Chapter 13 #2
“About six years, give or take. My kids were in high school when I started, and I needed something that was mine, you know?” She smiles. “My husband’s an orthopedic surgeon, so he’s always had his career. I wanted something, too.”
“Wow, we have a lot in common. I used to paint murals in children’s bedrooms, and my ex is a plastic surgeon. I have two kids, a boy and a girl, but they’re both grown and in college.”
“Really?” She leans back and laughs. “We’re practically twins. I have a boy and a girl, both in college. Twenty-two and twenty. Yale and Stanford.” She gives another laugh, and there’s a mother’s pride tucked inside it.
Mothers can turn anything into a trophy case. I say this as a woman who once framed a participation ribbon.
Poppy tilts her head, curiosity plain on her face. “Can I ask what happened? With your ex, I mean. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Oh, it’s not a secret. It’s barely even a story anymore.
” I wave a cookie for emphasis. “I came home the day we were supposed to leave for our twenty-fifth anniversary cruise and found him entertaining. Several women. At once. In our house. The man couldn’t remember our anniversary, but he could coordinate a group activity. ”
Poppy barks out a laugh, then claps a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny. Give it a decade, it ripens.” I shrug. “So I took the cruise by myself. Best decision I ever made. I boarded the ship and simply never got off. Some women get a tattoo. I got a stateroom.”
We share a laugh, warm and easy, and then Poppy’s gaze drops and the laugh drains right out of her.
“I’m so sorry he cheated on you,” she says quietly. “That must have been so very painful.”
“I make jokes about it because the jokes are free and the therapy wasn’t.” I soften. “But yes. It hurt. For a while there, my heart and I weren’t on speaking terms. I thought I wasn’t enough, and I mourned what I believed we had and what we lost.”
Poppy nods, slow and quiet, and lets the moment sit between us.
I tuck the nod away for later. Some women nod along to be polite. Poppy nods along in the original language.
“That honey-blonde hair,” Magnus murmurs, circling her slowly. “The way she moves. Graceful. Controlled. I’d wager she’s excellent at keeping secrets. Among other talents best practiced behind locked doors.”
I take a long sip of my latte to keep from agreeing out loud. The trouble with Magnus is that underneath all the leering, he’s occasionally right. It’s his least attractive quality.
“So between the kids, the surgeons, and the cookies,” I say, steering us somewhere lighter, “I’d say we’re practically twins twice over.”
I snap up another cookie, and she belts out a genuine laugh. “You know, Trixie, when I saw you at the bon voyage party, I remember thinking you looked like someone I’d want to be friends with. You just have this energy that feels real.”
“That’s possibly the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week.”
Maybe all year, if we’re not counting Ransom’s sweet nothings. Although those tend to run less nice and more naughty. I keep that tidbit to myself.
“I mean it.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “And I’m so sorry you got caught up in all this. Especially when Astrid, you know... grabbed you and shook you like a rag doll. It must have been horrible.”
Magnus straightens. “She comforts. She connects. She makes you feel seen. A triple threat. I’d like to teach her a lesson or two of my own. Lesson one takes place in the bedchamber. So do lessons two through twelve.”
It takes all of my strength not to roll my eyes.
“It was pretty awful,” I admit. “But you were there, too. That couldn’t have been easy.”
“No.” Her smile fades. “I keep replaying it. One minute she was making a toast, the next...” She shakes her head.
“I’ve known Astrid for twelve years. She could be demanding, sure, but she built something special with this club.
She brought women together. She made us feel like we belonged somewhere. ”
“You two were close?”
“Close enough.” She reaches for another cookie and winces. “Oh, sorry.” She clutches at her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” I reach out in case I need to catch her before she topples off the bench.
“I’m fine.” She winces again as she rights herself. “I had shoulder replacement surgery about nine months ago. Let’s just say the wheels of healing churn about as slowly as the wheels of time.”
“Tell me about it. I pulled something in Gothenburg reaching for a cinnamon roll, and I’ve been babying it ever since.”
We trade a quick laugh.
“Anyway,” she continues, “Astrid and I had lunch sometimes when she was in my neck of the woods. She’d text me book recommendations, ask about my projects.” Poppy’s voice wavers. “She remembered my kids’ names. She sent my daughter a graduation card. She was thoughtful that way.”
Tears glisten in her eyes, and the grief there is real. You can feel the loss radiating off her.
“She sounds like she was a good friend,” I say carefully.
“She was.” Poppy wipes at her eyes. “Sorry. I’m usually better at holding it together.”
“You don’t have to hold anything together with me.” And I mean every word of it. Whatever else Poppy Lindgren may or may not have done, grief this raw deserves a soft place to land, and I’m happy to be the landing pad.
“Look at her,” Magnus says quietly. “Tears, vulnerability, shared humanity. If she needs a shoulder to cry on, mine is bare, broad, and historically very popular.”
I shoot him a look before he can wander back into triple-threat territory. Or her bedchamber.
I hand Poppy a napkin.
She dabs at her cheeks and laughs a little. “Here I am, crying over cookies in Stockholm. Now there’s something that wasn’t on my bingo card.”
“Grief doesn’t keep a schedule or a dress code. And it has no problem crashing bingo, either.”
Her chest bucks with a silent laugh. “Thank you for that. Really. You’re easy to talk to.”
And that’s the problem. Because either Poppy Lindgren is exactly who she appears to be, a genuinely kind woman mourning her friend, or she’s an excellent actress who committed the perfect murder and is now plying the investigation with cookies.
“So who do you think could have done something like that to Astrid?” I ask. “You know, in the event she was poisoned. I mean, even if she had an allergy, I suppose it still could have been something nefarious that went down that night.”
“I guess you’re right,” Poppy says slowly. Her brow furrows as she mulls it over.
“She’s delicious when she’s pensive,” Magnus muses.
There is no HR department for the dead. I’ve checked.
“I know Sienna had a falling-out with her,” Poppy says finally.
“Sienna?” I’m genuinely surprised to hear it. “What kind of falling-out?”
That’s funny. Sienna didn’t mention any falling-out when we spoke in Gothenburg. Come to think of it, Sienna didn’t mention much of anything at all.
Poppy leans in, lowering her voice. “I saw them arguing at the bon voyage party. Sienna was crying, and I heard her say something like ‘You can’t do this to me, I won’t let you.’ It was intense.”
“Do you know what it was about?”
“Astrid discovered something about Sienna’s daughter.
” Poppy sips her coffee. “Her daughter is older, in her thirties. I have no idea what Astrid found out, but I do know that Sienna is very close to her. I mean, she has to be. Sienna is always with her three grandchildren. Ages six, eight, and ten, I think?”
“That’s sweet that she helps out.”
“It is. Sienna’s told me her daughter has a very lucrative career and travels a lot for work, so she helps with the kids. But it’s been years and I’ve yet to actually meet the daughter. Sienna’s brought photos, but...” She shrugs.
I file that away, too. A daughter nobody’s met.
“So Astrid confronted Sienna about her daughter?”
Poppy holds up a finger. “I just remembered something else Astrid said to her that night. I was walking past them and I heard it clear as day. ‘We have standards about the families our members come from.’ What do you think she meant by that?”
“No clue, but it sounds downright cruel if you ask me.”
“Exactly.” Poppy blows out a breath. “I love—loved—Astrid, but she could be harsh when she thought someone wasn’t meeting her standards. And whatever was going on with Sienna’s daughter, Astrid clearly didn’t approve.”
“Oh, that’s rough.” I grimace at the thought. “I mean, as a mother, you know we’ll go to bat for our kids no matter what.”
She nods, and something steely threads through all that softness. “Any mother would go to great lengths to protect her children. The ends of the earth wouldn’t be far enough.”
“Agreed. The ends of the earth and several nautical miles past it.”
It does make me wonder what exactly could be wrong with Sienna’s daughter, but I don’t dare say that out loud.
“Oh, something else just hit me.” Poppy’s lips part in a small gasp.
“Those lips,” Magnus breathes. “The way they part in surprise. In my day, a woman parted her lips like that and a man abandoned an entire raid. Sometimes a fjord.”
“What is it?” I lean forward so eagerly I nearly send the rest of my cookie tumbling to the cobblestones. I’m about to shove it into my mouth for safekeeping when Magnus swoops in, eats the cookie, and steals a kiss right off my lips while he’s at it.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I mutter.
“No, I’ll tell you,” Poppy says, mistaking my outburst for impatience with her.