Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  Scarpa sniffed, and at first I thought it was a comment on me, but then realized he was checking to see if Gottfried stank of rotting flesh.

  I said, “No, he doesn’t smell. In fact, revenants smell better than most living people.”

  “I see,” he said, as if suspecting a hidden insult. “Sorry, but this is my first experience with this kind of thing. Can you tell me how you expect him to be able to finish a renovation this complex? It’s my understanding that a revenant has limited mental capacity.”

  “It’s not that his capacity is limited—it’s just very focused. Gottfried is just as capable of finishing this house as he was when he was alive. The difference is that he no longer has any interest in anything other than this task.”

  “But he’s got to modify his plans to fit into our development,” he said, waving a handful of papers at me. “How can he do that?”

  “This house predates the development,” Gottfried’s assistant, Elizabeth, said. “You should be modifying those trashy houses to match his work.”

  The two of them started in on each other, ignoring Von Doesburg when he tried to calm them down. I said, “Mrs. Hopkins, if you want my advice, I’d say to let Gottfried get to work.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” she said. “C.W., why don’t you take him out to the house?”

  The construction chief nodded and said, “Come on, boss, and I’ll show you what we’ve done while you were gone.”

  “Gottfried, I’ll be back this evening to take you back to Revenant House,” I said, but he didn’t even pause. As I’d told Scarpa, his attention was all on the house. I checked with Mrs. Hopkins to see what time I should pick him up, and left her to handle the bickering.

  It was at about three thirty that afternoon when I got that panicked call about Gottfried being dead. Again.

  FOR ONCE I was glad I didn’t have any other jobs going so I could drive over there right away. A bunch of men wearing tool belts were standing around, and when I got out of my car, Elizabeth came running over to nearly drag me inside the house.

  Just past the front door was a gorgeous set of stairs, the kind made for sweeping down in a ball gown. The image was spoiled by the sight of Gottfried’s body at the bottom. And it was a body, not a revenant—he didn’t even look a little bit alive anymore, and the smell of formaldehyde was strong. Mrs. Hopkins and C.W. were looking down at him.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Your damned spell wore off,” Elizabeth snapped, “and he fell down the stairs.”

  “Wait. He died before falling? You saw that?”

  “No, I didn’t see it—I was in the trailer—but what else could have happened?”

  I pushed past her and went up the stairs. The floor up there was covered with a sheet of sturdy paper that must have been taped down to protect the wood from the workers, and the tape at the very edge had peeled off, leaving a fat curl of paper.

  Elizabeth had followed me up, so I had to push by her again to go look at Gottfried’s shoes. Revenant House must not have had any shoes in his size because he was still wearing the black dress shoes he’d worn in his coffin, and I could see scuff marks on the toes.

  “His original cause of death was from falling, right?” I asked.

  Mrs. Hopkins nodded.

  “Then this is what must have happened. He tripped on that paper up there—revenants don’t have a lot of feeling in their extremities and tend to be clumsy. He could have survived the fall just fine—you can’t really kill him, just damage him. But when he felt himself falling, he remembered the other fall, and let himself die. You could say it scared the life out of him.” It was unusual, but not unheard of. Papa Philippe had once raised a drowning victim because she was needed to locate some important papers, but when the revenant saw she was going to have to go on a boat, she collapsed and he couldn’t raise her again.

  I was afraid I’d get some push back, but Mrs. Hopkins was nodding. “The contract did say something like this was possible. The question is, what do we do now?”

  “You’ll have to bring him back,” Elizabeth said.

  “According to our contract, you’d have to pay me again,” I pointed out, “but since this is for a charity, I’ll do it for free.” Well, that and the fact that I was hoping that Mrs. Hopkins would mention my name to the wealthy friends her clothing choices implied she had. “But I need another sacrifice.”

  “This is outrageous!” Elizabeth said, but C.W. was pulling a ring off his finger. “Use this.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, taking it. It was ugly, but it was gold and the sapphire looked real.

  “Yeah, take it. My ex-wife gave it to me—I never did like it.”

  “Is it enough?” Mrs. Hopkins wanted to know.

  I hefted it. “Yeah, it should be.” I remembered Papa Philippe’s warning from the night before, and said, “I should talk to my sponsor first.”

  “There’s no time!” Mrs. Hopkins said. “Scarpa is coming back with an inspector. Gottfried has to be up and talking.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Von Doesburg is stalling him now. Twenty minutes, if we’re lucky.”

  I should have called Papa Philippe anyway, but instead I sent Elizabeth out to my car to get a fresh carton of salt. I could have done it myself, but what was the fun of having a minion around if I didn’t take advantage of her. Then I made a circle, put the sacrifice on the floor next to Gottfried’s body, and did my thing. Five minutes later, I was explaining to Gottfried why I’d brought him back again, and with my fingers crossed, I asked if he was still willing to finish the house.

  He agreed just in time for Von Doesburg to arrive with Scarpa and the inspector. I stayed around long enough to make sure Gottfried was compos mentis enough to hold his end of the conversation, then made myself scarce. I could have left entirely, but I was going to need to take Gottfried back to Revenant House in an hour or so anyway, and you can hardly get anywhere in the Atlanta area in that length of time. So I found where somebody had set up a bunch of folding chairs under a tree and swiped a bottle of water from a cooler that looked as if it was there for everybody.

  C.W. came and got a bottle of his own after a while. “How’re you doing?” he asked.

  “Not bad. You?”

  “Not your average day on the work site, that’s for sure.”

  “You mean you don’t work with revenants every week?”

  “Not hardly,” he said with a grin. “I guess it’s old hat to you.”

  “I don’t usually raise the dead on-site, but otherwise, same old, same old.”

  “Have you been doing this long?”

  “Since college. I was an apprentice for five years, then got my license about a year and a half ago.”

  “You went to college for this?”

  “Nope, I just happened to fall into it after a particularly wild Halloween party at one of the frat houses. Somebody had brought a stuffed black cat—the taxidermy kind, I mean—for decoration, and while I was drunk, I started patting it. Before I knew it, the thing was purring. We had to call a real houngan to put it back to rest, and he told me I should look into doing this as a career.” I shrugged. “What can I say? It’s a living.”

  It took him a minute, but he eventually got the joke and chuckled.

  “I am sorry about your ring.”

  “Don’t be. I only wore it because the ex-wife wanted it back in the divorce settlement. I was just afraid it wouldn’t be enough of a sacrifice.”

  “Something valuable, something important. Either will work.” We sipped for a few minutes, and then I asked, “So what’s Scarpa’s deal?”

  C.W. made a face. “He hates this house being here because it makes the other houses look like slapped-together garbage, which is what they are. It pissed him off no end when Mrs. Hopkins brought us in to fix it up.” “Wow. He puts the ass in homeowners’ association.”

  That got a snicker.

  “Wait, didn’t Von Doesburg slap tog
ether the garbage? Why is he helping you guys fend him off?”

  “He says it’s because having a Gottfried house here will increase the profile of the place, but I think he’s trying to persuade Shelia to let him buy up some of the acreage around the lake so he can put in a country club. He’s been trying to get hold of the land the house is on for years, but the owner wouldn’t sell. Von Doesburg thought he’d get it cheap from the heirs, but that was before Shelia got involved.”

  He went on to tell me about the plans Gottfried had for the house. “When he died, I didn’t know what we were going to do, but now that he’s here, we’re on track.”

  C.W. went back to work and I went back to killing time until construction shut down and Gottfried was ready to go. Again, conversation was spotty, though I did warn him again about poor sensation in his feet so he wouldn’t have any more “fatal” falls. I stopped in at Revenant House just long enough to suggest they find him some sneakers so he’d have more traction.

  Papa Philippe was waiting for me again.

  “I was going to call you,” I said before he could speak, “but there was no time. Then there were people around. Then I had Gottfried in the car, and I couldn’t talk in front of him and it would have been dangerous to text while driving and—”

  “And you was hoping the loa not be watching you this day.” He shook his head. “The loa always be watching.”

  “The FBI really ought to have the loa working for them. Do you want to know what happened?”

  “Not me, but Tante Ju-Ju be wanting to know.”

  “You’re joking.”

  He just looked at me.

  “When?”

  His answer was to gesture toward a dimly lit path into the woods.

  “Shit.”

  I didn’t know how extensive the Order’s grounds were. Revenant House and the office buildings were close to the road, but stretching behind were all kinds of paths and other buildings, most of which I avoided whenever possible.

  Papa Philippe let me lead the way until we got to the hut from which Tante Ju-Ju held forth. Presumably she had a house somewhere with a TV, a microwave, and plumbing, but I’d never seen her anywhere outside Order grounds, and I didn’t think anybody had ever seen her break character. She was either a true believer, or the best method actor ever.

  Tante Ju-Ju was sitting outside her hut on a rickety stool, stirring a pot of something ominous over a fire. She was dressed like all the other voudou queens in the Order, but the skirt and the peasant blouse looked comfortable on her and her coloring was natural. Her tignon had seven points knotted into it, just like Marie Laveau’s supposedly had, and mysteriously it never slipped, even though I’d never seen a bobby pin in her vicinity.

  “I hear you raised the same man twice,” she said without preamble. “Why he not stay moving after the first time?”

  I explained how Gottfried had fallen, ending with, “He didn’t want to feel himself die again.”

  “So why you bring him back?”

  “His task wasn’t finished yet.”

  “This task need doing that bad?”

  “I think so.”

  “You only think so?”

  “Okay, I’m sure,” I said. “He’s finishing a house to raise money for a foundation that studies a condition called Stickler syndrome.”

  “This syndrome, it be killing people?”

  “No, but they have a lot of pain and sometimes they lose their sight and hearing. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”

  “That what I be asking you.”

  Okay, I was missing something. “If it were me, I’d want to come back for a task like this.”

  “Why I care what you think?”

  “You asked—” I stopped and tried to figure out what she was getting at. “I brought Gottfried back because the task is important to him. He doesn’t care about the charity, but he does care about leaving the legacy of the house.”

  Tante Ju-Ju nodded. “Then maybe you do the right thing. What do the loa tell you?”

  “I don’t talk to the loa.”

  Papa Philippe winced, but it was nothing I hadn’t told him before.

  “What if they be talking to you and you not be listening?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.

  I didn’t have an answer to that.

  She waved me away. “You go on. I talk to the loa about you. When they tell me, I tell you.”

  I didn’t need Papa Philippe’s touch to tell me I’d been dismissed, but I was glad to have his company walking back down that path, even if neither of us spoke. If he hadn’t been there, I’d have been tempted to run.

  “Why in God’s name did you tell her you don’t talk to the loa?” he asked once we were at my car.

  “Because I don’t. Just because the first houngans were practitioners doesn’t mean that everybody needs the loa to raise revenants. I do fine without them.”

  “Some people say the loa aren’t happy with that, and that’s why your revenant failed.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “I believe you, but would it hurt you to at least pretend to respect the loa?”

  “I do respect the loa and voudou, but as a religion—it’s not my religion. For me to wear a tignon wouldn’t be showing them respect—it would be mocking them, just like it would be for me to wear a nun’s habit or a yarmulke. And you know damn well that most houngans only pay lip service to the loa.”

  “There are plenty of us that believe.”

  “I know you believe, Papa Philippe, but you know I don’t.”

  “Dodie, it’s just clothes.”

  “If it’s just clothes, then why can’t I wear mine? Look, I don’t tell the other houngans how to do their job, and all I want is for them to do the same for me. If that means I never make master, then so be it.”

  “I’m not talking about making master. I’m talking about you losing your license. I’m talking about you getting ejected from the Order.”

  “Because of blue jeans? I don’t wear my zombie movie T-shirts to work anymore.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s everything, the attitude toward the loa, the jokes. And now you’ve not only brought back an architect to fix a house, you had to bring him back a second time. You need to tread carefully.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one falling down stairs.”

  He shook his head and sent me home, but I knew he was worried. Which got me worried. What if I was wrong about Gottfried? What if I hadn’t done a good job bringing him back? What if he collapsed again? What kind of job could a former houngan get?

  I didn’t sleep very well.

  I WAS HAPPY to see Gottfried in brand-new Converse sneakers when I picked him up the next day—plenty of tread on those babies. I was less happy to hear the apprentices whispering about me and looking at me in what they imagined was a subtle manner. One actually made devil horns at me, as if my being there could contaminate a house where dead people spent the night. I returned the greeting with a traditional one-finger salute.

  “How are you today?” I asked Gottfried.

  “Fine. I practiced walking last night—I won’t trip again.”

  “Good. And the work is going well?”

  He just smiled, which was enough of an answer.

  C.W. was waiting for us on the porch of the house, but when he started to lead Gottfried in, I said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stick around today. Just in case.”

  “If the boss doesn’t care, I don’t care.”

  “All I care about is the work,” Gottfried said.

  You have to admire that focus.

  So I spent the day following him around, envying the fact that he didn’t have to breathe in the ever-present dust. I’d expected a world-famous architect to spend most of the day in the trailer, but Gottfried was a hands-on kind of guy. We went up to the attic to check out the roofing, down to the basement to check on mold, outside to see if the shingles were being attached properly, back inside to approve of the fixtures in the master bathroom—a
nd that was just in the first hour. He didn’t actually sit down until nearly noon, and even then he preferred to work in the house’s kitchen so he could keep an eye on things. That was when I ran out to the nearest McDonald’s for a bag of grease, salt, and caffeine.

  When I got back, Gottfried was in conference with Elizabeth. She’d managed to ignore my presence so far that day, and glared at me now. I would have stayed out of the way, but I realized Gottfried was signing his name.

  “Gottfried, you know your signature isn’t valid, right?” The courts had decided that for a dead man to sign anything was the same thing as forging, and the people at Revenant House were supposed to have told him that.

  “It’s just an order for supplies!” Elizabeth snapped.

  But Gottfried was reading the paper in front of him. “This isn’t about the house,” he said. “I only want the papers about the job.”

  “But Gottfried—” Elizabeth started to say, but when I got close enough to snoop, she snatched it up. “Sorry, my mistake. This wasn’t supposed to be in this stack.”

  The afternoon was the same as the morning. We went up, we went down, we went outside, we went inside, Gottfried climbed a ladder, I stood below and wondered if I could catch him if he fell again.

  Never having been on a building site that didn’t involve Legos or sand, I was surprised by the number of decisions that had to be made and the arguments that ensued. Who knew that using the wrong color of wood would totally destroy a house’s aesthetic? I didn’t even know that a house had an aesthetic.

  By the time the living workers were ready to call it a day, I was exhausted. Back to Revenant House for Gottfried, and after making sure Papa Philippe wasn’t poised to issue warnings, it was home to takeout Thai food for me.

  The next day was mostly the same, except a little more contentious as the arguments from the previous day escalated—Gottfried ordered one man to completely replaster the ceiling in the dining room because it swirled the wrong way and told C.W. to send back a whole load of lumber because they weren’t building an Emerald Lake shack. I tried to hide my grin when both Von Doesburg and Scarpa heard that latter comment, but I didn’t do a very good job.