Nothing to Ghost About (9 page)

“
That’s what she told you,”
Tara said, “but if she
is
the murderer, then that’s exactly what she would
say. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a cop’s wife,
it’s that you can’t always take people at face value. Trust no
one.”

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.

Chapter 13

Somehow my mother had managed to talk
me into attending Ian’s birthday party. She was having it at her
house, and as I lived there, too, I was hard put to come up with a
good excuse to avoid it. For that reason, my mother didn’t have to
ask me any more than, well, about fifty times. Finally, I
agreed.

I was getting ready for the event when
I heard Mom calling me. “Laurel, did you have a meeting at the
funeral home?”

I went out of my room and stood at the
top of the stairs, looking down at her. “No, why?”

“
There’s someone there,”
she said. I went back into my room and looked out of my window.
Sure enough, a long black sedan was parked outside the funeral
home. I couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel, so I assumed they
were up on the front porch, ringing the doorbell.

“
Who is it?” my mother
asked from downstairs.

“
I don’t know,” I said.
“I’ll go find out.”

I pulled on some socks and shoes, and
hurried to the funeral home. A large man in a black suit stood on
the porch. He turned to face me. “Ah, I should have figured you
didn’t have to work on weekends,” he said with a slimy smile. He
offered me his hand, and I shook it slowly and briefly.

“
Can I help you?” I
asked.

“
Surely you know who I am?”
His round, bald head tilted to one side.

I shook my head. “No, I’m sorry. Have
we met?”

“
Your father didn’t speak
of me?”

“
I don’t know what your
name is,” I said politely.

“
My name is David Dunne.”
When I didn’t say anything, he sighed. “I own Dunne Funeral Home in
Tamworth.”

Dunne Funeral Home was a bigger,
glitzier, and in my opinion, tackier funeral home that did triple
the business of my place.

“
Oh yes,” I said icily.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Dunne?”

“
Please, colleagues should
call me David,” he said, “especially colleagues I am
suing.”

“
Suing?”

“
I thought I would come up
and speak with you before our lawyers got involved. You do have a
lawyer, yes? But the short version is, I came up with the so-called
celebrity funerals first, and as such, you stole my idea, and
you’re profiting from it. I plan on getting my cut of that profit,
and I’m sure you’ll agree I’m entitled to it.”

I was furious. “You’re not entitled to
anything. You can’t own an idea.”

“
Ah,” the man said, holding
his finger up, “so you do admit I had the idea first?”

“
What? No!” I said. “I’m
just saying that you can’t own an idea, even if you had it first,
which you didn’t. I came up with the idea. Anyway, ideas are not
subject to copyright.”

David Dunne laughed and shook his
head. “Your celebrity funerals are disasters.”

“
If you think they’re
disasters, then why do you want a piece of them?”

“
It’s owed to
me.”

“
I don’t owe you
anything.”

The man stepped forward. “Let me tell
you something, missy, your father and I didn’t see eye to eye on a
lot of things, but we respected one another. You’re just a little
girl bumbling her way through a business idea of mine, and I’m not
going to allow that.”

“
Get off my property now,”
I said angrily.

“
I know your
type.”

“
My type?” I said
icily.

“
Your type. You’re making
such a mess of things you can’t keep the business going, so you’re
grasping at straws. I did the service for the funeral singer who
was murdered here. They came to me, because everyone knows what a
mess your place is.”

That stung. “You’re a bully, and you
need to leave,” I said. “Now!”

The man stared at me for a while, and
then he smiled thinly. “You can expect a call from my lawyers.” He
left the porch and got into his car. I stood on the top step and
watched him drive down the road.