Waking Up Dead Read online

  “Bravo! Good show on the phone.” He clapped his hands. “You really have a knack.”

  “Arg. You again? I already told you. You are not a nice angel.” I opened the filing cabinet drawer in his face.

  I ignored the musty, library smell of old documents and thumbed through the files. Kitty tried to badger me into changing the old Will after Craig left me. Why didn’t I listen?

  “What are we looking for,” Sam asked as a pair of chic glasses materialized in his hand.

  “Why are you so eager to help? You don’t have a dog in this hunt.”

  “The minute I echoed that silly chant, I was invested. Now, what are we hunting?”

  “I’m looking for my Will. If I can change it to let Stacy inherit my catering business, then I’ll have a better shot at finding my murderer and coming along quietly with you and Suriyel to the afterlife.” His rapid eye blinking behind the glasses disturbed me. “I didn’t know angels needed glasses.”

  I swear I saw his chest puff out. He looked like a banty rooster. “Of course we don’t have to. Your dreadfully messy office needed some character. These enhance my intellectuality, don’t you think?”

  I left him hanging. Was “intellectuality” even a word?

  “Ah-ha! I got it!” I waved the file under his nose.

  “Fine.” He deflated to the size of an egg yolk.

  “I still need your help in changing this thing. I mean, is there some super fallen angel power to change the words?” I handed the Will over.

  Sam skimmed with his glasses on his nose. “Who’s this person?”

  “My ex-husband.” I let the anger and pain in my tone fill in the blanks.

  “Oh my, you should have changed this sooner. A human never knows when their time is up.”

  I waited for the evil Vincent Price laugh to follow his sentence. He remained engrossed in the document. I awarded him with an eye roll-sigh combination.

  “The police will be here any minute. Hurry up!”

  “I am hurrying. I assure you it’s not me they’ll catch in the office reading the Will.”

  We read the Will together. When we came to the “bequeathing” part, Sam handed the document to me. “Just put your finger under the line you want to change and think about what you want it to say.”

  I heard the police siren in the distance. We looked at each other.

  “Oh, hell!” I refused to get caught in the office with the Will in my hand. I quickly pictured, “I Ava Berry do hereby bequeath all my worldly possessions and the catering business to Stacy Summerlin.” The words appeared on the paper as if I had typed them onto a computer screen.

  “You might want to change the date and make Stacy the executor of the estate so you don’t end up in probate. Don’t forget to get rid of Craig’s signature and the fishing poles he wanted to give to Guinness Book of World Records if he passed away first,” Sam reminded.

  “Does being a fallen angel-slash-Grim Reaper give you insight into drafting Wills?”

  “Stop being a smart-ass, and do it before Sheriff Carp—Tharp, whatever you call him, finds you here.”

  My birthday last year jumped into my head probably because it was the last time I’d use it. The date changed on each page. Any mention of Craig vanished. I proudly returned the Will to the filing cabinet.

  “Oh, no!” I smacked myself in the head. I forgot to call Kitty.

  “What’s wrong, now?”

  “I forgot to call Kitty. I mean, Mom.” I walked as I dialed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Outside. Nobody would want to be inside the house if there was a dead body would they?”

  “You’re doing it all wrong.”

  “What? Walking?”

  “Teleportation, dear.”

  Sam vanished. I made it to the door as Kitty answered the phone and the door bell rang. “Hello, hon. I really can’t talk right now. I’m behind a dumpster off Fourth Avenue. Twila Denton is throwing away some very nice merchandise.”

  Kitty loved to case the alleys of the local merchants on Sunday. Thanks to surveillance cameras, everyone knew. The cowards talked behind her back. They never confronted her. Nobody wanted to risk extra painful dental work on their next visit to Robert.

  “Hold on a sec Ki—Mom.” I ordered. The door bell rang, followed by insistent knocking.

  “Hi, Sheriff Tharp.” I checked to make sure Sam was truly out of sight before I let the law man cross the threshold.

  “Hello, Ms. Stacy. What was it you called in? A murder,” he asked, through the brick of chewing tobacco in his mouth.

  I gestured to the second floor with one hand and held the phone with the other. “My uh…aunt is… uh…upstairs.”

  “Stacy? Tell me what happened! Stacy?” I bet Kitty’s screams blew her cover to smithereens.

  I followed the sheriff through the house to the stairs. Tearfully, I explained how I went to visit Aunt Ava and found her in her bed not moving.

  “What do you mean ‘not moving’? You don’t mean…she’s not…” Kitty’s reaction helped me feel better about inhabiting Stacy’s body.

  ”Mama, you better get over here.” I hung-up when the Sheriff came to a dead stop in my old bedroom.

  “Damn.” He did the “take the hat off—rub the head at the same time trick,” and asked nobody in particular, “What the hell happened?”

  “This is how I found her.” Right. Like the partial truth made everything better?

  The sheriff realized he had company. “You shouldn’t be in here.” He grabbed my elbow to escort me out of the room.

  A swirl of dark energy appeared as a shadow. The hair on my arm stood up. Not good. The sheriff’s grip on my arm tightened. He flung me around to face him. His eyes slitted and sunk in his head. “You! You killed her,” he sputtered, which sent tobacco pieces flying into my hairline. Wintergreen fumes threatened to drop me right then and there.

  “No sir! I just found her like that!” I struggled to free myself from his ferocious grip.

  “I spent all those years waiting for her to divorce that stupid jock she married so I could divorce that bitch I married.” Head trauma loomed in my future if he didn’t stop shaking me with every word.

  “But, I—she’s been divorced for three years!”

  He destroyed any sense of flattery I harbored by cackling until a stream of tobacco ran like molasses down his chin.

  He slapped me in cuffs pretty fast for someone going through demented seizures. “Hey, you big fat baldy. Quit spitting your chaw all over me and listen.” I stomped my foot in protest. “I did not murder her! I’m the one who found her, you idiot.”

  He whipped his gun out. I wanted out of the cuffs and out of his way. The fear-induced notion landed me on the balcony instead of somewhere far away like Hawaii. “I really suck at this teleporting thing sometimes.” At least the cuffs were gone.

  The French doors flew open. Sheriff Tharp appeared, wild eyed and jowl-shaking mad with his finger on the trigger of the gun. I remembered what Suriyel did to me when I tried to shoot him. I pointed my finger at the gun. It disappeared.

  “Cool!”

  The sheriff looked at his empty hands, roared like a bull, and charged at me full steam ahead. I panicked and vanished to stand behind him.

  The sheriff sailed over the balcony.

  ”No,” I screamed, and ran to the rail with my hands outreached to stop him. He froze—head first, inches away from my Camellia bush. I looked down at my hands in disbelief. “Ha! It worked!”

  “Of course it did,” Suriyel said from his position beside me on the balcony.

  “Oh, it was you.” I said, not bothering to disguise the disappointment in my voice. I crossed my legs to ease the throbbing that started at the sound of his voice.

  “What? You thought you did it?” Suriyel laughed. “You are getting better. But you are not that good.”

  “Look, O’ King of Back-Handed Compliments, I don’t know what got into him. He came at me,
saying that I killed her-me, and he was planning to divorce his wife so he could be with me-her. That’s real romantic, but it kind of contradictory considering he was trying to kill me at the same time. Of course it wasn’t me he was trying to throttle. It was Stacy.”

  Suriyel held his hand up to stop me. “Slow down. You have to remember for all purposes you are Stacy.” Eyes narrowed, he asked, “You said the sheriff came at you?”

  “What are we looking at?” Sam asked as he joined us on the balcony.

  A chill arose from the blazing ground. Suriyel and I turned to see him standing there like an excited school kid.

  “Nobody invited you.”

  Sam ignored him and leaned over the rail. “We can’t leave him like that for all the neighbors to see.”

  “He does have a point.” I turned to Suriyel.

  We stared at the sheriff’s lifeless body with an “Oh shit,” frozen on his face. The Homeowners Association has a strict policy against profane lawn ornaments. I didn’t want to pay the fine.

  Suriyel grumbled and made the body do a cartoon-like rewind of his near fatal last step. His body, in its gray, bursting at the seams, uniform reminded me of a walrus as it floated over the balcony rail. Oh, I must be desperate to be flattered by “koo-koo-ka-choo” here.

  Suriyel maneuvered the body into a standing position beside the bed. The fallen angel examined the inert body. “I cannot tell what made him try to kill you, but something feels evil.”

  “Maybe it’s our little miss ‘Pet Cemetery’s’ personality,” Sam said in a deadpan tone.

  “Stephen King—really?” I jabbed him in the shoulder.

  “I could have said, ‘Christine.’”

  Car doors slammed in the driveway. The sound echoed through the open French doors. Good thing we weren’t still lollygagging on the balcony when Kitty drove up. The whir of sirens and other emergency vehicles sounded close on her heels.

  ”You guys scat! I’ve got to go downstairs,” I whispered.

  “What are we Suriyel, felines?” Sam whined to my disappearing body as I zapped down to the bottom of the stairs to head off cyclone Kitty.

  “Where is she?” Kitty demanded as she clutched her handbag in one hand and tried to push past me with the other.

  Robert’s Zoom-whitened teeth flashed in the dim light of the stairs. He stopped Kitty from climbing through me.

  “Now, Kitty, I told you. You don’t want to go up there, darlin’.”

  She batted his restraining hand away from hers with her purse, the oldest weapon known to women.

  “Mama, listen, Rob—Dad’s right. You don’t want to see her this way.” I ended up plastered to the rail as Kitty pushed past me with a cry of grief.

  Robert pulled me into his shoulder in a gesture of fatherly comfort. “You okay sweetie? Is she…?”

  I broke away from Robert to chase after Kitty. I didn’t want her to find a petrified sheriff along with a molting corpse when she blasted through the door.

  A sweaty, dazed looking sheriff barred her from the ugly sight lying on the bed. “Now Kitty, this is the last thing you need to see.”

  He forced her to do a one-eighty and herded all of us through the door. His nice, normal eyes settled on me, not narrowed orbs of death. I rubbed my arms where he bruised me.

  The EMS workers pushed through us and diverted his attention. Deputies and a coroner piled in behind them.

  Drama queen, Kitty refused to be calmed by the police officer who met us at the bottom of the stairs and guided us over to the couch. I was sad, too. We grew up as poor white trash and forged a sisterly bond nobody dared break. The bond weakened because we took our relationship for granted. Her reaction echoed my guilt for not spending more time with each other.

  The policemen tromping up to my bedroom distracted me from my “shoulda, woulda, coulda” reverie. My face flushed as red as the sofa I let Craig talk me into buying. I taught some of those boys in children’s church. I never dreamed they’d take notes, and, Lord help me, photos of my T-shirt-granny-drawer-clad body.

  The cell phone rang. I looked at Kitty who looked at Robert who looked at me. It was Stacy’s phone. The hard, face-paced screaming music ratcheted my blood pressure up another few notches. Kitty glared at me until I went outside to answer it.

  Some guy named Mason told me how much he enjoyed last night. I searched my brain for a nanosecond. Gross, Mason Dooley, the high school athletic director’s son I hired to help staff catering events. I thought Stacy dumped him before she went to culinary school. I felt nasty for cradle-robbing until I remembered Stacy slept with him, not me.

  I heard Mason check to see if I was still on the other end. Damn. The town’s only news van took up half the front yard. I thumbed the phone off.

  “Hey! Get the hell outta the front yard! This is an invasion of privacy!” I yelled at the camera guy as he balanced on top of the van and pointed the lens at my front door. “I’ll be tarred and feathered before I allow images of my bloated body to be electronically transmitted to homes all over the three-town viewing area.”

  I threw some rocks from my flower bed at the van. One large rock pelted the camera guy. It sent him skittering for cover behind the satellite dish, but not before he got footage of my angry tirade. An officer dragged me inside the house while another made the van move onto the street.

  * * * *

  We spent six hours at the police station. My blood still boiled as we pulled into the driveway. Sheriff Tharp treated me as a suspect even though he didn’t actually accuse me of being one. I don’t know what else I expected after the little handcuff incident. He didn’t even bring it up.

  I took one of Kitty’s shoulders. Robert took the other. We got her out of the car and into the bedroom. She held it together long enough to contact the funeral home, then fell apart again. The coroner gladly parted with a tranquilizer to make her stop caterwauling.

  The Will made it home with us, too. I asked Robert if he thought we needed a copy of Ava’s Will while we were there. That way Kitty wouldn’t have to return any time soon. He gladly jumped at the chance to get away from his wife. Kitty drooled as she slept on the couch which made it easy for Robert to slip the document inside her purse.

  I watched the local news instead of getting ready for sleep that would never come. There I was on the local news, looking even more lumpy than usual, in a body bag on a stretcher. The anchor, an aspiring Nashville market Barbie, said in a matter-of-fact way: “Caterer and longtime resident of Europe, Ava Berry was found dead in her home today. Sheriff Tharp says the fifty-one year old died of natural causes.” They cut to footage of me rushing the news van. “Family members are visibly upset…”

  The audio of me saying, “Get the ‘bleep’ off this property,” warranted a Jed Clampett hat and shotgun.

  “Natural causes? Natural my former big fat ass,” I muttered and scrambled to turn the TV off. “I’m gonna’ prove them wrong!”

  * * * *

  Only in the movies do people get to attend their own funeral. I skulked beside “my parents” in the front row at the graveside service and absorbed the details. Most of the town turned out. I didn’t feel special because funerals were huge social events in my small town. Police directed traffic and intervened when people fought over the five handicapped spots in front of the First Baptist Church. They even hauled a few elderly folks away for unruly conduct. The ones who didn’t have to make pit stops from consuming all the coffee and pastries got into a ruckus with some early birds waiting for the “good seats” at the funeral. One walker got pulverized by a man from another county’s wheelchair on the way to viewing my body.

  I heard the murmurs of disappointment as people approached the casket to find it closed. Kitty came out of her sedative-induced coma on the way to the funeral home and asked for a closed casket funeral. She said there was only so much a make-up artist could do for me dead or alive. I gave her a dirty look. I couldn’t argue with the truth.

  People sent fl
oral stands in every color, a lot of yellow from my friends who knew it was my favorite color. I really hoped Kitty got the beautiful blanket she placed over the casket from Jimbo. I got suspicious when someone said it looked very similar to one done for her mother’s funeral the day before.

  Tennessee in the springtime at an outdoor graveside service surrounded by flowers only meant one thing, bees. Hand fans provided by the funeral home made really great weapons. Most of us put ours to good use. Reverend Jeremiah Warner wheezed his way to the “come to Jesus” portion of the eulogy when a bee worked its way under his robe. It crawled in between his shoulder blades. He twitched and thrashed like a scarecrow caught in a wind storm. He fought his way out of the robe and threw it in the direction of the coffin-lowering mechanism. The fabric from the robe was heavy enough to flip the switch. The crank started on its own. The cry of alarm from the funeral goers echoed to the next town.

  Robert tended to Kitty who passed out the minute my body crashed down to the bottom of the grave. Pallbearers and the funeral home owner tried to right things in the grave and take care of the mortified minister. I just hung my head. I blamed myself for wondering what would happen if a bee crawled up the Reverend’s robe. I only wanted to avoid hearing the “fire and brimstone” part of the service. A funeral should be a tribute to the deceased instead of an opportunity to save souls.

  As the crowd made a mass exodus from the cemetery, Nina Blackstone and Lorna Tharp passed within earshot.

  “Fitting end to such a pathetic life, don’t you think?” Nina drawled in that sweet as honey backstabbing way perfected by only the best catty southern belle bitches.

  “I noticed she gained about 20 pounds when she came with Kitty to the church rummage sale a few weeks ago,” Lorna said in a conspiring tone.

  They couldn’t even leave me alone after death! A big gust of wind lifted the graveside service tent into the air. It tumbled end over end into the two women as they made their way up the hill to their cars. They toppled over like bowling pins. Sheriff Tharp and a few deputies ran to pull the canvas off of them.