by Rae Renzi
Sam tossed me a scathing look. “Don’t be ridiculous, Joy, and don’t try to distract me.”
“Because that’s what is happening here. By all means, ignore the evidence. It certainly is easier, if prone to error. It’s a wonder your patients survive. Or do they?”
Sam took on the aspect of a mountain in a thunderstorm. “The evidence, which I followed over here, was in the hearse. Once I find the bodies, the scam is over,” he ground out between clenched teeth.
I was momentarily at a loss. My tongue, however, kept pace. “Bodies? What bodies?”
Marybob bounced up from her chair. “Shows what you know, Sam. Our scam, er, business, is a dating service. No bodies. Except live ones.”
“What bodies?” I asked again, starting to feel a little unnerved.
“Dating service?” Sam pronounced the words slowly, as if opening an envelope that might hold an unpleasant surprise. “What dating service?”
“The Dearly Departed Dating Service,” Marybob said, with a note of pride. She whipped out a card and handed it to him. “Specializing in post-mortem relationships.” She looked at Sam speculatively. “Of course, we’re open to other situations.”
Sam had the appearance of a foreigner trying to join a conversation in the wrong language. He spoke slowly. “So your scam—”
“It’s not a scam.”
“—is to…” He wrinkled his forehead. “Post-mortem… relationships?” A note of horror colored his voice.
There was a long, puzzled pause.
Marybob’s features suddenly contorted. “Oh! No. No, no, no. No dead bodies! Ick. Double ick!”
Sam looked from one to the other of us, a stranger in a strange land, trying to find the facilities.
“What bodies?” I asked again.
“Look,” said Marybob, sounding a little exasperated, “all we do is match up people who are recently bereaved—with the Departed’s help, of course. They—the Departed—tell us who might be a good match, because, you know, they’re the ones who know…” She paused, no doubt remembering Catherine’s husband. And Ruby’s error in judgment with Clydes. “Er, the ones who should know their Bereaved’s needs the best. Then the Departed can move on.”
“Departed… move on…,” Sam parroted. His expressive language skills had diminished as the conversation had progressed. Not surprising, I suppose. Marybob had that effect on people.
“Look, I know this is hard to get,” Marybob said, speaking slowly and enunciating clearly, “but the Departed can’t, er, depart until their loved ones are settled, until they’re at ease, which happens best when another relationship replaces the old. We want to help the process along.”
Given the source, I thought the virtuous tone was a little misplaced, but she essentially had it right. The fact that the biggest conceptual hurdle for most people—that we actually communicated with the Departed—might possibly be insurmountable apparently hadn’t occurred to her.
“So, you talk to the dead to get their expert opinion.” Sam’s voice was like a punctured tire.
“That’s about the size of it. Though, I have to say, for experts, they’re sometimes a little clueless.”
No need to mention pots and kettles calling each other black, I decided. Under the circumstances.
“And get paid along the way,” Sam said, little bit of incisor starting to show.
“Oh, hell, yes. You think this is easy? Hello? Remember Joy’s stitches? If you ask me, we should get combat pay.”
Clydes looked sheepish. “Yeah, sorry ‘bout that. I can help cover—”
“So, you claim to talk to the Departed, and this isn’t a scam?” Sam crossed his arms and gazed down at Marybob imperiously.
Marybob stuck out her chin. “No, it’s not. We can prove it. Luke, think you can give us a hand here?” she said in the right general direction.
“What bodies?” I asked a little more forcefully this time. It was, after all, the essential point.
Chapter 41
Sam completely ignored me. Instead, he looked around, newly confused. “Luke? Who’s Luke?”
Luke looked at me, a smirk on his face. “Can I, like, you know, give him a wedgie or something?”
“I don’t care what you do. It doesn’t concern me one bit whether he believes us or not.” I was more concerned about those bodies. I had a bad feeling. Still, a part of my mind enjoyed the idea of Dr.-Know-It-All Kendall faced with an inexplicable wad of underwear in his butt crack, to put it crudely. That would give him something to think about.
“What? What I do—about Luke, or… ?” Sam began to look less certain of himself.
Marybob rolled her eyes. “No, doofus. She’s talking to Luke… I think.”
That got an eyebrow lift out of Sam. “You think? I thought you were the medium.”
Marybob sighed. “Okay, you got me. I can’t see or hear them or anything. I know they’re there, but that’s all. Joy can, though. She has to deal with the Departed all the freakin’ time. Believe me, that’s not a piece of cake.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “So, I suppose there are Departed here, now?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said snippily. “But feel free to ignore the facts, as usual.”
“Ruby’s here,” Clydes stated. “Ain’t she?”
“And Luke, for sure. I can almost smell him.” Marybob sniffed around, a bit theatrically.
Luke snickered and thrust his armpit at Marybob’s nose.
“Luke, please,” I said. “Yes, Ruby is here. Luke, too, of course, and… oh! Um, who are you?”
A tall, striking blonde woman, about thirty years old or so, had materialized next to the credenza. She looked around the room with detached interest, until she got to Sam. Then her interest attached. Quite.
“Name’s Christie. Just joined the ranks.” She sauntered up to Sam, circled him while eying him up and down. “Hmm. Nice. This may be more entertaining than I’d expected.”
I cleared my throat. “My name is Joy. I’m the restoration artist here at Tranquility Park. Are you… that is, are your corporeal remains here?”
“Yeah, my body’s down there. What’s left of it.”
“Fine. I’m a little tied up at the moment—”
“Who in the hell are you talking to? What’s going on? Or is this a part of the act?” Sam stepped in front of me, and I shoved him aside. Or rather, I shoved, which had the effect of propelling me to the side. One would think I’d have learned the physics of Sam Kendall by now, but he seemed to have a bad effect on my cognition.
“—but I’ll be with you shortly,” I told Christie when I caught my balance.
Christie waved desultorily and vanished.
“No Craig?” Marybob glanced around the room.
“Not yet, but he’ll be here soon,” I said, ignoring the little clanging in the back of my mind alerting me of a short-circuit between my brain and my words.
I expected Sam to ask who Craig was. But he wasn’t paying me the least attention. His attention was glued to the table where the large black felt pen was moving across a piece of paper.
Luke wrote: CRAIG IS DEAD.
I don’t know why Luke wrote those particular words, or why, after all this time, the words now hit me with the force of a pile driver. I stood staring down at the stark black letters. The lines wavered a little as I blinked the unexpected moisture from my eyes and tried to catch my breath. Marybob said something. So did Clydes. I was vaguely aware of their footsteps moving away, but my attention was riveted by the letters, as if they held something more, something beyond the hollowed-out cavity where my heart used to be.
“Who is Craig?” Sam’s belligerence had vanished. He placed his hand on my arm, gently, as if I would break.
A splash, one salty drop, appeared on the paper, causing the A and I to crinkle. I reached down to brush it away.
“Craig is… was… my boyfriend. He died… two years ago. In a car wreck.”
Sam’s gray-blue eyes locked onto my face
when I looked up, and a rill of panic ran through them. I looked at those eyes through the watery lens of time, and my mind stretched back to that moment in the ER, to the eyes of the surgeon I had tried to face down, the surgeon bent on preserving Craig’s life.
“Oh. Oh, shit. That was why…” He paced away from me, his face tight. “Hell. I didn’t know.”
The moment came back to me in full force. The gushing blood, the beeping monitors, the horrible jumping of Craig’s body and his pleas for me to intervene. The surgeon who kicked me out of the room. The anger rose up in me again, like a noxious weed that refused to die. I struggled for a moment but beat it down. Craig was gone, body and—I was afraid—spirit. Nothing Sam had done, now or then, changed that.
Except I hadn’t lost Craig, not entirely. We’d had a good relationship even after his death. Or so I’d thought. My mind drifted to his demonstration of Departed relationships. A tiny, niggling uneasiness wormed its way into my mind, eating away my delusion, baring the hard fact that I had lost him when he died. I just hadn’t accepted it.
A distressed growl from Sam brought me back to myself. I shook my head and focused on the relevant fact.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. The point is someone wrote the ridiculous sentence. Someone you can’t see. Explain that, Dr. Kendall. And then tell me about the missing bodies.”
Sam wasn’t as quick on the uptake as I would have expected. “Bodies?”
Certain types of men excelled in applying power and speed in predictable situations, but had trouble traveling mental byways that required rapid course changes and flexibility in acceleration. The difference, I’d guess, was akin to driving in the Monaco Grand Prix versus the Indianapolis 500. Sam was definitely an Indy 500 man: once pointed in the right direction, I was sure he’d arrive at the finish line in record speed. But ask him to change direction? Different story.
I stepped in front of him and snapped my fingers. “Focus. You said something earlier about missing bodies.” With visible effort, he pulled his thoughts from the morass of the past to the current situation and aimed his eyes at mine. Zoom.
“Yes. There have been an unreasonable number of bodies released from the hospital in error, supposedly a mix-up in paperwork. They each disappeared on a Tuesday or Thursday night—not during regular working hours. On a hunch, I waited outside the morgue tonight. Sure enough, a hearse showed up. I followed it here.”
My mind flipped back to the not-so-recent past, when Mr. Botts had mentioned increasing market shares. I had a bad feeling then, and I had a bad feeling now.
I heard a faint shuffle at the door.
“Hmmm.” I yanked the door open to find Mr. Botts standing, ear forward, in front of the door.
“Mr. Botts. What are you doing here at this hour?” Of course he could have asked me the same thing, but guilt had a way of clouding the mind, and guilt was written all over him.
He straightened up with a start. “Joy! Ah… new door handles. We need new door handles. Don’t mind me. Just having a quick look. Just… carry on.” He displayed his full array of cosmetic dentistry and scurried down the hallway, glancing over his shoulder.
I didn’t follow. He was next on my list, but I wanted to get the facts straight before I confronted him, and I knew exactly who to ask.
“Stay here,” I said to Sam before I marched out the door.
I found her in the Restoration Art room, which was, for reasons not entirely clear to me, by far the favorite hang-out for the Departed. Luke had apparently decided he’d fulfilled his obligation to Marybob, so he was there, too, though Ruby wasn’t. Neither was Craig.
“Christie, is your body here?”
She arched a perfect eyebrow at me. “No, I came here for enlightenment and…” She glanced at Luke. “… mature, insightful conversation.”
I closed my eyes and huffed a sigh. If the physical features of the Departed were rearranged after death to show their best side, why couldn’t the non-physical features—personality, for example—get the same remodeling?
“I’ll take that as a yes. I realize you’d much prefer to move on. But I have to guess that you’ve left someone behind or you wouldn’t be here.”
Christie settled like a snowflake into a chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Naturally.”
“Good. I’d like to ask you a question. I don’t know if you’ll know the answer, but you might. Did your significant other—”
“I don’t do significant others.” She held up a hand adorned with illusory diamonds. Several.
“Husband, then. Did he ask that your body be sent here?”
“No, neither of them did.”
I opened my mouth to ask the next question, then closed it again. After a moment’s thought, I regrouped and asked, “Neither body, or neither husband?” However probabilistically unlikely, the former was marginally possible, given what I had learned about twins. The latter was limited only by convention and law. Which, for some people (possibly including Christie), meant not at all.
“Husbands.” She looked heavenwards. “Is there anyone here with even a smidge of intelligence?”
I ignored her snipe, but my curiosity got the best of me. “Do they know each other?”
“Actually, they do. But they don’t know about each other.” She smirked. “One of my better ploys.” Her face became thoughtful. “Or, it was until one of them tipped the scheme and poisoned me. I wonder if it was Andrew or John William. Probably Andrew. A baseball bat would be more John William’s style.”
I’d never worked on a murderee before, but I can’t say I was altogether shocked that this particular victim—if that word could be applied here—had been helped out of the mortal world. However tempting, I didn’t allow myself to be distracted.
“So, to be perfectly clear, you are survived by two husbands, neither of which requested your body be sent here to Tranquility Park.”
“That is what I said. Shall I repeat it once more, slowly?”
“Who released you—er, your body? And to whom?” Dead people did not sign themselves out as a matter of routine. Though, I suppose, someone like Luke might be capable. Imagine the confusion that would cause…
“Some guy in the morgue named Wilson. He took a fistful of money from—well, well, well. Speak of the devil.”
I was grabbed from behind and a chemically-sweet cloth smashed against my face. The last thing I saw was the floor rushing up to meet me.
Chapter 42
Consciousness returned to me in a series of brief jerks and startles from the depths of blissful oblivion—blissful relative to my throbbing headache, that is. Each time I surfaced, my semi-conscious self recognized that awareness might not be the ideal state at the moment, and I sank back into nothingness.
Now, though, I awakened with a whole new type of discomfort, aside from the sick headache: I was being crushed. Something large, heavy, and unwieldy covered me. I couldn’t see what, because it was pitch black. For a few confused moments, as I hovered between the dream world and the real, I imagined I was battling a giant octopus—the result of reading too much Jules Verne—but I quickly realized my foe was not a cephalopod, but an inert human. A large one.
I’m embarrassed to say I reacted badly. In my defense, I think anyone in intimate proximity to a corpse would do the same. With a small (under the circumstances) screech, I pushed and shoved at the thing, trying to get it away from me, but with no effect. I tried to roll away from it and ran into a solid structure at my back… and at my head… and above me. I balled my fists and hammered at the roof of the… coffin?
Oh, God, it was a coffin. I was locked in a coffin with a corpse. Adrenaline fueled my renewed attempt to escape the horrible thing draped over me. I kicked frantically at the side of the coffin and gave the corpse another push.
The corpse groaned.
I stopped mid-shove. Even in the most unusual circumstances—and I thought this qualified—corpses didn’t groan. Presented with a rational disconnection, I took a
deep breath and let it out slowly.
Taking stock of the situation, I realized several things: One, the corpse was breathing, and, importantly, it didn’t smell like embalming fluid—or decay, for that matter. Therefore, it was most likely not a corpse, but a body. The second realization arrived after a quick but thorough examination of said body. My hands told me that, unless some other overly muscular, unruly haired, smooth-cheeked, square-jawed, sensuous-lipped man with a tiny scar above the left eyebrow was in the environs of Tranquility Park, the person I shared a coffin with was Sam Kendall.
The suspicion that had been percolating in the back of my mind now zoomed to the front. Accidental encounters with Sam had become so numerous that “accident” couldn’t be part of the equation. The Departed—and, undoubtedly, Marybob—had been plotting, I was sure, and my present unhappy circumstances were the result. I had no trouble recreating their twisted logic: if putting us in the same room hadn’t worked to get us together, maybe putting us in even closer contact might. Although stuffing us into a coffin seemed somewhat extreme, even for the Departed.
“Luke! Ruby! Show yourselves at once,” I yelled.
My voice was amazingly loud in the cramped coffin, but Sam snuffled peacefully and attempted to roll over. He thumped into the wall of the coffin and rolled back on top of me, snuggling his face into the crook of my neck. In other circumstances or with a different person, this position might be pleasant. If it were voluntary and not the result of a practical joke.
“Luke! Ruby! Marybob! This isn’t funny.” I hesitated a moment. “Craig?”
Apparently, Marybob was not within hearing range, and neither were the mischief-making Departed.
Christie was, however. She popped her face through the wall of the coffin, glowing iridescently in the dark. “They’re busy.”
It was hard to maintain any sort of decorum with Sam draped all over me, but I spoke with what dignity I could muster. “Christie, I would be grateful if you would ask Luke or Ruby to come here.”
