A Grave Issue Read online

  A Grave Issue

  A FUNERAL PARLOR MYSTERY

  Lillian Bell

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-490-5

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-491-2

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-492-9

  Cover illustration by Ben Perini

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: February 2018

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter One

  The Verbena Free Press

  THURSDAY, JULY 5

  Emu Death Possibly Caused by Foul Play

  Animal Control and the Verbena Police have been investigating the unexpected passing of Rosemarie and Alan Brewer’s pet emu, Vincent. Ms. Brewer has blamed her neighbors Kyle and Lola Hansen for the death. Ms. Brewer claims that Vincent was in good health until the Hansen’s two dogs barked at the bird and frightened Vincent enough to run in circles until he collapsed on the ground. “Those vicious attack dogs scared Vincent to death,” Ms. Brewer said. “Who will they kill next? None of us are safe.”

  Representatives from Animal Control and the Verbena Police Department have stated that they can find no causal relationship between the dogs barking and the death of the emu. In addition, there is nothing illegal about Kyle and Lola Hansen’s dogs. Emilio Fuentes of Animal Control told the Free Press that there was no evidence that the Hansens’ dogs were vicious. “Even if they were,” Fuentes said, “they’re kept fenced in and pose no danger to anyone.”

  Detective Butler of the Verbena Police Department stated that no laws had been broken and that he would not be pursuing the matter any further.

  Dead bodies are nothing new to me. I grew up in a funeral home. I was taken straight from the nursery at Verbena Memorial Hospital to the top floor of the Turner Family Funeral Home, where I lived until I was eighteen years old. At which point I hightailed it out of here as if snapping packs of jackals were on my heels. But still, having a dead body around was the norm. They didn’t scare me. They didn’t gross me out. They honestly didn’t interest me that much.

  Murdered bodies, though? Murdered bodies were a whole different thing. Even after covering the police beat in Los Angeles and being on the scene of dozens of shootings and stabbings, murdered bodies still shocked me, and they definitely interested me. There was always a story when there was a murder. Always. And I loved stories. You don’t become a journalist if you’re not interested in stories.

  Nate Johar, Pluma Vista County medical examiner, had brought the body in, zipped up in one of those black body bags, and had wheeled him directly into the embalming room where he’d be conducting the autopsy. Pluma Vista County, home to Verbena, which was, in turn, home to the Turner Family Funeral Home, wasn’t a big place. We were near big places. Sacramento wasn’t that far. Neither was San Francisco. Napa was a day trip. On our own, though? We were pretty small, mainly the unwanted corners of a few other counties, the sweepings left on the cutting-room floor after gerrymandering. Because we were small, we didn’t have the resources to have a dedicated office for our medical examiner. It’s not that uncommon. In small places and a lot of rural places, the medical examiner generally works out of funeral homes. The honor rotates. And by “honor,” I mean total and complete pain in the ass.

  I had decided to hover nearby for a number of reasons. I wanted to be around in case he needed anything. Uncle Joey was out picking someone up, and I wanted Nate out of our embalming room as soon as possible so Uncle Joey’s workflow wouldn’t be disrupted. Also, it was the first time I’d seen Nate since I’d come home. Circumstances—I’m being kind to myself here—had brought me back home ten years after I left, my tail quite firmly between my legs and having eaten so much crow that I’d be picking feathers from between my teeth for years to come. Nate had come home by choice to take over the medical examiner’s position when old Dr. Pittman retired. His tail could fly high, and I didn’t think he’d eaten a single bite of crow.

  From where I sat at my uncle’s desk in the basement, I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear everything. Nate said, “Subject is a forty-eight-year-old white male identified as Alan Brewer. Cause of death at the moment appears to be a bullet wound in his forehead.”

  I sat up straight in my chair and swallowed a gasp. I didn’t want Nate to know I was eavesdropping so I needed to be quiet. It was shocking, though. Alan Brewer, manager of the Verbena Union Bank, vice president of the Downtown Verbena Business Association, member of the Verbena Chamber of Commerce, lay dead of a bullet to the forehead only a few feet away from me. I’d known right then that it was the emu’s fault. We’d all known that bird was bad news, but I didn’t think anyone could have predicted how bad it would get. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that things could go so horribly wrong because of a bird that couldn’t even fly.

  * * *

  A while later, Nate came out of the embalming room, drying his hands. “All done,” he said.

  “Are you releasing the body for burial?” Sometimes the medical examiner held on to people for a while until everything was resolved.

  “Not quite yet.” He gestured to his case. “I took some samples. We’ll run tox screens and all the rest, but it’s pretty clear what happened.”

  “Is it . . . homicide?” I asked.

  Nate looked at me and didn’t answer.

  I held up my hands. “Right. Right. I get it. You can’t say anything.” Except sometimes the things people didn’t say were a lot louder than what actually came out of their mouths. “I’ll take it from here,” I said. I’d find out later from Uncle Joey where Alan would be going. For now, he could stay in our refrigeration unit at the back of the basement.

  “Thanks.” He stopped and rubbed the back of his neck. “Thanks for this, and thanks for the use of your facility.”

  I stood to walk him to the door. “That last part isn’t exactly at our discretion.”

  He smiled. It made him look younger, more like the Nate I’d known back in high school, back when we’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, back when we’d thought we’d be together forever, back before we’d gone to different schools and taken different paths. “I know, but som
e places make that clearer than others.”

  At the door, he stopped. He’d always been taller than me, but I was even more aware of it now, standing close with my nose at about the same level as his Adam’s apple. There was an awkward pause, and the air seemed to warm around us. Then he stuck out his hand. “It was nice to see you, Desiree.”

  I shook his hand, feeling oddly deflated. “Ditto.”

  I leaned against the door and watched him go, just like I’d watched him drive away dozens of times when we’d been kids. Well, not kids. At least, we hadn’t thought we were kids back then. We’d thought we were all kinds of things. We’d thought we were going to conquer the world. We thought we could make our dreams into reality through sheer force of will. We’d thought we were in love.

  I sighed and went into the embalming room to get Alan. Nate had taken the black body bag with him and had left Alan covered by a sheet. Damn. He was on the old gurney, the one with the sticky wheel. I’d been meaning to go after it with some WD-40 but hadn’t gotten to it. Whatever. If I took a bit of a running start, I should be able to get it over the door sill and straight back to the refrigeration unit.

  I got behind the gurney, pulled it back toward myself, and went for it. We made it over the sill, but not in a straight line, and I banged it a little against the doorframe as we went through. The sheet that Nate had draped over Alan slipped.

  There he was. Alan Brewer. In all his glory. Well, not all his glory. His lower half was still under the sheet. It was hard to take my eyes away from that bullet hole, truly right in the center of his forehead. As precisely placed as a bull’s-eye on a target. I reached to pull the sheet back up over him, which is when I realized that his chest was also exposed along with a great big hickey right over his left nipple. Apparently Alan went out with a spring his step. Lucky him. Well, I supposed the bullet to the forehead outweighed a night of passion that would produce a hickey like that one on the lucky scale. I pulled the sheet up and wheeled him to the refrigeration unit.

  Alan Brewer. Bullet wound to the forehead. Unless he slipped in the shower and fell on a bullet in just the wrong way to jam it into his forehead, this was going to be foul play. Or should I say fowl play?

  Chapter Two

  The Verbena Free Press

  SATURDAY, JULY 13

  Local Businessman Murdered

  Alan Brewer, manager of the Verbena Union Bank, was found shot to death on his property at approximately seven AM on Friday morning. Mr. Brewer’s wife, Rosemarie, realized that he had not returned from collecting eggs from the couple’s chicken coop after she took her shower. She went to investigate and found Mr. Brewer dead from a gunshot wound to the forehead. “Whoever did this is a monster!” Ms. Brewer said. “They could have hit the chickens, too.”

  Detective Butler of the Verbena Police Department has said that they are following several leads but declined to comment on the identities of any individual suspects. “We’re looking at everybody and everything,” he said.

  Two days before the murder, Ms. Brewer had been in an altercation at the Turner Family Funeral Home with neighbor Lola Hansen. Detective Butler would neither deny nor confirm whether that altercation was related to the current situation. Ms. Brewer and Ms. Hansen both declined to be interviewed.

  Mr. Brewer was taken to the Turner Family Funeral Home. Desiree Turner, assistant funeral director, was also a witness to the altercation between Ms. Brewer and Ms. Hansen. She declined to comment on that issue. Mr. Brewer’s murder is the first to have taken place in Verbena since Ms. Turner’s return to Verbena.

  It was two days after I’d wheeled Alan into our refrigeration unit when Henrietta Lambert’s cell phone went off just as Uncle Joey wheeled Mr. Murray out of the Lilac Room to the back entrance of Turner Family Funeral Home, where he would be loaded into the hearse and transported to the Lawn of Heaven Cemetery. I shot Henrietta what I hoped was a death glare. She had the good grace to blush. Silencing your phone during a funeral was just good manners, and Henrietta had been to enough services to know better. Henrietta was one of our regulars. Olive Wheeler, Henrietta Lambert, and Grace Cohen attended most of the funerals that took place here at the funeral home, nearly all the funerals held at the Church of Open Fields on Oriole Street, and a healthy smattering of the ones at Beth Chaverim on Robin Avenue. Other women watched soap operas or knit. Olive, Henrietta, and Grace attended funeral services.

  I didn’t care that Mr. Murray only had seven family members there (one daughter, one son-in-law, three grandchildren, two nieces), that the service was basically over (a few words from Pastor Campbell, a cute memory from the son-in-law about meeting Mr. Murray for the first time, a recitation of the twenty-first psalm), or that Mr. Murray’s daughter had picked our most stripped-down funeral package (basic casket with no drape, no memory box, and no decorative accessories; twenty-five printed programs; funeral in the Lilac Room; transportation to the cemetery, but no video montage, no music, no frill and no fuss). Silencing your cell phone was a matter of respect.

  I brought Henrietta’s walker over to her from where it was resting against the wall. She started fishing through the pocket of the walker for her phone before I could say anything. “Sorry,” she said. “I swear I thought I’d turned it off.”

  “No cookies?” Olive asked.

  “The family’s having a postfuneral reception at their home,” I said as I brought her walker from where I’d stashed it against the wall.

  She sniffed. “Doesn’t seem like much of a celebration of life.”

  “Because he lived too long,” Grace said. “He took too long, and now they’re giving him the bum’s rush out the door.”

  “I’m sure they’re very sad,” I said, delivering another walker. I felt a little bad. I’d been the one to convince Sheena Murray that she could have a small gathering at her home and not do a big thing here. She’d looked so exhausted when she’d come in to make the arrangements. I almost offered to clean her house for her before people came over. Now Grace, Olive, and Henrietta—sitting where they always sat looking like three gray-haired Fates—were throwing shade over it. “Sheena’s really exhausted. I think we should cut her some slack.”

  Grace shot me a look through her coke-bottle-thick glasses. “This is Olive’s walker. It’s got her name right here.” She pointed to a piece of tape that did indeed have Olive’s name on it. “Your father always knew which walker was which.”

  “Sorry,” I said and handed it to Olive, who patted my hand.

  “They didn’t look too sad,” Grace called after me. “You look sadder than they did.”

  “I’m sad,” Olive said. “I wanted a cookie. I mean, why bother with a funeral at all if you’re not going to at least offer people cookies?”

  It was one of those existential questions that simply did not have an answer.

  Henrietta held her phone as far from her face as her arm would allow. “I can’t read this. I think it’s a news alert from the Free Press, but it’s blurry. Can you read it? Don’t make me find my reading glasses.” She shoved the phone at me.

  I decided not to mention that her reading glasses were hanging from a chain around her neck, because I was curious too. What was Rafe Valdez up to now? And when had the Verbena Free Press gotten so high tech that they sent out news alerts? Whatever it was, I’d better not be in the article. I’d shown up in a few too many already, and my family was none too happy about that. I read the message on Henrietta’s phone and gasped. I thought about asking to borrow her glasses to be sure I’d read it right.

  “Well, what is it?” Henrietta asked. She thumped her walker on the floor for emphasis.

  Not believing the words that were coming out of my mouth, I said, “Kyle Hansen has been arrested for the murder of Alan Brewer. Can you ladies let yourselves out?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran.

  * * *

  Verbena, California, is no place to be running around in panty hose and heels during the summer. I remembered
that the second I stepped out of the nicely chilled interior of Turner Family Funeral Home and into the furnace that was my hometown. It felt like I’d hit an actual wall of heat. Verbena is nestled into the upper corners of the Central Valley. People grow things here. Tomatoes. Corn. Almonds. Families. Summers were hot and dry during the day with plenty of times that the temperature soared over one hundred degrees. Today was one of those days. The inside of my mouth went dry the second I hit the outside air. I shaded my eyes from the unrelenting glare of the sun with my hand.

  My dry mouth and stinging eyes didn’t matter, though. Kyle had been arrested. Kyle, the man who had practically been my second father as I’d grown up, who couldn’t and wouldn’t be unkind or cruel to anyone, even Alan Brewer, whom he had plenty of reasons to be unkind and cruel to. I had to find Lola and see what I could do to help. If Kyle had been arrested, I was pretty sure I knew where he’d be and therefore where Lola would be: the police station.

  I made it downtown and squeezed my dad’s black Honda Element into a parking space before the air conditioning in the car even had time to take effect. I raced into the police station while trying to stop the back of my skirt from sticking to my legs. I skidded to a stop in front of Lola, who was sitting in one of the hard plastic chairs in the lobby and staring straight ahead with her jaw a little slack, her normally mirror-smooth hair uncombed.

  Rafe Valdez, editor and publisher of the Verbena Free Press, was two steps away from Lola, notepad in hand. I positioned myself between Rafe and Lola. “Ms. Hansen has no comment.”

  He smiled, white teeth a blinding flash. “I haven’t asked her a question, Ms. Turner.”

  “Doesn’t matter. She has no comment regardless.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Are you sure she and her husband don’t want to get their side of the story out there before the whole town makes up its mind?” He cocked his head to one side, and his dark hair flopped over his forehead. My fingers simultaneously itched to brush it off his face and to punch him.