Dead Man Talking (2 page)

“Aunt Lulu’s ruby necklace was nowhere to be found after she passed,” a woman wailed.

“My brother told Ma I was the one who ate the last of the cherry pie,” a man moaned.

“There’s money missing from the collection plate.” This from an elderly man in a clerical collar.

“Which ain’t nearly as important as my problem.” A flapper pushed to the front of the crowd. “There’s liquor missing from the speakeasy, and if the boss finds out, there will be hell to pay.”

At the sound of such language, Ms. Yellow swooned.

The preacher tsk-tsked.

And me?

I knew if I didn’t take control, these annoying ghosts would spend the summer bugging the crap out of me. With the restoration project already on my plate, that was more than I could handle.

“You’re not listening. None of you are listening!” I stomped one Juicy Couture ballet-flat clad foot against the ground to emphasize my point. “I don’t waste my Gift on dumb stuff,” I told them, even though I shouldn’t have had to. “So let’s make two lines. Those of you who are looking for lost necklaces and missing boyfriends and money and such . . .” I waved to my right. “You get over here. If any of you were murdered and need me to actually use my Gift to find your killer so you can finally go into the light . . .” I gestured to my left.

They shuffled and shambled. They stalled and hemmed and hawed. But in the end, they formed the lines. I should say
line
. One. On my right.

“All rightee, then,” I said, with a ta-da gesture to my left. “None of you have anything important for me to investigate. Nothing that involves you crossing to the Other Side, anyway. So how about you just get a move on.” I shooed them. “I’ve got enough problems without a bunch of annoying spooks spooking me.”

Big surprise, they actually listened. One by one, they drifted off among the tumbled headstones and overgrown paths of Monroe Street and disappeared.

Except for one guy who’d been lurking at the back of the crowd. I’d noticed him not because he was as pushy as the other ghosts, but because he wasn’t. While they competed for my attention, he kept his distance. While they chattered, he kept his mouth shut. And while the rest of them scattered off into the nowhere where ghosts go when they aren’t hanging around to bug me, he stayed. But he never looked at me.

Chin up, shoulders back, chest out like a soldier on parade, he paced back and forth on the small, clear path between the cemetery driveway and the overgrown tangle of weeds that was all that was left of the once-pristine grounds of Monroe Street.

Interested in spite of the good sense that told me not to be, I looked him over.

This ghost was a middle-aged man in a charcoal pin-stripe suit. Narrow stripes, narrow lapels, narrow tie. The only thing big about the guy was the black plastic frames of his glasses. That, and his shoulders. He wasn’t tall, but he was stocky and broad, and not as handsome as he was rugged looking. Maybe it was my imagination, but I also thought he looked a little lost.

Did Pepper Martin know to keep her mouth shut? You
bet she did. Which doesn’t explain why I stepped toward him. “Is there some part of
if you weren’t murdered, I’m not interested
you don’t understand?” I asked. “Because if there isn’t—”

He stepped behind a tall-standing headstone and vanished into thin air. Just like that.

“So much for ghosts.” I brushed my hands together, ridding myself of the thought as well as the responsibility of taking care of so many ectoplasmic pests, and it was a good thing I did. Just as that last ghost vanished, my boss Ella pulled up in her minivan and parked behind my Mustang.

“Yoo hoo!” She rolled down the window and waved. Like I’d miss the only other living person anywhere around?

I waved back. “What are you doing here?” I asked. When she stepped out of the van and struggled to lift not one, but two overloaded tote bags, I headed that way. I grabbed one tote from her and went toward the canopy tent that had been set up as a workspace, since there was no office or administration building at Monroe Street. “I thought you had a staff meeting this morning.”

“Isn’t it just like you to be thinking about Garden View, even when you have so much else to do!” Finally at the tent, Ella hoisted her bag onto the lopsided card table under it and deposited it with a
thunk
. “Careful with that,” she said, moving forward to help when I lifted the twin tote. “We don’t want to aggravate that wound of yours.”

I stretched my left shoulder and felt a little pang in my side. “It’s fine,” I told her because she was already worried and there was no use making things any worse. Ella is the single mother of three teenaged girls. Worry is her middle name.

Not that I could blame her for her concern. She wasn’t
used to sending an employee—me—off to a cemetery conference and having that employee—me—end up in the hospital with a gunshot wound. If only she knew all the things that happened in between!

Even after a couple months, the thought of nearly losing my body to the ghost who wanted to keep it for herself still sent heebie-jeebies up and down my spine. My solution was simple: I’d think about something else.

What’s that old saying about being careful what you wish for? No sooner had I decided to put everything that had happened to me in Chicago the winter before on the back burner than Ella reached into the closest tote bag and pulled out one of those little pink message slips.

“Don’t want to forget to give that to you.” She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and let’s face it, it should have been. It was. Until I glanced down at the message.

The words were carefully written by Jenine, the woman who worked the front desk back at Garden View and answered our phones when we weren’t around to do it ourselves
. Give him a call sometime
, it said.
He’d like you to come out and visit
. Jenine’s loose, flowing script was a sharp contrast to the icy claw that gripped my insides when I saw that on the line marked “From,” she’d carefully added,
Your dad
.

Ella tried to look casual when she leaned over my shoulder, but since she was a full head shorter than me and had to stand on tip-toe to read the message, her strategy didn’t exactly work. “Important?” she asked, as nonchalant as can be.

I stuffed the pink slip in the pocket of my black cotton sateen cargo pants. “Not really. I’ll take care of it later,” I said. I wondered if Ella knew I was lying to her and to myself.

“So . . .” I glanced at the overstuffed bags. A better
strategy than thinking about my dad or about how last time we talked, I promised I wouldn’t let so much time pass again before I gave him a call. Except I did. I had. And really, there was no wondering why. If I talked to him, he’d ask me—again—to get on a plane and fly out to Colorado, and I’d have to come up with some excuse—again—to explain why I couldn’t.

Me? In a prison?

I’d rather shop for a new wardrobe at Kmart.

Seeing my dad, Gil Martin, the once-prominent plastic surgeon, in his khaki federal prison uniform . . . Well, if I did, it would make the whole thing all too real, wouldn’t it? Facing Dad would also make me face the facts: no matter how many times I told myself it couldn’t be true, it was. He really had done all those things the US attorneys accused him of. He really was guilty of Medicare fraud. And in the process of committing it, he’d betrayed his profession and his family. He’d hurt Mom so much she was hiding out in Florida. He’d broken my heart.

I cleared a sudden knot from my throat and concentrated on the totes. “You planning on camping out here or something?”

I could just about see the advice dripping from Ella’s lips. Instead, she grimaced to keep her opinions to herself and looked where I was looking—at those overstuffed tote bags. She was wearing a flowing orange skirt and an orange top with three-quarter sleeves. A trio of sparkling orange bracelets graced one arm. They were just summery enough and matched the beads around her neck in shades of melon, peach, and lemon that sparkled in the early morning sunlight.

“I needed to get these supplies over to you,” she said. “Log books, digital cameras, journals, T squares, and triangles. You know, for plotting out the new landscaping.
There’s tracing paper and sketch books, too. Two sets of everything.”

I remembered my instructions to the ghosts—one line on the right and one on the left. “One set for each hand?” I asked Ella.

She laughed in the way Ella does when she’s nervous or a little unsure, and honestly, I wouldn’t have thought a thing of it if it also wasn’t the way she laughed when she was feeling guilty.

Nervous and unsure I could deal with. Heck, I’d never done a cemetery restoration. If I cared enough, I’d be nervous and unsure, too.

But guilty was another thing.

And wondering what Ella was feeling guilty about, I was suddenly a little nervous myself.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” I looked at her hard as I said this, and I knew for sure something was wrong when she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“It was Jim’s idea,” she said.

Jim is the administrator over at Garden View, and he’s Ella’s boss. Which means he’s my big boss.

This did not bode well. Neither did the fidgety little dance Ella did from Earth Shoe to Earth Shoe. “Jim said you’d be fine with the idea once you understood that it’s great publicity for Garden View.”

I folded my arms over my chest and waited for more.

It came in a rush, the way Ella usually imparts information when she knows there’s a chance it’s going to piss me off.

“You see, all the pieces just fell into place late Friday afternoon, and that’s why I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it because Jim was handling all the details, of course, but nobody was sure about anything until this morning, and I didn’t want to tell you before now because
I didn’t want you to spend your weekend worrying when you should have been resting. And I hope you did get some rest, I mean, with that gunshot wound of yours, and you know, I don’t ever want anything to happen to you again, and so I thought it was just best if we left it all for today.”

She sucked in a breath and I took the opportunity to move a step closer. “And?” I asked.

“And . . .” She swallowed hard. “It really is brilliant. I mean, it’s brilliant publicity, and Lord knows, we need all the good publicity we can get. And by we, I mean both Garden View and Monroe Street. People hear about cemeteries and so many of them are creeped out. They don’t understand that cemeteries are actually museums without walls. There’s so much history in a cemetery. And so much interesting art and architecture and—”

“And so you and Jim decided . . . ?”

“Well, I didn’t. Decide, I mean. Though if it had been up to me, I would have made the same decision Jim did. That’s how good of an idea it is. And I know you’ll agree once you hear the details. It was Jim and the board who decided, and the people over at the Historical Society. Since they’re going to be such a critical piece of the puzzle, they had to be in on it, too. And that’s why it took all weekend to come to a decision, because they had a lot of work to do on their end, and—”

A big black limo pulled up the drive into the cemetery, and we both turned to watch. Since there hadn’t been any active burials in Monroe Street for who-knew-how-long, I was intrigued.

Ella, I noticed, wasn’t. But then, she could afford to be blasé; she knew what was going on. I still didn’t, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.

“They’re here.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me toward where the limo stopped. “You’re going to
love this,” she said in a stage whisper just as the limo door opened.

Jim, our boss, got out. “Good morning!” Jim is a pleasant guy who I’m convinced wouldn’t know me if he tripped over me in the hallway outside my office. It’s just as well since these days I spend more time investigating for my dead clients than I do working on cemetery business. “Ella told you what’s going on?”

Before I had a chance to either lie or hang Ella out to dry, the door on the far side of the limo opened and a woman in pink popped out. She was old and thin, one of those fluffy types who hang around at the country club my family used to hang around—before Dad did what Dad did and we lost our country-club membership along with our home, our friends, and what there was of a Martin fortune.

The little pink woman was followed by another, taller woman with a broad chest and a scowl on her face. That woman was followed by another, and—

“Mrs. Lamb!” I knew the fourth woman who emerged from the limo. She lived just a couple doors down from where we used to live before—

Anyway, Mrs. Lamb was the mother of my best childhood friend, Dominique. Domi and I were inseparable through our high school years, right up until college when we went our separate ways. We’d kept in touch, until—

There was no use going over it again. I found myself fingering the phone message from my dad and told myself to get a grip. It was a good thing I did. Just at that moment, Mrs. Lamb recognized me (it’s hard to forget a five-foot-eleven redhead) and came around to the other side of the limo.

“Pepper!” Her smile was pleasant enough, but I
couldn’t help noticing the way Katherine Lamb’s gaze raked over me from head to toe, checking out my hair, my makeup, my clothes. Her smile wilted a bit when she said, “So, the rumor I heard is actually true. You really do work in a cemetery?”

“Not this cemetery.” I thought it best to set the record straight. Garden View is way classier than Monroe Street. “I’m just sort of here on loan.”

“Yes. Of course.” Mrs. Lamb touched a hand to one diamond earring. “And how is Barb?”

I was tempted to tell her that she could find out herself if she would just pick up the phone and call my mom. But it was early in the morning, and I am never at the top of my game before noon. Besides, like it or not, my hand strayed again to the pocket where I’d tucked my dad’s message. Of course Katherine Lamb hadn’t called my mother. Like all Mom’s other friends, Mrs. Lamb was embarrassed and appalled by my dad’s lack of good sense. Not to mention his carelessness at getting caught.