A Grave Issue Read online

  I nodded slowly. “Okay, then. So what do we do now?”

  “Now? Now you take Lola home, and I’ll see what I can do here for Kyle. It may be a few days before there’s a hearing, but I’ll make sure they know we’re watching them.” She picked up the plate. “And you eat a piece of banana bread.”

  We said our good-byes, mine mumbled through crumbs, and I shepherded Lola out of the police station and tucked her into the passenger seat of my car. “I’m going to fix this, Lola.”

  I would too. I had to. I’d lost my father in the past year—I wasn’t going to lose any of the father figures I had left, and I certainly wasn’t going to lose this one to Luke-freaking-Butler.

  * * *

  I’d wanted to take Lola back to Turner’s. I could take care of her there, but she’d shaken her head and said, “I can’t. Maurice and Barry need me.”

  I sighed. I loved Maurice and Barry. There wasn’t a better pair of Australian shepherds out there. They were the dogs in Luke’s dogs-plus-emus-plus-guns-equals-dead-neighbors equation, though. I shrugged out of my suit jacket, positioned the AC to blow on my face, and headed out of town. Lola sunk down into the passenger seat, head pressed against the window. I reached over and patted her clenched hand. She whimpered. “What can I do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, a catch in her voice. “I just don’t know.”

  I let go of her hand and focused on my driving as the road began to wind and twist through the walnut orchards and fields of tomatoes. You never knew when you were going to come around a curve to find a combine blocking the road. We finally pulled into the driveway of Lola and Kyle’s place about four miles out of town and were greeted by Maurice and Barry, tongues lolling as they competed for pets. Five women—all good friends of Lola’s—were already in her kitchen heating up casseroles, putting out snacks, and pouring fishbowl-sized glasses of wine. I didn’t even know how they’d known to come.

  We walked in the door, and Bonnie Hernandez enveloped Lola in a hug. “We got the news alert from the Free Press. We let ourselves in with the key you keep behind the ceramic cat on the porch.” She pointed.

  I cringed. I’d made that for Lola and Kyle in art class. It wasn’t a cat. Or at least it wasn’t supposed to be a cat. It was supposed to be a horse. Whatever. And as to how they knew, well, apparently all the cool kids had the Free Press app and everyone knew where Lola and Kyle hid their extra keys.

  Cheryl Cooper, always first on the scene with baked goods, shooed me out the door. “We’ve got it from here,” she said.

  I went back to the Element, shook a piece of the gravel from the driveway out of my shoe, and gave Maurice a scratch between the ears. I looked up the hill at Rosemarie and Alan’s place. It was hard to believe the situation had come to this. There’d been a time when Rosemarie and Alan had been friends with Lola and Kyle. They’d help each other trim trees and they’d share tools. They’d sit on the deck during the summer sipping wine and watching the sunset, chatting about nothing. Now it was a feud and someone—other than an emu—was dead. Behind me, I could hear the soprano melody of Lola’s friends fussing and buzzing around her. It was a stark contrast to the complete lack of sound coming from Rosemarie’s house.

  No one’s car sat in Rosemarie’s driveway. No one appeared to be bringing her casseroles or pouring her a glass of wine, although I suppose they all had when it had first happened. I felt a pang of sadness for her. Then I felt a tiny rivulet of sweat slide between my shoulder blades and trickle down my spine. I kicked off my shoes, stripped off my panty hose, got in my car, and drove home barefoot. I needed to get to Tappiano’s to meet Jasmine.

  Chapter Four

  Once I got home, I went upstairs to the room that had been mine since forever but hadn’t really been mine for the past decade. I blew out a breath as I walked in, feeling both relief and exasperation. Dad hadn’t changed the room since I’d left for college. He hadn’t turned it into an office. He hadn’t used it for storage. He hadn’t taken up weaving and set up a loom. It was exactly as I left it when I’d packed up and gone to UC San Diego.

  In the years in between, it had never occurred to me to change anything about it either. The framed Maxfield Parrish poster of the girl sitting on the rock was still on one wall; a poster of a kitten exhorting me to “hang in there” while hanging from a branch was on the opposite wall. The bedspread was still pink gingham, and the desk and dresser were still white. It was sweet and girlish and totally not my style anymore. Why would I have changed it though? I was never here for more than a week at a time, first on school vacations and then on quick trips home with the meager amount of days off I had from the WXYZ Radio news desk and KLVX TV. This room had never been more than a stopping-off point between places I was going once I’d left.

  But now . . . now I didn’t know how long I’d be here. Now I didn’t have a plan. Now I didn’t have a place I was going, and the dreamy pastel girl on the rock looking up at the sky no longer spoke to my soul the way it had when I was fifteen. In fact, she pissed me off a little. I took the poster off the wall and shoved it in the closet. Then I flipped off the kitten and pulled it down too. I felt a little better.

  I peeled off the rest of my assistant funeral director clothes; changed into a tank top and a short, flowered skirt with sandals; and put on my charm bracelet that jangled a little too happily for the whole “somber funeral” thing. That made me feel a little better too. More me. Less whoever I was pretending to be now.

  I stepped out of the air-conditioned chill of Turner Family Funeral Home (seventy-two degrees rain or shine, summer or winter) and back into the full-blast furnace. Even though the peak heat of the day had now passed, it was still probably in the nineties, and the air had the dusty feel of a place that hadn’t had rain in months. Because it hadn’t. Not since sometime in March. The land stretched away from me, down the long drive lined with crepe myrtle and ornamental plum trees—riots of pink flowers and purple leaves. Miles away, the Vaca Mountains loomed, lavender against the pale blue of the cloudless sky.

  I took in a deep breath and inhaled the scents of dust and hay with a tinge of tomatoes from the romas that had fallen from trucks on the way to the processing plants in Williams and were now crushed on the side of the road. In the distance, I could hear the high school band practicing. Home. I took a long swig from my water bottle and stepped off the porch.

  I walked past the Cut ’n’ Curl; the In-n-Out; the Dollar General; the Count on Me Bookkeepers, which had sprung up after I left home; and the Clean Green Car Wash (“You can keep it clean while staying green!”), which was even newer than all the rest, and finally reached Tappiano’s.

  Tappiano’s was a wine bar before wine bars were trendy. They had had a tasting area when tasting rooms in Napa were still free and nobody went there. They made handcrafted wines before anyone called anything artisanal and made flavored olive oils before “extra-virgin” was in anyone’s lexicon. It was the place to go to get a glass of wine back when the floor was hard-packed dirt and still was now that the floor was bamboo. It was at least partly due to the clever stewardship of Mark Tappiano, great-grandson of the original Tappiano who had started the place.

  For instance, I was not the only person to graduate from Verbena High and hit the ground running while the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” still echoed in the air. A lot of us hightailed it out of town. Verbena High had a pretty decent reputation and a lot of teachers like Lola who knew their subjects and cared about their students. We scattered to dozens of different colleges and universities around California and beyond. None of us thought we’d ever come back. Who would want to?

  Turned out that ten years later, a bunch of us had. We were back for lots of different reasons from the quality of the schools and the price of housing to helping out aging parents, but back we were. As far as I knew, I was the only one who came home because she’d humiliated herself on live television and had her gaffe go viral. I’ve always been special.


  Mark Tappiano had seen a marketing opportunity in all of us coming home though. Forget Ladies’ Night or Two-fer Tuesdays—he started the Hometown Happy Hour. If you could point to your picture in any one of the dozens of Verbena High yearbooks he kept on the shelves, you got your drinks half price from five to seven.

  Judging by the noise level inside Tappiano’s when I walked in, happy hour had been going for a while. I stepped inside and paused for a second to let the air conditioning and the noise wash over me. Before I could take another step, I heard someone shout, “Death Ray! You made it! Hey, everyone! Death Ray is here.”

  There it was again. That nickname. From the first day of kindergarten, I was known as the girl who lived in the mortuary. I hadn’t known there was anything weird about it until then. To me, it had been normal. My classmates made sure to enlighten me otherwise. By junior high, I was also the girl with the dead mom. Death hung around me like a cloud. The young and the beautiful have a nearly lizard-brain response to that: avoid it at all costs. They don’t even know why. They just do. Then there was the nickname. I blamed Luke Butler, but it probably would have been someone else if it hadn’t been him. It hadn’t been too hard for elementary school minds to go from Desiree to Deathiree, and from there it was one easy step to Death Ray. Death Ray stuck like glue. Crack open my high school yearbook, and I’d guess that three-quarters of the inscriptions are addressed, “Dear Death Ray.” That’s what everyone called me.

  I pretended that I didn’t care, but getting away from being known as Death Ray was one of the reasons I’d left Verbena—and one of the reasons I was not happy to be back.

  I gave a halfhearted wave and ducked to the side of the room where I’d spotted Jasmine. Jasmine had been my best friend since I could understand the concept of friendship. We’d gone to the same hippy-dippy preschool, and our mothers had bonded over playdate scheduling, making organic playdough, and stocking the dress-up box with gender-neutral costumes. Jaz and I bonded over one-hundred-percent-natural juice boxes and whole wheat graham crackers. When my mother passed away, Jasmine’s mom was another person who stepped in to fill the gap. She’s the one who took me to buy my first bra, explained tampons to me, and tucked a Costco-sized package of condoms in my backpack when I left for college. Dad was awesome, but he got a little squeamish when it came to the girl stuff.

  Jaz and I might as well have been sisters except for the very noticeable difference in our skin tones. I came in more of a mayonnaise-like tint, while Jaz was more mocha. And our figures. She had the kind of curves that made people stop talking when she walked by. I was . . . sporty. I made it to her table, picked up her wineglass, and sucked down half of something pink.

  “Hey,” she said. “That’s mine.”

  I nodded toward the crowd. “You expect me to face that without any liquid courage?”

  “Ignore them. You always have,” she said, raising her hand and waving at the waitress. The waitress, a cute honey-blonde thing, nodded. Jasmine held up two fingers. The waitress nodded again and showed up with a second glass and a bottle of the same pink liquid.

  “I thought we didn’t drink pink liquor anymore,” I said. We’d drunk plenty of pink stuff back in the day. And green. And purple. Somewhere along the way, we’d stopped wanting wine to taste like soda pop though.

  “We started again when Tappiano’s started making a decent rosé.” Jasmine turned to the waitress. “Thanks, Monique. When did you start working here anyway?”

  “Like, a couple of weeks ago? I wanted to make some extra cash?” Her sentences all went up at the end as if she were asking us whether or not she wanted to make more money.

  “Are you still working at Cold Clutch Canyon Café too?” Jasmine asked.

  “I do the morning shift there, then head to my classes at the community college, then back here for happy hour a couple nights a week?” Monique set the glass down and poured us each a healthy serving.

  “Busy,” I said, impressed. I’d been driven, and I didn’t think I’d ever juggled that many things at once.

  “I like it that way?” she said. She smiled. She had a dimple. And freckles. She was cute and fresh and had a perky butt and made me feel old. And tired.

  Monique left and Jasmine turned back to me. “How’s Lola holding up?”

  “Not that great. It’s like she’s sleepwalking.” I turned to look out the window and watched a dirty pickup truck pull into the Clean Green Car Wash. A man got out of the truck and handed his keys to a car-wash attendant. He was the kind of guy you noticed. He looked a little like a turtle with a head cold, and he was wearing what looked like a kurta pajama set. The attendant pulled the truck around toward the back of the car wash. “It’s all ridiculous, though. I can’t believe Luke could even imagine that Kyle would kill someone. Who would get that angry over a neighborhood dispute anyway?”

  Jasmine turned to face the window too and gazed out at the car wash. “There’s a lot more anger in this town than you realize. Stuff simmers for long enough, and then it just blows up. People want to get in the last word and escalate situations until they turn violent. People get obsessed about something and chase after it in ways that aren’t healthy.”

  “In Verbena?” That didn’t seem right, but if anybody would know, it was Jasmine. She’d established her therapy practice here right after she’d been licensed and hadn’t had a free day since. She’d shrunk half the town in the past three years.

  The car-wash attendant brought the truck back and handed the man the keys. He got into his truck and drove away. I was surprised he hadn’t complained. It didn’t look like they’d washed his truck at all. Mud still spattered the wheel wells, and dirt streaked down the sides.

  “Totally in Verbena. I run a regular Saturday anger management session, and there are always plenty of people there. Every week.” She looked down at the table and turned her wineglass in circles. “Plenty,” she reiterated.

  That gave me something to think about. Angers simmered. People got violent. Not Kyle, though. Never Kyle. But someone. Someone had gotten angry enough to kill. Somewhere underneath Verbena’s placid small-town exterior, roiling emotions worked. I’d been away too long. I didn’t know all the little feuds and skirmishes that simmered. Jasmine, however, had been right here and had a front-row seat into a lot of the town’s true fears and obsessions. “So who hates Alan Brewer?”

  “Besides Kyle and Lola?” Jasmine asked. She twirled her stool around to face me.

  I shot her a look. “Yes, besides Kyle and Lola.”

  “He’s a banker, Desiree. Everybody hates bankers these days.” Jasmine finished her wine, pulled some cash out of her wallet, and put it on the table. “Give you a ride home?”

  “Thanks.” I plunked some money down too. Walking had seemed a good idea before I’d had wine on a nearly empty stomach. Now the idea of weaving home in the heat was significantly less appealing.

  We left Tappiano’s, pausing as we stepped out onto the sidewalk to adjust to the twenty-degree swing in temperature from inside to out, and walked over to where Jasmine’s Subaru was parked near her office. “What’s that on your hood?” I asked, squinting, when we were about half a block away. There was a small box on the hood of her car, and it looked like whatever was inside had leaked out.

  Jasmine’s steps slowed. “I’m not sure.”

  We approached the car as if it were some kind of animal that might suddenly lunge at us. Whatever had leaked out of the box was brown and puddling on the hood. “Is that . . . ?” I didn’t even want to finish the thought.

  Jasmine straightened, took two more steps forward, jammed her finger into the brown puddle, and stuck her finger in her mouth.

  I screamed.

  “Chocolate,” she said. “Want a taste?”

  “Oh.” I stepped closer and could smell the chocolate now. I could also see the box. See’s Candy. A local delicacy, but not outside on a hot summer day. “Who would leave chocolate out on a one-hundred-degree day?” I asked.r />
  She looked around with narrowed eyes. “Someone new. Someone who wouldn’t realize what our heat does to chocolate.”

  We wiped the chocolate off the car as best we could with the wet wipes Jaz kept in her car. Then we got in, licking our fingers and laughing. As we pulled out of the parking space and into the street, I thought for a second I saw someone coming out of the doorway of one of the shops. I started to say something, then I saw a squad car pulling into the street in the opposite direction that we were driving. I thought the driver was that female officer that had been at the desk when Kyle was arrested. I settled back in my seat. If there was anything or anyone there, she’d deal with it.

  Chapter Five

  I slipped in the back entrance once I got home. Our living quarters took up the third floor with back stairs that let us go in and out without going into the funeral parlor itself. I could hear the television in the family room and poked my head in. Uncle Joey sat in the big recliner chair that he filled completely and then some. Donna was on the couch, long legs extended and her feet in the lap of her husband, Greg. Her blonde hair gleamed in the lamplight while she crocheted something pink. Greg rubbed her feet. It all looked so peaceful until Donna turned around and saw me and I could see the fire in her eyes. “Where have you been?”

  I gulped. It hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone where I was going or why. In my decade away, I’d become pretty accustomed to not reporting to anyone when I came or went. “Kyle Hansen was arrested. I went to the jail to help Lola out and then . . .”

  Donna sniffed the air. “Then you went for drinks with Jasmine?”

  I felt the heat creep up my face.

  Donna said, “Can I talk to you?”

  I sighed. “Sure.” I trooped to the kitchen, ready to take whatever was coming my way.

  Donna walked in after me. “You steamed out of here without letting anyone know and with people still in the Lilac Room.” She winced.