by Lillian Bell
She shook her head. “No. No way. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Not ever.”
“Really? This woman was blackmailing you. You had to have been angry. Plus, we know you’re a thief. You clearly don’t have much respect for the law.” I pushed.
She gasped. “Stealing a little bit of money from petty cash and killing someone are two very different things, don’t you think?”
I did, but there was still at least a little connection. “A felon is a felon is a felon,” I said.
She snapped her fingers. “Wait. I worked late that day. I had to deliver some papers to a client. Isaiah Causey. He talked my ear off. I remember because I heard about the car accident on the radio when I was on my way home, but I didn’t know it was Violet until the next day.”
I made a face. Old Man Causey was a sweet guy, but he was a talker. If you let him get his hooks in you, you were sunk. It could be hours before you could extricate yourself.
“Yeah. Exactly,” Rachel said, interpreting my facial expression correctly. “Nobody wanted to deal with him. Violet gave me the side eye and I volunteered. I delivered the papers and then he went into one of his stories about when he was a kid. It was nearly eight when I got home. I couldn’t have done it.”
“So you say.” It was a nice story, but right now it was only a story.
“I’m pretty sure Mr. Causey will back me up on this one. Go ask him.” She crossed her arms over her chest, a triumphant look on her face. “Or ask Greg. He’ll know.”
“Fine,” I said. “But don’t go anywhere.”
She laughed. “You’re the one who should go somewhere before that dog eats your entire car.”
I whirled around. I couldn’t see exactly what Orion was up to, but it didn’t look good. I ran to the car. A substantial corner of the back seat of the Element was gone, chewed to within an inch of its life. “What did you do?” I asked Orion.
He glared at me in return.
“Did you chew the seat up? Bad boy!” Apparently, Orion didn’t like to be left in the car when I went some place and wanted to make sure I knew it.
He barked.
“You’re talking back to me?”
He barked twice.
Grumbling, I gathered the bits of foam and fabric that he’d shredded all over the back seat to put in the garbage. As I scooped, I saw something out of place, something white and thin. Something paper. It was an envelope, or at least what was left of one after having been chewed within an inch of its life. I could make out parts of the address on it. It must have been wedged down in the seat. I got into the car next to Orion and ran my fingers along the crease of the back seat. He stuck his tongue in my ear. “Usually I expect a guy to buy me dinner before I let him do that,” I told him.
He licked my nose.
I wiped my face and went back to the fold of the seat, finally hitting on the rest of the envelope. I teased it out, careful not to tear it anymore. I managed to get it out in two pieces. I took the partially chewed one and the two he hadn’t chewed on and laid them out on the part of the seat that hadn’t been eaten. The name on the envelope was Quinn. The last name wasn’t readable anymore. I could see a few street numbers. A two and a four. The first three letters of the name of the city were still legible, too. Lag. Like Laguna Palma?
Laguna Palma was where Violet lived before she moved to Verbena. Two and four were the two numbers visible on the mailbox in the photo of my father. Laguna Palma wasn’t all that near here. It was at least a two-hour drive toward the coast.
I didn’t know where the envelope had come from and I’d been pretty much the only one to drive the Element since Dad disappeared. Had the envelope belonged to him? The cops had been over and over this car. Of course, the chief cop who had done that was Luke Butler and I wasn’t feeling all that good about his thoroughness right now. I’d been over it, too, but this envelope had been jammed really deep down into the seat. I’m not sure anyone would have ever seen it if Orion hadn’t chewed it all up.
I patted him on the head. “Good boy.”
He licked my nose again.
I got into the front of the Element, considering my next move. What ifs ping-ponged around in my brain. What if Violet had seen my father in her hometown of Laguna Palma and had also seen him on the news? If she’d done any research on Verbena before moving here, she might well have seen news reports about him. There were also all those missing posters and ads we’d sent far and wide right after he disappeared. Knowing Violet, she wouldn’t have told us or the police about it. She would have found something she wanted from Dad. What if her working in Greg’s office wasn’t a coincidence? What if she’d tried to find a job here in Verbena with a connection to us? We weren’t hiring at the funeral home. Maybe that was the only spot she could find where she might be able to keep an eye on what we were up to.
My cell phone rang. It was Donna. “What’s up?”
She sighed. “Reita didn’t make it. Can you pick her up at the hospital?”
*
Poor Reita. She looked even smaller inside the body bag. I’d gone home, switched out the Element for the van and gone to the hospital. I didn’t bother Uncle Joey. I could handle the pick up on my own and, frankly, I wasn’t quite sure I could look him in the eye yet. Once I got her back to Turner’s, I called Nate to let him know we’d picked her up.
“I hope you don’t mind hosting the autopsy,” he said. “She was going to your place eventually no matter what. I figured it would be easier.”
Since business was still slow, it didn’t seem to matter much. I told him what I’d found out about Rachel, too.
“Now that I think about it, Rachel was right when she said Violet would have reacted within minutes. It doesn’t make much sense with slow-acting insulin,” he said. “It works slowly enough that it would make her woozy, but I don’t think it would make her pass out behind the wheel.”
“Whoever injected her had to have done it just a little bit before she crashed?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“So what we really need to do is figure out where Violet was right before her accident. Whoever injected her must have done it there.” I tapped my pencil against the desk.
“How do you anticipate doing that?”
“I have the calendar on her phone and on her computer. I’ll look it up. Call you back in a bit?”
“Sure.”
I fired up her computer and her phone. Then wilted. There was nothing on her computer for the Monday she had her accident. Nothing at all. For all I knew, she’d spent that Monday sitting on her couch in her jammies eating popcorn and watching movies. Wait. That wasn’t true. I knew she’d gone to work that day. Rachel had mentioned it. Violet had been the one to send her off to see Old Man Causey.
Of course, we all do lots of things that we don’t put on our calendars. We grocery shop and do laundry and go to work. None of those things ever get put on a calendar. I chewed my lip.
I opened Violet’s Facebook account, looking for a pattern that I might be able to figure out for what she did on Monday nights. I scrolled backward through her timeline. A listicle about tweets your dog would send if he had thumbs. A recipe for eggplant parmesan. An ad for an exercise skirt with ruffles that was perfect for Zumba.
Zumba. Violet was a member of a Zumba Facebook group. That would imply a certain amount of commitment to the class. It would be something a person would do on a regular basis, but wouldn’t put on their calendar. I dug Violet’s keys out and looked at the tags on them. Sure enough. There was one of those tags that you scan as you walk in and out of a place. It was for Verbena Fitness.
I went to the Verbena Fitness website and clicked on their schedule for group classes. Zumba was on Monday nights at six. Violet crashed her car at around seven-thirty. I clicked open a map of Verbena and found Verbena Fitness. It was on the opposite side of town from Violet’s house. It would make sense for her to cut around town on County Road 202 where she’d crashed to avoid going through town. It was a lon
ger route, but would probably cut five minutes or more off the time it took.
I had one more thing to look up on the computer before I was ready to move on. I typed in Laguna Palma to the map program. First I looked up all the streets that started with “Wh.” There were five: Whaler, Whittier, Whistler, White Sands, and Whispering Pines. Then I looked to find houses whose street numbers ended in a two and a four. It took a while. Hours, in fact. But I found it.
The address was 5724 Whittier. I looked at the street view. It was the same house in the photo of Dad that I’d found in Violet’s collection.
Someone had killed Violet Daugherty. I was sure of it. Nate was sure of it. They might not have shot her with a gun or stuck a knife in her, but they created a situation where she would almost certainly come to harm. What’s worse was that whoever did it, didn’t care about how many other people might be hurt in the process. Violet didn’t hit anyone, but she could have. She could have triggered an accident that would involve any number of people just trying to get from one place to another on a Monday night.
No one was looking for justice for Violet. All her friends were online. She had no family to speak of. No wonder she was searching for some place to belong with all those Facebook groups and e-mail lists. I’d spent a lot of time trying to get away from the family and the community that laid claim to me. I’d had that luxury, knowing that they’d always be there, no matter what. I could leave for decades, but I’d always be welcomed back in Verbena and back at Turner Family Funeral Home. What would it have felt like not to have that in my life? How lonely and insecure Violet must have been?
Well, I cared. Maybe I didn’t care a lot about Violet, but I cared about Verbena. There was someone out there who did this thing right here under our noses. It was likely that the person lived in Verbena. Walked alongside us. Shopped alongside us. It wasn’t the kind of person I wanted in my community. If no one else was going to step up and do something about it, I would.
Chapter Eleven
Nate came the next day to do Reita’s autopsy. I waited patiently for him to finish. Okay. Not all that patiently. Orion and I went for a walk. We paced. We played ball. Finally, he came out and sat down in an office chair by the desk I usually sat at when I worked in the Turner office.
“So what happened to Reita?” I asked.
He sunk down the chair. “It sounds crazy, but it’s like her heart literally broke.” There was a catch in his voice. “There’s nothing else wrong with her. She’s in great shape, unlike her husband. No underlying problems I could find anywhere. Her heart just stopped working.”
I told him about her saying she had felt it when Jordan had died.
He shook his head. “I think that’s almost unbearably sweet, but I don’t think Reita sensed when her husband died. Who knows what really happened? Maybe a big truck drove by and shook the house a bit and it’s a coincidence that it was at the same time her husband fell to the floor.”
“That seems like a really tortured way of explaining it all. Wouldn’t it be simpler if we accepted their connection and that she felt it when he died? That we would all feel it if someone really close to us died?” I scooted the chair I was in closer to his.
“You can explain it however you want,” he said. “I’m sticking to my version.”
“But you think a heart can break?” I asked.
“Of course it can. Grief is stressful. Stress causes things like heart attacks.”
“You kill the romance in everything.” I pushed my chair back away from his.
He caught the bottom of it with his foot and pulled me back toward him. “Everything?”
Heat blossomed on my face. “Nearly everything.”
A few minutes later, I pushed away from him. I wasn’t ready to recreate the Uncle Joey and Zenia Morrow scene I’d stumbled on the other day. “I think I figured out where Violet would have been right before her accident on Monday.”
“Your idea of sexy talk needs some work.” He let his hands drop off my waist.
I laughed. “Solving murders doesn’t make you hot?”
“Well, when you put it like that …” His hands went back to where they’d been and there was less talking for a minute or so. Then apparently his curiosity got the better of him. “So where was she?”
“Verbena Fitness. For a Zumba class.”
“What the heck is Zumba?” Nate asked.
I tried to figure out how to describe it. “It’s like aerobics, but more dance-y.”
His eyebrows went up. “Dance-y?”
“Yes. Dance-y. Keep up. I’m not sure that matters. What matters is that it was at the gym.”
“Why does that matter?”
I thought about those photos of the woman and man on the lat pull. It made sense that it had taken place at the gym. “If I show you, you will never look at a weight bench the same way again.” That would be a bit more sexy than I thought either of us was ready for.
*
I was dying to drive to Laguna Palma and cruise past the house in Violet’s photo, the house with the address that might be on an envelope that had been jammed deep behind a seat in my father’s car. There was no way to do it that weekend, though. With Reita’s autopsy and then her service the following day, I didn’t have any five-hour blocks of time to make it there and back. Plus, I wasn’t sure what I would find there. It might take a lot longer depending on what I saw when I got there.
I’d decided to check out Verbena Fitness closer to the time that Violet would have been there on Monday so I was kind of stalled on that investigation, too. I called Jasmine to see if she wanted to meet me at the Zucchini Carving Competition. She did. Then I texted Rafe to let him know I was going and I’d cover it for the paper. He texted back that he’d be there anyway since he was one of the zucchini bake-off judges, but he’d appreciate the back-up.
The first Zucchini Carving Contest took place in Verbena in 1957. According to town legend, the year before Ella Whitehead found a four-foot zucchini in a neglected corner of her garden and wanted to share it with neighbors and invited people to her home to carve up the monster squash. The event was so enjoyable, she purposely grew a five-footer the next year and a tradition was born. Participants are judged on intricacy, originality, and spookiness. There are also zucchini baking contests, booths about the history of zucchinis, and pretty much anything else zucchini-related you can think of.
We only had one appointment scheduled for the day. Annamarie Oh was scheduled to pick up her husband’s ashes. Not everyone actually comes to pick ashes after a cremation. They’re not sure what to do with the ashes and as time goes on the actual disposal of them seems to matter less and less. We had an entire area of the house with shelves where urns full of people waited for someone to come get them. We couldn’t do anything with them. We just had to hold them. I was pretty certain that some of them had been there before I’d been born. By law, we only had to hold onto them for four years, but Uncle Joey read about a case where a woman showed up to pick up her great-grandfather’s ashes seventy years after his death. “Imagine how bad we’d feel if we had to tell the person we had scattered them ourselves,” he’d said.
I figured it was about a fifty-fifty chance that Annamarie wouldn’t show up. I would have put the odds even lower that she’d show up in her bike gear with twenty-five or so other people all similarly garbed. Shows what I knew.
“We’re here for Blaine,” she said standing out on the front porch.
“Blaine!” The group yelled in unison.
I looked over them. It was like a human cloud of confetti with all the brightly colored bike jerseys. Each one also had a ribbon pinned over their hearts. It took me a second to make it out, but the ribbons all read: Blaine Oh with a birth and death date. “Right,” I said. “Do you want to come in.”
She shook her head. “That’s okay. There are kind of a lot of us.”
It was hard to argue that as they spilled down the front porch steps and out into the yard. Men. Women
. All colors. All sizes. All here to honor their friend. “So what exactly are you planning on doing.”
“I’m going to ride at the back of the peloton and release his ashes bit by bit as we ride the hills out there.” She pointed to where the Vaca Mountains rose up from the flat land of the valley.
“Uh, okay. I’ll just go get him then.” I turned to go back inside.
“Desiree,” she said stopping me.
“Yes?”
“Is Orion here? Could I see him?” She clasped her hands in front of herself like a little girl asking for a special Christmas present.
“Sure.” I whistled and in a few seconds he came trotting down the stairs. Annamarie knelt down on the porch and he approached her, tail wagging so hard his whole back end wiggled.
The peloton shouted, “Dog!”
Within seconds, he had disappeared into the crowd of bikers.
I went back inside and got the urn with Blaine’s ashes in them and came back upstairs. It took me a second to get Annamarie’s attention, but when I finally did, she stood and moved out of the throng around my dog. I handed the urn to Annamarie. She looked inside and pulled out the plastic bag that contained the ashes. “Perfect,” she said. “I can snip a tiny hole to let them slip out as we ride. He loved feeling the wind rush past him. Now he’ll be part of the wind.” She choked up a bit and lowered her head.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s a lovely way to honor his memory. Do be careful of the disc, though.”
“Disc?” She lifted her head. Her eyes were wet.
“There’s an identification tag in there. You should hang onto it. Otherwise someone might find it and turn it in and then things get complicated. Also, if you end up on anyone’s private property, make sure you have permission, okay?” I glanced over her shoulder to make sure Orion wasn’t getting overwhelmed. He looked like he was laughing. I couldn’t stop the smile on my face.
Annamarie threw her arms around me. “Thank you so much, Desiree. I’m so glad I picked Turner from that list the hospital had. You’ve helped so much.”
