Chapter Nine

The Verbena Free Press

October 12

By Desiree Turner

Annual Ghost Tour Plans in Place

The first time a ghost spoke to Tamara Utley she was only seven years old. She didn’t think anything of her dead great-aunt telling her where to find the diamond earrings everyone was looking for. Since then, all kinds of people have contacted Utley to send messages to their loved—and not so loved—ones here on this mortal plane.

“I generally don’t pass on anything threatening,” she said in a recent interview. “I don’t think it’s nice.”

She will, however, show everyone the best places in Verbena to contact the spirits. Tickets for her popular Verbena Ghost Tour will go on sale starting on October 17. The tour will begin at the Lawn of Heaven Cemetery and range through downtown Verbena to historic sites and contemporary areas where ghosts have reportedly been seen and heard. Meet ghosts old and new and learn a bit about Verbena history at the same time.

The final stop will be at the corn maze. Town legend has it that the maze is built each year on top of the site where Iddell McCrary and Jonas Purdy killed each other in a duel over ownership of a horse in 1898. Utley claims phantom neighs can be heard on nights with a full moon.

Taylor Nieves of Taylor’s Corn Maze said, “Every year Tamara tries to drum up more business for her gosh darn ghost tour by telling people my maze is haunted. It’s not. There’s nothing out there but good old-fashioned dirt and corn.”

Further research has not been able to prove that either Mr. McCrary or Mr. Purdy actually lived in Verbena at all.

*   *   *

Thurman Sizemore had died of an infection that had run rampant through his body.

“They say it started with his tooth,” Olive said as she took her usual place.

“Really?” Henrietta said. She clucked her tongue. “How bad do your teeth have to be to kill you?”

“Not even that bad,” Grace said. “Think about how close your mouth is to your brain.”

Henrietta’s hand went to her cheek. “Remind me to buy floss on the way home.”

I went to stand next to Thurman’s husband. He was a white man in his midfifties, his head shaved clean. Well, clean except for the very neatly trimmed goatee. He didn’t look entirely comfortable in his suit, although it was pressed and neat. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

He jumped as if I’d poked him. “Yes. It’s fine. Everything’s totally fine.”

“Well, let me know if you need anything.” I made my rounds, making sure the guest book was out and the right music was playing. Everything was going smoothly. Everything had been going smoothly lately. I hadn’t screwed anything up. There’d been no fistfights and no one had tried to climb into a casket. The flowers had been set up were they were supposed to be and the right cookies had been placed on the right platters. So why was he so nervous?

I made my way back to Grace, Olive, and Henrietta. “I guess this is the last time I’ll be seeing you three this week. We’ve had some cancellations,” I told my trio of little old ladies.

The three of them exchanged some glances. “So we heard,” Grace said and then pressed her lips together in a tight line. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to keep more words from slipping out or showing disapproval.

Whichever it was, it made me go cold inside. I’d been hoping the mass cancellations were a coincidence, one of those flukey things that happens from time to time. Based on Grace’s expression, that wasn’t the case. “What have you heard?”

Henrietta looked at Olive, and Olive looked at Grace who unpressed her lips. “Nobody wants to be accused of murder,” Grace said.

“What?” The cold feeling inside spread to my extremities. A very big uh oh was forming in my brain. A huge uh-oh. An uh-oh the size of a redwood.

“Well, apparently you accused Iris and Daisy of giving Frank a little nudge into the grave and now you’re running around poking into Violet Daugherty’s car accident.” Henrietta looked up at me, one eye squinted shut as if she was about to start my portrait.

I sat down next to Olive because my knees felt wobbly. “I didn’t accuse Iris and Daisy of anything! I just wanted to be sure everything was okay before Uncle Joey embalmed Frank.”

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?” Olive asked.

I decided to keep what I’d overheard to myself. It seemed stupid now. “No real reason. Just being extra sure. Doing my due diligence and all that.”

“And Violet?” Olive pressed.

“I’ve been helping out her cousin since she lives so far away.” No good deed went unpunished, I guessed. “And I may have found a few things that need a bit more explanation. Nate’s not satisfied that it was just a car accident either.”

They exchanged looks again. “Do you think someone’s been up to no good?” Henrietta finally asked.

I did. Unfortunately, that person was Violet. “Violet Daugherty might have done some things to make her less than popular.” I traced the pattern on the carpet with the toe of my sensible pump.

“Dying while unpopular doesn’t make you a murder victim,” Olive said. “If it did, Luke Butler would be a lot busier.”

*   *   *

When I got home from the cemetery, I found Donna and Uncle Joey seated at the kitchen table. It was almost funny to see them across from each other, their profiles with their Norwegian ski slope noses nearly identical. I probably would have at least smiled, but the expressions on their faces told me that wasn’t such a good idea.

“Sit down, Desiree,” Uncle Joey said. It was a totally different sounding invitation than the one to grab a plate and start eating roast chicken that I’d had the night before.

I sat.

“You have to stop looking into Violet Daugherty’s death,” Donna said, her voice flat. “In fact, you have to stop looking into any deaths.”

That cold sliver of ice that had been in my stomach since Grace, Olive, and Henrietta had made their comments grew into more of a cube. “Where’s this coming from?”

“Those cancellations we had? The slowdown in business? It’s all about you and your meddling.” Uncle Joey leaned back in his chair.

I looked over at Orion. At least now I had a dog to go with my meddling self. “How do you know?” I asked. “Did someone tell you that?”

“Thurman Sizemore’s husband told me he was relieved that he wasn’t accused of murder before the service was done,” Donna said. “And I had a call from Jackson’s Funeral Home over in Ardilla asking what was going on. That he was hearing rumors.”

“I don’t have to tell you how bad your timing is for this, Desiree. We’re being inspected.” Uncle Joey looked down at his hands.

This wasn’t a small deal. This was our livelihood. “What if I’d been right about Mr. Fiore? What if he had been murdered and it was only because of our thoroughness and interest that anyone found out?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that have gotten us good press?”

Donna blinked a few times and then her eyes narrowed. “This is about all the attention you got for solving Alan Brewer’s murder, isn’t it?”

“Of course not!” I’d gotten more than a few pats on the back for helping find the person who had really killed Alan Brewer, but it had been nerve-wracking and it had taken weeks for my eyebrows to grow back in.

Uncle Joey shook his head. “I don’t think it’s an attention thing. She just likes to be the person who fixes things.”

Donna weighed that for a moment. “I can see that. She had a real thing about fairness the whole time we were growing up.”

“Hey,” I said. “I’m right here.”

They turned to look at me as if that surprised them. I wondered how long they had been sitting at the table talking about me before I came in. “Whatever your reasons, no matter how altruistic or well-meaning, you need to drop all this investigative stuff,” Donna said. “Capisce?”

I bit my lip. It’s not like I wanted our family business to suffer, but there were questions that still needed to be answered. I told them about going to Dad’s storage space and finding it cleaned out. “So if there was something in there that implicated Titus Canty, it’s gone now. I just have to figure out where.”

“No,” Donna said. “That’s not your job. The FBI is looking into the corruption. It’s their job. Let them do it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “At least, not totally.”

Donna knocked her forehead on the table a couple of times. “Why?” she asked. “For the love of God, why?”

“Give me a second. I’ll show you why.” I went upstairs and got Violet’s shoebox of shame and my laptop, came back downstairs, and put it all down on the table.

“What’s that?” Donna asked, pointing at the shoebox.

“I found this in a safe hidden in Violet Daugherty’s laundry room behind a sign with an Italian saying on it.” I flipped the box open. First I put the pictures of the mayor with Titus Canty out for them to see.

“Oh,” Uncle Joey said. “That’s how you knew. What’s the other stuff?” He pointed at the DVDs and thumb drives.

“I haven’t had a chance to look through all of it.”

Donna pounded her fist on the table. “I don’t care. I don’t care who did what to whom. All I care about is this family and this business. You need to keep your nose out of everyone else’s in the hopes that we can salvage the reputation of this one.” He face turned red.

The last thing I wanted to do was get my pregnant sister upset enough that she ended up back on bed rest or worse. I looked over at Uncle Joey. He didn’t meet my eyes.

“What’s more important to you, Desiree?” Donna gestured at the laptop and the box. “What all these people have been doing that they should have been doing? Or your own family?”

I hadn’t thought about it like that. “My family,” I said.

“Then you have to drop all this. If Nate feels so strongly that there’s something wrong with Violet’s death then let him deal with it. No one else cares.”

It was true. No one was mourning Violet Daugherty. The more I learned about her, the less I liked her. She exploited people’s weaknesses. Even in the case of the mayor’s corruption, she didn’t use the information she had for good, to protect the community. She used it to torment a neighbor who had spent time, energy, and money into turning a yard into a work of creative genius. When she discovered that someone was driving around town drunk, she didn’t move to protect the people who could have been injured. Instead, she had used the information to winnow down her to-do list. In the end, what did it matter how she’d died? Especially if looking into it was going to hurt people I did care about. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll drop it.”

Donna scowled at me. “Promise?”

I held out my hand, little finger extended. “Pinky swear,” I said.

She locked her pinky with mine. “Double,” she said. We shook.

*   *   *

I took Violet’s laptop and her box o’blackmail and my dog (he was my dog now—no one was going to separate us) up to my room. I called Nate. “I’m dropping the whole Violet Daugherty thing.”

There was a pause. “Why?”

I explained about the cancellations and Donna’s red face. “I promised Donna and Uncle Joey I would drop the whole thing.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Give it to Luke. I don’t think there’s anything else for us to do. He’s the police. He’s the one who’s supposed to investigate murders.” Orion jumped up on the bed next to me, turned around once and settled at the foot of the bed. I slipped my feet under him to keep them warm. “Or ask Carlotta.”

“Luke doesn’t even believe there is a murder. And if Carlotta started investigating something knowing he didn’t want it investigated? Well, I can’t imagine that would be good for her career. It’s got to be us.”

“It can’t be us. Or, at least, it can’t be me.” I had double pinky swore.

“So people are dropping you because they think they’ll be accused of murder?” Nate asked.

“Pretty much,” I said.

“And they think that because you questioned Frank Fiore’s death and now are nosing around Violet’s death.”

“Yes.”

“They think that you randomly accuse people of murder.”

“Yes. That’s the point.” I should have put it together sooner. Not Vodka Mom had said something about needing to drum up business. Luke had said something about me pissing people off. It was possible I hadn’t wanted to see all the connections.

“Well, I think the best way to disabuse them of that notion is to prove that Violet was murdered and by whom. Then they’d know that they’d only be accused of murder if they were murderers and your sister doesn’t want murderers’ business anyway.”

It made a certain amount of sense, but only a certain amount. “I don’t know. I don’t think Donna and Uncle Joey would go for that.”

“They don’t have to know about it until it’s a done deal. Then what are they going to say? That you shouldn’t have sought the truth?” he asked.

I knew I was being manipulated. The trouble was that I was being manipulated into doing what I already wanted to do. “You think so?”

“Sure. If you prove that you’re not just randomly accusing people of murder, you seem less crazy.”

Less crazy was good. I could always use a dose of being seen as less crazy. Plus, if people found out I wasn’t crazy about Violet’s death, maybe someone would believe me and think I wasn’t crazy about my dad either.

“I think you should at least think about it. Sleep on it. We can talk tomorrow. Okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not changing my mind. You wouldn’t either if you could have seen how upset Donna was.”

“Tomorrow,” he repeated.

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Tomorrow.”

We hung up and I stood to pick up the laptop and the box. I stood for a second with the whole armful poised over the garbage can. The little angel on my right shoulder whispered, “drop it.” But the little devil on my left whispered, “just take one more peek.” The little angel asked, “do you really need to know people’s secrets and shames?” The little devil asked, “what if there’s more corruption there? More people like the mayor?”

I told the angel that I was only going to look through the rest of the material to be sure there wasn’t something I should do that was on the side of the angels. She made a raspberry noise at me then flitted off. Better angels have said a whole lot worse to me in the past. I could take it.

I opened up the laptop and put the thumb drive with all the photos on it into the machine and started clicking. I recognized a few faces, but couldn’t figure out what they might be doing that they shouldn’t. There was one of Jasmine and Carlotta holding hands as they walked down the street. Did Violet really think that was blackmail material? If so, I almost felt bad for her. It must be uncomfortable to have such a tiny mind. There was a photo of the young woman who had offered me cake at Greg’s office sitting at a desk with a metal box in front of her and another of Carol Burston high-fiving a young man right after crossing a finish line at a race. It occurred to me that maybe Violet didn’t know what might be wrong with the photos either. Maybe she just went around snapping photos knowing that people being people, at some point someone would do something they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about.

I kept clicking. An older man at a grocery store. Maybe he was shoplifting? Who knew? A photo of people at the dog park. Perhaps they weren’t picking up after their pets? I clicked more. Then a photo came up that made me freeze. I must have gasped because Orion got up and wiggled closer to me.

It was a photo of my father putting a surfboard on top of a gray Element in front of a house I’d never seen before. Next to him stood a little girl of maybe ten or eleven.

I slammed the laptop shut as if closing it could erase what I’d just seen. It didn’t. When I opened the laptop back up, it was still there. My father might be one of Violet’s blackmail victims. Would that mean that my father might have a reason to kill her? There was really only one way to know for sure and that was to figure out who had really done it.

 

I texted Nate: I changed my mind.

 

He texted back a smiley face.