Chapter 3 #2
“We were married.” Meredith sipped, her eyes watching me over the rim like a panther pretending to be disinterested.
“Wedding rings don’t always equal intimacy,” I pressed.
She smiled, slow and sharp, like a fox among the hens. “It burned hot and brief, like some romances do. Nothing about Beau was practical. He was charming, ridiculous, and entirely too much for his own good. But harmless.”
I tilted my head. “Harmless people don’t usually haunt funeral homes.”
“They do when they think it’s an encore.” She set her cup down with a soft clink, the sound as precise as a punctuation mark. “Beau loved being the center of attention. Alive, dead, or somewhere in between. This is just his final act.”
She made it sound so simple. So tidy. Like a man haunting his own funeral was a mildly embarrassing personality quirk, not a cosmic cry for help.
But it was too neat, too polished. The way grief often gets trimmed when it doesn’t fit the social calendar.
There was something too perfect about her stillness.
Too sculpted, like she'd filed her sorrow down to the bone and sealed it with poise.
She spoke in clean, deliberate words, like a woman telling a story she'd practiced in the mirror, over and over, until even the lies had lost their heat.
“Did he have enemies?” I asked, watching her carefully over the rim of my cup. The tea had gone cold, but I didn’t move. Neither did she.
Meredith chuckled, but the sound was brittle, like dry lavender crumbling beneath careless fingers.
“Darling,” she said, her smile a touch too sharp, “this is Assjacket.
Everyone has enemies. Especially if you're beautiful, rich, and prone to seduction. And Beau…” Her gaze slid out toward the garden as if his ghost might still be lounging somewhere under the hydrangeas.
“Beau had all three going for him, and he knew it. But someone who hated him enough to kill him?” She shook her head slowly, the gesture languid and dismissive, like the idea itself was quaint.
“That takes passion. The right kind of hate has teeth. That kind? You feel it in the marrow.”
“Any suspects come to mind?” I asked, my voice even, deliberate.
Her eyes didn’t flicker. Not even a twitch. Her expression stayed perfectly neutral, Southern charm polished to a high, strategic shine. “Not that I’d name,” she said smoothly, reaching for her teacup with the calm of someone who’d practiced holding her cards close for a very long time.
I nodded, letting the quiet bloom between us like fog. Slow. Smothering. Long enough to make her shift in her seat, just once. She didn’t like silence. “You said you hadn’t seen him for several days before his death,” I said, keeping my tone light, conversational.
“Yes,” she replied crisply, folding her hands in her lap. That single syllable was airtight.
I tilted my head. “From what I can tell, his spirit was anchored within hours. He was already attached to the funeral home before he died.”
Meredith blinked. Just once. But in a woman like her, that was enough.
Her shoulders tightened, a subtle shift masked by elegance.
One hand drifted back toward her teacup not to drink, just to hold.
A distraction. A shield. When she spoke, her voice was too light, too amused. “Maybe he just liked the decor.”
I didn’t smile. I didn’t blink. But something inside me settled, low and certain. That blink wasn’t a tell. It was a warning.
The air between us had thickened, and my gut (a reliable, cranky instinct) began to buzz. She was hiding something. Whether it was guilt or pride or just the need to control the narrative, I couldn’t tell. But something didn’t add up, and I hated liars.
A loud clink echoed from the hedgerow, followed by a distinctly Zelda-flavoured curse.
I excused myself with a murmured apology and rounded the corner to find Zelda crouched in a decorative herb patch, an edging brick in one hand, and her other actively gnawed by a garden gnome.
A real one. Two more had come to life nearby.
One had started pelting us with gravel, and the third had mounted a topiary deer and was waving what looked like a pair of Meredith’s underwear on a stick like a battle standard.
“What the actual—”
“I was just trying to test the local ley line flux!” Zelda yelped, smacking the bitey gnome with the brick. Stunned, he released his jaw and Zelda yanked her hand back. “But apparently these little creeps are enchanted. I may have accidentally awakened them.”
One of the gnomes made a shrill battle cry and headbutted her shin. “Ow!” Zelda growled.
“Stop. Animating. Things!” I hissed.
“I didn’t mean to!” she barked back. “They’re very sensitive!”
I yanked a charm pouch from my bag and tossed it onto the grass. The effect was immediate. Every gnome froze mid-attack, returning to their previously cheerful poses, one still clutching Zelda’s bootlace like a war trophy.
Zelda glared at the frozen tableau. “I’m starting to understand why Meredith has no pets.”
“She’s got them,” I muttered. “They’re just ceramic. And very stabby.”
Once we got back to the house, Meredith didn’t comment on our slight dishevelment. Her smirk said everything. She might claim that she didn’t believe in ghosts, but she definitely knew about magic.
“Charming companion you’ve got, Miss Hearst,” she quipped, glancing at Zelda.
“She’s an acquired taste,” I replied, brushing a leaf from my hair.
“Right back atcha,” Zelda shot back, tilting her head.
I took a breath. We were getting nowhere fast, and now I was on the verge of a rather monumental headache. So I decided to just level with Meredith. Woman to woman.
“Can you think of any reason why your dead husband doesn’t want to move on?”
She didn’t flinch, but she didn’t offer any other insights either. The silence that followed was loaded. Pressurized. Like something beneath her ribs was rattling its cage, begging to be let out. But Meredith just lifted her teacup again and took a measured sip, before looking me right in the eye.
“I don’t have a clue.”
* * *
Later that evening back at the funeral home, I made a new circle in the parlour.
While I didn’t think I had anything to fear from Beau, there could well be other spirits in the vicinity and I wasn’t about to throw out a house party invitation.
The salt hissed faintly as it hit the scuffed wooden floor, echoing in the stillness like a warning whispered through a cracked keyhole.
The candles flared to life one by one, little tongues of fire licking at the gloom, casting the wallpaper’s decayed floral patterns into ghostly relief.
The air was already cooler, already humming with ghoststatic…
that kind of low, electric hum that raised goosebumps and made the back of your neck itch like something was just about to reach out and touch it.
I exhaled slowly, centering myself. Breath. Flame. Focus.
Beau arrived as I finished the incantation, slipping into the room like a secret you weren’t supposed to remember.
Elegant, amused, and vaguely insufferable.
He leaned against the edge of the fireplace like it was his living room, eyes glinting with that same wicked charm that made him both suspicious and annoyingly likable.
“Didn’t get enough of me yesterday?” he asked, his voice honeyed with mockery, sweet, cloying, and entirely too aware of itself.
His presence settled low against my skin, denser than air, like humidity before a storm.
It wasn’t just cold. It pressed. I folded my arms, not because I was cold (although I was) but because I needed the barrier. “Meredith says you were harmless.”
He snorted, the sound brittle and dry as dead leaves. It bounced off the chandelier like a laugh that had forgotten how to be joyful. “Did she now?” The way he said it was sharp enough to cut something soft, and maybe that was the point. A wound made casually, almost on instinct.
“She also says you were dramatic,” I continued, unwilling to let him tug the reins. “That part checks out.”
He gave a ghostly bow, one arm sweeping wide in a gesture that would’ve made any theater director weep.
The shadows seemed to lean with him, like they were part of the act.
“Guilty as charged,” he said, that wicked half-smile playing at his lips, but there was something hollow behind it this time.
The kind of emptiness that felt... recent.
“Did she kill you?” I asked, direct as a scalpel.
He stilled. Just for a second. But it was enough.
The air dropped a few degrees, and the chandelier above us swayed gently, though there was no breeze.
He stared at me for a moment too long, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost its velvet edge.
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” he murmured, too casual. Too rehearsed.
“Not a real answer, Beau.” My voice was steady, but inside, something twisted. Because the ghost in front of me was performing — and badly. And the worst liars? Were the ones trying to convince themselves.
“It’s the best I’ve got,” he replied with a shrug that barely rippled his translucent shoulders. “I don’t remember. Not clearly. It was... sudden. One minute, I was here. The next, I was dead. And tethered. That’s not normal.”
“No lingering trauma? No slow fade?”
“Nope. Just lights out and lights up again.” His smile faltered for the briefest second. “Like someone hit the off switch on my soul and gave me a reboot.”
I frowned. Something about that phrasing itched under my skin. Tethered. It was starting to sound less like a haunting… and more like a trap.
“She said she hadn’t seen you for days.”
He chuckled, low and cold. “Well. Meredith always was a liar.”
His words slithered through the candlelight, unsettling and unbothered, and something in my gut twisted. I’d dealt with grief before. Obsession. But this? This was different. Like someone had neatly sliced the cord of what Beau remembered of his murder, tied it off, and hidden the knot.
“She’s polished her grief into a PR campaign,” I said, half to myself.
“She always did love a performance,” Beau said, drifting toward the piano and trailing his fingers over the closed lid. Dust puffed into the air like powdered secrets. “And she hated not being the most interesting thing in the room. In that respect, we really were quite perfect for each other.”
I watched him move, his form flickering ever so slightly, as if the veil between our worlds didn’t quite know what to make of him. Not a violent ghost. Not a vengeful one. Just... there.
“Is there anything else you remember?” I asked.
He paused again. His gaze drifted to the far corner of the room, where the light didn’t quite reach.
“I remember the smell,” he said softly. “There was... something buttery. Warm.” He turned back to me, smirk faltering. “Like a croissant.”
“I beg your pardon,” I started, frowning at what I assumed was a joke in very poor taste.
But Beau didn’t give me more. Instead he started to fade again, dissipating like fog under the weight of dawn. No dramatic exit. No swirling mist. Just... gone. Leaving me with more questions and a vague desire to eat flaky French pastries.
Assjacket was getting under my skin. The town had its hooks in me now.
The shadows were too long, the smiles too bright, the stories too neat.
Everything in this place wore some kind of mask, and the more I tugged at the edges the more I was convinced I’d find teeth lying beneath.
If I didn’t find the truth soon, I had a feeling it would do more than just haunt me. It’d swallow me whole.