Chapter 12

I had sent Anna Stiles a polite email thanking her for the article she had written about the funeral home. I hadn’t expected a reply, so when her email arrived, I leaned forward in my office chair and peered at the screen.

‘I need to speak with you. I will be over soon.’ Short, sharp, and to the point. Just like the woman herself, apart from the fact that she was tall.

What could she possibly want from me? And the nerve of her assuming that I would be at the funeral home all day, and she could stop by whenever she liked!

Despite myself, I was intrigued. What could it be? We had no more reason to contact each other. She had done her story, and that was that. I did not like the woman. However, I was grateful to her, because she had written a positive story about the funeral home, when she most certainly could have torn me to shreds in the same way that the other paper had. How much Basil had to do with that, I most certainly did not want to know.

The doorbell rang, so I hurried out the front, expecting Anna. Instead, it was Duncan’s partner, Bryan.

“Hey, Laurel.” He handed me a black tape. “We’ve finished with this.”

The tape was my surveillance footage. There were a few small and discreet cameras throughout the funeral home, installed by my father at least a decade before. They recorded onto a series of black tapes that would erase themselves every forty-eight hours. Dad had installed the security system after a woman had stolen an expensive watch from her dead sister during a wake. It had caused quite a scene when the dead woman’s husband realized the watch had gone missing.

I took the tape from Bryan. “Did it help?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not really. The detective in charge of the case said he went over it three times, and there’s nothing. They thought it would be a good lead, but sometimes things don’t work out. Still, it was good that we had the chance.”

When he left, I walked back into our tiny security room and sat on an uncomfortable metal folding chair in front of a VCR and a small monitor. I placed the tape into the VCR. I skipped around, speeding forward and going back, but I couldn’t see anything that stood out. I set the tape back into the machine so it would be erased and recorded on again.

I was half way back to my office when Anna arrived. I should have smelled her coming. Like before, she was wearing strong perfume, this one a heady floral fragrance. It was a pleasant enough perfume, but once again, there was just too much of it. It was as if she had bathed in it.

I admit that I was annoyed to see how nice she looked, although she always looked nice. Expensive clothing, her hair done perfectly, her makeup the same, and, as always, a mixture of small good jewelry and large fake jewelry. It was strange to see such a muscle-bound woman look as feminine as she did. Everything about Anna annoyed me, and I wanted to get our meeting over quickly.

“I have some questions,” she barked at me. She pushed past me and headed for my office.

By the time I got to my office, she was already sitting in the chair opposite my desk. I hurried around the desk to take my seat.

“Preston Kerr!” she said.

“You want to ask me questions about Preston Kerr?” I should have known.

“Yes.”

As soon as she took her seat opposite me, she leaned forward. “I’m making good progress with the story.”

“Good for you,” I said, completely disinterested in her and her little story. She was so sure it was going to open any door she wanted for her, and she was probably right. “Anyway, thanks for that article. That was good of you.”

Anna waved her hand at me, as if she were shooing away a fly. “Don’t thank me. Thank your accountant, Basil. He’s the one who talked me into it.”

I bit my lip.

Ann smiled at me. “He’s really quite funny, too, isn’t he? Still, he’s your accountant, so I’m sure you know all about him.”

“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “What did you want to ask me about?”

“Right.” Anna leaned forward. For a moment I thought she was going to take out her tape recorder and set it on the desk like she had done the first time I had spoken with her, but she did not. “This isn’t off the record or anything, but I just don’t want a digital copy of anything we’re about to say,” she whispered. “I have a very good memory. It’s a gift.”

I nodded, once again intrigued, my annoyance with Anna and her meeting with Basil forgotten, at least for the moment. There was no need for her to whisper. After all, we were alone in the building. My mother was at church praying for God to help her take responsibility for her own actions, even though they weren’t her fault.

Anna looked down her nose at me as if I were a cockroach or something equally distasteful. “Anyway, back to Preston Kerr. What do you know about him?”

“I don’t really know too much,” I said. “He was a funeral singer I hired online. I had been told he had arrived, but I couldn’t find him, so I went looking for him. When I was upstairs looking for him, I heard someone scream, so I went downstairs. Someone else had found him in the bathroom, dead.”

“He was strangled.”

She said it as a statement, rather than a question, but I answered. “It looked that way to me, but you’d have to ask the police.”

Anna narrowed her eyes slightly. “Okay, now to the funeral. It was for a man who had been hit by a stolen car?”

“Yes,” I said. “A hit and run. Someone might have been trying to kill him.” I wondered why she asked. It had been all over the news.

Anna smiled. Her smiles were always small and full of malice, or at least they appeared that way to me. “Trying? They did kill him.”

I was irritated. “I meant that I’m not sure if he was killed on purpose.”

“The police seem to think he was,” Anna said.

“I’m not a cop,” I said with a shrug.

“Who was at the funeral?”

I stared at the woman. “Who was there? Lots of people were there. You were there, too.”

“I was only there in my capacity as a reporter,” Anna said, “so I didn’t know the mourners. Was anyone of importance there?”

“Who are you hoping was there?” I asked. “You seem like you want me to say someone in particular.”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I’m just curious.”

“Well, like I said, there were lots of people there. I didn’t know them either, apart from the deceased’s brother who organized the funeral.”

Anna nodded. “I hear he’d had some trouble with the law.”

I knew that to be true as well, but did not want to admit that to her. “He seemed nice enough to me.”

“Who else was there? Friends?”

I nodded. “Of course. We don’t have a guest list, though. We never do.” I thought I had better say that before she asked for one.

“Anyone else? Any people hurt by the deceased?”

“Hurt?”

Anna narrowed her eyes once more. “He had only recently been released from prison. Whoever murdered him obviously had a problem with him, and whoever murdered him was probably at the funeral. Did you see anyone acting suspiciously at all?”

“I don’t know any of the people who came,” I said. I did know Helen, the mayor’s wife, but I wasn’t going to tell Anna. Helen had been robbed by the dead man, and had gone to his funeral. Yet, if Helen could be believed, her husband was the one who was angry about the stolen jewelry.

That didn’t seem to be the answer Anna was looking for. “So you didn’t see anything strange?”

I shook my head. Her questions were making me wonder if she knew more than she was letting on. And from there it wasn’t a stretch to wonder if she was involved in some way. She was searching for something, trying to hit upon an answer she wanted. What sort of answer? It occurred to me that she sounded as if she was trying to find a likely suspect. But why? Because she was trying to solve a case so she could write about it, or because she was guilty of killing both men and so needed to write a story pinning it on someone else? That was a bit of a stretch, of course, but I disliked Anna, and so was willing to go with it.

“Nothing at all?” she persisted. “Someone was murdered in your funeral home, and you didn’t notice anything odd?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t think of anything unusual at all.”

Anna stood. “I can see myself out.”

I watched her go, wondering when she would be back. I could tell she wasn’t finished with me.