If the Coffin Fits Page 18
I started to protest. I hadn’t even given her a ride home on the day her husband died. She stopped me before I could utter a word.
“I mean it. You’ve let me mourn in my own way, in my own time. It means a lot.” She turned to face her friends. “Are we ready to ride?”
A cheer went up and they all clicked down on the steps on their bike cleats out to the bicycles they’d lain down on the lawn. I stood by Orion, holding his collar gently to make sure he didn’t chase them. Then they streamed down the driveway, calls of “left!” echoing from the front of the peloton to the back.
In a few minutes, they were gone. Blaine would be carried away on the wind he loved and I hoped Annamarie would find some peace.
*
Orion and I met Jasmine and Carlotta in front of the gazebo. A pack of children ran by us squealing, trailed by long green balloons painted to look like zucchinis. Orion strained at his leash to chase after them. I gave him a look and he sat. I pulled a treat from my pocket for him.
“You’re good with him,” Carlotta said. It was funny to see her out of uniform. Everything about her changed. Her hair was loose instead of pulled back into a bun. She had on makeup. Her whole posture seemed different. Less stiff. Less erect. Her head was still on a swivel, though. I supposed that was instinctual.
“He’s easy.” I smiled down at him and he smiled back.
We started touring the booths set up around the square. The historical society had a series of posters detailing the history of the zucchini from its start in Mexico and South America, to its development in Italy, and its appearance in North America in the 1920s. The high school science club had a series of zucchini-based science projects including a zucchini-powered clock and a cross-pollinated zuash. There was also an information placard explaining why the zucchini was a fruit and not a vegetable. I snapped a photo of Rose Fiore explaining the clock to a wide-eyed kid. She smiled and waved. Maybe their whole family didn’t hate me. That would be nice. The high school band had made horns out of zucchini stems and were performing a spirited rendition of “Werewolf of London” with pumpkin drum accompaniment. I recorded a bit of it on my phone. It would be a nice addition to the Free Press website. Rafe was always looking to maximize our digital content.
We toured the actual zucchini carving entries. “That submarine is intense,” Carlotta said as we walked through.
“It’s good, but a little on the nose, don’t you think?” Jasmine said. “I kind of favor the Noah’s Arc with all the little zucchini animals stuck to it.”
“Do you think it’s more of an assemblage than a carving?” I asked. “It could get disqualified on a technicality.”
Carlotta shook her head. “It’s a vegetable carving contest. Not an Olympic event.”
“I think we all learned a little bit ago that it’s actually a fruit carving contest,” I corrected.
“Still not the Olympics,” Carlotta said.
We rounded a corner and made it to the zucchini baking contest booth. Rafe and Nate stood behind the table, face to face and clearly not happy with each other. Nate pointed at a pyramid of zucchini brownies, his long fingers making stabbing motions toward them. Rafe threw his hands in the air and then pointed just as vigorously at a zucchini Bundt cake. Bernadette Kim physically pushed them apart, whispering furiously at them.
“Uh oh,” Jasmine said.
Carlotta’s posture changed. She still had on makeup and her hair still waved around her face, but she squared her shoulders and planted her feet. She was out of girlfriend mode and back in cop mode. “Excuse me,” she said, striding over to the trio.
I snapped a few photos although I doubted Rafe would ever let them be published. At least, not in his paper. Carlotta stood between the two men, speaking quietly. There was a stillness to her that gave her even more of an air of authority. Then she took a bite of a brownie and then a sample of the cake. Her brow furrowed. She reached for something with cream cheese frosting and sampled that. She spoke again to Rafe and Nate. They each sampled that cake, conferred, and then shook hands. Bernadette Kim lifted the blue ribbon and announced it would be going to Vera Figueroa’s zucchini-carrot cake.
Carlotta rejoined us. “Those two would fight over a burned out light bulb.”
“Not destined to be besties?” Jasmine asked.
“Not in this lifetime.” Carlotta shook her head and glanced over at me. “And I think we all know why.”
*
Reita’s service was on Sunday. I put on my funeral director clothing and went downstairs to check on Uncle Joey. I hadn’t really had a chance to talk to him after seeing him with Zenia macking for all he was worth on his desk.
I didn’t remember Uncle Joey ever dating. I didn’t remember Dad ever dating. Somehow, in my mind, I never really thought about whether or not they might be lonely, whether or not they might want someone special in their lives. Had not thinking about that, not acknowledging that led my father to need to stage his own death to go be with someone? The thought pained me on so many levels.
Uncle Joey was just finished putting the last touches on Reita as I got downstairs. “Hi, Desiree. Everything ready upstairs?” he asked.
I nodded, trying to come up with a way to say what it was I wanted to say to this man who I’d counted on my whole life. I traced my finger along the wood grain of the desk outside the embalming room.
He looked up, seeming startled that I was still there. “Is there something wrong?”
I shook my head. “No. Maybe.”
He set down the makeup brush he had been using and waited, quiet and patient, big and solid. The calm strong pillar whose support I’d taken for granted my whole life.
“Nate said Reita’s heart just broke,” I said.
Joey nodded. “I know.”
“It’s like she loved Jordan so much that her heart broke as we buried him.” I bit my lip, not quite sure how to take this to the place I needed to go.
Joey waited.
“It’s sad, but also beautiful that that kind of love exists.”
He still didn’t say anything.
“I just wanted you to know that I think love is great and that if a person has a chance at love, they should go for it. They shouldn’t worry about what other people think or how they might react. And if they might be wondering how I would react, I would hope they would know that I would be happy for them.” I felt something wet on my cheek and brushed a tear away. Damn it. I was turning into a big cry baby.
“Thank you, Desiree,” Uncle Joey said. “I will take that under advisement.”
I nodded and went back upstairs to finish setting up for Reita’s service.
Chapter Twelve
On Monday afternoon, I loaded Orion into the Element and drove over to Verbena Fitness on Meadowlark Lane.
In the gym’s entry area, someone had set up a little memorial notice about Violet letting people know she’d passed away. There was a photo of her with Orion and a suggestion to make donations to the SPCA in her name. Violet had been a nice-looking woman. Maybe a little more on the handsome side than the pretty with a strong Roman nose and a cleft chin, dark eyes and dark hair. There had been a place for people to write remembrances, but some had been scribbled over. That seemed rude. I craned my neck to try to see if I could figure out what had been written from another angle.
“Were you a friend of Violet’s?” a voice asked next to me.
I turned. A woman wearing a lot of Lycra with her hair pulled back in a ponytail bounced a bit on her sneakered feet behind me. “Oh, hi. No. Not really. I mean, I never met her.”
She pointed to Orion and then to the notice. “Isn’t that her dog?”
Awkward. “It is. I’m taking care of him for a bit until her cousin decides what to do with him.” I was surprised at how easily the lie rolled off my tongue. Orion wasn’t going anywhere.
“How’d you get roped into that?” She shifted her gym bag to her other arm and tossed a small towel over her shoulder.
The woman pressed her lips together. “People have no propriety anymore. I know Violet wasn’t the most universally liked person, but writing that on a public expression of sympathy is pretty tacky.”
I had to agree. You had to really not care about social niceties to scrawl “Good Riddance” on an In Memoriam poster. “Tacky is one word for it.” I could think of a few others. Disrespectful. Mean-spirited.
“Sometimes you reap what you sow,” she shook her head making her ponytail bounce again.
Now we were getting somewhere. “Violet wasn’t nice?” Orion walked over and nosed at the memorial. He whined. He’d been such a fun companion, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might miss Violet. Say what you would about her, she was clearly crazy about her dog. I knelt down to put my arm around him. He’d been there for me these past few days when I was sad. It seemed like the least I could do was return the favor.
The woman gave me a weird look. “Who are you again?”
I stuck out my hand. “Desiree Turner. I work for Turner Family Funeral Home. We’re handling her services and I’m trying to give some extra help to Violet’s cousin. She seems really stressed out.”
She shook my hand. “Laverne Cason. I teach the Zumba class Violet used to take.” She looked around as if to see if anyone was listening. “Things always seemed to happen to people who crossed Violet.”
I straightened. “Like what things?”
She pressed her lips together. “I feel like I’ve already said too much, but I know one woman who beat Violet for a parking spot and ended up in divorce court after someone sent compromising photos to her husband.”
I was pretty sure I knew who that could be. “Were you teaching on that Monday? The day it happened?”
Laverne nodded and her expression changed. “The day she had her accident was the last time I saw her. So sad.”
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary? Anything that might explain why she might have fallen asleep or passed out in her car?” I asked.
Laverne furrowed her brow. “Come to think of it, she was a little extra sweaty when she was getting in her car in the parking lot. I noticed because she hadn’t been sweaty in class.” She made a face. “She was almost never sweaty in class.”
That was interesting. Hadn’t sweatiness been one of the symptoms that Nate had mentioned? On the other hand, it was pretty normal to leave the gym sweaty, although apparently not for Violet.
“Why do you want to know?” Laverne asked.
“Oh, just trying to figure out why she passed out behind the wheel. It seemed weird. You know, perfectly healthy woman passes out and crashes,” I said.
“I guess,” Laverne said. She glanced at her watch. “I should probably go in. I need to get set up.”
I’d called to request a tour a little before Violet’s Zumba class was scheduled to meet. I waited until Laverne had already disappeared into the back to walk up to the desk. A young white man with seriously huge biceps looked over the counter at Orion. He had short blond curly hair and a name tag that read Ty. “No pets,” Ty said. Apparently he hadn’t looked too closely at the memorial sign.
I didn’t want to leave Orion in the car. I couldn’t afford to buy that many more seats. “He’s a therapy dog,” I blurted out. “An emotional support animal.”
Ty came around the counter and Orion, bless his heart, offered up his paw to be shook. “Aw,” said Ty. “So like you have to have him with you or you’ll like freak out?”
“Totally,” I said.
“Okay, then. I guess I could make an exception. Especially for such a cute support animal.” He gestured for me to follow him. He took me through the group exercise room where Zumba class would start in thirty minutes. “We also have yoga, step aerobics, and bootcamp classes.”
Then he took me down the hall to show me the room with the treadmills, then the Nautilus machines and then the free weights. As we walked along, I spotted a display of photos. “Our Personal Trainers.” I recognized one of them. This photo was an 8 × 10 of his face, which I have to say I preferred to some of the other views I’d had of him on the lat pull. His name was Brice. I scanned the rest of the faces, but couldn’t find his lifting partner.
The weight room didn’t look quite the same as the one in the photos I’d seen. “Is this the only weight room you have?” I asked. “Are there any that are more … private?”
When Ty gave me a funny look, I reached down to pet Orion and said, “I’m shy.”
He nodded. “There’s a private one where the trainers can work out with their clients. You know, just one on one. Wanna see it?”
I did and when I did, I’d found the spot where Brice had that very private one on one time with whoever his partner was. We walked through a room with bikes and Ty suggested I take a look through the women’s locker room on my own and then meet him back at the desk. I did.
“So what do you think?” Ty asked. “Wanna join?”
“I’ll have to think about it, Ty. Thanks for the tour, though!” I glanced at my watch. It was the perfect time to go outside and watch who was coming in and out of the gym at the time that Violet would have been going in.
We said good-bye and Orion and I turned to leave. A small group of women stood outside the aerobics room with Laverne. I recognized a few of the people including Iris Fiore. I hadn’t known she went here. Laverne then pointed over at me. The group all swiveled around. I waved and ducked out. I had no desire to have any more conversations with Iris. She looked daggers at me every time I ran into her, which seemed to be happening a lot lately. It was kind of like learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it everywhere. It must have been there all along, you just didn’t notice it. I could see not noticing Iris. She was one of those women who could kind of fade into the woodwork. It had even happened at her father’s funeral. Everyone had flocked around Daisy. Iris had stood on the edge of the circle.
I didn’t have much time to think harder on that because as I walked out of the gym, I walked smack dab into the woman who’d been doing extra special aerobics with her personal trainer and had showed up in Violet’s Collection of Extortion, the one whose life Violet may have torpedoed.
*
Orion and I went for a walk—we figured Miss Fitness would be in the gym for at least an hour—and then took a seat on the low retaining wall by the gym watching the bees swarm around the sage and lavender plants in the last rays of fall sunshine. She walked out at about the same time that the women who’d been going into the Zumba class Violet had attended walked out, but she didn’t appear to be part of the group. They clustered near the front door and she headed down the street to a parking area out of the lot. I could see not wanting to park in the crowded lot if a fight over a parking space had already ended my marriage.
I followed her. If anything she was even more fit than she’d been in the photos. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t made her want to stop working out “Excuse me?”
She stopped and turned. “Yes?” She asked.
“I’m Desiree Turner.”
She stuck out her hand. “Rosalyn Compton.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Violet Daugherty.”
She retracted here hand, took the towel from her shoulder and dabbed at the sweat along her hairline. “Ding dong.”
That made me take a step back. “Pardon me?”
“You know. Ding dong. The witch is dead. Like in the movie?” She turned to walk away.
I jogged up next to her, Orion at my heels. “So you’re not exactly broken up about her death.”
“No. Not exactly.” She walked a bit faster.
“Rosalyn, did Violet blackmail you?” I asked. I pulled the photos ou
t of my jacket pocket and held them up.
Rosalyn stopped walking. She turned back to me slowly. “Why do you want to know? She’s dead. She has no hold over me anymore.” Her eyes narrowed and she took a step toward me. “Unless you think you’re going to take over where she left off.”
I backed up, hands in front of me. “No. Absolutely not.”
She shook her head. “Then drop it, Desiree. Let Violet’s secrets be buried with her.”
“But she did blackmail you?” I pressed.
Rosalyn blew out a breath. “She tried. She told me she had photos of me with Brice, the trainer here. I told her to go to hell. Two days later, my husband received photos of me with Brice and now I’m getting divorced.”
“You hated her for that.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. I did.” She laughed, but it didn’t sound like she thought it was funny.
“You wanted her dead.” Again, not a question.
Rosalyn snorted. “Why? She’d already done her worst to me. It was over.”
“Revenge?” I suggested. I’d had all kinds of fantasies about keying my boss’s car or lighting bags of dog doo on his porch after he fired me. I hadn’t done any of them, but I’d dreamed about them. Dreaming about them enough could make them seem kind of normal after a while. Would it be that big of a step to then actually acting on what seemed like a normal thought?
She laughed and held out her left hand. It had a ring with a teensy tiny diamond on it. “The best revenge is a life well-lived. Brice and I are getting married. He might not make as much money as my ex-husband did, but he makes up for that in a lot of other ways.”
I was pretty sure I’d seen at least a couple of those other ways. I didn’t want more details.
Rosalyn stopped at her car. She turned to me, a funny look on her face. “You know, in a lot of ways, Violet did me a favor. I was unhappy, but cheating on my husband wasn’t the right way to deal with that. I needed to leave and start over. Because of Violet, that’s what I did. I should have probably sent her flowers or something.”
It felt like I was hearing an echo of Not Vodka Mom and Rachel. Even the mayor had seemed a little relieved to make a clean break with his mistakes and do better in the future. “I don’t suppose you’re diabetic?”