI team played college football with Rob. He didn’t have much good to say about the guy. So, okay. Maybe he has an ax to grind. Maybe he resented the DiCenza privilege and power. But he flat-out saidRob was rough on girls. He said he’d witnessed one ugly incident where the girl might have been hurt if a group of them from the team hadn’t pulled Rob off.”

  “Do his higher-ups in the FBI know about this?”

  “Yes. They told him to keep his mouth shut.”

  “To forget it?”

  “No. Just to wait. That could be the same thing.”

  “I’m surprised he told you.”

  Ralph’s voice held a smile. “Yeah, well, he’s second-generation FBI, and I helped his old man once. You know how it is, Red. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

  And since Griffin’s family had scratched Ralph Haskins’ back to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, Griffin felt comfortable asking, “What about the other? Anything there?”

  Ralph’s tone went from smug to humble. “Nothing. She’s smart as a whip. Always was. I remember when I was over at the house and she used to sit there hanging on my every word. I’d think of Moonlighting or Remington Steele, and I’d picture her growing up to do something like that. I figured neither of those women had anything over our Cindy.” He made a self-deprecating sound. “She’s a clever one. Right from the start, she covered her tracks. Becoming invisible isn’t rocket science. A little ingenuity, and it’s done. I wouldn’t put it past her to be watching me doing the looking all this time.”

  Griffin thought of Heather Malone, with her lovely life in a bucolic town and no past to speak of. He imagined Cindy living like that somewhere. “So how do we find her?” he asked. His own little searches were coming up empty.

  “A tip,” Ralph said. “That’s the way it works. You get a lucky break, you talk to the right person, you get a tip.”

  Griffin thought of Randy’s case. He was thinking that he didn’t want to wait fifteen years to find Cindy, when he heard a car approaching the house. He felt a quickening at the thought of Poppy returning. “I’m impatient, I guess.”

  “I’ll keep on it.”

  “Thanks, Ralph.” He disconnected the call and would have gone tothe door if a button hadn’t lit up on the panel just then. It was Poppy’s private line. Hoping to look thoroughly in control when she walked through the door, he said a lyrical, “Poppy Blake’s residence.”

  “Who is this?” asked an accusing voice.

  “Who is this?” he asked right back.

  “Poppy’s sister, Rose.”

  “Rose, it’s Griffin.” They had met twice before, once in October and once yesterday. In both instances, he had sensed that Rose was a force to contend with. He would have liked to talk with her and win her over a bit, but this was not the time. Poppy was leaving the Blazer; he heard the door slam. And Rose wasn’t in a chatty mood.

  “Is Poppy there?” she asked coldly.

  “No.” And with that tone of voice, he wasn’t putting her on hold until Poppy came in. He could protect his girl. “May I take a message?”

  “Tell her I need to talk with her. Thanks.”

  The line went dead at the same time the front door opened, but Poppy didn’t wheel through. The woman who slipped in, set down a thermal bag, lowered the hood of her parka, and looked hopefully around was twenty-plus years older than Poppy. Her hair was short, dark, and cut stylishly enough so that even after being mussed by the hood, it fell well. Her eyes were gentle and her skin tanned. Below the parka were jeans and tall, Sherpa-lined boots. Her hands were graceful as they emerged from one glove, then the other. If ever there was an indication of how handsomely Poppy would age, Maida Blake was it.

  * * *

  Driving home, Poppy took several small skids. She blamed them first on the snow, then on the lousy job that someone had done plowing the roads. But the snow had let up well before she reached Lake Henry, and the roads were sanded, which meant—bottom line—that the fault was hers.She was distracted. She was fighting a panic that came in spurts. With each one, she accelerated. With each skid, she slowed.

  It’s no mistake. That was what Heather had mouthed. Poppy had been telling her about Griffin’s pictures of Lisa, and was remarking on the similarityin their looks. You can understand why someone made this mistake, Poppy had said.

  It’s no mistake, Heather mouthed.

  Poppy kept trying to find other words that might have looked the same. She kept telling herself that she had misread Heather’s lips. But she kept coming back to, It’s no mistake, and it left her stunned.

  No, not stunned.

  Well, maybe yes, stunned—by the enormity of the confession.

  But Poppy felt other things, too. She was disappointed. She was frightened. She was heartsick. She was confused. She was hurt, though she didn’t know why she should be. All these years, Heather hadn’t lied. She simply hadn’t told the truth.

  Well, hell, Poppy hadn’t either. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a good person now—at least, not if Griffin’s theory of growth was to be believed. He claimed people who experienced trauma could learn from it, wise up, and adapt. If so, Heather was a good person now. If she was responsible for Rob DiCenza’s death, there must have been justifiable cause.

  The only one that came to Poppy’s mind was self-defense, and the person she wanted to run it past was Griffin. But when she went down the newly plowed drive to her house, his truck wasn’t the only one there. Maida’s SUV was parked beside it.

  In a split second, Poppy ran through the list of people who might be driving Maida’s car while she was in Florida. A little voice inside, though, told her that it was Maida herself. There had been something in Maida’s tone the other day—something different, tentative, unsure.

  Uneasy on several counts, Poppy pulled up to the house. All the while she was wondering what Maida would be saying to Griffin and vice versa, and thinking that whatever it was, she wasn’t up for it.

  She quickly maneuvered out of the Blazer. The ramp was damp but free of snow. She was barely at the top when Maida opened the door and said with a grin and the kind of dry wit that Poppy didn’t usually see in her, “I’d shout ‘Surprise!’ except that isn’t my style.”

  Seeing the grin on her mother’s face, Po
ppy felt pleasure in spite of herself. “You’re not here, Mom. You’re in Florida.”

  “Oh, it got boring there,” Maida said breezily. “More was happeninghere, so I packed up and flew home. Someone must have seen me driving through town, though, because Rose just called here. Griffin said she sounded in a snit.” She gave an urgent little wave. “Come inside. It’s freezing.”

  “Did you call Rose back?”

  “No. She’ll hold. I wanted to see you first. Poppy, come in. You’ll catch cold.”

  Poppy crossed the porch and entered the house just as Griffin was pulling on his parka. He called out a discreet, “Did you have a good afternoon?”

  “Good” was not a word Poppy would use to describe the afternoon’s events, but suddenly she didn’t even want to think about them, much less get into the whole thing with Maida. So she said to him, “Are you leaving?”

  “I asked him to dinner,” Maida put in, ever the consummate hostess, “but he said he had work to do.” Poppy smelled something cooking. It was a familiar smell that brought back memories. She wondered how long Maida had been there.

  Griffin stretched the blue band over his head. “You and your mom want time together.”

  Poppy was thinking that she wasn’t sure about that, when a movement on the sofa caught her eye. She had forgotten about Victoria. But what a nice surprise she was. The cat was sitting on Poppy’s favorite chenille throw, simultaneously arching her back and stretching her front legs, looking as though she’d just woken up.

  “Did you meet my cat?” Poppy asked Maida.

  “Your cat?” Griffin asked.

  The words were barely out of his mouth when Victoria leaped off the sofa. With unerring aim, she approached Poppy. She slowed only for an orienting rub alongside one of the wheels, then she jumped right up. Poppy’s heart melted. Wool jacket and all, fingerless gloves and all, she wrapped her arms around the cat and, letting go of Heather’s confession in the balm of this warm little creature, buried her face in that soft orange fur. She imagined she smelled her own cologne there, picked up on the chenille throw, no doubt.