Free The Flower Girls by Margaret Blake

felt anger and at times despair of Jasmine ever doing something normal, seemed horrid now. She should just have loved her sister for what she was and not condemned the girl for not being what she, Poppy, wanted her to be.
    “Champagne and cider,” she muttered. “That’s what we were, Jasmine champagne of course, bright and bubbly and restless. But what am I, dull and ordinary, wanting everything to be tidy and neat and with purpose.” Miserably, Poppy slumped back into the bedroom. Under the duvet her mind spun around like a whirlpool. Something was in there and she couldn’t quite rescue it. She closed her eyes, trying to relax, stretching out her legs, letting her arms and hands go limp but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. And then it came to her and it was so shocking she gagged.
    * * * *
    The house was silent. It was very early, just turned six a.m. Quietly she snuck into the library. Seth’s papers were there, neatly piled just as she’d left them. She flicked through his written pages she’d typed only yesterday, finding what she wanted in chapter three. A battered, bloody body of a woman had been discovered in a remote area in Devon. Naked, the back of the head beaten to a pulp. The main character said, “Someone must have really hated this woman.”
    “Oh God,” Poppy said and moaned softly. It was all here and it wasn’t fiction, there was too much of a coincidence, surely. The description was sickening, even typing it had turned her stomach. It was too real. This couldn’t be happening. Jasmine had been more than miserable—she was frightened. Terrified perhaps. Poppy remembered her telling her sister how she couldn’t come right away. That she had things to arrange. She hadn’t been able to just drop everything and get over here; if she had then Jasmine might be—
    “Poppy, what are you doing?”
    Seth stood in the doorway. He looked calm and composed, his face showing no sign of the agony she knew her tear-ruined eyes showed.
    “No…nothing,” she managed. Her throat swelled with saliva, she wouldn’t be able to speak. Her desire to run away was uppermost in her thought but she knew she mustn’t.
    “Nothing? You don’t look like you’re doing nothing; you look as guilty as sin.” He came deeper into the room.
    Stay calm, she cautioned herself, there’s nothing he can do to you in this house.
    Mrs. Carrington would soon be around. But what if the surly housekeeper was in on it, what if they all were?
    Hey, a small part of her piped up, aren’t you getting to be just a tad hysterical and allowing an overactive imagination to take you where there’s no need to go? He has an alibi and you are being ridiculous, girl.
    “I was looking at something, something I typed yesterday.”
    “Really.” Seth, with deceptive quietness, had reached her side. He glanced down. The sheet of a paper with the terrible scene was there. He read it easily and after he had he sighed.
    “Poppy, do you think that real? That I took Jasmine out on the moor, killed her brutally and then came back and wrote about it?”
    Words wouldn’t come to her. Blankly she stared at him. She thought of what a divorce could mean; it could be costly to him. Rob him of all he loved. After all she knew that Jasmine liked money. She would have no conscience about taking him for every penny she could. She hated even thinking it but it was the truth. It was imperative she didn’t shrink from the truth.
    Seth pushed a hand through his hair and then said, “I guess that would really be giving it away, wouldn’t it? And I wrote this months ago, Poppy, even before Jasmine went missing. It was over between us and I felt nothing for her. There was madness in her death, jealousy, rage; she couldn’t even stir up anger in me anymore. We both made a mistake in marrying; divorce is easy these days, Poppy. But I’m disappointed you could even think that I’d do something like that to any woman, let alone a woman who’d been my