Chapter 1
Ghosts sure are a funny thing. The afterlife was something I didn’t think I’d ever figure out. Even as a Betweener and after helping at least seven ghosts cross over to the other side, I still didn’t understand them.
My latest Betweener client sat near the casket in the front of the viewing room with a book in her lap. She’d been hanging around for about six months now with little to no advancement on her case.
“She sure could charm the dew right off the honeysuckle.” Mary Anna Hardy stood over the mahogany wood high-gloss casket with the white velvet interior looking at her handiwork, and took my stare away from the little ghost. “Damn shame she drank herself silly.”
“Damn,” the ghost girl repeated. I’d found that my young client loved to repeat dirty words. “What?” she asked when she noticed me raise my brows toward her. She stuck the end of one of her pigtails in her mouth and chewed on it.
“Seeing that she died from liver failure that was due to drinking, I’d bet Eternal Slumber that half of her charm was due to the fact she was always sweet talking to get another free drink. At least that’s what I’d heard she did down at The Watering Hole,” John Howard Lloyd, maintenance man of Eternal Slumber, took the Swiffer mop and ran it over the walls to get any dust off.
It was a handy trick and he was tall enough to run it from ceiling to floor, not like me. I’d had to get a stepladder just to reach the top of the window casing. Granted, all the windows in Eternal Slumber, my funeral home business, were practically floor to ceiling with big wooden casing around them. After all, the funeral home was located in a very old Victorian house that’d been converted into the funeral home that my family had owned. Now it was mine. All mine.
I sighed deeply thinking about the last six months as my eyes gazed up at Mary Anna and John Howard and back to the little ghost. Shelley Shaw had been found in the gravel right outside of The Watering Hole. According to Jack Henry Ross, my boyfriend and local sheriff, Shelley hadn’t even been in the bar. Apparently, she died of her own doing according to her autopsy and I wouldn’t be seeing her ghost. It was always hard to have a funeral for someone so young.
The last person that young was my sister, Charlotte Rae. Truly it’s taken me the last six months to start feeling somewhat normal. Even Zula Fae Raines Payne, my granny, had just begun to show her spry self again.
“You sure do pretty work,” John Lloyd said to Mary Anna, referring to the cosmetology work she’d done on Shelley.
“It’s an art.” She had a pair of scissors in her hand. Her wrist twirled around as she talked; the sharp end pointed out made John Howard duck each time the twirl circled back to him. “A gift, really.”
She reached over the casket and did a few final snips of Shelley’s hair. John Howard went on about the rest of his work. The florist had delivered the flowers and had set them in the foyer. With a couple of the baskets in each hand, I walked back into the viewing room and set them on some of the floating shelves on the wall. After the last basket was in place, the casket spray was the last one and prettiest one. It was from Shelley’s family and done up in red roses. The gold banner across the blanket of flowers read: BELOVED.
I stood in the back of the viewing room to make sure that it looked aesthetically pleasing. Rows of folding chairs were set up with one aisle down the middle. The red slipcovers with the Eternal Slumber logo embroidered on the back were neatly tied on the chairs. I walked around to all the windows and fluffed out the baby blue floor-to-ceiling drapes.
“Emma Lee,” Mary Anna called me and turned around. The red lipstick almost took away from her white Daisy-Duke shorts and red-and-white gingham button down that was tied in a knot at her bellybutton. “I’m done. I’ve got to get back down to the shop.” She unbuttoned the first four buttons of her shirt and let the girls bust out. “Business is slow.” She stuck her hand in her bra and shimmied them things up to her chin. “I’ve got to call in backup.”
I laughed and waved ’bye, shaking my head with each twist of her hips. I could only imagine what she looked like walking down the sidewalk to Girl’s Best Friend Spa, the only salon in Sleepy Hollow, Kentucky, our little slice of heaven among the caves and caverns.
I ran my hand down my brown hair. It was time I get a highlight and a new cut. It was time I did a lot of things, like come back to the living. A little piece of me died with Charlotte Rae. Yeah. Like every sibling, Charlotte Rae and I had our fair share of disagreements. We never saw things the same way and at the very end it was a shame because it was only then that she truly knew who I really was.
Today wasn’t the day to get sad or depressed. The visitor log had to be put out on the stand and the memorial cards needed to be stacked.
Meow.
I looked down when I felt the orange tabby cat’s tail drag along my shin.
“Hey, kitty.” I bent down and put my hand out. “Here kitty, kitty.”
It was the closest the cat had ever gotten to me.
“Wee-doggie, it’s hot in here. Ah’m bout to burn up.” Granny scurried through the front door of the funeral home. “Not as hot as the cleavage of Mary Anna’s boobs, but still hot.”
She dragged off her big purple sunglasses and focused her eyes on me. She glared at me like I’d better straighten up or she was going to jerk a knot in me.
“Granny.” I stood up and put my arms out to walk over to give her a hug.
She completely bypassed me and looked into the viewing room. Her spiky red-haired head twisted right, left, and around before she jerked her five-feet-four-inch frame back over to me. She smacked her palm on my forehead.
“You got the trauma?” She gave me the wonky eye.
“No.” I took a step back. “I’m fine.” I crossed my heart.
Technically I didn’t lie. I didn’t have what Doc Clyde called the Funeral Trauma. Two years ago this Christmas, I had walked down to Artie’s Meat and Deli to get me and Charlotte Rae a soup and sandwich for lunch. All the Christmas decorations were up and Artie had put a plastic Santa on the roof of the deli. It was particularly warm for a December day in Kentucky, which helped melt the snow. As soon as I walked up to the deli, the Santa fell off the roof and knocked me out cold. When I woke up a few days later in the hospital, I was surrounded by family and clients. Let me clarify, the clients were dead ones. Ones I’d put six feet into the ground, only they’d not crossed over.
I’d mentioned to Doc Clyde that I could see them and he claimed I had what was called the Funeral Trauma and I’d been around dead people too long. In reality, Santa had given me a gift not on my list. The title of Betweener, the gift of seeing dead people. Really dead murdered people that needed me to help bring their killer to justice. Fast forward a couple of years to now and I’ve still got Betweener clients. The cat was my first animal client and it’d been around for at least a year now.
The chime of the old grandfather clock that sat in the corner of the foyer chimed. There were only thirty minutes until show time.
“You were looking awfully strange when I walked into the door with your hand out. You might not’ve thought I heard you, but I heard you call for a kitty.” Granny pointed into the viewing room. “There’s no kitty in there, just Shelley Shaw who’s going to melt if you don’t get something done about this humidity.”
“Here Mr. Whiskers. Here kitty.” The ghost of the young girl that had come on the day of Charlotte Rae’s funeral reappeared out of nowhere. She twirled her pigtail around her finger. “Remember me? You said you’d help me cross over.”
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