If the Coffin Fits Page 9

  “Hey, who’s this?” he asked, pointing at Orion.

  “Luke,” I said. “Meet Orion. He was Violet Daugherty’s dog.” We did the handshake routine. “I’m taking care of him until I find a home for him.”

  “The cousin didn’t want him?” Luke asked.

  “She already has a dog. She thought a second one would be too much.” It wasn’t really a lie. I was pretty sure that was what she’d meant when she hung up the phone on me.

  “How could you be too much?” Luke leaned down and rubbed his head against Orion’s. “You’re too cute to be too much.”

  He was awfully cute. Orion. Not Luke. Although I suppose some people might think Luke was good looking.

  “So what happened with Reita?” Luke sat up and asked.

  “I don’t really know. One minute we were standing there. Then Reita looked up as some geese flew over and crumpled to the ground.” I scratched Orion behind the ears. He licked my hands.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked. “Do you think it’s goose-related?”

  I looked up. He was willing to entertain the possibility of a goose-related death, but not one caused by insulin? “Earlier she seemed a little dehydrated. I gave her some water. I’m hoping it’s just that.”

  “Uh-huh.” He made a note. “So you don’t think it’s another murder?”

  There was a gloating smirkiness to his tone that I didn’t like. The goose thing was a joke. It wasn’t funny. Then again, Luke rarely was. “Is that really all this is to you? An opportunity to bust my chops?”

  He shrugged. “When something drops into your lap like this, you gotta take advantage of it.”

  “Luke Butler, a member of our community has been rushed to the hospital and all you can think of is scoring points in an argument?” Every once in a while, I warmed to Luke. I started to think he was okay. Then he proved to me he wasn’t.

  “Hey, who’s busting whose chops?” He snapped his notepad shut. “You never come to me for those quotes you put in your articles. You always talk to Carlotta. And you and Johar are the ones trying to tell me I’m not doing my job.”

  He was jealous that I’d quoted Carlotta and not him. How old was he? “Well,” I asked. “Are you?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Then have you looked into what Nate found out about Violet Daugherty? That she had high levels of insulin in her blood when she crashed her car?” I started to get up, but Orion put his paw on my leg and I settled back on the couch.

  “No. Because that’s a bunch of nonsense.” He waved me away.

  “How do you know it’s nonsense? You haven’t looked into it at all.”

  “Because there’s no reason to! The woman lost control of her car and it went into an embankment on a twisty country road at a time of day when the sun is setting and gets into people’s eyes. It’s tragic. It’s sad. It’s not murder.” He shook his head. “Somebody forgot to write down something that was done in the field in a moment of high pressure. I’m sure that’s it.”

  That was just supposition. Not fact. Not investigation. “But you don’t know, do you?”

  “I do know.” I hated how confident he sounded, how confident he always sounded. I’d felt that confident at one point in my life. I missed the feeling.

  “What about that e-mail? The nasty one. Nate said he told you about it. Maybe there are other people with grudges against her.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Luke said, sitting up straight. “You’re not playing detective again, are you?”

  “I’m not playing at anything,” I said. “I’m keeping my eyes open and seeing a lot of connections. I’m a reporter. It’s what I do. If that also makes me a detective, then I guess I’m a reporter-detective. I’m not so bad at it, if you’ll remember.”

  Luke’s eyes narrowed. “Solving one murder doesn’t make you a detective.”

  I leaned forward. “Yeah. How many have you solved?”

  He leaned forward, too, so we were nose to nose. “I solve what needs to be solved and there’s nothing here to solve. There are no murders to be solved here. None. Chick fell asleep while driving her car and rammed into an embankment. It was a single-car accident. No skid marks on the ground. There’s not a lot more to discuss.” He sat back and wagged his finger at me. “You are skating on thin ice, Death Ray. Don’t think I didn’t hear about your little to-do with Iris and Daisy Fiore.”

  I decided to ignore Luke going back to using my old grade school nickname. He knew how much I hated it. He was only doing it to get a rise out of me. “That was a mistake,” I said. I looked down. I still felt bad about it. Every time I thought of it, I saw the tears in Iris’s eyes when she talked about what it took to be a good daughter. I was embarrassed that I’d made her feel bad when she was already grieving. Embarrassed enough that I hadn’t talked to anyone about it, except Jasmine. I sat up straight. If Luke had heard about it, someone was talking about it. The only other people who knew were Daisy or Iris. They had to have been spreading it around. What possible reason would they have for that? “Who told you about it anyway?”

  Luke puffed up his cheeks and blew out a breath. “Someone at the coffee shop told me. No idea who told her.”

  So weird. Why would Iris tell anyone? But back to the matter at hand. “If there aren’t murders to be solved here, what does it matter if I poke around?”

  “You’re pissing people off,” Luke said, sounding as if he was one of the people I was doing that to.

  The feeling was mutual. “You’re pissing me off. Do you have to stop what you’re doing?” I said.

  He stood up, too. “I suppose so. I’ll see myself out.”

  I couldn’t help it. I stuck my tongue out at his retreating back as he went out of the room.

  Donna slipped into the room and cuddled into the couch with Orion. Perhaps he was already growing on her. I sat back down. I was not going to miss a group cuddle. “What did Luke want?”

  I told her what happened at Jordan’s graveside service. Her hand went to her mouth. “That’s terrible.”

  “I know. I feel awful.” I did, too. Now that my self-righteous indignation from talking to Luke was burning out, the sorrow over Reita came back to the fore.

  “It’s not like you did anything wrong.” She paused. “Did you?”

  Her tone made me think of Daisy asking Iris what she’d done. “Of course not!” I shrunk down in my corner. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, then we’re fine.” She patted me on the knee and left to go back upstairs.

  I didn’t feel like we were fine, though. I felt like there was some kind of disturbance in the field. Things were off kilter. I’d felt that way for a while, too. First Dad, then Kyle being accused of Alan Brewer’s murder. It had felt like something had happened to my community, something had knocked it out of balance, had put on a blot on it. Now there was Violet Daugherty, too. Something wasn’t right there, but Luke refused to see it. I needed to find something to force him to open his eyes.

  Chapter Six

  The Verbena Free Press

  October 9

  By Desiree Turner

  Bathroom Contract Awarded to Winters Construction

  Verbena City Council voted unanimously to give the contract for new bathrooms in four area parks to Winters Construction.

  Fumiko Winters, owner and CEO of Winters Construction, said, “I’m so pleased to be part of adding these necessary services to such a great town.”

  Luckily, I had the perfect opportunity to snoop around a bit more in Violet’s life the next day. I’d made arrangements to meet Michelle at Violet’s house that afternoon. “You have the key?” she asked balancing a box and some garbage bags on her hip as we walked up the front sidewalk. Orion pranced around, clearly happy to be back in his own yard. I took off his leash and he took off running in a giant circle around the yard. Then he made a beeline for the crabby neighbor’s yard. I dropped the box and stopped him before he dug up a lavender plant and dragg
ed him back. I snapped his leash back on.

  I opened the door and turned off the alarm system. There’s a particular silence about a house that has been empty for a while. If people have just stepped out, there always seems to be some echo of their presence, a warmth to the air, a scent. Violet’s house was truly empty. It gave me a bit of a shiver. Orion whined and tapped me with his paw. “What’s up, boy?” I asked.

  He trotted over to a corner of the living room and curled up on the rug by a fuchsia wingback chair, chin propped on his crossed paws. The chair looked like a good place to sit and read. I could imagine Violet sitting there with Orion beside her. Maybe Orion had felt the chill of Violet’s absence, too. Sometimes I wondered if Dad was wrong about ghosts.

  “So what did you need to talk about?” I asked Michelle.

  “We need to talk about staging.” She started walking through the house. “This has to go. This has to go. All these have to go.” She touched several framed photographs and prints and gestured to everything on the kitchen counter.

  “And this has to do with me how?” I had a bad feeling about what was coming.

  “Lizette said you’d volunteered to help her deal with all these things.” Michelle looked surprised, as if we’d all discussed this before.

  “I volunteered to get a few things started for her, not to act as her dogsbody.” Orion yipped. “No offense,” I said.

  She frowned. “Well, I don’t have time to do it and Lizette certainly isn’t going to come out here to do it.”

  I started to protest, then changed my mind. I’d get to go through all of Violet’s things looking for clues and be doing a good deed at the same time. I wasn’t sure anything could be more win-win than that. “Fine,” I said. “Tell me again what stays and what goes.”

  Michelle left me with a preprinted checklist that she’d annotated. “You want the space to be aspirational, but still relatable.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but I figured I could follow a simple set of instructions. I wasn’t really set up to do much, but I could at least do the first thing on the list. Gather up all personal photos and remove them. There weren’t that many of them. There was a studio portrait of a much younger Violet with an older woman. I was pretty sure it was her with her mother. Then there were some vacation-type photos. Violet on cross-country skis in the snow. Violet with a lei around her neck sipping a drink that had fruit and umbrellas sticking out of it. Violet in front of a huge fountain. It was always Violet alone in every shot. Then there were a few photos of Orion as a much smaller puppy. There were a couple more photos sitting out in the kitchen. These were a few group shots. Violet and her mother were in them with other people. I squinted at one of them. The man in the photo with his arm around Violet’s mother looked familiar. I couldn’t quite place him, though. He was a nice-looking guy with a full head of dark hair and a flirty smile, one of those guys who maybe wasn’t traditionally handsome, but had a joie de vivre that I could see even in the snapshot. I put those photos in the stack, too.

  I carried that set of items out to my car with Orion at my heels. The wind whipped up. Orion lifted his head and sniffed. I wished I’d brought a sweater with me. The breeze had a dampness to it that crept down the collar of my shirt and made me shiver. Fall was on its way and maybe that storm was finally coming.

  “Okay, then,” I said to Orion, pulling out the checklist that Michelle had given me. It was broken up by room, which was handy. First on the list was the kitchen. Job one was to empty the refrigerator. I grabbed a garbage bag and opened up the fridge, wincing away before I even got a good look. Orion lay down, whined, and put a paw over his snout. There was a definite smell. It was coming from the crisper where a head of lettuce had pretty much become water and half a red pepper was growing what was either an alternate life form or penicillin. It all went into the garbage. I pulled the drawer and put it in the sink and gave it a good scrub.

  There wasn’t much else in the refrigerator, but I seriously didn’t want to encounter much more like that. It felt wasteful, but I decided the best thing would be to simply throw it all out. I swept everything into the garbage bag. Everything until I picked up a can of soda from the far back corner of the fridge and found it to be nearly weightless. I gave it a shake and something rattled inside. I turned it and twisted it and shook it. Finally, I grabbed it in both hands and gave a forceful twist and the top popped off. A key rolled out.

  Keys are like loose change in most people’s lives. They seem to accumulate. I’d found one in my father’s desk a few months back that opened a storage locker we hadn’t known about. Random keys, however, weren’t the ones you hid inside fake soda cans in the back of your refrigerator. That kind of key was to something important. The question was what.

  I looked around the kitchen. I looked in every cabinet and the stove and even managed to slide the refrigerator out a tiny bit to be sure there wasn’t anything hidden behind it. Nothing but dust bunnies.

  Next, I searched the area off the kitchen that Violet had set up as her office with a desk and a two-drawer filing cabinet. I sat down behind the desk and turned back and forth in the chair. I went through the papers on the top of the desk. The usual stuff. A water bill that needed to be paid. I set those aside. Some solicitations from people who wanted to feed hungry children and others from people who wanted other people to stop abusing animals. All good causes, but definitely not what I was looking for. Nothing that needed a key. All the desk drawers opened. All the filing cabinet drawers opened. I went through all the drawers of the desk and found nothing more interesting than a tape dispenser in the shape of a high-heeled shoe. I started through the filing cabinet. Tax returns. Bank statements. Owner’s manuals for the refrigerator and stove and washer and dryer. I looked underneath to see if there was some kind of hidden compartment. No.

  Next I went to the dining room, taking down wall decorations to see if there might be something behind it. I did the same in the dining room, both bedrooms, and the bathroom. I struck gold in the laundry room behind a wall sign that read TANTO AMORE. Built into the wall behind it was a small safe. I stuck the key in. It turned easily. Inside was a shoe box. I shook it. It rattled.

  Outside, the rumbling sound of thunder echoed through the town.

  I spread the contents of the safe out on Violet’s dining room table. There were photos and thumb drives and a DVD and some cards encased in plastic with fingerprints on them. I started with the photos to see if there was anyone I knew.

  There were. Some only by sight, but I knew them. I wasn’t certain I understood what some of the photos meant. For instance, there was one of the neighbor who had come out to give Orion and I the stink-eye the first time I’d been at the house. She appeared to be scattering something into a garden. I could see the front of the house and it wasn’t one of the ones on this block with their striking Eichler profiles. This was a different neighborhood. It wasn’t a McMansion like Michelle’s either. I’d bet Michelle would be able to identify it, though. Others were a little more obvious. There was one of a woman working out with a well-built man, then another of the same two still in the gym, but in a more compromising position. I would never look at a lat pull the same way again.

  Then there was a series of photos of our illustrious mayor accepting envelopes from a man in a suit. I recognized the man. I’d seen him at the city council meeting I’d covered for Rafe, the one about the bathrooms. His name was Titus Canty and he’d been one of the people submitting bids. You couldn’t tell from the photographs what was in the envelopes, but I had a feeling they weren’t greeting cards. It was certainly worth looking into. It was definitely worth looking into why Violet would have photos of the two men together tucked away in a safe.

  I chewed my lip. I’d seen Canty Construction’s name somewhere else recently, too. It was the company that Broderick Gunter worked for. Broderick had been one of the people Dad had buried in the weeks before his disappearance. Could this all be linked? Could Dad have heard or se
en something to do with Canty Construction while taking care of Broderick Gunty that would make him want or need to disappear?

  I looked at the items spread out in front of me. Had this been what Brandie Frierson had meant when she said Violet’s hobby was photography? If it was, no wonder she’d snorted. The next question, however, was what had Violet been doing with these photos? And could it have led someone to pump her so full of insulin that she’d pass out behind the wheel of her car and slam it into an embankment?

  I shivered. Orion set his head in my lap and whined.

  “I know, boy. I know. We’ve got some digging to do and it’s not the kind that ruins someone’s garden.”

  *

  Back home, I opened up my laptop and typed in Canty Construction. The first thing that came up was the company’s website. Might as well see what they wanted their public face to be. There was a big banner with the company name, then underneath was a scrolling set of images of things they’d built. I clicked over to the “About Us” page. There was a nice big photo of Titus Canty wearing a hard hat and pointing upward while holding a blueprint. Another man in a hard hat stood next to him looking like Canty was giving the directions to the fountain of youth.

  According to the copy, Canty’s father had started the company way back when. Titus took over from Canty, Sr. about five years ago. He had a degree in Construction Engineering and an MBA. Apparently, he’d been groomed from birth to take over this company.

  The next three hits for Canty Construction’s name were not so glowing. All three involved ethics violations. It wasn’t Canty that was being charged, though. Four members of the school board in Santa Linda were put on administrative leave after it came out they had accepted gifts just before awarding Canty a contract to build additional classrooms at the junior high. The gifts looked pretty good, too. Trips to San Francisco. Tickets to Hamilton. A ski weekend in Tahoe. The obligatory golf outing to Pebble Beach. I wasn’t sure they were worth ending your career in ignominy, but that’s a tough mathematical equation to put into play. People didn’t expect to get caught. They didn’t think anyone was watching and with no one watching … well, not everyone wanted to be good for goodness’ sake. Sadly, some people needed oversight.