A Grave Issue Read online

  “You know that this is at least partly your fault, don’t you?” I asked.

  He touched his fingers to his chest. “Moi? How could I be in any way responsible for a murder?”

  I shook my head. He knew what he’d done. He might not have known what the consequences would be, but his stories on the escalating animosity between the two sets of neighbors had certainly not helped settle anything down. No, he’d whipped it all up into as much of a frenzy as he could. Then he’d kept the frenzy going whenever possible. But it would do me no good to argue with him, and more important, it would do Lola and Kyle no good. The less you said to a reporter, the better. I knew. I used to be one. “No. Comment.”

  “Fine.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, which he reached around me to hand to Lola. “Call me if you change your mind.”

  “She won’t.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared. It probably wasn’t that impressive. I’m only about five foot four and a touch on the scrawny side. Definitely not the good Viking stock of my Dad’s family. My sister Donna got those genes.

  I watched Rafe leave the building and then slipped into the chair next to her and took her hand. “Lola, what happened?”

  Her head turned slowly toward me like a carnival puppet. “They arrested Kyle.” Her tone was flat.

  I rubbed her ice-cold hand to try to get some warmth back into it. My own were still nearly hot enough to cook with thanks to the steering wheel of the Element. Why had my dad always insisted on a black car? Wasn’t that just a bit cliché? “I know that part, but why?”

  “The emu.” A tear leaked down her cheek. “The emu and the gun. The stupid gun.” She took her hand from mine and wrapped her arms around her middle as if her stomach hurt.

  I didn’t understand what she was saying. “What gun? Whose gun?”

  “Our gun. They’re saying it’s the one that killed Alan. It couldn’t be, but when we went to look for it in the gun safe—the one on the porch—it was gone.” She began to rock in her chair. “They found it in the pond down by Rosemarie’s chicken coop, down where . . . it happened. Somebody threw it in there.”

  While murder didn’t happen much in Verbena, it was pretty common in Los Angeles. I’d covered plenty of murders as I’d worked my way up through the reporting ranks in the six years I’d lived there. “The gun is the only evidence they have?” I asked. Guns were stolen all the time. A name on the registration didn’t mean that person had shot the gun. It didn’t even mean the gun was in their possession.

  Lola nodded. “When Luke arrested Kyle, he said Kyle shouldn’t have used his own gun, or he should have done a better job of disposing of it.”

  “Luke? Luke Butler is the arresting officer?” A glowing ember of anger started to burn through the haze and confusion of the news of Kyle’s arrest.

  Lola put her face in her hands. “Yes. Luke Butler. And to think I gave that boy an A in Yearbook.”

  I made a noise in the back of my throat. “We’ll see about this.” I marched up to the desk where a female officer sat. I’d seen her before but didn’t know her name. “I need to speak to Luke Butler immediately. Tell him it’s Desiree Turner.”

  “I know who you are. You’re the funeral parlor lady.” She picked up the phone. “Butler, Desiree Turner’s asking to see you.”

  I leaned forward to speak into the phone’s receiver. “Demanding. Demanding to see you.”

  The officer straight-armed me away and glared. She listened for a second and then hung up. “He’ll be right out.”

  I nodded and stepped back. I glanced over my shoulder at Lola, who was looking smaller by the moment. It broke my heart. I felt an almost physical pain at seeing her so diminished.

  Then Luke stepped into the lobby. He was a good-looking man, if you liked that all-American-boy kind of thing with the blond hair, blue eyes, and freckles. If you went for the whole broad-shouldered thing, he was okay, I guessed. He hadn’t made me wait. I was a little surprised but gave him points for not playing games.

  “Hello, Death Ray,” he said, using the nickname he’d saddled me with back in grade school.

  And just like that, he was back to zero points. “Hello, Luke. I need to talk to you about Kyle Hansen.”

  He sighed. “I figured. Come on back.” He gestured for me to follow him through the double doors. He ushered me into an interrogation room and shut the door. I started to protest. He raised a hand to stop me. “It’s so we can speak privately. There’s not much of that out there.” He gestured to the open room dotted with cubicles. Verbena’s police and fire department were housed in the same building and had been since the town rebuilt after the fire of 1913. It was a great building, with light-colored brick with high arches for the fire trucks and decorative clay tiles all around. The exterior spoke of solidity and calm authority.

  Inside it spoke more to a twenty-first-century population, with technology crammed into a more than one-hundred-year-old space and cords and wires and cubicles everywhere.

  I sat back in my chair. “What possible reason could you have for arresting Kyle Hansen for Alan Brewer’s murder?”

  He made a face. “I assumed you’d spoken to Lola already. It was Kyle’s gun that shot Alan.”

  “His gun, but not him,” I countered.

  “His gun, his motive, his opportunity.” He ticked the items off on his fingers. “Look, I’ve spent some time studying homicides. The ones that take place between neighbors generally have two things in common: guns and dogs. There’s pretty much always a dog and definitely always a gun. We’ve got the same thing here. Dogs and guns.” He paused. “And, of course, the emu.”

  “You really think Kyle would kill someone over an emu-related dispute?” I scoffed. The whole idea was ridiculous. Anyone who knew Kyle at all could surely see that.

  “That may have been where it started, but you know it had grown bigger than that. You were there when Rosemarie and Lola got into that fistfight.” He pointed his finger at me like I was somehow responsible.

  Because I was responsible, in a way. I shifted in my seat. If only I’d been able to stop that fight. It had happened at Delia Burns’s funeral service. Delia had never hurt a soul in her life. She died in her bed of what my grandfather used to call “the blessed heart attack.” She’d turned eighty-seven two months before, lived on her own, and still had all her teeth. Then one Thursday morning, she simply hadn’t woken up. When Cheryl Cooper stopped by with some coffee cake and no one answered the door, she let herself in with the spare key Delia kept under a flower pot. She found Delia in bed with the blankets pulled up to her chin and wearing her special satin bonnet to maintain her perm until her next salon appointment at Cut ’n’ Curl on Main Street.

  The blessed heart attack had a special place in my grandfather’s pantheon of deaths, and it was a vaunted one. I’d been happy for him when it had been the way he went in the end. I wondered what he would have thought about how his son, my dad, had gone.

  Rosemarie had been seated in the third row at Delia’s funeral, two seats in, quietly looking at her smartphone while pretending not to. I wasn’t judging. If I could have been playing spider solitaire instead of standing by the big blown-up portrait of Delia and trying to smile the right amount of smile (warm and welcoming, but not having fun), I would totally have been doing it. Instead, I had to content myself with looking at the top of Rosemarie’s head, where dark roots were starting to show along the part in her honey-blonde hair, and wondering if there was anything interesting happening on Facebook.

  I didn’t know Rosemarie. At least, not well. She hadn’t even been Rosemarie Brewer (or a blonde) when I left town. She’d been Rosemarie Maldonado and a brunette back then. She’d been a big deal on the softball team back in the day. She’d had a changeup that would make your jaw drop. She also apparently had daddy issues that had led her to marry a man fifteen years her senior.

  Then Lola Hansen walked in. Lola had been my journalism teacher at Verbena High back in the da
y. At the time, I’d thought of her as a sophisticated older woman. She’d been the same age I was now. I still thought she was sophisticated, with her dark hair cut in a smooth bob and wearing a beautifully cut sleeveless tunic over capri-length leggings and ballet flats. She was where everything started for me. She was the one who told me I could write. Plus her husband, Kyle Hansen, had been my dad’s BFF. Lola and Kyle didn’t have kids but had been two of the many people who stepped in after my mom died to help my dad parent Donna and me.

  Lola and Kyle were two of the reasons I’d come back to Verbena. I’d called Lola when I didn’t know what else to do, and she’d made it simple. “Come home,” she’d said. “Take a breather, and we’ll figure it out from there.”

  When she strode in that day, my professional assistant-to-the-funeral-director smile went from carefully maintained to genuinely warm.

  “Desiree,” she said, opening her arms.

  Then I remembered Rosemarie and the emu.

  Before I could do anything, before I could usher Lola out or distract Rosemarie or do one of those other sleight-of-hand moves my dad used to do to diffuse confrontation and unpleasantness before it started, Rosemarie had risen from her seat and strode up to Lola, fists clenched at her sides. “So you’ll come to this funeral but not to Vincent’s?” she asked, her voice tight.

  Lola took a deep breath and schooled her features. “I’m sorry, Rosemarie. I didn’t think it was appropriate—”

  Rosemarie cut her off. “Why? Because you were responsible for his death?”

  I stepped between them the way I’d seen my dad do dozens of times, quietly and smoothly. Death didn’t always bring out the best in families and friends. Disputes arose, but Dad felt those disputes didn’t need to mar a perfectly nice memorial service. He’d made it look easy. Dad had made pretty much everything look easy. He was that guy.

  “Rosemarie, let’s remember why we’re here and focus on Miss Delia, okay?” I said, hands up in front of me to stop her advance.

  Lola tried to move to the side, but Rosemarie shifted to continue to block her way. Lola sighed. “Excuse me, Rosemarie. I need to get to a seat.”

  “There’s no ‘excuse’ for you, you murderer!” Rosemarie’s voice rose on the last word, and everyone who hadn’t been looking already—which I think was only Henrietta, and probably only because she needed to change the batteries in her hearing aids—swiveled around.

  I moved a chair aside so I could stand between the two women again. “Let’s sit down and talk about this later.”

  They both ignored me.

  Lola looked down at Rosemarie. “Don’t be ridiculous, Rosemarie. There was no murder.” She tried to step around Rosemarie again.

  Rosemarie moved to block Lola. “Then explain to me why Vincent is dead.”

  Lola sighed and shut her eyes for a second. I could practically hear her counting to ten. Lola said, “I’m sorry that Vincent died, but it still doesn’t have anything to do with me. Maurice and Barry are farm dogs. They bark. If you let your emu run up and down the fence line like some kind of crazy bird-relay machine, it’s going to get barked at. Besides, the barking might not have had anything to do with its death anyway. No one has proved that. Maybe it just had a heart attack. Birds die.”

  “It? You’re calling Vincent an ‘it’?” Rosemarie’s voice had risen to a very high pitch, and two round splotches of red had appeared high on her cheekbones.

  “It. He. Whatever. It was a bird. My dogs barked at it. It’s dead. We’ve been over this, Rosemarie. With animal control. With the police. If you have anything else to say, please contact my lawyer. I know you received the cease-and-desist letter. I have the receipt on file.” Lola looked over at me—finally—and gave me an eyebrow raise.

  Rosemarie took a step forward, crowding Lola. Lola stepped back, but there was no more space; there was a chair behind her. The back of her knees hit it, and she toppled backward.

  Lola shouted, “You pushed me! You all saw it! She pushed me! You’ve gone too far this time, Rosemarie. Too far!”

  “Oh, shut your pie hole, you big whiner!” Rosemarie screamed back. “I never touched you. Just like your dogs never touched Vincent!” Then she nudged Lola with her toe. Well, nudged with purpose, let’s say. It’d be hard to call it a kick, but it wasn’t friendly.

  Lola came up swinging.

  I tried to pull them apart and got an elbow in the gut from Rosemarie for my trouble. When I saw Grace heading toward the melee with her walker as if she could break it up, I ran for the phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  The newspaper coverage had been just this side of epic.

  Chapter Three

  The Verbena Free Press

  THURSDAY, JULY 11

  Female Fisticuffs at Funeral Home

  Two Verbena women were arrested Friday afternoon on charges of disturbing the peace and assault and battery. Lola Hansen and Rosemarie Brewer were both attending the funeral of Miss Delia Burns (see obituary on page B4) when an argument began between the two women. The situation escalated quickly into a physical altercation. Witnesses say that while it was Ms. Brewer who made the first move by pushing Ms. Hansen backward over a chair, Ms. Hansen held her own in the scuffle and landed several sound punches. Police arrived before a definitive victor could be called.

  Desiree Turner, assistant funeral director at Turner Family Funeral Home, declined to comment on the incident. Ms. Turner returned to her family business recently after leaving her position as an on-air reporter for KLVX TV in Los Angeles. No other fistfights are on record as having occurred at the funeral home prior to her assumption of that position.

  It had irritated my family; this was not the kind of press they wanted for Turner Family Funeral Home. It had come to the notice of the superintendent of schools who had notified Lola that her teaching contract could be nullified because of a morals clause that specifically forbade public fighting. And it had landed us here with Kyle arrested and Lola looking like she’d been run over by a whole herd of emus.

  I squinted my eyes at Luke and leaned forward. “Kyle didn’t do it.”

  “Desiree—”

  I cut him off. “Do you have any other evidence?”

  “That’s not something I have to share with you.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Did you even look at anyone else?” I knew a few things from my police beat days. I knew who usually committed murder. “Did you look at Rosemarie?”

  “You don’t think we looked at her? The spouse is the first person we look at. That’s detective training 101. Have you seen her? She’s been like a zombie since Alan was killed. She can barely put one foot in front of the other. She’s grief-stricken. What about a motive for her? And how did she get Kyle’s gun? They lived next door, but they were only speaking to each other through lawsuits.” He leaned back and shook his head. “No. It’s Kyle. I’m sure of it.”

  I stood. “I’m sure it’s not.” He had a point about Rosemarie, though. I couldn’t imagine leaving a love bite on someone’s chest and then turning around and shooting him in the forehead.

  “Then who?” he sneered.

  That stopped me only for a second. “I’ll figure it out, and then you’ll see it isn’t Kyle.”

  He stood and leaned onto the table between us on clenched fists. “Fine. Prove that it’s not him, Death Ray.”

  “I will, Butler.” I flung open the door of the interrogation room and stalked out. I marched out to the front lobby to find Janet Provost sitting next to Lola.

  “Janet?” Janet Provost was the head of the PTA when I was in grade school. She was the mom in charge of first aid on every volleyball team that I’d been on with her daughter, Ruthie. She ran fundraisers and got us Band-Aids and constantly complained about her weight while simultaneously baking every week “for the kids.”

  “I came as soon as I saw the news alert.” She stood to give me a hug. She wasn’t much taller than me, but she was significantly more squishy. She smelled like vanill
a. I didn’t really want her to let me go. She pushed me back to arm’s length anyway. “You look thin. I brought banana bread.”

  Sure enough there was a plate of banana bread covered with plastic wrap sitting on one of the chairs.

  “Thanks, but why are you here?” I asked, not wanting to be rude but very much wanting to protect Lola from everyone, even if they brought banana bread.

  She straightened. “I’m Lola and Kyle’s lawyer. I’ve been representing them in their dispute with Rosemarie and Alan. As soon as I heard about Kyle’s arrest, I came to help. They won’t let me in to see him. They say they’re processing him.” She sniffed like she’d caught a whiff of something rotten.

  I was still trying to catch up mentally. “You’re a lawyer?”

  “I went back to school when Ruthie left for college.” She smiled. “Best decision I ever made. I love it.”

  Ruthie was my age. Let’s say it took Janet three years to get through law school. That still left the whole passing-the-bar thing. “So you’ve been a lawyer for how long?”

  “Two years now,” Janet said.

  Two years. Two years of experience. Kyle’s life was on the line. Well, maybe not his life—California hasn’t executed a prisoner since 2006—but his liberty was definitely up for grabs. “Janet, this is a murder case.”

  “I’m aware.” She heaved a sigh. “Look, do you remember when the school board was going to cut funding for girls’ volleyball?”

  I did. The school board meeting had been a bloodbath. Janet had organized a protest, gotten a petition out and signed, and compiled a report showing how participating in sports could positively affect young women’s lives. They hadn’t cut the program and had actually ended up increasing our funding because of the public pressure she had generated. “I hadn’t thought about that in ages.”

  “Well, think about it now. Think about the person who organized that in her free time, and now imagine her in a courtroom with a law degree.” She raised her eyebrows.