Chapter 13
Unfortunately, I had to sleep. I was exhausted from gritting my teeth and dealing with my birthday, which was made worse by the party and then Amir. I could barely think after he leaves, and I tumbled into bed within the hour, then fell asleep way faster than usual.
But I’m up early. With it being my day off, I can dedicate my whole day to this little scavenger hunt. I’m out of my apartment by ten am, grab a coffee before heading to my car, and at the mortuary by ten thirty.
Unfortunately, Sarah is there too. What should be a quick conversation turns into a literal hour of me having to help her with whatever the hell she’s doing. Though by the end, I’m making every excuse I can to try to get away from her.
Finally, once she goes home after working for maybe four hours and graciously leaves me alone in the silent mortuary, I’m able to jog my ass back to the embalming room…where I pause. Stupid.
Find what Andrew was missing when you saw him that night. Start where I first saw you talking to your ghosts.
I can do this. It’s only been a week, and I cycle through my memories of Andrew, and the beginning of his embalming.
He was missing a chunk of his tongue, but I refuse to consider, even for a moment, that I’m looking for a piece of decayed, rotting flesh.
Mentally I go over the autopsy in my head, running my fingers through my hair.
My coffee is half empty by now, and I take another big sip.
The ring.
My mind flashes back to when Jenkins was retaking possession of the body, and I looked down to see the white line around the ring finger of his right hand.
It was pale and defined enough that I was sure he must have worn the ring for a while, and I remember offhandedly noting that he didn’t come in with it.
At the time, I just waved it off. After all, that’s not part of my job, and there were bigger things to worry about.
But today, it’s going to be my entire project.
The place where Amir saw me talking to ghosts is easier, but only because I’ve been cringing about it for the last week.
Anyone catching me doing that embarrasses the hell out of me, so it’s hard not to remember that I stood on the loading dock, trying to figure out why the motion light kept going off.
Now, I realize it was Amir. He was fucking watching me, even that night, when Andrew was brought in.
My feet take me outside, and I look around, not sure what I’m looking for.
If he tossed the ring out here, then it’s probably gone.
I can’t imagine it being in the same place considering how much time has passed, the wind and rain we’ve had, Cecil and I coming in and out, and just my luck with shit like this.
Sure enough, there’s no ring. I search around the doors, even getting down on my hands and knees to check every little cranny that I can find.
“Fuck,” I grumble, getting up. “Fuck, fuck this. What am I supposed to do?” My voice is louder than I intend, and I look around self-consciously, as if Amir is standing somewhere nearby to watch this for his enjoyment.
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were.
“Why were we out here that night?” The voice is male, and when I glance over my shoulder, I see Andrew’s face, though parts of it are…
not quite there. As if my brain can’t really remember exactly what he looked like beyond his messy brown hair and flat lips.
Freckles stand out on his skin, and today there’s a mole under his eye I don’t remember being there before.
When I blink, the mole is gone.
“What?” I ask him, indulging in the hallucination. “We were talking. That’s how he knows about this whole problematic situation, Andrew.” My words are brittle, and I roll my eyes at the ghost.
“No,” he replies patiently. “You weren’t out here to talk to me. Why were you out here?” He stands there, meeting my gaze, while I watch him with a nonplussed frown.
“I was out here to—” I break off, eyes narrowed.
“I was out here to investigate the motion light going off and sending an alarm to the laptop.” Turning toward the light sitting over its sensor, my eyes lock onto a paper flitting against the light, trapped between it and the wall.
“Oh,” I breathe, something unclenching in my chest. “Okay, well, that’s creative. ”
As I can’t reach the light myself, I end up having to go back inside to grab a stepstool. As I reach for it, I can’t help but imagine Amir doing the same. He’s not tall enough that he could have reached it without help either, unless he had one of those litter-grabbers, I guess.
The thought of him with one, snapping its tongs at his murder victims, nearly makes me grin despite myself.
When my fingers pluck the folded-up paper from the light, the step stool wobbles under me, and I’m quick to stumble my way back down until I’m once more on the asphalt.
I can feel Andrew over my shoulder as I open it, and he huffs out a small scoff at the words written in an elegant scrawl that my chicken scratch and I can’t help but envy.
Find the place where every arrival becomes a line of ink.
It occurs to me that I am terrible at this.
To give myself time to think, I pick up the step stool and put it back.
The phone rings while I do, forcing me to take a break to answer a call from one of Cecil’s clients holding a funeral here in three days.
She talks and talks, even though I tell her more than once that I am not Cecil nor Sarah, and I do not know how to help her.
In fact, I have no idea what she’s calling for.
But that doesn’t stop her from going and going.
Eventually, I sit down at Sarah’s desk, head in my hand, trying to find new ways to tell her I do not know how to help with what she’s calling about.
More than once, I explain to her that Cecil is gone for the day, only for her to continue trying to pry more help out of me.
She’d be better off asking literally anyone else.
But I suppose I’m not allowed to say that.
The woman goes on and on, and I have to remind myself she’s grieving her husband as I listen while staring at the clock on the desk like it’s going to flash through numbers faster and faster if I’m not watching.
Finally, at long fucking last, the woman agrees that she should probably wait for Cecil. Then proceeds to spend another two minutes making sure I’ve taken down her information correctly and that I promise he’ll get back to her by tomorrow.
“God.” I push to my feet, picking up the crumpled paper from outside, once more reading the words on it.
“Every arrival becomes a line of ink,” I murmur, trying to work through what that means.
I use the laptop when I’m cataloging a new entry.
There’s no reason to write things down when we have the glory of technology at our beck and call.
I never—
A light goes off in my head and I walk toward Cecil’s office. Something in me recoils, and I go through all the possibilities in my head before I push open his heavy, creaking office door.
“Sorry, Cecil,” I whisper as I look around his well-decorated office space.
He barely spends any time here anymore and mostly uses the private space to work with clients on the worst day of their lives.
He told me once that people prefer privacy when they’re going to break down over flowers, coffins, and funeral scheduling.
“Do you think your mom cried in an office like this?” Andrew skims his fingers over the old, nonfiction books on the shelves that Cecil had informed me were collected by his father and passed onto him when he inherited the mortuary.
“Or do you think she sat there, stone-faced and cold, like she did every day after that?”
“Don’t help,” I instruct dryly, turning to look at the ghost of Andrew for a second. I’m not stupid. I know Andrew is just voicing what I’m thinking, that he can’t exactly have independent thoughts of his own. But it still hurts, and it’s so hard not to wonder just that.
Did she cry?
Did she sit in an office like this one while making the arrangements for Elaina’s funeral? The details are blurry from back then, and no matter how I run the events over and over, I just can’t remember—
It doesn’t matter.
My movements become automatic as I move around to stand beside Cecil’s chair. I don’t have the audacity to sit down, so I gently pull open the top drawer where Cecil keeps the few things he actually uses in this shrine of an office.
Notepad. Pens. A stapler that’s been jammed since way before I got here.
Finally, his ledger. Even though he barely uses it anymore, he’s shown me the names that were marked down in this book for however many years. Before the computer, there was the ledger. Now, sometimes, there is still the ledger when Cecil wants to use his fancy pen or the computer is down.
“Sorry.” I sigh again, feeling like I’m intruding.
Carefully, I crack open the ledger and leaf through the pages of names.
Cecil’s handwriting is much like mine. That is to say, sloppy as hell and sometimes hard to read.
Some pages have marked-through names, others have a few empty lines marked through or used for comments about names above.
Halfway through, I find a folded-up piece of white paper. I huff out a breath and gently tug the paper free. It comes out easily, and with that found, I close the ledger and put it back in the drawer where I found it.
While I doubt Cecil would be mad at me for coming in here if I need something, it still feels like an invasion of his privacy. Unfolding the paper, I stare down at the ink on it, wishing the ring would just drop out.
But of course, I’m not that lucky.
I have no tailor, yet garments change here.
I have no painter, yet faces are restored.
I have no audience, yet every detail matters.
Seek the room where the final portrait is prepared without a canvas.