9. Dead on Arrival
9
Dead on Arrival
“FLORENCE?” MOM CALLED from the parlor. “Is everything okay over there?”
I blinked, and Benji Andor was gone. I quickly drew my hand back and rubbed at my fingers. They tingled from where I’d touched—and gone through—him. He wasn’t really here. He wasn’t really dead.
I was losing my goddamn mind.
“Florence?” Mom put a hand on my shoulder, and I jumped in surprise. She gave me a worried look. “Are you okay? Who was that at the door?”
I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest to warm my cold hand. “No one—I’m fine. It was, um—someone ding-dong ditched.”
She squeezed my shoulder.
“I’m fine,” I reiterated, and tried to shake off the encounter. Benji Andor wasn’t
dead.
I’d just groveled in his office yesterday.
Kissed
him last night behind the bar. He couldn’t be dead.
He wasn’t.
But if my mother was good at anything, it was seeing right through my lies. “You saw one, didn’t you? A ghost.”
“What? No—I mean. No,” I decided, because it was easier than trying to explain whatever had happened. Mom had enough to deal with already—she didn’t need her eldest daughter coming off the rails already. I had to be there for her. Not the other way around. I grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly. “I’m fine,” I said again, and this time I put my heart into it. “I’m okay. Glad to be home.”
“I know it’s a lot,” she replied, and we moved out of the foyer and back toward the parlor again. “But things have changed. People have changed.”
But how much had stayed the same?
I couldn’t tell her that, at the airport, I had debated on whether or not to turn around and go back to my apartment. Skip the funeral. Burrow myself in a murder podcast. Try to forget that Dad was dead. That he was never coming back. That I would never get to, not ever, not while he was alive, tell him about my career, and my ghostwriting, and share with him all of the starred reviews and—
Stop. Stop thinking.
“Besides,” I said, trying to bury my thoughts, “I couldn’t let the family fall apart without their favorite disaster child.”
“You aren’t a disaster,” Mom chided.
“No, she definitely is,” Carver argued, and Mom hit him in the shoulder. Karen called her over and she left us for the parlor. Carver asked, putting his hands in his worn jean pockets, “Who was at the door?”
“A ghost.”
He blinked. As if he wasn’t sure whether I was lying or telling
a particularly bad joke, but then I smiled and he barked a laugh. “Ha! If it was Dad, I hope you thoroughly chewed him out.”
“Gave him what for.”
“Really?”
“No. No one was at the door,” I lied, and he melted a little.
My brother was a lot of things—a smartass, a computer tech guru, and a gullible mess. He was like the glue that kept the Day siblings together. I couldn’t remember the last time Alice talked to me of her own volition.
“You never know. I mean, when we were kids—”
“How are you and Nicki?” I interrupted.
“Good,” he replied, annoyed that I’d changed the subject, but he took the hint as he led me back into the parlor. “So, did you figure out what to do with the editor for Christina Lauren?”
“Christina and Lauren write their own books,” I replied automatically. “But no, I didn’t.”
“So what happened?”
“Dad died. I came home.”
“You never turned it in?”
“Can’t turn in half a book.”
“Do you think you could—I don’t know—copy and paste the same chapter fifty times, turn that in, and by the time your editor realizes you turned in the wrong thing, you’d have the book done?”
I stared at my brother in surprise. “That’s . . .”
“A great idea, right?”
“A
terrible
idea,” I replied. Then I frowned, and thought about it for a moment. “It might work.”
“Ha! See? You’re welcome. I’m a genius.”
Maybe Carver’s ploy could give me enough time. Not much—but
enough
. The ghost I saw at the door—it wasn’t a ghost. It was a
hallucination. Benji Andor couldn’t be
dead
. I’d kissed him last night! And he looked healthy, and he wasn’t
that
old, and as far as I could tell, it would take a lot to murder someone akin to a tree trunk.
He was fine.
It was a trick of my brain—the imaginary ghost of my new editor whom I’d accidentally made out with in a back alley in Brooklyn coming to haunt me because I was already stressed out and chugging along on three hours of sleep and four cups of airplane coffee.
That was all.
“Uh-oh, what now?” Carver murmured under his breath as we came back into the parlor. Everyone had left their seats and was huddled around Karen and the will. Mom was pacing back and forth on the other end of the parlor, her heels clipping on the hardwood floors like a metronome, never missing a beat. That was bad. She rarely paced. Most of the time she just floated between rooms like an ethereal Morticia Addams.
“What’s the commotion about?” Carver asked, looking around.
Nicki looked up from the will, and handed it to Seaburn. “Well, we’ve sort of got a problem.”
“What kind?”
Alice sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Dad didn’t give anyone instructions on any of this,” she said in her deadpan voice. “He just—I guess—thought we could read his freaking mind.”
“We’ve got a receipt for the party stuff, but that’s it. I’m not sure about the wildflowers or the murder of crows or . . . Elvis? I dunno what to do about that one.” Seaburn shrugged and handed the will off to me.
Dad’s script was long and loopy, and all I wanted to do was move my fingers across the words, memorizing the way he dotted his Is and crossed his Ts. It was written on the yellowed cardstock that I’d gotten him a few years ago for Christmas.
“He always liked live music—maybe he meant an Elvis impersonator,” I thought aloud to myself. “And the flowers . . .”
Carver snapped his fingers. “He always picked them out on the old walking trail.”
The Ridge. I didn’t want to think about the Ridge.
“Murder of crows, then?” Alice asked, crossing her arms over her chest. Everyone shrugged.
Mom joked, “Perhaps we could use the crows he always fed in the evenings. They’re never very far.”
“Someone else’ll have to catch them,” I said. “They don’t like me.”
“They don’t
know
you. You haven’t been home in ten years,” Alice pointed out.
“Crows can live up to twenty years.”
“Sure, it’s about
you
, then,” Alice said with a roll of her eyes.
“That’s not what I meant,” I snapped as I passed the will back to Karen. She tucked it neatly into a manila folder, where the receipt and a few other pieces of paper resided.
“We’ll figure Xavier’s funeral arrangements out tomorrow,” Mom assured us, clapping her hands together to dismiss everyone for the evening, before Alice and I could get into a fight. “That’s enough for one day, I think.”
After everyone had left, Carver, Alice (steadfastly ignoring me), and I went around the house and turned off the lights in every room. It was second nature to us at this point, even if I hadn’t been around for ten years. Carver took the back rooms, I took the left, Alice took the right. We checked the windows to make sure they were closed; we locked the doors.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking for Dad as I did.
Though I was about as subtle as an elephant, apparently.
“If you want to see him, he’s just down the hall, you know,”
Alice said, breaking our silent fight. She hugged herself tightly, pulling her sweater sleeves over her hands again. “Third freezer on the left. The one with the shaky handle.”
I closed the door to the second parlor room behind me, and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. I was glad that most of the lights were off, so hopefully she couldn’t see them. “I wasn’t looking.”
“You were. For his ghost.”
“Maybe I was,” I admitted.
She pursed her lips and looked away. “Well, I don’t think he’s here.”
“I don’t think so, either,” I admitted.
“Who’s not here?” Carver asked, stomping loudly out of Parlor C. He stomped everywhere loudly. It was just what he did. Nicki followed out into the hall behind him, quiet as ever. It always struck me how different Carver and Nicki were—like a square peg and a round hole—but I guess they were like pieces in a puzzle. They found grooves where the other person fit, and that’s how they worked.
“No one. Everything’s locked up on my end,” Alice said, and left for the foyer, where Mom was putting on her boots and coat.
My brother gave me a sidelong look, and put his hands in his pockets.
“Don’t worry about it,” I sighed, and finished my rounds. I did pass the door to the basement—the mortuary—where we stored the bodies in cold fridges until it was time to prep them for burial. Those set for cremation went to a crematorium the next town over. The basement door was like any other, though the handle was different—a pull latch with a hard dead bolt.
For old times’ sake, I checked the dead bolt again. Locked. Probably Alice’s doing.
I hadn’t been down into the prep room in ages. I hated the smell of it—a mix of disinfectant and formaldehyde, and a distinct undercurrent of something you weren’t really born recognizing. It was a smell you found in the hospital, too, and extended care homes.
There’s a certain smell to death.
You didn’t really recognize it at first, but the longer you existed in those spaces, the more acquainted with it you became. I didn’t realize death had a smell until we moved out of this house. I always thought it was what the world smelled like—a little sad and bitter and heavy. On spring mornings, Dad would open up all of the windows, and turn up the radio, blasting Bruce Springsteen, and try to breathe life into the house again, wake up the old wooden floors and the creaky attic beams.
It was about that time again, when the mornings were crisp but the sun was already warming up the buds on the trees. The air in the house felt heavy with incense and disinfectant and that sad, soft smell of death, waiting to be let out into the wind.
My hand closed tightly around the handle to the basement. Maybe Dad was down there, sitting on one of the cold steel tables, smoking a cigar and wondering when one of his kids would realize he’d been playing us the whole time. He’d laugh and say, “I couldn’t die, buttercup, until I’m good and ready.”
But he was dead, and he wasn’t ready.
And his ghost was not here.
“We’re leaving,” Carver called from the front of the house. “Florence? You still back there?”
I let go of the handle. I’d come back later when it was light out. When I was in a steadier state of mind.
“Coming,” I called and hurried down the hallway to the foyer, where everyone else had already put on their coats and shoes. Carver handed me my heavy winter coat, so misplaced here in
Mairmont where everyone had already brought out their cute spring cardigans and jean jackets.
He kissed me on the temple and said, “It’s good to see you home.”
“
Grossssss
,” I complained. “Sibling
affection.
”
As we left the funeral home, Mom locked up behind us. We meandered down the stone pathway to the sidewalk. The crows were gone from the oak tree. Had I actually seen them? Or were they just a part of my messed-up head, like my editor?
Mom said as she caught up to me, wrapping her arm around my shoulder, “Oh, it’ll be so nice to have you home! Right, Alice?”
I gave a start. “She’s home, too?”
My sister said pointedly, “Some of us fail quieter.”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“Oh, yikes!” Carver interrupted me, his arm interlocked with his boyfriend’s. “It’s past Nicki’s and my bedtime. We’ll see you in the morning? Over at the Awful Waffle?” Code for Waffle House. “Ten?”
“Sounds beautiful,” Mom replied. Carver kissed her on the cheek as he said his good night, Nicki telling me how nice it was to see me, and they left down the sidewalk in the opposite direction.
Mairmont wasn’t terribly busy in the evenings. Most of the restaurants down Main Street closed up around eight, and the ones that stayed open were packed with sports fans watching a late-night basketball game or families gone for a late-night ice cream run. Nicki and Carver had bought a house together just on the other side of the town square, on a cute road with rainbow-colored houses and white mailboxes, and in five years I could see them fostering a few kids and introducing some pandemonium to their quiet little street.
Honestly, I couldn’t wait for it.
When they had disappeared down the sidewalk, Mom pulled Alice and me close to her, a daughter on each arm, and led us home. The walk was quiet, the night air chilly but not cold like it would’ve been in New York. The flowering Bradford pears did stink, though. A
lot
. In that unpleasant way teen boys’ bedrooms did. But the trees did look beautiful with their small white buds glowing in the streetlights that lined Main Street. The soft golden glow reflected off the windows, and the wind was quiet, and the sky was wide.
My parents moved into the unassuming two-story house around the corner from the funeral home when I was twelve. Neither Carver nor Alice really remembered ever living in the funeral home—they didn’t remember that the third stair creaked, or that at night when the wind rattled the old rafters they moaned, or that sometimes you could hear footsteps in the attic. (Though, later, I managed to get rid of them.) I was the only child who remembered living—truly
living
—in the funeral home. Dad chasing me across the hardwood floors, and Mom humming as she restored the stained glass window above the door. Alice wandering around the front yard in her underwear, a funeral bouquet fixed onto her head like a flower crown. Carver drawing great stick figure epics on the parlor walls, improving the fifty-year-old wallpaper filled with flowers and orchids. Me, with my bedroom door locked, whispering to the ghosts who came to find me.
Alice and Carver didn’t remember why we moved, but it was because of me. Because one night, when I had been pulled out of bed by a mischievous young spirit, I had found myself wandering toward the basement.
“Are you sure this is your unfinished business?” I had asked the ghost. “To see—to see you?”
He had smiled at me. “Absolutely—I wanna see. I have to see,” he said as he led me down into the mortuary. I had gone down
there a few times with Dad, but never alone. It was where the dead were stored in narrow freezer boxes until their funeral came. I didn’t know the facts yet. I just knew Dad prepared them for the rest of their journey—like Charon over the river Styx.
There were only two guests in the mortuary that night—Dad called them “guests.” They were bodies. Obviously. I had guessed the right freezer box on the first try, and pulled the drawer out. On the narrow table lay a boy who looked a lot like the one who stood beside me. Young—twelve, maybe. Dad had already fixed him up, painted his blue lips tan, and covered the bruises on his neck.
“Does that help?” I asked the ghost—and he looked . . . “Are you okay?”
“I wanted to wear my
Transformers
T-shirt,” he replied, and looked away. “I’m really dead, aren’t I?”
“I’m sorry.”
He took a large breath (or as much as a large breath looked), and then he nodded—just once. “Thanks—thank you.”
And like the dozens of ghosts before him, the sparkling bits that made him began to break away like dandelion tufts, and dispersed into the room—and he moved on. A firework there, then gone. And I was left alone in the frigid mortuary.
I climbed the steps to the door again, but it had locked itself when it closed the first time—I had forgotten to unlock it. I pushed on it—once, twice.
Banged on it—called for help.
Nothing worked.
Dad found me the next morning. Apparently, they had looked everywhere once they realized I was missing, until they finally came down into the mortuary and found me curled up on the steel table in the middle of the room, a blanket over me, asleep.
Mom and Dad decided that maybe—just
maybe
—raising a
family in a funeral home might not be as eclectic and wholesome as they were expecting.
Luckily, there was an old two-story house down the street, built in 1941, so it gave Mom things to renovate and fix around the house as we grew up. That was her college major—architectural renovations. She was really good at it, too. I used to wonder if she ever regretted marrying Dad, and moving to a small nowhere town with nowhere people, but she never gave the slightest hint she did. She took unloved things, like the stained glass window above the door in the funeral home, and the stone and brass fireplace in the new house, and turned them into wonders.
The new house was less showy than the funeral home. It sat on a side road off Main Street, beside the Gulliver family and the Mansons, built with old crumbling bricks as red as clay, and pristine white shutters. But at night, when Carver and Alice’s respective room lights were on, the house looked like it had eyes and a grinning red mouth for a door.
The house was exactly as I remembered it as we came up the cobblestone pathway. Bare threads of ivy clung to the brick walls, and a lone spider hung from the sconce beside the door. Alice’s red convertible was in the driveway, though it looked a lot worse for wear these days, beside Mom’s unassuming SUV. Dad had a motorcycle, though I didn’t see it in the driveway. I wondered where it was.
“Ah! That thing,” Mom said as she fished into her heavy purse for the keys. “He took it to the shop this week before . . . well, you know. Before.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ll ask Seaburn to get it tomorrow.”
“I’ll get it,” Alice said.
“Oh, Alice, you know how I feel about you riding that thing.”
“Mom.”
“Fine, fine.” Mom unlocked the front door, and it creaked wide
open. She walked into the foyer and flipped on the lights. Alice marched inside, not even bothering to take off her boots as she stormed through the house to the kitchen, and flung open the liquor cabinet. She asked Mom if she wanted anything. “Oh, a nice whiskey would be lovely . . . Florence?”
“That sounds amazing,” I agreed, taking off my coat.
The house was warm and it smelled like it always had—of pinewood and fresh linens. The walls were a bright gray, and the furniture was hand-me-down and restored, worn and loved. A staircase off the main hallway led up to most of the bedrooms, while the master was on the first floor, across from the living room. There were photos of all of us on the stairway wall—from elementary school through college graduation, smiling moments frozen in time. Years where we went through bad hair, and blue hair, and braces, and acne.
I looked at one of the earliest photos of us—so early, Alice was an infant. It had been taken outside of the funeral home, Mom in a sleek red dress and Dad in a terrible tweed suit, Carver in one to match. I had pitched a fit that day because I wanted to wear my rainbow unicorn house shoes instead of the white dress shoes that hurt my feet, and I’d won. There I was in a fluffy red dress and . . . unicorn slippers.
On the hallway table there were a few framed newspaper clippings. Dad getting the keys to the town. Mom being presented with a local restoration award. Carver winning a robotics competition. And—
LOCAL GIRL SOLVES MURDER WITH GHOSTS
Along with a photo of thirteen-year-old me smiling for the papers.
It made me sick to my stomach.
“Here you go,” Alice said, offering a glass of whiskey on the rocks.
I jumped at her voice, and spun to her. She rattled the ice in the glass, waiting for me to take it. Suddenly, I was very much not in the mood. “I—I think I’m going to go to the bed-and-breakfast.”
Mom poked her head out of the kitchen. “What? But it’s so late . . .”
“I’m sure they have a room.” I grabbed my coat where I hung it on the coatrack, and shrugged it back on. “I’m sorry.” I stepped back out into the brisk night with my suitcase. “I have a book due and—I’ll keep all of you up.”
“Writing can’t be
that
noisy,” Mom said, frowning. “And I even blew up the mattress in your old bedroom for you!”
“Bad back.”
“Since when?”
“Mom,” Alice said, downing my glass of whiskey, “let it go. There’s a hole in the blow-up mattress anyway.”
Mom gave her a surprised look. “There is?”
Alice shrugged. “Was gonna let her figure it out herself.”
“Thanks,” I replied, not sure if she was lying to cover for me or if there actually was a hole in the inflatable mattress upstairs. I wouldn’t put it past her.
I just couldn’t stay here. In this house. After the episode at the funeral home, I didn’t want to test being home. Mom already had enough to worry about with the funeral. I didn’t want her to have to worry about me, too.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning?” I promised. “At the Waffle House?”
Mom relented without persisting. She was good at that—at seeing when people were shutting down, and letting them. “Of course, darling. See you in the morning.”
I smiled a small thank-you, trying not to meet Alice’s hard gaze, and wheeled my suitcase down the cobblestone steps again,
back toward Main Street. Mairmont was quiet at night, but walking the sidewalk alone, while all the storefronts were closed, reminded me how out of place I felt here in the town that never really accepted me. In New York, I could walk down any street and find another creature of the night walking, too. But here, everyone had their cozy houses and their cozy families, all sequestered for the night, and I was alone.
I told myself I didn’t mind it.
I packed my bags and left the day after high school graduation. I never visited. I never looked back. Not when Carver proposed the idea of TP’ing my bully’s yard for my birthday a few years ago, not when my parents had their thirty-year anniversary.
Not when Alice begged me to come home.
We had been best friends once, but that was a lifetime ago. I didn’t regret leaving—I
couldn’t
regret leaving. It was for my own sanity. But looking back on it, I could’ve handled it a little better. That I did regret. I could’ve not shut Alice out of my life. I could’ve visited once in a blue moon. I could’ve . . .
Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve.
Hindsight was such a bitch. Because everything I ran from had caught up with me. Even the crows that now sat on the roof of the bed-and-breakfast, looking down at me with their beady black eyes.
I tightened my grip on my suitcase. They were just birds. They didn’t mean anything. And even if they did, I had nowhere else to go.