Chapter 5
The funeral home was quieter by late afternoon.
Not peaceful, but quieter in the way a graveyard might be quieter right before the earth decides to shift.
The kind of stillness that clung like cobwebs and whispered along the nape of your neck, hinting at unseen eyes peering out from behind peeling wallpaper and slanted crown molding.
I’d opened three windows, burned half a rosemary-infused cleansing candle, and even seriously considered bribing Beau with the half bottle of bourbon I kept for emergencies and exorcisms. Nothing shifted the feeling that the place wasn’t just occupied. It was anticipating.
Possibly a punchline. Possibly a murder confession.
I was elbows-deep in the crumbling business archives, which smelled like mildew, old glue, and terrible taxidermy.
Dust motes danced in the air like bored fairies.
The ledgers I was combing through were brittle with time and suspicious stains, and contained decades’ worth of Assjacket family information.
It seemed Old Jenkins, the former owner of the funeral parlour, hadn’t just arranged funerals.
He’d written spilled secrets in the margins of his ledgers that read like confessions from a drunk cryptkeeper.
That was when Zelda burst into the room like a rhinestone hurricane with zero personal boundaries.
She shoved the door open with a dramatic gasp, clutching something to her chest like she’d just robbed a bank and was deeply proud of it.
Her hair was windblown and her entire aura screamed glitter-fueled revelation.
“Ivy,” she hissed, eyes wild with triumph, “you will not believe what I just found.”
I didn’t look up immediately. “Is it another gnome?”
“Worse.” She whipped out a cracked smartphone wrapped neatly in a ziplock bag labeled Moran – EFFECTS.
I blinked and sat up straighter. “Is that Beau’s phone?”
“Absolutely,” she crowed, cradling the bag like it was our saving grace… and it just might be. “Artie the mortician owed me a favour. He’s both nosy and disturbingly into labeling personal artifacts like he’s curating a haunted museum. We don’t question his methods.”
“Because we fear them,” I muttered, taking the bag. The phone inside was sleek, cold, and deader than its owner. The screen was cracked across the middle, a spiderweb of possibility. “Password protected, of course.”
Zelda had just whipped a charging cable out of her tiny purse and plugged the phone in when Beau materialized in the doorway like an answer to a question I hadn’t asked aloud. He leaned against the frame, arms folded, the usual smirk curling one corner of his mouth like a promise or a warning.
“You rang?” he drawled, voice all honey and mischief as the phone blinked to life and all three of us looked at it.
Zelda lit up like a spell gone right. “Can you unlock it?”
Beau floated closer, peering at the phone like it had once insulted his mother. “Damned if I remember. It was either my anniversary date, or my dog’s birthday... or possibly something sexy. I had a very liberal definition of ‘security.’”
I sighed. “Try just… touching it.”
He obligingly extended a hand. His ghostly fingers passed straight through the screen, triggering absolutely nothing.
“Well that was helpful,” I muttered.
Zelda tapped a finger against her lip, eyes narrowed in thought. Then she brightened. Which was never a comforting sign.
“Ghosts have energy fields, right?” she said. “What if we could make him more visible?”
“I am extremely visible,” Beau said indignantly, smoothing his exquisite vintage lapels.
“More corporeal,” Zelda clarified. “Just long enough to trick the phone’s facial recognition. It can’t unlock if you look like a fog machine with cheekbones!”
He tilted his head. “Worth a shot.”
Zelda dropped to her knees beside her handbag and began pulling out what looked like the contents of a magical drag queen’s dressing room: a compact mirror, a small bottle of shimmer spray, and a stick of enchanted chalk that smelled faintly of citrus and mischief.
Unease began to bubble in my stomach. “I swear, if you’re about to bedazzle him—”
“Trust the process.” She directed Beau to stand against the blank wall, where the candlelight painted flickering shadows and everything smelled vaguely of wallpaper glue and tension.
Beau gave a dramatic bow and positioned himself like he was posing for a magazine cover about brooding in the afterlife.
Zelda spritzed the shimmer spray glitter suspended in something vaguely lemon-scented, and drew a quick, intricate sigil in chalk across the floor at his feet.
She snapped the compact open like a stage magician and whispered a few sharp words under her breath.
The effect was instant.
Light shimmered across Beau’s form like moonlight on dark water. For a moment, he sharpened. His features solidified, a faint gleam of light caught in his eyes. His shadow appeared on the wall behind him, faint but there.
“Now!” Zelda barked, tossing the phone to me like a grenade.
I caught it, heart in my throat, and held it up.
The phone scanned.
A chime.
Click.
Unlocked.
We all froze.
Beau blinked at the screen, mildly impressed. “Well damn. Look at me. I’m tech-savvy and dead. That’s range.”
Zelda fist-pumped. “I am so putting this in my résumé.”
I stared down at the screen, heart thudding. Notifications, call logs, texts. Breadcrumbs. Before anything else could mess us up, I went straight into the phone settings and removed the password protection.
“Now,” I said, voice low, “let’s find out who wanted you dead.”
The further I scrolled, the colder my fingers felt. Like the phone had absorbed the last flickers of Beau’s human life and was now radiating quiet accusations. There was no blood spatter. No crime scene photos. Just silent metadata and unanswered messages.
A dozen texts sat unread in his inbox. A few from Meredith. Short, clipped, as if typed from across a room she didn’t want to be in. One from an unknown number.
You should’ve stayed gone.
Sent at 8:03 p.m., the night he died.
I showed it to Zelda.
Her brows drew together. “Burner phone?”
“Maybe.” I chewed my lip. “But this message is personal. It’s not someone panicking. It’s someone angry.”
Beau hovered at the edge of the room now, less smug than usual. His expression was unreadable, his form more flicker than figure. The glamour spell must’ve drained him. Or maybe... maybe something else had.
“I knew someone wanted me out of town,” he murmured. “But I always figured they’d just ruin my reputation. Not end my pulse.”
I slid the phone back into a fresh evidence bag. Something I’d begun carrying in my kit after too many run-ins with haunted jewelry and demon-possessed Fitbits. Then I sat back and looked at Beau. “Why would someone want you gone?”
He shrugged.
But the truth wasn’t buried, it was fractured. Shattered like a mirror someone had kicked in, shards reflecting different versions of Beau’s story. Meredith painted him as an arrogant jerk. Gigi swore he was a thief. And Beau himself? He only had fog and suspicion.
I exhaled and reached for the ledger again. The edges crumbled beneath my fingers like they were resisting resurrection. “This town,” I said finally, “has secrets in its woodwork.”
Zelda made a noise halfway between agreement and a sneeze, brushing cobwebs off her sleeve. “That’s Assjacket’s charm. A little rot, a little glamour. Think of it like a haunted casserole. You’re not quite sure what’s in it, but it keeps showing up at potlucks.”
Beau gave a low chuckle from his corner. “That’s the most accurate description of this place I’ve ever heard.”
“Where did you go?” I asked, hoping for a crumb of information.
Beau fixed me with an apologetic look. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.
Outside, wind stirred the trees with a hollow groan. Somewhere within the walls, the organ gave a single discordant note, as if the building itself was responding. The moment stretched, thick and strange.
Then Zelda broke it by sneezing again, this time loud enough to rattle the sconce above her head. “Okay, if I inhale one more ounce of this mildew, I’m hexing someone’s ancestors.”
I smirked. “You’d enjoy that.”
“Only if they’re charming and full of unresolved trauma.”
She shot a look at Beau.
He grinned. “Darlin’, I’m practically a buffet.”
The levity barely held. Beneath it, the tension hummed like an electric current beneath damp wood and candle smoke.
The pieces were aligning, but something still didn’t fit.
A corner missing. A detail too convenient.
And worse… there was that feeling again.
That pull. I looked down at the phone in the plastic Ziplock. At the text.
You should’ve stayed gone.
“Someone was waiting for him to come back,” I mused. “But how do we find out who?”
Beau shrugged. It was probably a good thing he was so pretty. I can’t imagine he’d been super helpful when he was alive, either.
Zelda lifted her hand up to inspect her flawless manicure. “I might have an idea.”
“Terrifying,” I told her, tucking the phone into my bag and brushing dust from my jeans as I stood. “We just need to ask the questions Beau can’t. And if we’re lucky?” I looked toward the charismatic ghost next to me. “Maybe we’ll get answers before someone decides we’re asking too many.”