If the Coffin Fits Read online

  “Great. Then leave her alone and this won’t go any farther.”

  “I can’t leave her anymore alone than I’ve left her.” I threw my hands in the air. How was I supposed to stop harassing someone I wasn’t harassing in the first place?

  He just looked at me.

  I held my hands up in front of myself. “Fine. I’ll be sure to stay out of Iris Fiore’s way.”

  My car was parked behind the station so I could go directly to it without going back on the street. No serpentining or slinking required. There was, however, some slumping as I scrunched down again in the driver’s seat. The first stop was to get the window fixed. I took the car over to Baumann’s Best Auto Shop. Angela Baumann came out of the back, wiping her hands on a rag that looked greasy enough to possibly be putting dirt back on her hands rather than removing it. She had on a gray coverall that had not been cut for the female form, but did have her name stitched over the pocket. Her blonde hair was swept into a side ponytail and she carried a clipboard.

  “I wondered when you’d be bringing her in.” She held out her hands for the keys.

  I dropped the fob into her outstretched hand. “Oh yeah? How’s that?”

  She came out and walked around the car. “Heard you got shot at. Knew you’d need a repair done, right?”

  “Right.” We’d never taken our cars any place but Baumann’s as far as I could remember. It was a decent assumption.

  “Luke got any idea who did it?” She started making notes on whatever was on that clipboard.

  “Luke thinks it was a prank and someone got a lucky shot in.”

  She looked up from her writing, one eye squinted shut. “Not so lucky for you.”

  “That’s what I said!” I sighed. “He thinks whoever did it fired from the corn maze.”

  “He find anything in there that would help figure it out? I don’t care if it was a prank or on purpose. Folks shouldn’t be shooting off firearms inside the town.” She ripped off the top page of the form she’d been filling out. My estimate was at the bottom.

  Angela had a point. “He didn’t say anything about checking it out.” Had he? What would there be to be found?

  Angela made a shooing gesture. “Then you better go look, right? Before whoever it is knows that Luke knows where they were or before the kids all trample it up. I got the Element. I’ll call you when it’s fixed up.”

  I was at the door, ready to walk back home, but then it was time to take that first step into the open. Panic rose inside me again, just as it had when I had to pull out onto the road from the shelter of home. I slid one foot out onto the sidewalk. My heart beat a little faster, though. My mouth went dry.

  “You okay out there?” Angela called to me.

  “Uh, yeah. Sure. Fine.” I was anything but.

  I stepped into the square and froze. It seemed bizarrely quiet. Like the birds had stopped chirping. The breeze had stopped rippling the leaves. Or maybe everything was drowned out by the buzzing of an incipient panic attack in my ears.

  “Hey, Desiree!” Rafe jogged up to me from down the block.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “Home.”

  “Want a ride?” He turned to walk back toward the newspaper office, realized I hadn’t moved, then stopped and held out his hand. “Come on. I’ll take you.”

  I stared suspiciously at his hand. “Why?”

  He put both hands on his hips. “Because if someone had shot at me, I’d feel a little jumpy about walking around in the open by myself.”

  “Who says I’m jumpy?” A car drove by on the street and I darted into a doorway.

  He looked down at his feet, but I could have sworn I saw a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth before he did. When he looked back up, however, his face was blank. “No one says you’re jumpy. I was saying that I might feel that way.”

  “Well, all right then.” I fell into step next to him. He took the spot closer to the sidewalk, just like Nate had done earlier.

  “Does Butler have any idea who did it?” Rafe asked.

  “He thinks it was a prank.”

  Rafe looked over at me, his forehead wrinkled. “Seriously? Why?”

  “It was a BB gun. A lucky shot.” I bit my lip.

  “Not so lucky for you,” Rafe observed.

  True that.

  We got to his car. He opened the door and shifted so he was between me and the street as I got in “Thanks, Rafe,” I said.

  “No problem. Buckle up.” He got into the driver’s seat and off we went.

  The panic started to set back in as we got closer to the corn maze. We had to drive past it. The only other route would be to get on the freeway, go two exits, and then wind around on the back route favored by the bicyclists who jammed the roads on weekends with their skinny-tired bikes and Lycra-covered butts. It would take an extra half an hour.

  Plus, it would mean giving in. It would mean that if whoever had shot out my window had wanted to scare me off they would have won. They would have successfully cowed me into slinking off home and staying there. Well, screw that.

  I pulled myself up straighter in the seat. We drove past. There was only one car there at the moment—van, actually—parked over by the makeshift office in one of those portable pods. I glanced up at the big sign for the maze that included the names of all the businesses who had donated money or services to help set it up. Turner Family Funeral Home was there. So was Cold Clutch Canyon Café and You’re Covered Insurance. So was Canty Construction.

  “Hey,” I said. “Did you see that? Canty Construction helped sponsor the corn maze.”

  “So?” Rafe said.

  “So maybe someone who works for them knows the corn maze really well from sponsoring it and knew where to hide to shoot at me. Maybe somebody’s still angry about exposing their bribery scheme with the mayor.”

  He signaled and pulled into the Turner Family Funeral Home driveway. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting and worth following up on,” I said. “Turn around. Let’s go look.”

  “No,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No. It’s a pretty simple word. One syllable. Easy to read. Easy to say. I suspect it’s one you haven’t heard a lot though.” He made a bit of a face.

  “I’ve heard it plenty. Now is the not the time for it, though. Now is the time to say yes. Let’s go take a look.” I looked back over my shoulder at the maze.

  “No.”

  “Fine.” I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me. A fine mist of anger started to form in my brain. I liked it. I’d way rather be angry than scared. I jammed my hands into my coat pocket and walked out onto the road.

  Rafe pulled up next to me in the car. He rolled down the passenger side window. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m walking over the corn maze to see what I can find.”

  “The corn maze from where someone shot at you?” he asked.

  “I don’t see any other corn mazes here.” I kept walking.

  He inched his car along next to me. “Is there any way I can talk you into going home and letting the proper authorities investigate this?”

  “Maybe if I thought they would.” I marched on.

  He stopped the car, reached over and opened the door. “Get in. I’ll go with you.”

  We pulled into the lot. I got out. Rafe grabbed his phone and started furiously texting someone.

  Taylor Nieves wheeled down the ramp of the portable and out into the driveway. He had a beard that was a tiny bit shaggy and a wool skull cap pulled down almost to his eyebrows. He hit the joystick on his wheelchair and rolled up to me. I heard Rafe get out of the car behind me. “Good morning, Desiree. Rafe. I’m surprised to see you out here. Sure you don’t want to take cover?”

  I did, but I didn’t feel like broadcasting that information. “I take it you heard, too.”

  “News travels fast in Verbena.” He scratched at his beard. �
�What can I do for you?”

  I pointed at the sign. “What did Canty Construction donate to the maze?”

  Taylor repositioned himself to look at the sign. “Oh, they were awesome. Came out with some nice machinery to help me really cut sharp corners into the maze. Titus came out himself to do it. Great guy.” His brow furrowed. “Except for that whole corruption thing, of course.”

  I let that go for now. “So he’d know the maze pretty well?”

  “Probably nearly as well as I do.”

  I threw a glance over at Rafe. “Any chance I could go into the maze?” I asked. “Luke is pretty sure the shots were fired from in there. He thinks it was probably kids horsing around. Someone got off a lucky shot and hit my window.”

  He snorted. “Not so lucky for you.”

  “I know.” I was glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that way. A consensus was definitely forming. “I’d like to take a look around. See if I can find anything that might point to who it was.”

  “You think Canty might be involved?” he asked, frowning.

  “I wrote an article exposing their bribery of an elected official and then I got shot at from a place they know well. Seems worth looking into.” I was happy my voice didn’t shake when I talked about being shot at.

  Taylor nodded and scratched at his beard. “That’s crazy. I can see it, though. It makes sense to take a look. Want a map?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  He reached into one of the pockets of his wheelchair and pulled out a trifold brochure. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “I will.” I turned the map so I was looking at it in the same direction as I was looking at the maze. I looked out at the road. Where exactly had I been when the window had shattered? I’d been talking to Jasmine, but she’d been on the speaker phone and my eyes had still been on the road. What was the last thing I’d seen before that popping noise and the window imploding? I shut my eyes, trying to visualize the whole thing. Jasmine’s voice on the phone. Orion sitting in the passenger seat. The moon about a quarter full. The road in front of me.

  It all came flooding back. I had just passed the three oak trees by the Thacker’s driveway. I looked at where that was and back at the map, then put my finger on where someone must have been if they’d been shooting from inside the maze. “There,” I said.

  “You’re sure?” Rafe asked.

  I shrugged. “Reasonably.”

  We entered the maze.

  Things are different inside a corn maze. Sound from the outside is muffled as if the world beyond has somehow faded. Whatever scents might have been in the air before you came in were masked by the scent of green growing things and fecund soil. The breeze might rustle the tall corn tassels, but it didn’t make it down to where we walked. The air was close and warm. I slipped off my jacket and consulted the maze map again. It looked like we needed to take three rights and a left for the first part. I set off with Rafe next to me.

  Once there, I looked again. If I’d done that correctly, now I needed to make another right and then two lefts. I kept my finger on the map to keep my place. We were nearly there. Two more turns.

  We reached the spot I thought was the right one. I turned in a slow circle. There wasn’t much there except dirt and some leaves that must have blown in. There were a few bits of trash. The label off a bottle of beer, a wrapper from a cough drop, a shred of worn fabric from a flannel shirt. I reached down to pick them up.

  Rafe grabbed my wrist.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What if that’s actually evidence? There could be fingerprints. DNA. Who knew what else? You’d destroy it by picking it up.”

  I straightened back up. “It’s not like I walk around with gloves and evidence bags in my purse.”

  “Poop bags for picking up after Orion?” he suggested.

  Bingo. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I pulled a plastic bag out of my purse, turned it inside out, and picked up the items. Rafe took it from me. “I’ll drop them off at the police station after I drop you off at home. Okay?”

  “Will they do anything with it? Law enforcement has seemed pretty uninterested in people shooting up Verbena.” Especially since law enforcement was Luke Butler and the person getting shot at was me. “What will Luke do with a few scraps of trash anyway?”

  Rafe heaved a sigh. “Law enforcement will do what it needs to do. You might want to give Butler a chance. You might want to give all of us a chance. That’s really all I ask,” he said, then he turned and walked back to the parking lot.

  *

  Rafe dropped me around back and I trudged up the stairs. Orion greeted me at the kitchen door.

  “He’s been whining since you left without him,” Donna said. She was cutting up an apple at the kitchen sink.

  I bent down. “Sorry, boy. I’ll try not to do that again.”

  I’d left my laptop on the kitchen table that morning. I opened it up and let my e-mail load. Right at the top was one from Loreta Godfrey suggesting a time for an interview. My calendar was pretty open these days. I e-mailed her back that next week sounded great. I should probably put together some clippings for her. I looked at my computer. The desktop was cluttered with memorial videos and layouts for funeral programs. It might help find what I was looking for if I cleared those off. “How long should I keep these?” I asked.

  Donna looked over my shoulder and offered me a section of apple. “You can get rid of them as soon as you’re done with the service. I back them all up every week.”

  “Great.” I started sorting through the hordes of them I had stored as I crunched through the apple. It was good, but it would have been better with peanut butter on it. I had the icons set so each one showed the beginning image of the video. Somehow that was easier for me than searching for them by name. It was when I hit Frank Fiore’s video that I froze. That face. His face. His face much younger than it had been when he was laid out in the Magnolia Room. I hadn’t really looked at the video before. Donna put them together and I’d been busy running the service when it was playing. The opening image was the face of the man that had looked familiar in the photo on Violet’s counter. I ran upstairs to get it to be sure. I dug it out of the box I’d put in the corner of my closet, and ran back downstairs with it. I opened Frank’s video and froze it on that image. It was the same man. Why did Violet have a photo of Frank Fiore with her mother?

  “What’s gotten into you?” Donna asked.

  I started to tell her and then remembered the way she’d held her stomach when she’d told me to drop all this. I remembered that I’d promised her that I would drop it. Twice. “Nothing. Just making sure I got it all right.” I closed the laptop and carried it back upstairs.

  My brain clicked along. There was a connection between Frank Fiore and Violet Daugherty. Or at least between Frank and Violet Daugherty’s mother. Olive or Grace had made some remark about him being a flirt. I’d figured he had been kind of like my dad. No harm in it. Maybe he’d gone a little farther than my dad had. Maybe he wasn’t just a flirt. Maybe he was a player.

  Violet had found out she had relatives she didn’t know about and shortly after she had moved here. Iris had said something about Rose doing a science project on genetics. Maybe Rose had used Helix Helper and had shown up as a possible relative. Maybe she was one of those possible relatives that had made their profile private and refused to answer Violet when she messaged them. So how would Violet have known to come here? Violet knew an awful lot of things that no one else seemed to know. Maybe she’d figured it out from something else she’d seen. She’d taken an awful big interest in her background recently. She’d become obsessed with her Italian heritage, putting up corny signs in Italian, investing in an expensive pasta maker, drinking Frangelico. Frank Fiore was of Italian descent. He was also diabetic and had relied on his daughter for everything. Iris could still have had insulin around and she’d know how to give it.

  Could Violet have been a relative of Frank Fiore? Co
uld she have been his daughter? Violet. I’d assumed she’d been named for the color. What if she was named after the flower? The way Iris and Daisy were named after flowers? What had Daisy said her father called them? His little flowers? Maybe he had more than two. Maybe he had a whole freaking bouquet. What would that mean, though? Why would that lead to her being murdered? Knowing Violet as I felt I had come to, she’d have found something she wanted from Iris. Not money, though. She’d never seemed to want anything that prosaic. Violet had wanted to belong, more than anything else. It was probably part of why she was so observant. She was always looking for ways she might fit in. Maybe she wanted family. Maybe she’d come here to try to connect with the family she’d discovered. How sad to figure out who and where your father was just to find him at death’s door. Then, of course, Violet had died before Frank by a day or two.

  But what if she hadn’t died before him? What if he’d died and she was somehow entitled to part of his estate? Iris had had a pretty ready rant about what made someone a daughter. Had she already given that speech? To someone who wanted all the rights and privileges and assets that a daughter who had spent years caring for their father was getting? As his daughter, would Violet have stood to inherit some of Frank’s dwindling fortune that Iris had been counting on to send her daughter to whatever school she wanted to attend?

  I opened Violet’s photo program. There were about a bazillion pictures of Orion. Orion sleeping. Orion running. Orion standing looking noble. Orion sitting looking cute. Orion as a little tiny puppy with giant paws at the ends of his legs. Violet may have been a manipulative blackmailer, but she loved her dog.

  There were hardly any pictures of Violet, herself, though. I supposed that made sense she was the person holding the camera all the time. Not everybody liked to take selfies and even if Violet had, I wasn’t sure if they would have shown me what I wanted to see.

  I called Nate. “I need to see those photos of Violet’s hands again.”

  “No.”

  I was hearing that word an awful lot that morning. “Please, I think there’s something in the photos that will help us figure it all out.”