Nothing to Ghost About (4 page)

Ian looked torn. “Well, only if Laurel
attends our church first, Thelma,” he said.

Mom looked horror-stricken. “Of
course, Ian! That’s what I meant. And Laurel would have to learn to
cook first, or what else would she have to offer a good man like
John Jones?”

I got through the rest of dinner by
imagining myself alone on a deserted island. And then I imagined
that Ian was a bartender who had to wait on me and bring me drinks,
and I liked that even better. Of course, in my imagination he had a
sock in his mouth so he couldn’t speak.

After dinner, I offered to brew coffee
for everyone, and I hurried into the kitchen to escape.

Ernie was waiting for me. “How do you
put up with your mother?” he asked me.

“
No idea,” I said. “Really.
None. It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“
How’s the new guy holding
up?” I asked.

“
Not too well,” he said.
“He’s nice enough guy, but he’s still in that first
stage.”

“
First stage?” I
asked.

“
He’s still in shock. He
can’t believe he’s dead.” With that, he floated up and away,
through the ceiling and wall.

I edged toward the door as the coffee
brewed so I could hear what Ian and my mother were talking
about.

“
Thelma,” Ian said, “I
don’t know what to do with my girlfriend.”

“
Are you still having
problems?” my mom asked. “Does she still want candles in the room
when you know one another?”

“
Yes, and something new,
too,” Ian said tersely. “It’s much worse than the candles
now.”

“
What is it? Not something
else New Age, surely?” Mom’s voice was horrified.

“
Even worse,” Ian said.
“She wants to be more adventurous.”

I thought I would pass out. Imagine
Ian saying such a thing to my mother!

“
That’s not for a woman to
decide,” my mother said firmly.

I knew that Mom had absolutely no idea
what Ian was talking about. He was still speaking in the world of
‘knowing’ one another, which to my overly religious mother meant
lying with someone in the Biblical sense, to put it in another nice
term no one uses these days besides those two. I was pretty sure
that, to my mother, being adventurous meant that Ian’s girlfriend
wanted to climb a mountain or run with the bulls.

“
I know!” Ian exclaimed in
a self-righteous tone.

“
That’s for a man to
decide,” Mom continued. “If he wants to take on adventures, and
wishes for her to do the same, then it’s one thing.”

“
I tried explaining that to
her,” Ian said. “In all things, a woman is supposed to support a
man and submit to him. I don’t know what’s wrong with being normal.
I don’t need adventure.”

“
Certainly not,” my mother
said. “A good man like you. Who knows what she even has in mind?
You don’t need things like animals being involved. That could be
dangerous.”

“
Animals?” Ian said in
horror.

I jammed my hands over my mouth so
they wouldn’t hear me laughing. I was still standing behind the
door between the kitchen and the dining room. I didn’t want them to
find out I was listening in.

“
Sure. Animals. Why not?”
my mother said.

“
I don’t think she would go
that far,” Ian protested.

“
Something with a bear,”
Mom said. “That would be adventurous.”

“
A bear?” Ian’s voice was
barely a squeak.

“
Who knows? Adventurous. I
don’t even like the word. In the water, in the air, who
knows?”

“
I didn’t even think of all
of this,” Ian said weakly.

“
You had better consider
it,” Mom said. I heard her chair scrape on the hardwood floor as
she pushed it back and stood. “I better check and see what’s going
on with my lazy daughter. Coffee isn’t that hard to
make.”

I hurried to the machine and pulled
the full pot out from under it. I was pouring the first cup when
Mom came in.

“
Laurel, what’s taking you
so long?” she asked.

“
Sorry,” I said, still
giggling.

We filled three cups together and went
back out.

“
Now here’s an adventurous
one,” my mother said to Ian.

I snorted a quick bark of
laughter.

Ian’s face went white. “She
is?”

“
Oh yes,” Mom said. “Very.
She knows I don’t approve at all, but that’s never stopped
her.”

“
What? You know that she
is?” Ian asked.

“
Of course. When she was
younger, and had her friends over, she was up late at night, being
adventurous. I don’t think she knows this, but I could hear it from
my bedroom. This and that, all over the room. On the bed, and then
off the bed, trying to climb the wall. It never ended.”

Ian stared at me in shock. “I didn’t
know.”

“
Oh yes, I’m quite
adventurous, Ian,” I said. “No boring stuff for me.” Of course, I
knew that Mom was referring to the time I had friends over and we
rehearsed for a school play, but Ian had an entirely different
idea.

“
One time she went out into
the bush to be adventurous,” Mom said.

Ian’s mouth fell open. “In the bush?
You don’t mean outside?”

“
Well, of course,” my
mother said.

“
I got leaves everywhere,”
I told Ian.

Ian jumped to his feet. “Thank you for
dinner,” he said suddenly. “I have to go.”

My mother and I watched as Ian hurried
toward the front door.

“
What has gotten into him?”
my mother asked.

“
I think he heard the call
for adventure,” I said.

Chapter 5

I sat staring at the Sydney paper, at
the article by Bob Hendry to be precise. He had mentioned the
celebrity funerals only in passing. The whole piece was a
sensationalist thriller exposé about the fact that there had been
two murders at the funeral home.

As Sydney was a good six hours away
and had several major newspapers, I thought that the story would
not filter down to Witch Woods. I was wrong.

The phone rang.

“
Witch Wood Funeral Home?”
a voice snapped.

“
Yes,” I said.

“
This is Henrietta McCourt.
We had a wake booked for Thursday.”

“
Yes, Mrs. McCourt,” I
said.

“
I’m sorry, but I have to
cancel. I’ve decided to go elsewhere.”

I took a deep breath. “Could you tell
me why?”

There was a lengthy silence on the
other end of the phone, and I thought for a minute she had hung up.
After an interval, she spoke. “People get murdered at your funeral
home, so I didn’t want the wake to be at such an unsavory
place.”

I sighed. “I understand,” I said. She
hung up before I finished speaking. I reached forward to open my
email. There was an email from the reporter, Bob Hendry.

‘
Here’s the piece we’re
running today,’ was all it said, along with a link to a word
document.

I slammed the laptop shut in anger,
right as another phone call came through. This time, it was Mr.
Holland calling to cancel his Great Aunt Harriet’s funeral. That
one was set for the following day.

I closed my eyes and leaned back in
the old chair.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my mother
standing in the doorway of the office. She didn’t look happy. “So
you’ve heard?” I asked.

She stormed forward and stood on the
other side of the desk, her hands on her hips. “How embarrassing!
How could you do this?”

“
Me?” I shrieked. “It’s
hardly my fault! Two people have died here. There’s not much I can
do about the story.”

“
No one died here until you
came back home,” she said. “Has anyone canceled yet?”

“
Two people have already
canceled,” I said just as the phone rang. “And there’s the third.”
I took a deep breath and answered the phone. My mother stood and
watched and listened as Rebecca Chambers canceled her father’s
service later in the week. I hung up.

“
What are you going to do
to fix this?” my mother snapped at me.

“
I don’t know. It’s just
one story. It will die down.”

My mother rolled her eyes and shook
her head. “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “What are you going
to do about your life?”

“
Is this really what you
want to talk about right now?” I asked.

“
Yes!” she said. “Laurel,
you need to come to my church and think and pray about
it.”

“
No,” I said. “I have work
to do.”

My mother huffed. She took a deep
breath and then basically spat it out. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go
and think and pray for you, since you won’t think and pray for
yourself.”

I watched her go and then pinched the
top of my nose, my eyes tightly closed. When I opened my eyes, I
gasped to see an apparition in front of me. It was Preston Kerr,
still smoky and hard to see.

He looked sad. “I kept thinking it was
all a dream or something, but I don’t think it is. I don’t think
there’s any waking up from this.”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid
not.”

“
Ernie says I will move on
when I’m happy.”

“
I don’t know if happy is
the right word for it,” I said, “but people only stay here if they
have unfinished business.”

“
That makes sense,” Preston
said. “Sometimes I feel something pulling at me.”

I nodded. “But you don’t go because
you need to know what happened to you?”

“
Yes.”

“
I want to know, too,” I
said. “I don’t want to sound selfish, or self-serving, but I can’t
let people think that the funeral home is a dangerous place. People
need to know that what happened to you has nothing to do with the
funeral home, as such.”

“
I understand,” Preston
said.

“
So you don’t think it was
anyone you know?”

“
No, I don’t think so. It
was whoever killed that other man, the man the funeral was for, the
man in the coffin.” Preston vanished, and then at once materialized
again. “How come you can hear me and see me? No one else can. I’ve
tried to speak to people, but they don’t know I’m
there.”

“
The daughters in every
second generation in my mother’s family can see and speak to
ghosts,” I said. “I don’t have a clue how or why.”

Preston nodded and then floated
through the office wall.

As soon as he left, the phone rang. I
almost threw it to see if it would go through the wall,
too.

Chapter 6

I hate clowns.

In fact, I am terrified of them—their
oversized shoes, their red noses and crazy hair, and worst of all,
their painted faces with the fake smiles.

The town morgue had brought over the
corpse. Janet arrived shortly after that. Janet, the funeral home’s
cosmetician, made the bodies presentable, and she was about as
cheery as you would expect a woman like that to be. She was nice
enough, although she was maxed out as far as social awkwardness
went.

“
It’s going to be a late
night, boss,” Janet said, as I let her into my office. She held up
her large cup of coffee. “I would have brought you one, but I don’t
think of you often.”

“
It’s fine,” I said, hiding
a smile at Janet’s words. “This will be our first clown funeral.” I
shuddered and rubbed my arms. “The deceased is Lynette Smith, and
the client is her daughter, Daisy. Daisy and her mother were in
business together as professional clowns.” I shuddered again.
“Daisy has supplied some photos so you can see how the clown makeup
is supposed to look. Anyway, they’re all in the folder.”

Janet nodded.

I handed her the paperwork. “I’m
wrapping up for the day. Will you lock up when you
leave?”

“
Sure.” She headed to the
door, and then looked back at me with a wide smile. “I’m looking
forward to seeing my finished work, a corpse in full clown face
paint!” Her tone was gleeful.

I stared after the departing Janet.
The very last thing I wanted to see was, in fact, a corpse in full
clown face paint. I was sure I’d have nightmares all
night.

I locked up and went outside to see
the sheep, Arthur and Martha. I had a five-acre paddock next to the
funeral home, and Basil boarded his two pet sheep there. That
suited me fine, for two reasons. One, I didn’t have to pay to have
the whole thing mowed, an expensive proposition given the area, and
two, Basil frequently dropped by to visit his sheep.

“
Hi there, Arthur and
Martha,” I said to the sheep.

The sheep looked up from
their grazing and bounded over to me, baaing loudly. They expected
to be fed every time they saw me. The reason for that was likely
because I
did
feed
them every time they saw me. “Here you go,” I said, holding out two
pieces of apple.