Nothing to Ghost About (2 page)

Ernie liked to hang around the funeral
home and hand out advice as well as bad puns. I met him soon after
returning to my hometown. Ernie was old and stooped, hunched over.
He looked the same as he had when he died. At least I figured he
did, because I didn’t think a soul would choose to spend eternity
hunched over like that.

Ernie was here because he wasn’t
satisfied with his death. I had helped Tiffany, a young woman, find
out who had killed her soon after I’d moved back. She had gone to
the other side, whatever that might be. Ernie wasn’t ready to move
on, although I wasn’t sure why. We had never spoken about
it.

“
I know,” I said, with my
hand over my mouth. “He’s the second person to die since I’ve taken
over the funeral home.”

“
You’re supposed to take
them after they die,” he said, “not get them killed.”

“
Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Did
you see anything?”

Ernie shook his head. “I wasn’t
around. The new fella’s still inside, but I don’t want to talk to
him. New ghosts ask too many questions, and I’m not a people
person.”

“
I’ll talk to him, but I
wanted to give him some time first.”

“
Who are you talking to?”
my mother asked as she crept up behind me.

“
No one,” I said, turning
around.

Mom glared at me, her lips pursed.
“You know, we need to have a discussion.”

“
About what?”

“
The dead body. These crazy
things happening to you. Perhaps it would be best if you left this
all to me. I think a demon might be following you. Ian thinks you
might need deliverance.”

“
Huh!” I said loudly. “Tell
Ian to mind his own business!” I was about to say more, but the
blare of sirens put a stop to that.

Whatever it was that my mother wanted
to say to me about demons would have to wait.

Chapter 2

It was going to be a long day. I
pushed my way through the crowd and went to the front door, but the
two men in suits had beaten me to it.

I looked between the men to see two
squad cars pulling up. Duncan climbed out of the first car. Duncan
was the local sergeant, and was married to my best friend, Tara.
The three of us had grown up together.

Duncan nodded to me, but approached
the two men. “What happened?” he asked.

“
There’s a body in the
bathroom,” one of the suits said in hushed tones.
“Murdered.”

My mother tut-tutted and shook her
head. “Why would you think something like that? He probably just
passed away. You shouldn’t always assume the worst.”

The police ignored my mother, and I
found myself grateful that Ian was still passed out so I didn’t
have to hear that sort of nonsense from two directions at
once.

“
It looked like he was
strangled,” one of the plain-clothes cops said to Duncan. “I’m
going to start interviewing everyone.”

Duncan turned to me. “I’ll get your
statement last. Let me get these people done, and we can send them
on their way.”

I nodded. I left the police to their
work, and went to find John, the brother of the deceased who had
organized the funeral.

“
I’m so sorry,” I said,
when I found John. “I know how horrible this is.”

John shook his head. “Please, this is
a horrible tragedy. No one is angry with you. I think everyone can
come back tomorrow for the funeral.”

“
Are you sure?”

“
Yes. I suppose the police
will insist on it. It’s probably not every day you’re caught up in
a mysterious death here, is it?”

I wanted to tell him that he would be
surprised, but instead I shook my head. “Thanks so much. Let’s do
tomorrow then, whatever time’s best for you. I think the police are
going to speak with everyone if that’s okay.”

“
That’s fine, I’ll speak
with the family and we’ll do tomorrow. Same time, if that
suits?”

“
Yes, absolutely,” I
said.

I looked back at Duncan, and I was
surprised to see the two undercover officers were now wearing
badges and interviewing people. They must have decided there was
too much work for the three officers who had shown up, especially
with two of them still in the bathroom with the body of the funeral
singer.

My mother was standing in front of me,
too close for comfort. “We need to discuss what’s wrong with you,”
she said loudly.

“
Mom, I’m not possessed. I
promise,” I said wearily.

She made a snorting sound and crossed
her arms. “Why do you always twist my words, Laurel? Don’t be so
flippant. I didn’t say you were possessed—I said there is evil
around you.”

I rolled my eyes. “That sort of stuff
only happens in movies, Mom.”

“
You can blow me off, but
you can’t blow off true evil,” she said in a raised voice. “You
were almost killed recently. An evil woman was drawn to you because
of the evil that surrounds you.”

“
So I’m evil now?” I said
angrily. “I can’t keep up with this. First I’m possessed, and now
I’m evil?”

“
I never said possessed!”
she yelled. “And you aren’t evil, but there is evil around you. How
else could you explain it?”

“
Bad luck, I guess,” I
said. It was true that my life since moving back home had been a
little more exciting than it had been before, and a whole lot more
dangerous.

Mom took a step closer to me. “You
should leave here and go back to Melbourne. You should leave me to
run the business.”

I frowned. “No, Mom. Dad left the
business to me. I’m sorry, but you’re stuck with me and the demon
within.”

She threw up her hands in a dramatic
display of exasperation. “Oh, for gosh sake, Laurel, he isn’t
within. I did not say you were possessed, you silly girl, just
followed. Demons are attracted to immoral lifestyles.”

“
Immoral lifestyles?” I
asked.

“
Yes. Unmarried,
drinking…”

“
Mom, I have maybe one
glass of wine a week, if that. I spent all last weekend in pajamas
with kittens on the front reading books about pirates and the girls
they love. I hardly think I’m living a decadent, immoral
lifestyle.”

“
Well, how would I know
what you do? You never speak to me about anything.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Okay, Mom. I’m
going to go talk to Duncan.”

When Duncan saw me approach, he waved
me over.

“
Can you talk?” he
asked.

“
What’s happening with the
undercover cops at the funeral?” I asked him, before he had a
chance to speak.

Duncan sighed. “The deceased—the first
one, the one the funeral is for—had a criminal record.”

“
Yes, I know that,” I said.
“The hit and run was all over TV and in the papers.”

“
Right. He was in town
visiting his brother, John, who also has a pretty respectable rap
sheet. Well, if that sort of thing would be called
respectable.”

I frowned. “John’s a criminal, too? He
seems nice.”

“
Well, maybe to you,”
Duncan said. “And the hit-and-run was premeditated, but keep that
to yourself. The car was stolen, and eyewitnesses said the car
accelerated right before it hit him. Usually, people try to stop
when they realize they’re about to smash into someone with their
car.”

I took a moment to process that. The
news reports had not mentioned that piece of information. “Now
everyone knows the police were at the funeral,” I said.

“
It couldn’t be helped. And
besides John, no one at the funeral has a criminal lifestyle. We
ran all these guys through the system when they came to town for
the funeral. Besides the deceased and John, everyone came back
clean, even his other brothers.”

“
Do you think John had
something to do with his brother’s death?” I asked.

“
I don’t know,” Duncan
said. “I hope not, because if he did, tipping our hand made him
realize we were keeping an eye on him.”

Just then some people in white
forensics suits wheeled out the funeral singer’s body right past
us.

“
If everyone’s going to be
here for a while, I’d better feed them,” I said. I left Duncan and
went to brew pots of coffee. Just as I was filling some platters
with food, Preston Kerr materialized in front of me.

“
I’m sorry,” he said. “I
don’t know why I’m sticking around here.”

“
Do you remember anything?”
I asked him.

He shook his head. “Not really. All I
can remember is that I was setting up my gear behind the curtain,
and someone was speaking to the dead man in the casket. Whoever it
was, was apologizing for killing him. They said they had to kill
him. They said there was no other way. They had to do
it.”

Chills ran through my body. Whoever
had killed Alec had killed Preston. That meant they had been at the
funeral. And by all accounts, the killer was in the funeral home
now.

Chapter 3

I was thoroughly annoyed. Anna Stiles,
a journalist from the paper in the town half an hour or so away,
had just called to tell me that she was coming today. Normally, I
would be happy to have the publicity, but the problem was that I
already had a reporter coming to speak with me at the same time.
Bob Hendry was from a big Sydney paper. Anna Stiles refused to
postpone, so I had reluctantly agreed to the interview.

Both reporters had said they were
coming to interview me about the celebrity funerals, but I
suspected they were more interested in Preston Kerr’s
murder.

I spent the morning in my office,
sitting in the old wheeled office chair that my father had sat in
for so many years. I made considerable headway on the ever-mounting
pile of paperwork, including drafting up a bill for the last
funeral we had done. I had to knock some off the price, considering
a man had been murdered, which caused it to be postponed, but
still, it would be a nice chunk of change.

I had been blissfully alone all
morning. My mother was spending the day at church, no doubt trying
to pray away the demon she was so sure was following me around, and
she had taken Janet, the funeral home’s cosmetician, with her. When
my father was alive, my mother had made sure that everyone who
worked for them attended her church. The only exception was old Mr.
Sandalwood, Dad’s accountant, and father of Basil, my current
accountant. I have no idea how Dad managed to get Mom to agree to
that.

A ringing doorbell brought me out of
my math-induced stupor, and I looked at the clock my father had
hung on the office wall so long ago. It was twelve-twenty, a little
too early for the reporters.

I pulled open the front door to see
Basil, my accountant and also my crush. He was tall, well built,
and looked like one of those models on the cover of a romance
novel. Of course, junior high girls have crushes, but sometimes
Basil made me feel like a junior high girl.

“
Is it a bad time?” he
asked, tucking a folder under his arm.

“
No, not at all. Come
in.”
It’s never a bad time for you,
Basil
, I thought.

As he stepped inside, he removed his
sunglasses and slipped them inside the pocket of his suit
jacket.

“
A present for me?” I
asked, nodding toward the folder.

“
Oh, yeah,” he said
sarcastically. “Monthly expenses. Do you have time to go over
them?”

“
Probably. I do have two
reporters due here any minute, though.”

He raised one eyebrow. “I can come
back.”

“
No, let’s go ahead. Who
knows when they’ll actually show?”

We retreated into my
office.

Basil laid some papers in front of me
after we both sat down. “Your figures have improved since your
mother stopped sending the funeral home’s money to televangelists,”
he said.

“
That’s good. She was
furious when I changed the bank account and refused to give her the
details,” I said, shaking my head and then rubbing my temples. How
did I get an instant headache just at the thought of my mother?
Right then, the doorbell rang several times in a row. “That must be
one of them now.”

Basil slid the papers back into the
folder. “Whoever it is sounds insistent. Hungry for a story, no
doubt.”

“
I can go over the rest,” I
assured him, “and call you with any questions.”

Basil shrugged. “That’s what I was
thinking. I guess there wasn’t much of a reason for me to come over
here, but I have to keep earning what you’re paying me
somehow.”

I laughed. I was secretly hoping that
the real reason he came over to go through the paperwork with me in
person was because he wanted to see me. I certainly wanted to see
him, but I had no idea if it was reciprocated. Basil was a hard man
to read, harder than most. Then there was the fact that he was
hiding something, or so I thought. He always smelled of white sage,
and I still suspected he was able to see ghosts. Of course, that
could all just be my over active imagination.