by Rae Renzi
Ruby was quite taken. “Gosh. That chokes me up. See, Rose is my middle name. So, Ruby Rose. Don’t that look nice?”
Nice wasn’t exactly the word I’d use, but it did have a certain carnivale macabre appeal.
With the help of some burly bystanders, we unloaded the casket and went into the church. Given the interesting spectacle in the parking lot, I was fairly itching with curiosity to see what the service would entail.
I was only slightly disappointed that the service was quite ordinary, other than the venue, which was a former Git-and-Go convenience store; and the pastor, who was tall, thin, tattooed, and wore a bandana; and also the sermon, which conventionally, and, I guess, comfortingly, made ample reference to the Hereafter, but which was laced with the kind of language one did not usually hear in church.
In some way, even the colorful language was fitting. Sex and its derivatives filled out the lists of both earthly pleasures and hellish curses. For instance, no one yelled, “Chocolate you, you ice-cream eater!” as an insult, but substitute any sexual term you like for “chocolate” and “ice cream,” and you’re in business for a top-notch curse. In fact, the pastor didn’t actually deliver a curse to anyone or anything (and abstained from profanities altogether), but rather used the obscene words as convenient substitutions for adjectives or nouns, which I took as a lack of vocabulary, rather than a lack of respect. With a mental filter judicially applied, the sermon was quite nice.
When the service was over, we joined the motorcycle entourage for the deafening and spectacular procession to the graveside. After the short graveside ceremony, we lined up with the others to offer our condolences to Clydes.
Now, I can’t really say that Marybob is a heartless opportunist. Possibly heartfelt opportunist is more accurate, as she truly believes the Bereaved moving on to another love is in everyone’s best interest (not excluding ours). In any case, before the funeral, she had convinced Ruby (through me) to provide a fund of facts and incidents known only to her and Clydes, just in case. The “in case” at hand was any situation that would allow her to sprinkle evidence that she, alias Madam Mystique, possessed the Gift of Communing with the Dearly Departed. I was a little uncomfortable with that, but she insisted that it was only good business to plant the seed, so to speak. “Just in case we have to use Madam Mystique, you know, in the future.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” we each said to Clydes. He nodded through his tears.
The pastor, at his side, spoke for him. “Thank you. We take comfort that she’s in a better place now.”
Marybob flashed a fin. “Actually, she isn’t. Not yet. She’s still here—right over there, in fact. But she’s okay with that. For now.”
I looked at her in shock. I mean, she was absolutely telling the truth—even if she didn’t realize she had pointed directly to Ruby—but to tell Clydes so baldly that she had not yet made it to the Hereafter was very nearly insensitive.
On the other hand, it was Marybob.
“Anyway, I hope you recover soon.” Marybob started to turn away.
“Wait.” Clydes looked up, hope spilling out of his eyes.
It killed me, but Marybob just smiled benignly. “Yes?”
“You can see her? You can see my Ruby?”
The pastor had tensed up, a look of outrage coming over his face. I didn’t blame him. He assumed we were scamming Clydes and he was right, to some degree. Except it was more akin to a mother scamming her kids into taking vitamins. Or would be, if the kids paid their mom for the vitamins.
“It’s a Gift,” Marybob said.
By now the pastor’s face had turned an unpleasant purplish red and veins bulged at his temples. “Clydes…”
Clydes wasn’t listening. “You can talk to her?”
Marybob glanced at Ruby, or rather, near Ruby—her aim was off by about a foot to the right. “She talks, yeah. Oh, by the way, she says…” Marybob tilted her head, as if listening. “She says to tell you that silver ring you bought, the one with the little rubies in it? You left it in your jeans. She found it when she did laundry the day before the crash and forgot to tell you. It’s in… what? Oh, girl, that is too… okay, I’ll tell him.”
This last she supposedly addressed to Ruby, who was slapping her knee and hooting. “Well, shit. She says it’s in her purse in the little… ah, personal products pouch she carries around for her monthlies, if you know what I mean.” Marybob had the grace to appear embarrassed. Why she chose that fact out of the ten or so Ruby had supplied, I can’t guess.
The pastor was apoplectic. I stepped in.
“We better go now, Marybob. I’m sure Clydes can find his ring. Perhaps you can go with him, Pastor? My friend here, ah, sometimes forgets that not everyone sees the, um, continuity of life so clearly as she, so they don’t know how happy their Dearly Departed truly are.”
“Which purse?” the pastor asked between his teeth. “If you can talk to her, ask her which purse.”
This wasn’t something we had rehearsed.
I looked past Marybob to Ruby and raised my eyebrows.
“I only had one freaking purse, you moron,” Ruby said to the pastor. She turned to me. “I never did like him all that much. He tried to feel me up more than once.”
I stepped between Marybob and the pastor, as if trying to avoid a scene. “Let’s go, Marybob. Sometimes people aren’t ready.”
Marybob looked at me, and I mouthed, “The only purse.”
“Yes, you’re right.” She looked at Clydesdale. “Now, don’t forget to get your ring out of her purse—she says you know she has only the one purse. Take care now, Clydes.”
“Wait. She’s here? Right now?” A note of desperation had crept into Clydes’s voice.
Time to leave.
“Nah, she’s gone—she just wanted to tell you about the ring, but she’ll be back sometime. She wants to make sure you’re okay. You know, before she goes to that Better Place?”
“How can I be okay? How can I?” Despair tinged his voice, but Marybob closed in anyway.
She handed him a DDDS card with the finesse of a casino dealer. “Now, that’s something we can talk about.”
Chapter 23
Clydes didn’t call right away, thank heavens. I needed a little time to rethink the whole enterprise, but with only forty-one days left before the hatchet dropped, time was exactly what I didn’t have. I was trying to come up with a new, more strategic approach to the dating service while working on the reconstruction of an ear that had been all but sheared off when a parachute malfunctioned (the rest of the head was in reasonably good shape, all things considered). I had made progress with the ear, but not the dating service, when the intercom buzzed.
I plunked my shaping tool on the desk, took a deep breath and walked over to jab at the button. “Yes?”
“Joy! Joy!” Mr. Botts bellowed. “Please report to the office. Très important!”
I flipped off the switch without answering, heaved a sigh, and yanked off my apron.
“What now?” I asked of the dozen or so Departed standing around passing the time. “What are you all doing here? Don’t you have some spying to do or something? We need clients!”
“We’re getting ready for Clydes’s séance,” Luke said with a lopsided grin. “Watch.”
He lifted a pair of boxers from a basket that held clothes for one of the newly Departed and danced them around the room. “They’ll freak, right?”
“The purpose of the séance is not to make people freak. It’s to comfort them,” I snapped. My tone raised eyebrows on several of the Departed, but I had three more bodies to do today—Marshall practically had them stacked like firewood—and the Departed were milling around the lab as if they were playing musical chairs.
My tone didn’t faze Luke.
“Yeah. Comfort them and make money.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me.
“Luke, you can make better use of your time than dancing around with misplaced underwear. Your girlfriend is still wal
lowing in grief over you, though exactly why escapes me at the moment.”
Luke merely waved the boxers at me with a lopsided grin.
I snatched them out of his hands, jammed them back into the basket, and raced out the door. “Find her a boyfriend,” I called over my shoulder.
“I’m working on that down payment,” he called back to me. “Which would be easier if it wasn’t so expensive. Hint, hint.”
Ten minutes later, I ogled Mr. Botts with (habitual by now) skepticism. “The Beaujolais Festival?”
“Put on by the French-American Chamber of Commerce! It’s an annual event. A must-do venue. Terrific promotion opportunity for us!”
I’ve never been accused of a lack of imagination, but as I tried to picture a gala event with food, wine, music, and coffins, my inventiveness flagged. The best I could come up with was a haute version of a wake.
Mr. Botts had no such limitations. He leaned over his desk and proffered an envelope. “I’ll be out of town at the Coffin and Casket Exposition, so you’ll have to represent us. You’ll love it.”
I opened the envelope and slid out two square cards printed in bright colors.
Annual Beaujolais Food and Wine Festival
with Silent Auction
“Silent Auction?” Honestly, I couldn’t imagine Mr. Botts participating in any activity that required silence.
Mr. Botts beamed at me. “Hottest thing in charity fundraising. It’s perfect for us! All the trendy boutiques will be there.”
I looked closely at my boss. “You do realize, don’t you, that Tranquility Park is not a trendy boutique?”
Waving his hand impatiently at my lack of vision, Mr. Botts replied grandly, “It’s only a matter of marketing.”
Chapter 24
“Thanks for helping with this.” Craig glanced at Luke hovering on the sidewalk beside him outside Joy’s place. Beside him, a girl with short dark hair and big brown eyes grinned at him. She leaned against the lamppost, hands in the pockets of her jeans. She was cute. And dead. Her name was Bernie.
“I live to help others,” she said.
“You’re just bored,” Luke said, with a dig to her ribs.
“Like you’re not?” Craig asked him with a laugh.
“True. Anyway, you can’t deal with this by yourself.”
“Good point.”
Bernie grinned. She eyed a plastic grocery bag at Luke’s feet. “How did that lady Marybob get you to do this? She can’t see us or hear us, right?”
“No, but she knows we’re here.” Though there might be more to it than that. Craig wondered if the act of believing in something—or someone—had some kind of transformative power. The notion was troubling from his point of view—
—but obviously not for Luke. “Anyway, this gig was her idea. She got the ticket, and asked us—me and Craig—to deliver it.”
“And trusted you heard her.”
“Yeah, it was lucky I was there when she asked, but I did float the ticket away afterward, so no special trust needed there,” Luke said.
“She trusts we’ll deliver,” Craig reminded him.
“There is that. Hey, Bernie, want to see my bag trick? I figured it out as a way to move the ticket in public without anyone freaking out.”
Luke slipped his finger through the handle of the dirt-smudged grocery bag and lofted it into the air.
“Awesome,” Bernie said, her eyes following the bag as it inflated and fluttered with Luke’s movement.
“It really is, right? Like, pure inspiration. These plastic bags are everywhere, floating around like trash—well, I guess they are trash. No one pays attention to them.”
The kid was right, Craig thought. The bags were blights on the cityscape, and it wasn’t unusual to see one caught in a breeze and swirling down the street as if it had a purpose, a destination. Now, at least one did.
Luke gave the bag a dervish whirl as if the wind had snagged it. He laughed as he scampered down the street.
Bernie giggled and ran after him. “It’s like bag dancing.”
“Yeah, I’m perfecting my moves. See, you do slow swirling down to the ground at traffic lights, but then you wait for a bus to come by. It’s got a power-whoosh to lift off the bag so you can cross big streets.”
Craig kept up with the two of them as they tripped down the street, timing runs with the breeze so the bag seemed to move at the same time as the waving tree branches. Luke lofted the bag into the air over his head when he got too close to someone, then let it fall before swirling it up again.
“You’ve gotten it to an art form, Luke.”
Luke grinned. “Yeah, right? Passes the time, I guess. Better than bumping around the funeral home and tons better than sitting around watching my girlfriend cry her eyes out.” His eyes darted down the street. “Dudes, get ready to catch the wave. Surf’s up!”
A bus was coming, dragging a trail of litter and leaves in its wake. It would be good for a couple of blocks if they sprinted.
Craig laughed at him and shook his head. “You’re totally nuts, but go for it.”
Luke lofted the plastic bag holding the festival ticket in the air and let it go. Bernie snorted and made a grab for it as a dump truck growled by in the opposite direction. The bag caught the cross draft and swirled up into the air and out of their reach.
“Shit! Grab it.”
Bernie made a lunge for it, but her hand went right through the plastic. “Oh, right. Like I can.”
They ran down the street, laughing madly. “Marybob will kill me if we lose it.”
Despite his words, Luke didn’t seem too concerned, Craig noticed.
“Dude, you’re already dead,” Bernie said.
“Oh, trust me, she’ll find a way to make me deader.”
“And if she doesn’t, I will. We need this to happen,” Craig said. “I need to move on.”
“You tired of being here? I though you and Joy—”
“It’s more than that.”
“Like, what?”
“Luke, catch the bag. We’ll talk later.”
Two blocks later, the bag finally settled fitfully in the middle of the street. Luke looked both ways and dashed into the street to grab it and skitter back to the sidewalk.
“It’s not like a car can hurt you, you know.” Bernie shook her head at him.
“I know it in my head…”
“But you don’t believe it.”
Luke shrugged. “Not yet.”
Craig and Luke stood on the sidewalk outside the building and looked in. The doctor’s place was a new condo in Midtown, one of the upscale ones. A security guard sat at the desk in the lobby to buzz people through.
“How will we get in?”
Craig looked at Luke and raised an eyebrow.
Bernie said, “Uh, how about, like, walk in?”
“Not sure about that…” Luke put his hand on the glass door and pushed. Nothing happened. Not even fingerprints on the glass. “These glass ones are worse than wood. More solid.”
Bernie snorted and walked right through the door. Craig followed her, although he noticed a little resistance. Not much, but some. Obviously not as much as Luke, who remained outside.
Bernie wiggled her fingers at Luke, and he responded, “Smart ass.” She laughed. Craig poked his head back through to talk to Luke.
“I don’t think your bag trick will work in here, anyway. It’s not exactly the kind of place where trash is allowed to collect.”
“Yeah, I know.” Luke squatted next to the doorway and wriggled the envelope out of the bag. The bag floated down the street, but Luke kept his finger on the envelope. A slit of light beamed through a gap under the door. He slid the envelope toward the gap and raised his eyebrows at Craig. “Anyone coming?”
Craig looked around. “All clear.”
Luke eased the envelope under the door. On the black granite floor, the white paper rectangle couldn’t be more obvious.
The elevator dinged. Craig swung around. “So
meone’s coming. Come on, get your ass in here, Luke. You’ve got to get this envelope out of the way.”
A man with a briefcase strode off the elevator and into the lobby, checking his cell phone as he walked.
“I can’t!” Luke threw up his hands and paced in front of the door. “Distract him.”
Bernie spun around and stepped in front of the man. “Yeah. Like this?” She yanked her shirt up in front. The man walked right through her.
Luke’s jaw dropped open. “Holy shit, Bernie.”
She pulled her shirt down to face Luke. “Told ya. No one can see me, remember?”
“I can.”
“Hello? Dead, remember?”
“Still.”
The man clicked off his phone as he got to the door. His eye fell on the envelope.
Luke groaned. “We are so screwed.”
“You are so screwed. I don’t even know Marybill—” Bernie said.
“Marybob.”
“Whatever.”
Craig watched the man closely. “Maybe not. Let’s see what he does with it.”
He and Bernie hovered inside the lobby, and Luke watched from outside the door. The man picked up the envelope. He frowned at it, flipped it over to read it, and strode to the desk.
“Be right back.” Bernie scooted over to the security desk and leaned on it with her elbows, listening first to the man, then the guard. Craig joined her a little more sedately.
The guard reached over and picked up the desk phone. “Dr. Kendall? There’s an envelope here at the desk for you.”
