Home Improvement: Undead Edition (42 page)

Papa Philippe was waiting for me again.

“I was going to call you,” I said before he could speak, “but there was no time. Then there were people around. Then I had Gottfried in the car, and I couldn’t talk in front of him and it would have been dangerous to text while driving and—”

“And you was hoping the loa not be watching you this day.” He shook his head. “The loa always be watching.”

“The FBI really ought to have the loa working for them. Do you want to know what happened?”

“Not me, but Tante Ju-Ju be wanting to know.”

“You’re joking.”

He just looked at me.

“When?”

His answer was to gesture toward a dimly lit path into the woods.

“Shit.”

I didn’t know how extensive the Order’s grounds were. Revenant House and the office buildings were close to the road, but stretching behind were all kinds of paths and other buildings, most of which I avoided whenever possible.

Papa Philippe let me lead the way until we got to the hut from which Tante Ju-Ju held forth. Presumably she had a house somewhere with a TV, a microwave, and plumbing, but I’d never seen her anywhere outside Order grounds, and I didn’t think anybody had ever seen her break character. She was either a true believer, or the best method actor ever.

Tante Ju-Ju was sitting outside her hut on a rickety stool, stirring a pot of something ominous over a fire. She was dressed like all the other voudou queens in the Order, but the skirt and the peasant blouse looked comfortable on her and her coloring was natural. Her tignon had seven points knotted into it, just like Marie Laveau’s supposedly had, and mysteriously it never slipped, even though I’d never seen a bobby pin in her vicinity.

“I hear you raised the same man twice,” she said without preamble. “Why he not stay moving after the first time?”

I explained how Gottfried had fallen, ending with, “He didn’t want to feel himself die again.”

“So why you bring him back?”

“His task wasn’t finished yet.”

“This task need doing that bad?”

“I think so.”

“You only
think
so?”

“Okay, I’m sure,” I said. “He’s finishing a house to raise money for a foundation that studies a condition called Stickler syndrome.”

“This syndrome, it be killing people?”

“No, but they have a lot of pain and sometimes they lose their sight and hearing. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”

“That what I be asking you.”

Okay, I was missing something. “If it were me, I’d want to come back for a task like this.”

“Why I care what you think?”

“You asked—” I stopped and tried to figure out what she was getting at. “I brought Gottfried back because the task is important to him. He doesn’t care about the charity, but he does care about leaving the legacy of the house.”

Tante Ju-Ju nodded. “Then maybe you do the right thing. What do the loa tell you?”

“I don’t talk to the loa.”

Papa Philippe winced, but it was nothing I hadn’t told him before.

“What if they be talking to you and you not be listening?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.

I didn’t have an answer to that.

She waved me away. “You go on. I talk to the loa about you. When they tell me, I tell you.”

I didn’t need Papa Philippe’s touch to tell me I’d been dismissed, but I was glad to have his company walking back down that path, even if neither of us spoke. If he hadn’t been there, I’d have been tempted to run.

“Why in God’s name did you tell her you don’t talk to the loa?” he asked once we were at my car.

“Because I don’t. Just because the first houngans were practitioners doesn’t mean that everybody needs the loa to raise revenants. I do fine without them.”

“Some people say the loa aren’t happy with that, and that’s why your revenant failed.”

“That’s not true!”

“I believe you, but would it hurt you to at least pretend to respect the loa?”

“I do respect the loa and voudou, but as a religion—it’s not
my
religion. For me to wear a tignon wouldn’t be showing them respect—it would be mocking them, just like it would be for me to wear a nun’s habit or a yarmulke. And you know damn well that most houngans only pay lip service to the loa.”

“There are plenty of us that believe.”

“I know you believe, Papa Philippe, but you know I don’t.”

“Dodie, it’s just clothes.”

“If it’s just clothes, then why can’t I wear mine? Look, I don’t tell the other houngans how to do their job, and all I want is for them to do the same for me. If that means I never make master, then so be it.”

“I’m not talking about making master. I’m talking about you losing your license. I’m talking about you getting ejected from the Order.”

“Because of blue jeans? I don’t wear my zombie movie T-shirts to work anymore.”

“It’s not just that. It’s everything, the attitude toward the loa, the jokes. And now you’ve not only brought back an architect to fix a house, you had to bring him back a second time. You need to tread carefully.”

“Hey, I’m not the one falling down stairs.”

He shook his head and sent me home, but I knew he was worried. Which got me worried. What if I was wrong about Gottfried? What if I hadn’t done a good job bringing him back? What if he collapsed again? What kind of job could a former houngan get?

I didn’t sleep very well.

I WAS HAPPY
to see Gottfried in brand-new Converse sneakers when I picked him up the next day—plenty of tread on those babies. I was less happy to hear the apprentices whispering about me and looking at me in what they imagined was a subtle manner. One actually made devil horns at me, as if my being there could contaminate a house where dead people spent the night. I returned the greeting with a traditional one-finger salute.

“How are you today?” I asked Gottfried.

“Fine. I practiced walking last night—I won’t trip again.”

“Good. And the work is going well?”

He just smiled, which was enough of an answer.

C.W. was waiting for us on the porch of the house, but when he started to lead Gottfried in, I said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stick around today. Just in case.”

“If the boss doesn’t care, I don’t care.”

“All I care about is the work,” Gottfried said.

You have to admire that focus.

So I spent the day following him around, envying the fact that he didn’t have to breathe in the ever-present dust. I’d expected a world-famous architect to spend most of the day in the trailer, but Gottfried was a hands-on kind of guy. We went up to the attic to check out the roofing, down to the basement to check on mold, outside to see if the shingles were being attached properly, back inside to approve of the fixtures in the master bathroom—and that was just in the first hour. He didn’t actually sit down until nearly noon, and even then he preferred to work in the house’s kitchen so he could keep an eye on things. That was when I ran out to the nearest McDonald’s for a bag of grease, salt, and caffeine.

When I got back, Gottfried was in conference with Elizabeth. She’d managed to ignore my presence so far that day, and glared at me now. I would have stayed out of the way, but I realized Gottfried was signing his name.

“Gottfried, you know your signature isn’t valid, right?” The courts had decided that for a dead man to sign anything was the same thing as forging, and the people at Revenant House were supposed to have told him that.

“It’s just an order for supplies!” Elizabeth snapped.

But Gottfried was reading the paper in front of him. “This isn’t about the house,” he said. “I only want the papers about the job.”

“But Gottfried—” Elizabeth started to say, but when I got close enough to snoop, she snatched it up. “Sorry, my mistake. This wasn’t supposed to be in this stack.”

The afternoon was the same as the morning. We went up, we went down, we went outside, we went inside, Gottfried climbed a ladder, I stood below and wondered if I could catch him if he fell again.

Never having been on a building site that didn’t involve Legos or sand, I was surprised by the number of decisions that had to be made and the arguments that ensued. Who knew that using the wrong color of wood would totally destroy a house’s aesthetic? I didn’t even know that a house had an aesthetic.

By the time the living workers were ready to call it a day, I was exhausted. Back to Revenant House for Gottfried, and after making sure Papa Philippe wasn’t poised to issue warnings, it was home to takeout Thai food for me.

The next day was mostly the same, except a little more contentious as the arguments from the previous day escalated—Gottfried ordered one man to completely replaster the ceiling in the dining room because it swirled the wrong way and told C.W. to send back a whole load of lumber because they weren’t building an Emerald Lake shack. I tried to hide my grin when both Von Doesburg and Scarpa heard that latter comment, but I didn’t do a very good job.

Once again, around midday Gottfried settled down in the kitchen for paperwork. After Elizabeth’s attempted document-signing trick, I’d decided to hang around the whole day and had brought lunch with me. So while Gottfried pored over his notes and blueprints, I found a relatively dust-free spot at the counter to eat my ham sandwich and apple.

C.W. came to speak to Gottfried, got snarled at for not meeting code, and then grabbed a Coke out of the refrigerator, one of the few appliances in the house that was plugged in.

“You ready to change jobs and go into construction?” he asked me.

“I’m thinking not. You guys work too hard. And I’d probably never be able to keep to the code.”

“The what?”

“I heard Gottfried saying something about keeping to the code.”

He laughed. “He meant the building code. This house was built long before a lot of the regulations were established, but our renovations have to be up to code.”

“So it’s nothing to do with pirates?”

“Just Captain Bligh over there.”

I lowered my voice. “Sorry Gottfried is giving you a hard time. Revenants aren’t good at compromise.”

“Gottfried was never good at compromise. He’s actually easier to deal with now than when he was alive.”

“Seriously? Why did you work with him?”

“Because when the job was done, I knew it was something that would last. That made it worthwhile.”

He finished his Coke and headed off for code-meeting while Gottfried continued to bark orders at everybody in range. Since he didn’t look as if he was going to be moving any time soon, I said, “Gottfried, I’m going to go visit the little houngan’s room.”

Since my bladder capacity didn’t affect the task at hand, he didn’t bother to respond.

The bathrooms were not in usable condition, which meant I had to brave a Porta-Potty. That was enough to make me go as fast as possible, even if I hadn’t been on watchdog duty. But despite the added incentive, by the time I got back to the kitchen, Gottfried was gone.

I wasn’t immediately alarmed—he hadn’t promised to stay put, after all. So I spent a few minutes looking for him. When I had no luck, I started asking all the workmen I came across if they’d seen him. That was worse than useless because construction workers concentrating on their work don’t pay attention to the clock, so I couldn’t tell who’d seen him last.

I finally spotted him after I’d gone outside—C.W. thought Gottfried went to inspect some ongoing work on the foundation, but he was actually inside when I spotted him at the entrance to the second-floor balcony. As I watched, he stepped over the yellow caution tape that had been strung up to block the entrance.

I wanted to call up to warn him to be careful but was afraid to distract him. Instead all I could do was hold my breath as he bent over to examine the junction of the balcony with the house. I heard rather than saw the wood give way, and later decided that I must have screamed when he tried to grab for a handrail that splintered under his weight.

Even at that distance, I could still sense that Gottfried was aware, but a split second after he started to fall, I felt him give up the ghost. All that hit the ground was a body that had been dead for weeks.

PEOPLE CAME RUNNING
from all directions, but the first to reach Gottfried was Elizabeth. She turned away when the smell got to her, her hand over her mouth. I thought she was going to cry, but then she saw me and she went from sad to furious in nothing flat.

“You incompetent moron! You let him die again!”

“I didn’t do anything. He fell!”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “A real houngan can keep a revenant alive for months, years. You can’t even manage two days.”

“He fell,” I repeated. “The floor he was on broke. Go look!” But in looking at the faces around me, I could tell nobody really believed me, and nobody rushed up to examine the evidence, either. “Fine, I’ll raise him again and we’ll ask him what happened.” I wasn’t completely sure that Gottfried would care enough about the question to answer it, but if I framed his repeated “deaths” as a barrier to finishing the job, it might get his attention. “Get me a sacrifice and I’ll get him up and moving again.”

But Mrs. Hopkins was shaking her head. “No, we can’t do it to him again. You said it yourself—a revenant has to want to stay long enough to finish the task. It’s clear that Gottfried doesn’t. We have to let him rest.”

“He doesn’t want to rest!” I protested.

“Obviously he does,” Von Doesburg said. “It seems to me that if you’d done your job properly, you’d know that. I think the courts will agree with me.”

“There’s no need for that—I’m sure Dodie did her best,” Mrs. Hopkins said kindly, “but it’s over. I need to see about getting Gottfried back to his grave.”

The people there didn’t literally turn their backs on me, but they might as well have. Even C.W. just shook his head sadly when I looked at him.

“I’ll mail your check back tomorrow,” I said to nobody in particular, and walked away.

MY PHONE RANG
as I walked in my front door, and the voice on the other end said only, “The council be wanting to see you at full dark.” Then whoever it was hung up.