The Dead Romantics (23)

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.