Home Improvement: Undead Edition (43 page)

It was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall. Maybe there was something to the loa business—how else could they already know?

I knew Papa Philippe would want me to dress the part, so I took the time to rummage around and find my loose cotton skirt and blouse, the myriad strings of beads and amulets, and the curly black wig I’d worn as an apprentice. Then I fastened on my tignon of calico scarves knotted together, needing a dozen bobby pins to keep it on my head. It was while I was applying makeup six shades darker than my real complexion that I got a good look at myself in the mirror. And nearly laughed my ass off.

So when I arrived at the Order’s compound, it was only after I’d washed my face, pulled the tignon from my head, dumped the jewelry onto the floor, and changed into blue jeans and my
Shaun of the Dead
T-shirt.

Screw ’em if they couldn’t take a joke.

A pair of apprentices—one in tignon, one in top hat—was waiting for me at the head of the path leading to the council’s gathering place with burning torches in hand. They didn’t speak, but produced some excellent expressions of contempt when they saw my clothes. I just said, “Hey, fabulous outfits! Are those new looks for you?”

They led the way down the path until I could see a clearing with the roaring bonfire the council kept lit no matter what the weather was, then stopped. Obviously I was supposed to make the rest of the trip on my own.

“Tweet me!” I said to my exiting escorts as I followed the dusty path to the gathering place. The fire should have been comforting in the chill of a fall evening, but it really wasn’t.

I stepped into the center of the clearing and waited. I knew there were people around me, but I couldn’t see them until somebody struck a match. Then I could just barely make out the features of Papa Philippe as he walked around the edges of the clearing, stopping every few feet to light a candle in the hand of a council member. There were thirteen candles—the full council was there. It wasn’t a good sign.

Then Papa Philippe came to stand beside me, which was a relief. At least he was still willing to act as my sponsor.

Tante Ju-Ju was standing in the middle of the row of council members. “I see you, Dodie Kilburn. I want you to tell me what you been doing since I talked to you before.”

I did so, ending with my walking back toward my car after Gottfried’s fall.

“And you just leave after that?”

“I thought about it, but no, I didn’t leave. I turned around and went back.”

There were murmurs from the rest of the council, but Tante Ju-Ju kept eyeing me. “What you waiting for? Keep on talking.”

I REALLY HAD
intended to drive off in ignominious defeat, stopping only at the nearest Publix to pick up a gallon of fudge ripple ice cream, but just before I got to the car, I turned around and stomped back to the people clustered around Gottfried’s body.

Somebody had found a tarp to lay over him, and most of the workers had wandered away, but the key players were still there: Mrs. Hopkins, Elizabeth, C.W., Von Doesburg, and Scarpa.

“Hang on,” I said, “something stinks here, and I’m not talking about Gottfried.”

Elizabeth sputtered, but I didn’t give her a chance to go into a righteous tirade.

“I spent all of yesterday with Gottfried and he was fine. I spent half of today with him and he was fine. But the second I leave him alone, he falls. Again. Don’t you people think that’s just a little bit suspicious?”

“What are you talking about?” Elizabeth said.

“I’m talking about murder.” Well, technically it wasn’t, since you can’t murder a dead man, but it sure got their attention. “I know Gottfried’s will was strong, so he didn’t just die, and I don’t believe he had two accidents. Somebody either pushed him, or set a trap. Both times.”

“Who would have done that?” Mrs. Hopkins asked. “And why?”

“Why does anybody kill somebody else? Either the killer hated Gottfried or he—or she—benefited from his death.”

I spent a second considering the possibility that Hopkins had been the one, mainly because of the way she’d refused to let me raise him a third time, but it didn’t compute. She needed him to finish the job, and I hadn’t picked up on the first hint of her having anything against him.

“This is ridiculous,” Scarpa said, starting to inch away. “I’m not going to stand here and be accused of . . . Of whatever it is you’re accusing me of.”

“I haven’t accused anybody yet. But you—and the rest of you, too—can stand here and listen, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Von Doesburg scoffed. “Call the cops? There’s been no crime committed.”

“I won’t call the cops. I’ll call the loa.” The disadvantage of being a houngan is that people think you can commit creepy acts. The advantage is that people think that you
will
commit them.

“What do you want from us?” Scarpa asked in a strangled tone.

“Answers. And the loa will know if you’re lying.” Of course, the loa wouldn’t have told me squat, but they didn’t know that. Having already tentatively eliminated Mrs. Hopkins from my list of suspects, I went on to Elizabeth. “Did you talk to Gottfried while I was in the bathroom?”

“How would I know when you were in the bathroom?”

“Okay, fine. Did you talk to him while I wasn’t around?”

“No. I was in the trailer most of the day unsnarling purchase orders.”

“Did anybody see you?”

“People came in and out, but nobody was with me constantly.”

“Okay.” I made as if to turn to somebody else, then jerked back to her—I’d seen the maneuver on TV. “What was that paper you tried to trick Gottfried into signing yesterday?”

“I wasn’t trying to trick him!” she said. “It was something he’d promised to do before he died, but he never got a chance.”

“What was it?”

“A recommendation letter. I’m applying to architecture schools. I figured I could get his signature and then fudge the date to make it look like he’d done it before he died.”

C.W. said, “Gottfried told me that she was applying, if that helps any.”

Actually, it did. Even if Elizabeth had wanted to kill Gottfried for some reason, she wouldn’t have done so until he signed her paper. True, she could have forged it, but she could have done that anytime.

On to C.W. He’d been awfully nice to me—maybe he’d had an ulterior motive. “What about you?” I said to him. “If Gottfried was out of the way, you could have gone on to finish the renovation your way.”

“My way? I don’t have a way. I’m a builder, not a designer. You give me a blueprint or even something sketched on a napkin, I’ll build it, but I wouldn’t know where to start on a project like this.”

I would have loved to have a loa with a lie detector standing by, but he sure sounded sincere to me. “Then tell me this. Did you see Gottfried any time today when I wasn’t with him?”

“No, you were sticking to him like glue.”

“All right then, Mr. Von Doesburg and Mr. Scarpa. Same question. Did you speak to Gottfried at any time today when I wasn’t around?”

Scarpa shook his head vigorously, but Von Doesburg said, “Yes.”

“You did?” I said, surprised that anybody had admitted it.

“I went looking for him, as a matter of fact, and found him on the second floor examining flooring. I assume it was after you left him.”

“What did you want with him?”

He gave me a condescending smile. “I wanted his advice on a project I’m working on—it’s fairly technical. I could explain it, but only another architect could understand.”

“Did he help you?”

“We talked for a few minutes, but then he said he needed to check something on the balcony. I thanked him for his time and went into an empty room to call my office. Then I heard a scream and ran outside. I suppose somebody else could have been upstairs when we were and followed Gottfried, but I didn’t see anyone.”

I was about to make a stab at Scarpa when I realized what Von Doesburg had said. “Dude, you’re so busted.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Okay, all of you have interacted with Gottfried since I first got him back. Has he expressed any interest in anything other than finishing this house?”

There was a round of heads shaking.

“He wouldn’t even sign Elizabeth’s paper—something he’d promised to do—because it wasn’t directly connected to his task. So why would he have given Von Doesburg advice about a different project?”

“I’m no expert in zombie behavior,” Von Doesburg said, “so I can only tell you what happened.”

“Bullshit,” C.W. said. “The boss wouldn’t have given Von Doesburg the time of day when he was alive. Everybody knows he thought the man’s work was crap.”

“I assure you that Gottfried respected me as a colleague,” the developer said, but he was sweating.

“Let’s find out for sure,” I said. “Let’s ask Gottfried.”

“SO YOU DONE
raise him again?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.

I nodded. “I hope that’s it, too—it gets harder every time. But Gottfried came back. His body is a bit banged up from the falls, but he’s still willing to do the task. And when I worded the question the right way—asking him what work needed doing on the balcony—he told us that it was Von Doesburg who told him to check for termite damage. Which there was, only not in the place Von Doesburg told him to look. Von Doesburg set him up to fall, and probably pushed him down the stairs the other time, too.”

“Why he want to get rid of a revenant so bad?”

“We’re not absolutely sure because Von Doesburg has clammed up, but I started thinking about what Gottfried said about substandard building materials, and how he wasn’t building an Emerald Lake house. I got C.W. to take a look at Mr. Scarpa’s house, and apparently the place wasn’t built to code. Fixing it will be expensive and Scarpa said he was going to sue Von Doesburg to recoup his costs. Chances are that all the houses in the development have the same code violations. The man’s going to be bankrupt.”

“You think that enough? Or are you gonna send the loa after him for messing with your revenant?” Tante Ju-Ju said, with an ironic twist to her lips.

“Actually, I suggested to Mrs. Hopkins that the police just might want to investigate Gottfried’s real death a little more closely. After all, he must have discovered the problems with the Emerald Lake houses before he died, and from what I know about him, I don’t think he’d have kept quiet.”

“Where the revenant be now? You didn’t bring him here.”

“They’ve lost so much time these past couple of days that Gottfried insisted on working through the night, and you know how hard it is to argue with a revenant. With Von Doesburg out of the way, I figured he’d be safe enough there—C.W. and Elizabeth will keep an eye on him.”

“I think Dodie done us proud,” Papa Philippe said firmly. “If she not be bringing that man back, people start to think we can’t keep a revenant up and doing his task.”

“Maybe she did—maybe she didn’t,” Tante Ju-Ju said. “Tell me this. That third time you bring him back, where you get that sacrifice?”

I was so screwed. I’d been hoping nobody would ask that question, which was why I’d kept my hands behind me while I was talking. “I used my Order ring.” I held out the hand with the white mark that showed where the ring had been.

There were audible gasps, and if looks could have killed, I’d have been revenant material. I was afraid to look at Papa Philippe, who must have been wishing he were anyplace on earth other than standing next to me.

“Why you sacrifice that ring?” Tante Ju-Ju asked. “You got nothing else to give the loa?”

“What could I have given them? My car? My computer? None of that is worth anything.”

“But the ring be gold so that make it valuable?”

“No! Yeah, sure the gold is worth something, but that’s not what made it valuable. A sacrifice has to mean something, right? The ring was the only important thing I had.”

“Why it be so important?”

Was this a trick question? She knew what that ring symbolized. “Papa Philippe gave me that ring when I became a houngan.”

“You saying being a houngan is something special?”

“Are you serious?”

“You the one who never be serious about what you doing!”

“Sure, I make jokes. It’s a funny job—people are funny, and dead people even more so. That doesn’t mean I don’t take raising the dead seriously. I help people finish their life’s work so they can rest easy. If that’s not special, then I don’t know what is!”

She looked at me for what seemed like a year. The other council members were looking, too, and probably Papa Philippe, too. Then Tante Ju-Ju smiled so wide it was almost scary.

“You come here.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, but since Papa Philippe nudged me and I was outnumbered, I went.

“Gimme your hand.” When I held it out, she slipped a ring on my finger, right where the other one had been. “The loa, they do like jokes. They be wanting you to stay houngan.”

“They aren’t playing a joke on me, are they?” I asked.

Tante Ju-Ju said, “No, I think maybe they be playing a joke on the rest of us houngans!” Then she actually laughed out loud, and the rest of the council joined in. People started patting me on the back and kissing both my cheeks, as if they’d been in on it from the beginning, but I didn’t think they had been. Papa Philippe was nearly as happy as I was.