Poppy
And here sits Lillith. One of the wealthiest women around. Famous war photographer.
Her mother?
“I don’t believe you.”
She looks up at him. He gives a small nod. Almost kind.
Poppy’s heart crumples upon itself. Confusion screams around the edges of her brain. She’s been hit by a bombshell—it’s still exploding in slow motion through her body, and she’s shocked. Dazed. Numb.
“Why? Why did you do it? Why tell me now, after all these years. Is—is this some kind of sick joke? A game?”
But as she utters the questions, she’s struck with the memory of the quote in Lillith’s Death List book.
Nothing sharpens one’s focus quite like the news of one’s imminent death.
That’s why. Lillith’s illness. Her imminent demise. Tying off the loose ends of her life.
Poppy is just another fucking loose end.
Find Poppy.
Lure Poppy.
Deal with Poppy.
End it with Poppy.
“What do you want?” Bitterness laces her question.
“You saw my list?”
Heat flares into her face. She glances at the closet. Closed now. Can’t see the safe inside.
“I knew you’d look, if I left it open.”
Poppy closes her eyes, overwhelmed.
“I know you went through my medications, Poppy. You’re trained as a nursing aide. You have a palliative background. I knew you’d figure it out—that I’m dying.”
Anger begins to leak into her shock, and it surges up inside her like a defensive wave. She welcomes it. She allows it to wash throughout her veins and spread to the very tips of her fingers and toes. She allows the anger to turn toward rage.
“So you abandoned a newborn. You were too busy becoming a famous war correspondent to allow your duty as a mother to get in your way. You were too damn chicken to even go through a proper adoption process in order to give me away. And now you want to come back into my life and mess with my heart and fucking soul and confess? So you can die in peace? Fuck you, Lillith. Fuck you to hell!”
She surges to her feet and marches to the door.
Avi steps in her way.
She shoves both hands into his chest.
“Fuck you, too, you goon. Get out of my way.”
He doesn’t move. Poppy hesitates, thinking of his flick-knife.
Get rid of Arra.
No good for my Patrick.
She spins back to face Lillith. “What really happened to Arrabella on Crete?”
Lillith gestures to the chair. “Sit, Poppy. We need to have this out. I understand your anger. I deserve it. But this is not just about me. I need to tell you something in order to keep you safe after I’m gone.”
Poppy swallows.
“Please.”
Slowly, she returns to the chair, sits.
“I don’t know what happened to Arra,” Lillith says. “That’s the truth.”
“Your list—you wrote—”
“‘Get rid of Arra,’ I know. Love is blind, Poppy. Patrick was unable to see, or unable to admit to himself, what Arrabella is. A seductive and transactional vulture. She’s still seeing her ex.
She has other sexual dalliances on the side.
But she’s after the McGregor legacy. I just wanted Patrick to see her for what she is.
Avi is well connected to the PI world. And when I got wind via Avi that Arrabella was looking for a certain kind of private investigator to dig into your past, we set it up so that Avi was presented to her as the best candidate for the scope of her work.
The idea was for him to feed her bits of information about you, let her take the bait, and sink herself by being forced to admit to Patrick she was paying a PI as a means to get rid of my assistant, get back into my orbit, and basically subsume me.
I gather they had a terrible row about it. We haven’t seen her since.”
Lillith’s words start rolling over Poppy as other huge and pressing questions swell in her mind, taking up all the space in her brain.
“Who’s my father?” she blurts. “Do you even know? Am I some mistake? A dirty little secret you needed to discard?”
“That’s the ‘why,’” Lillith says. “Your father. He’s the reason I’m doing this now. I had no choice.”
Poppy goes still. Her mind returns to her conversation with Dr. Marsh under the tree in Turkey, and a horrible snake of a thought begins to uncoil from deep inside her belly. Cold. Writhing. Slowly rising more fully into her consciousness.
“The serpent,” she whispers. “The necklace gift.”
Lillith touches the little snake at her throat.
Almost identical to the one in the photograph that Carter showed her—nestling in the hollow of “Veronique’s” throat.
AG—“André Gagnon,” a.k.a. Vincent. He’s the Thai naga—or dragon-like serpent—of the song sung on the streets by children in India. She’s read about the song.
The man on the bridge in Amsterdam in Carter’s other photo—clearly Hendrick, Vincent. And he’s not on the ship to target and con a rich old widow. He’s with her.
Poppy’s mouth opens. Her breathing becomes shallow. All the confusing little pieces of the big puzzle are suddenly slotting together like a shattering mirror playing in reverse. This is what Dr. Marsh meant about final research on the ship. Vincent has led him to Lillith.
No.
She still can’t grasp it.
“Aline-Claire?” she whispers. “You’re Aline-Claire Lavoie.”
Lillith nods. “I was her.”
“Vincent—Hendrick is my—”
“He doesn’t know about you, Poppy. He never knew I was pregnant. You were the tiny spark that finally helped—forced—me to make a break and run from him.”
“You didn’t die in the train derailment.”
“I swapped passports—identities—with a young woman who did. I was in a hospital for a long time with a severe head injury, but under a different name. It’s where I lost my vision in one eye.”
Poppy stares, mouth going dry. Unable to speak.
Lillith leans forward. “There’s no gentle way to say this other than to just put it out there. I wasn’t born in Mauritius. I was born in a small town in Quebec, across the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal. My parents were poor, but they were good people. I am the middle child of five siblings.”
Blood rushes from Poppy’s head. She clutches the armrests of her chair.
Lillith reaches for her glass, sips her water. As she swallows, the little serpent at her neck glints. And Poppy knows. She just knows it’s all true.
She can now see the shape of her own cheekbones in the man she thought was Hendrick. The similar sallowness of her skin. The color of her eyes. Her hair. The genetic echoes.
“Vincent Kapoor is my father,” she whispers.
She looks at Lillith. The shape of her lips—not unlike her own.
Lillith’s DNA is hers, too. Poppy has Indian and Vietnamese blood, and whatever else went into the making of this French Canadian woman.
Poppy has never understood her own looks, and suddenly her appearance makes sense.
But the truth of her own reflection is even darker than just being abandoned in a Tardis.
“I—I’m the child of killers,” she says quietly, incredulously.
“Not just any killers, but one of the worst pairs in recent history.” She stares at Lillith, her world folding in and over itself, and reshaping, and buckling, and .
. . she feels she might faint, or just black out under the sheer weight of it all.
“And you know, Lillith,” she whispers. “You must surely know—between the two of you—where all those other missing young men’s and women’s remains are, and how they died. Why isn’t that on your Death List?”