If the Coffin Fits Read online

  I bit my lip. It’s not like I wanted our family business to suffer, but there were questions that still needed to be answered. I told them about going to Dad’s storage space and finding it cleaned out. “So if there was something in there that implicated Titus Canty, it’s gone now. I just have to figure out where.”

  “No,” Donna said. “That’s not your job. The FBI is looking into the corruption. It’s their job. Let them do it.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “At least, not totally.”

  Donna knocked her forehead on the table a couple of times. “Why?” she asked. “For the love of God, why?”

  “Give me a second. I’ll show you why.” I went upstairs and got Violet’s shoebox of shame and my laptop, came back downstairs, and put it all down on the table.

  “What’s that?” Donna asked, pointing at the shoebox.

  “I found this in a safe hidden in Violet Daugherty’s laundry room behind a sign with an Italian saying on it.” I flipped the box open. First I put the pictures of the mayor with Titus Canty out for them to see.

  “Oh,” Uncle Joey said. “That’s how you knew. What’s the other stuff?” He pointed at the DVDs and thumb drives.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look through all of it.”

  Donna pounded her fist on the table. “I don’t care. I don’t care who did what to whom. All I care about is this family and this business. You need to keep your nose out of everyone else’s in the hopes that we can salvage the reputation of this one.” He face turned red.

  The last thing I wanted to do was get my pregnant sister upset enough that she ended up back on bed rest or worse. I looked over at Uncle Joey. He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “What’s more important to you, Desiree?” Donna gestured at the laptop and the box. “What all these people have been doing that they should have been doing? Or your own family?”

  I hadn’t thought about it like that. “My family,” I said.

  “Then you have to drop all this. If Nate feels so strongly that there’s something wrong with Violet’s death then let him deal with it. No one else cares.”

  It was true. No one was mourning Violet Daugherty. The more I learned about her, the less I liked her. She exploited people’s weaknesses. Even in the case of the mayor’s corruption, she didn’t use the information she had for good, to protect the community. She used it to torment a neighbor who had spent time, energy, and money into turning a yard into a work of creative genius. When she discovered that someone was driving around town drunk, she didn’t move to protect the people who could have been injured. Instead, she had used the information to winnow down her to-do list. In the end, what did it matter how she’d died? Especially if looking into it was going to hurt people I did care about. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll drop it.”

  Donna scowled at me. “Promise?”

  I held out my hand, little finger extended. “Pinky swear,” I said.

  She locked her pinky with mine. “Double,” she said. We shook.

  *

  I took Violet’s laptop and her box o’blackmail and my dog (he was my dog now—no one was going to separate us) up to my room. I called Nate. “I’m dropping the whole Violet Daugherty thing.”

  There was a pause. “Why?”

  I explained about the cancellations and Donna’s red face. “I promised Donna and Uncle Joey I would drop the whole thing.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “Give it to Luke. I don’t think there’s anything else for us to do. He’s the police. He’s the one who’s supposed to investigate murders.” Orion jumped up on the bed next to me, turned around once and settled at the foot of the bed. I slipped my feet under him to keep them warm. “Or ask Carlotta.”

  “Luke doesn’t even believe there is a murder. And if Carlotta started investigating something knowing he didn’t want it investigated? Well, I can’t imagine that would be good for her career. It’s got to be us.”

  “It can’t be us. Or, at least, it can’t be me.” I had double pinky swore.

  “So people are dropping you because they think they’ll be accused of murder?” Nate asked.

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “And they think that because you questioned Frank Fiore’s death and now are nosing around Violet’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “They think that you randomly accuse people of murder.”

  “Yes. That’s the point.” I should have put it together sooner. Not Vodka Mom had said something about needing to drum up business. Luke had said something about me pissing people off. It was possible I hadn’t wanted to see all the connections.

  “Well, I think the best way to disabuse them of that notion is to prove that Violet was murdered and by whom. Then they’d know that they’d only be accused of murder if they were murderers and your sister doesn’t want murderers’ business anyway.”

  It made a certain amount of sense, but only a certain amount. “I don’t know. I don’t think Donna and Uncle Joey would go for that.”

  “They don’t have to know about it until it’s a done deal. Then what are they going to say? That you shouldn’t have sought the truth?” he asked.

  I knew I was being manipulated. The trouble was that I was being manipulated into doing what I already wanted to do. “You think so?”

  “Sure. If you prove that you’re not just randomly accusing people of murder, you seem less crazy.”

  Less crazy was good. I could always use a dose of being seen as less crazy. Plus, if people found out I wasn’t crazy about Violet’s death, maybe someone would believe me and think I wasn’t crazy about my dad either.

  “I think you should at least think about it. Sleep on it. We can talk tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “But I’m not changing my mind. You wouldn’t either if you could have seen how upset Donna was.”

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated.

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “Tomorrow.”

  We hung up and I stood to pick up the laptop and the box. I stood for a second with the whole armful poised over the garbage can. The little angel on my right shoulder whispered, “drop it.” But the little devil on my left whispered, “just take one more peek.” The little angel asked, “do you really need to know people’s secrets and shames?” The little devil asked, “what if there’s more corruption there? More people like the mayor?”

  I told the angel that I was only going to look through the rest of the material to be sure there wasn’t something I should do that was on the side of the angels. She made a raspberry noise at me then flitted off. Better angels have said a whole lot worse to me in the past. I could take it.

  I opened up the laptop and put the thumb drive with all the photos on it into the machine and started clicking. I recognized a few faces, but couldn’t figure out what they might be doing that they shouldn’t. There was one of Jasmine and Carlotta holding hands as they walked down the street. Did Violet really think that was blackmail material? If so, I almost felt bad for her. It must be uncomfortable to have such a tiny mind. There was a photo of the young woman who had offered me cake at Greg’s office sitting at a desk with a metal box in front of her and another of Carol Burston high-fiving a young man right after crossing a finish line at a race. It occurred to me that maybe Violet didn’t know what might be wrong with the photos either. Maybe she just went around snapping photos knowing that people being people, at some point someone would do something they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about.

  I kept clicking. An older man at a grocery store. Maybe he was shoplifting? Who knew? A photo of people at the dog park. Perhaps they weren’t picking up after their pets? I clicked more. Then a photo came up that made me freeze. I must have gasped because Orion got up and wiggled closer to me.

  It was a photo of my father putting a surfboard on top of a gray Element in front of a house I’d never seen before. Next to him stood a little girl of maybe ten or eleven.

  I slammed the laptop shut a
s if closing it could erase what I’d just seen. It didn’t. When I opened the laptop back up, it was still there. My father might be one of Violet’s blackmail victims. Would that mean that my father might have a reason to kill her? There was really only one way to know for sure and that was to figure out who had really done it.

  I texted Nate: I changed my mind.

  He texted back a smiley face.

  Chapter Ten

  I didn’t sleep much that night. I kept opening Violet’s laptop and staring at the photo of my father. It was clearly him. This was no fuzzy security video. It was crystal clear. His back was to the camera, but he was looking over his shoulder at the little girl, the wide happy smile I associated with how he’d look when he saw me or Donna walking into a room plastered on his handsome face.

  Then there was the car. Dad loved the Element. This one was gray, not black, but maybe he wasn’t being a funeral director anymore. Maybe he toned it down to move onto whatever new life he was apparently leading. Could it be the same gray Element I’d seen in the Cold Clutch Canyon parking lot all those months ago? The one that had been parked there when someone had left a hiking boot charm for me and when I’d felt my father’s presence so strongly on the hike that I felt like he was looking over me?

  There wasn’t any date on the photo. It wasn’t too old, though. You could easily see the little bald spot that was starting to form on the back of Dad’s head. You could see the laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eye.

  There would be no way Donna could dispute that it was him and that it could easily have been taken since his so-called death. Then I thought about how she’d react when I showed it to her. I thought about her red face the night before and how precarious the balance of her pregnancy seemed to be. No. I needed more than just this one photo to show her.

  Where was I supposed to find that one more thing, though? Bleary-eyed and still half-asleep, I shoved my feet into boots and threw on a sweatshirt over my jammies and took Orion outside. He nosed at the gate from the backyard clearly suggesting that we take a walk rather than just taking care of business. “Later,” I told him. He sighed, but acquiesced. We went back upstairs where I fed him and then went to get myself ready to face the day.

  I took another look at the photo before I got in the shower. I didn’t recognize the house or the neighborhood. It wasn’t like I knew every neighborhood in Verbena, but I knew most of them. I knew I could probably show Michelle and she’d have an idea, but then she’d see the photo of my father and I wasn’t ready to share this information yet. There could be darn good reasons that he didn’t want us to know where he was. Until I knew those, I needed to keep this information as much on the DL as I could.

  I could see a tiny fragment of the address on the mailbox, but I wasn’t sure how the first two digits of a street number were going to help me if I wasn’t even sure what town it was in.

  Everything was all mixed up in my head. Violet. My dad. Canty Construction. I needed to slow down and think. First things first. Someone injected Violet with insulin. Who has insulin? Diabetics do. Who might have had something against Violet and was also diabetic. I froze, my hands in midshampoo. Someone at Greg’s office needed a sugar-free cake. Was it because that would make it diabetic-friendly? Who had he said needed it? The one who offered me cake? Whose photo was in Violet’s secret stash?

  My first instinct was to leap from the shower, throw on clothes and run to Greg’s office. Then I remembered that I was supposed to have dropped all this. I needed to act in a way that didn’t arouse suspicion. Screaming into Greg’s office with my hair still full of shampoo didn’t sound like a good way to do that. There was absolutely no way Greg wouldn’t rat me out to Donna either. I finished washing my hair, conditioning it, washing my face and all major body parts, and then leaped out of the shower. I didn’t shave my legs. It was like I was a total rebel.

  I made myself breathe and breathe deeply as I dried my hair and got dressed. “Wanna go for a walk?” I asked Orion.

  He rolled his eyes as if to say he had made that perfectly clear earlier.

  “Going out,” I called to Donna as I slipped out the kitchen door. If I didn’t hear her ask where, I didn’t need to answer her, right?

  I pulled my fleece jacket tighter around me as we walked. The mornings had gone from crisp to downright cold, at least for this California girl. Leaves swirled around our feet and Orion pranced down the street as if he was on a doggie runway. Well, he did until he saw a squirrel and then he took off after it so quickly that he nearly pulled me off my feet. When I finally got him back under control, I gave him a dirty look. “We are so starting those puppy training classes next week.”

  He jumped up and licked my face. It was impossible not to laugh.

  When we finally got to Greg’s office, we’d both calmed down a little. I went in, wracking my brain for a reason to ask the questions I wanted to ask.

  “Hey, Desiree,” Greg said, standing up and coming out from his glassed in office at the back of the space. “What are you doing here?”

  I glanced around at the people with their heads bowed over their work, tapping on computers, talking on phones. The woman who had been celebrating her promotion when I’d been here on Monday reached for a stapler on the edge of her desk. The sleeve of her sweater rode up. There was a bandage on her arm.

  “Desiree?” Greg repeated.

  I snapped back to the moment. “What’s the name of the woman who’s replacing Violet?”

  His face darkened and he motioned to his office with a jerk of his head. I followed him in and he shut the door behind us. He didn’t sit down. He turned to face me, hands on hips. “I am under strict instructions to not aid or abet you in any kind of investigations you might be undertaking.”

  “Who said it was an investigation?” I blinked my eyes, trying to look innocent.

  “Your sister. She said you’d still be poking around.”

  “I’m not poking. I’m asking for the newspaper.” I crossed my fingers behind my back. “Rafe likes to congratulate people who’ve received promotions. It’s a nice community-centered thing for a local newspaper to do.”

  “Oh.” Greg blinked and pointed out the window. “Sure. Her name is Rachel. That’s her right there. It was a big jump for her, but she’s a fast learner.”

  “Thanks.” With a little wave, I left his office then stopped at Rachel’s desk. “Hi, Rachel. I’m Desiree Turner.”

  She looked up from the spread sheet in front of her. “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “I was hoping to take a photo of you for a new column we’re doing at the Free Press. We’re going to be congratulating people who get promoted in local businesses. You’d be one of our first subjects.”

  She blushed. “Really? That’s so cool. Sure.” She looked around. “Where would you like to take the photo? Over by the sign?” She pointed to a sign on the wall by the water cooler.

  No way did I want to ask her the questions I wanted and needed to ask in the middle of her coworkers. “I was thinking of something with a bit more atmosphere. Could we meet after work today? Do you have some nice trees or something in your yard?”

  She nodded. “Sure. That’ll work.”

  I got her address from her and we set a time. “See you there,” I said and left.

  It had been a week since someone had broken into Violet’s house, someone looking for something. A week was a long time for a cut to still need a bandage, but not if you were diabetic. They healed a little slower than the regular population. Someone at the office was diabetic. Someone had needed the celebratory cake to be sugar-free. I thought I might have found who had broken into Violet’s house and who had tried to break into Turner’s. Someone who learned fast from her mistakes like maybe how to break a pane of glass and reach through it without cutting herself. Someone who worked with Violet and might have had reason not to like her too much. Someone with access to insulin.

  *

  I texted Jasmine to see if s
he was available for coffee. I’d steamed out this morning without a caffeine jolt and there was no way I was going to be able to do everything I wanted to do without some support from my dark mistress. She texted back that she was already at Cold Clutch and to come right over. When I got there, I found her seated outside, bundled up in a wool jacket with a scarf, Carlotta at her side. I waved through the window at Monique who lifted the copper thermos coffee carafe she was carrying and nodded. I sat down with them. Jasmine took a sip of coffee and sighed. “I needed this.”

  Orion curled up beneath my chair. I was dying to show Jasmine the photo of my father, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Carlotta. She was The Man, after all, and I wasn’t sure what that photo of my father meant. Had he been mixed up in something illegal? Something that would make him blackmail worthy? Was he still alive? Did Violet Daugherty have proof? Or had he gotten caught up in the Canty Construction conspiracy?

  “Long day already?” I asked Jasmine. It was only around ten after all.

  “One of a series,” she said. “We’re heading into my busy time of year.”

  “I didn’t realize shrink work was seasonal,” Carlotta said. She was in her police uniform. “Based on my experience, people are crazy year round.”

  Jasmine looked at her over the rim of her mug as she took another sip. “Holidays are coming.”

  “It’s only October!” I protested.

  “Go to the stores. Places already have Christmas decorations out.” She spread her hands out as if she was offering me the whole holiday season on a tray.

  I grumbled. “I hate that. They should wait until the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “And people should put their grocery carts back in the cart corral and use their directional before they change lanes, but they don’t,” Carlotta said.

  She was right. Especially on that directional thing. Half the drivers in California felt like using their directionals was tantamount to signaling the enemy. I wasn’t always sure they were wrong. “So the second the decorations go up, you get busy?”