by Tonya Kappes
Dedication
I have to say that my author bet was taken seriously and I killed Jade Lee in a book! Thank you Jade for being such a great sport! Thank you to reader Cricket McGraw for winning the epitaph contest from my newsletter! I’m beyond thrilled and love “gone to the great pageant in the sky.” Finally, to my family. This has been such a crazy year! Six book deadlines, Austin and Brady graduating from high school, and Jack becoming a senior . . . .Eddy and my parents (John Robert and Linda Lowry) have kept my family going. And to Charlie, my wonder dog, who not only left my side but continued to be so happy even after his leg was amputated because of cancer. This year has been amazing! All the love and support from my readers . . . gosh . . . hand to chest . . . THANK YOU!!!
XO~ Tonya
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Announcement
An Excerpt from A Ghostly Undertaking
Chapter 1
An Excerpt from A Ghostly Grave
Chapter 1
An Excerpt from A Ghostly Demise
Chapter 1
An Excerpt from A Ghostly Murder
Chapter 1
About the Author
By Tonya Kappes
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
“Sexy isn’t a firm fanny in a thong, ladies.” Hettie Bell didn’t seem so sexy in her hot pink leggings and matching top as she gasped for breath in her downward dog position in the middle of Sleepy Hollow, Kentucky. Her butt stuck straight up in the air, right there on display for everyone to see. Her black, chin-length bob was falling out of the small ponytail on both sides and her bangs hung down in her eyes. “Sexy is confidence and self-acceptance. It’s exactly what yoga provides.”
Hettie Bell curled up on her tiptoes with her palms planted on one of the mats she provided for us. The rickety old floor of the gazebo, in the middle of the town square, groaned as we all tried to mimic her pose.
“Yes!” Beulah Paige Bellefry hollered out like we were in the first pew of the Sleepy Hollow Baptist Church getting a good Bible beating from Pastor Brown himself. “Amen to a good pose!”
Beulah continued to adjust her feet and hands each time she started to slip. If she wasn’t a bit overweight, I’d say it was her eighties silk sweat suit that was slicker than cat’s guts giving her problems. Or it could’ve been those pearls around her wrist, neck and ears weighing her down. Beulah never took off those pearls. She said pearls were a staple for a Southern gal.
“You said it, sister,” Mary Anna Hardy gasped. She teetered side to side, nearly knocking into Granny. Her sweat left streaks down her makeup. Who on earth got up this early and put makeup on to do yoga? Mary Anna Hardy, that’s who. “God help us!”
“That’s it.” I pushed back off my heels and crossed my legs, staring at all the Auxiliary women’s derrieres at my eye level. “I’m here to do some relaxing, not Sunday school.”
Sleepy Hollow was smack-dab in the middle of the Bible Belt and if God wasn’t thrown in our conversations, then we weren’t breathing. But the last thing I wanted to think about was my butt stuck up to the high heavens and everyone up in the Great Beyond looking down upon me.
Trust me, not a sight the living want to see at eight o’clock in the morning, either. Especially when I hadn’t had my first cup of coffee for the day.
“Emma Lee Raines,” Zula Fae Raines Payne, also known as my granny, gasped in horror. “Where are your Southern manners?” Granny’s disgust of my behavior was written all over her contorted face.
My redheaded Granny only stood five-foot-four, but she was a mighty force to be reckoned with. At the ripe young age of seventy-seven, she’d give you the business while blessing your heart and pouring you a glass of her sweet iced tea no matter how mad you made her.
“My manners are right over there at Higher Grounds Café in liquid form in a large foam cup.” I pushed back a strand of my brown hair that had fallen out of the topknot I stuck it in after I’d rolled out of bed when I decided to join the Auxiliary women and Hettie Bell for their morning yoga class. I needed my caffeine fix to wake my manners up.
“This reunion has helped you misplace them.” Granny’s disapproval of how I was handling the stress of planning my ten-year high school reunion showed in the creases around her tight lips, cocked brows and furled nose. “Doc said you need to take the necessary precautions to keep the ‘Trauma’ away, especially in times of extreme stress.”
What did Doc Clyde know? Nothing.
“I’m sure you are stressed with no one to bury around here.” Granny did a sign of the cross and we weren’t even Catholic. She snapped her finger at me. “Now, downward dog, young lady,” she ordered.
Doc Clyde, Sleepy Hollow’s resident doctor, felt it necessary I do some type of stress relief since he had diagnosed me with what he called “Funeral Trauma” after I had gotten knocked out flat cold from a falling plastic Santa and woke up in the hospital seeing the clients I had stuck six feet in the ground. Being an undertaker can be stressful, but I didn’t have “Funeral Trauma.” I was a Betweener.
I saw dead people. Let me clarify, dead people that had been murdered. It was a gift that plastic Santa gave me. Unlike the annual ugly Christmas sweater Granny gave me, it was a gift that I can’t return. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be able to take the sweater back.
“It’s okay, Zula Fae.” Hettie Bell dipped back down into the stretch that started all this downward dog stuff. “Yoga isn’t for everyone.”
“You got that right,” I grumbled under my breath and watched with a dutiful eye as the white convertible Mercedes whipped into a parking spot right in front of Higher Grounds.
Sleepy Hollow was a tourist town in Kentucky. We were known for our caves and caverns. Tourists to our town were mainly the outdoorsy type that loved to spelunk and stuff that I wasn’t interested in doing. Now yoga was added to that list as well.
“Uh-un!” A woman jumped out of the convertible and wagged her hand at the car trying to park in the space behind her.
The woman had on a pair of big black sunglasses that took up nearly all of her thin face and a black scarf over her hair and tied under her chin. She wore a black strapless jumpsuit and her legs looked a mile long.
“Move!” she screamed at a car that was less desirable than hers. “You aren’t parking that beater behind mine!”
She jumped into her car and backed it up, taking up the only two available spaces in front of the café.
“Is that?” Beulah Paige jumped up, tugged on the hem of her silky zip top and squinted.
“You know your fancy wrinkle cream might work if you got you some glasses or contact lenses.” Mable Claire cackled and jingled all the way down to her mat.
“Oh, hush, Mable Claire,” Beulah warned, keeping her eyes on the little scuffle going on in front of the café. “I do think that is . . .”
Beulah ran her hand over
her bright red hair, pushing her fingertips in and fluffing it up. She put her hands on the strand of pearls around her neck and straightened them.
“Oh my God.” Shock and awe came over me. Then anger when I saw who it was.
Jade Lee Peel.
I stood up to steady my shaking body. It took everything in my power not to throw one big hissy fit right there in front of all of Sleepy Hollow or at least the Auxiliary women.
“It is!” Beulah jumped up and clapped her hands together like a little schoolgirl, not the forty-something-year-old gossip queen I was used to seeing.
Beulah did a little two-step and giddyup down the steps of the gazebo and scurried across the town square.
“And it looks like Jack Henry is happy to see whoever she is too.” Granny sure didn’t know when or how to keep her mouth shut. Especially in an emergency such as this.
“Jade Lee Peel,” I grumbled and gave my high school archnemesis the evil eye.
It was a time like this I wished I had some sort of cool gift like casting spells on people, not seeing them after the spell took effect and stopped their beating heart.
Jade Lee had left Sleepy Hollow right out of high school to pursue a modeling career. When she made it on a music channel’s reality TV show where they all lived in a house, she was discovered. She wasn’t the biggest star on the planet, but she was the biggest from Sleepy Hollow.
Reluctantly I had sent her people an invitation to the class reunion hoping they’d think it was fan mail and when I hadn’t gotten back an RSVP, I’d assumed she wasn’t coming. It would be just like her not to RSVP and then make a grand entrance.
“I take it you aren’t so happy to see her?” Hettie stood next to me with her hands on her hips and her leg cocked to the side.
Hettie Bell was lucky and didn’t know just how evil Jade Lee Peel was as a teenager. Hettie had recently moved to Sleepy Hollow and opened up Pose and Relax yoga studio next to Eternal Slumber. She would’ve definitely been one of Jade’s targets with her Goth girl look. Mary Anna Hardy down at Girl’s Best Friend Spa tee-totally gave Hettie a complete makeover and turned her into a beauty right before our eyes with her new chin-length bob, super white teeth and minimal makeup. Not to mention that she already had a killer body from doing all that stretching and twisting she was trying to get me and the rest of the residents of Sleepy Hollow to do.
“Not in the least bit happy to see her.” I couldn’t take my eyes off Jade Lee. Her talons had hooked Jack Henry Ross, sheriff of Sleepy Hollow and my boyfriend, when we were in high school. And it seemed she was trying to hook him now, right there on the sidewalk in front of Higher Grounds Café. “She’s the one who came up with my nickname, Creepy Funeral Home Girl, when I was in high school.”
It was true. Kids could be so cruel. I was the butt of all their jokes. Granted, growing up in a family business was hard, but mine had to be the funeral home. My granny and parents were also undertakers and we lived in Eternal Slumber Funeral Home. Needless to say, I wasn’t the most popular kid in school. Who in the world wanted to have a sleepover in a funeral home? No one. Least of all, Jade Lee Peel, the most popular cheerleader, prom queen and now small town celebrity. Even in high school she had celebrity status thanks to the community. After her mamma died of a stroke, Artie Peel, Jade’s father and owner of Artie’s Meat and Deli, did everything he could for his daughter, doing her no favors.
All the women in town felt sorry for Jade and took her under their wing. I blamed the town for blowing up Jade’s head as big as the town square.
“That’s right.” Hettie patted me on the back. “Your class reunion is this weekend.”
“Yep.” It was the only word I could muster up. My heart was breaking watching Jade and Jack exchange smiles, giggles, and whatever other else line of bull malarkey she was feeding him. No doubt trying to reel my handsome boyfriend into her lair.
Jade and Jack, their names were synonymous in high school. They even had their own nickname like Brangelina. JJ. Thinking about them with their own combined name made my stomach hurt and the feelings of the past flooded right back as if ten years had never passed. Only now I couldn’t run over to my bedroom in the funeral home, slam my door and bury my head in the pillow.
“And you were in charge of the reunion, right?” Hettie reminded me.
I admit I almost didn’t send Jade an invitation, but my good ole Southern manners, like Granny called it, won out. I can’t say I didn’t have a daydream about Jade coming back to town and seeing me in Jack’s arms, but I certainly didn’t daydream the other way around. I wasn’t even on the high school reunion committee in high school, but the school called me since I lived here and asked me to put it together. Like Granny said, people were living longer, making funerals a little sparse. I had nothing better to do.
A white van with sketchy windows came plowing down the street and abruptly stopped right next to Jade and Jack. A bunch of men jumped out holding a big boom microphone and camera equipment.
Jade grabbed Jack by the arm and smiled as big as the day was long.
“Smile, Jack.” I read her lips and heard her Southern twang in my head.
Jack fluffed up like a bandy rooster, sticking his chest out for all the world to see his sheriff’s badge. The cameraman walked around them with the camera on his shoulder, taking shots from all angles.
“Yoo-hoo! Jade! Remember me?” Beulah waved and patted her chest. “Beulah Paige Bellefry! You used to play with these pearls in my Sunday school class.” Beulah’s grin took up her entire face. The balls of her cheeks squished up into her eyes.
Jade planted that sweet, fake smile across her face, giving Beulah a hug. Both of Jade’s hands planted on the tops of Beulah’s shoulders, giving her a pat on the left and then a pat on the right.
Jade’s eyes grazed the grass along the town square, which drew them up to the gazebo. Our eyes caught. An easy smile was planted at the corners of her mouth. I glared at her, finding it almost impossible not to return her disarming smile.
She threw her keys to a young girl standing behind her. The girl ran in front of Jade and pulled open the door to the café, cowering down behind it. Her long brown hair was flat to her head. She had brown doe eyes and an olive complexion. She wore large black-rimmed glasses that were entirely too big for her face. But who was I to judge. I was by far no fashion expert. But it wasn’t a surprise Jade surrounded herself with people who weren’t as pleasing to the eye as she was. She always liked being the pretty one, center of attention.
I watched in horror as Jade grabbed Beulah’s hand and tucked her other in the crook of Jack Henry’s arm, dragging them both inside Higher Grounds. My heart sunk. My knees buckled. And any sort of Southern manners I had were thrown out the window.
“How do I look?” I ran my hand over my hair.
“Greasy.” Hettie Bell’s nose ruffled. She was never one to sugarcoat nothing.
I turned to Granny.
“Emma Lee, you are smarter than her. If dumb was dirt, she’d only cover about half an acre.” Granny had her own way of trying to make me feel better.
I wasn’t sure if she had just insulted me or had given me a compliment. My head tilted, my eyes lowered and I stared at her.
“You are beautiful inside and out.” Mable Claire jingled her way over. Mable Claire kept a lot of change in her pockets. She gave out dimes here and there to people who she passed on the street. “It’s early, honey.”
“Stop it.” Hettie stepped up. “You are in workout clothes. She’s gonna know you’ve been working out.” Hettie jabbed my shoulder with her finger. “You are not the creepy funeral girl anymore. You are an important member of this town.”
She was right. I wasn’t that girl anymore and I had Jack Henry Ross now.
Granny scooted closer. She bent her lips to my ear. She smelled of cinnamon and sugar, easing my belly pain somewhat. She whispered, “Emma Lee, you go on in there and get your man.”
I pulled back and we held ea
ch other’s eyes for a second. I straightened my shoulders and stomped my way across the square and stood right in front of Higher Grounds.
I looked in the front window. Everyone inside was making a fuss over Jade Lee Peel being back in town, Ms. Sleepy Hollow herself, and everyone acted as if it were Christmas day. They were all crowded around her. Even little children who didn’t know her, but knew of her and her legacy.
Chapter 2
“There you are.” Cheryl Lynne stood at the door of The Watering Hole. “You hadn’t come in Higher Grounds to get your coffee, so I thought I’d bring you a cup.”
“You are the best.” I put the high school reunion file down on the counter of the bar and walked over to get the cup. “I did try to come to get a coffee. In fact”—I paused to take a sip of the warm, welcoming brew—“I had my hand on the door handle, but it was so crowded, I left and decided to come here so I could make sure everything was ready for tonight’s reunion kickoff.”
Sleepy Hollow was a dry county, which meant there was no selling alcohol, at least in the legal way. There were a lot of people coming into town and I thought it would be fun to host a little prereunion get-together where everyone could mix and mingle. The Watering Hole was just on the other side of the county line and the only drinking joint around Sleepy Hollow. It was a perfect spot for everyone to come, relax and get reacquainted before the reunion tomorrow night.
“Crowded? Or the fact that Jade had dragged Jack in there?” she asked as if she didn’t know the real truth.
“Both.” I duck-billed my lips and sighed out my nose. I curled both hands around the cup. “Not that I don’t trust Jack Henry, but when I saw her with him after all these years, it was like these past years had melted away. All the memories of her making fun of me and making out with him just flooded back, making me feel bad and I just couldn’t make myself go in no matter how much Granny cheered me on.”
“If it’s any consolation, Jack wanted nothing to do with her.” Cheryl’s words did tickle my fancy a little. Enough for me to stand there and listen to more. “She has this camera crew with her and she was talking into the big camera all about her and Jack in high school and how they were royalty. Jack commented it was a long time ago and they were silly teenagers.”
