The Mortician’s Daughter

by Nan Higgins

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to sneak into the office soon,” Sloane said. I thought she was joking, but her expression was serious.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “You asked me to help with this, right? And the best way to figure out why Mrs. Braverman is still here and how to get her moved on is to get our questions answered.”

  “That’s true.” I’d made my peace with lying, as it seemed to be essential to my survival. But breaking and entering? That was next level, and even though I couldn’t see a way around it if we were going to get the answers we needed, I didn’t feel great about it.

  “Aw, look at you two,” Macy said. “The couple who breaks into funeral homes together stays together.”

  “Shut up,” I told her, but Sloane laughed and took my hand.

  “Hopefully that’s true,” she said. Crooked smile. Blush. I hoped it didn’t freak Sloane out to hear someone refer to us as a couple. “Listen, before we get too sidetracked, I need to tell you what my mom said.”

  “Okay. Is it bad?”

  “Not bad. Just confusing. I feel like the more answers we get, the more questions we have.”

  I was relieved to hear her verbalize what I’d been feeling since we started training. “What do you mean?”

  “She told me that the only time she knew of people who could communicate with priors before they were released was when they inherited interpretation from both parents, but only one parent made the ward of protection at birth. The ward is designed to protect the DNA from the parent who places the ward, but it doesn’t protect from dual parentage.”

  “Well, there has to be another reason that she doesn’t know about,” I said. “My mom isn’t an interpreter.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Macy asked.

  “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”

  “I mean, you just found out about your dad,” Macy said. “This whole world exists that you never even knew about. Isn’t it possible that your mom could be an interpreter?”

  Another brick had been added to the weight I carried, and I felt myself crumble underneath it all. It seemed not only impossible but also unbearable to consider that my mom wasn’t who I believed her to be and that the lie my parents had told might be even bigger than I thought.

  I turned to Sloane. “You tell us. You’re the one who was brought up as an interpreter, and you know all about my dad and his history in AfterCorps. You know more about my heritage than anyone. Have you ever heard about my mother being an interpreter?”

  “As far as I know, your mom is a reg. She’s aware of AfterCorps, of course. She essentially runs the surface business for your dad since his responsibilities as a special are a full-time job and then some.”

  “Right. So, it has to be something else. Did your mom have anything else to say about it?”

  “That was all she knew.”

  “That was the emergency you had to come over in the middle of the night to tell us about?” Macy smirked.

  “Hey, I didn’t tell you I needed to come over. But I wasn’t going to turn down the invitation.”

  “You know what?” Macy asked, and she stood. “We need more snacks.”

  “More snacks?” My stomach turned over a little at the thought of more junk food after all we’d consumed already.

  “I’m being a good hostess. Sloane hasn’t eaten anything. Besides, I need more popcorn if we’re going to watch another movie. Sloane, can you stay and watch one with us?”

  “Sure. And popcorn sounds great.”

  “Awesome,” Macy said, and she shuffled upstairs.

  Sloane brushed her fingers across my forehead. “How’s the nog?”

  “Better. Thanks to you.” A warmth spread across my head where her fingers traced my skin, and my pulse quickened.

  “I’m glad,” she whispered, and our faces were so close. She kissed my forehead, her lips skimming my hairline, then my eyelids, and then her mouth was on mine. It wasn’t a deep kiss like we’d had the day before, but a gentle one. Our lips parted, and she rested her hand on my shoulder. She pulled back and looked into my eyes. “I’m going to protect you.”

  “Protect me from what?” I was simultaneously happy and concerned. I loved that she wanted to protect me, but I knew that, in the event that Clara did try to hurt me, there would be very little Sloane could do. She couldn’t even interact with a prior without her guardian present.

  Her gray eyes darkened as if a cloud passed across them. “It’s not right that your father kept you in the dark about AfterCorps all these years. It’s good work, important work, but there are aspects of it that are more dangerous than you know. I don’t even know the extent of the danger, but at least I’ve been prepared for the fact that what I’ll be doing could get me hurt, and I know the basics of what’s expected. You’re coming to this completely unprepared.”

  “And you think that’s going to put me in danger?”

  “It already has. Look what’s been happening to you.”

  “But that’s not my dad’s fault.”

  “Isn’t it?” She touched my head again.

  “Snacks!” Macy appeared at the bottom of the stairs with a bowl of popcorn and a second bag of Milk Duds I hadn’t even seen her buy.

  I dragged a third bean bag chair out from the corner and sat between Sloane and Macy. We watched Leprechaun 4, the one where they go to space. With a lot of effort, I was able to focus on the terrible movie and the feel of Sloane’s hand on my leg. At the end, Sloane said she needed to be getting home, and I told her I’d walk her out.

  We stood next to her car together, and she leaned in for a hug. We held each other for a couple minutes before she pulled back, touched my chin, and kissed me. I realized every time we kissed, it made me hungry for more. I wanted to kiss her when it wasn’t time for one of us to leave; I wanted long, lingering kisses, deep and hard and soft and slow. I wanted all of her kisses, and that wasn’t all I wanted.

  “Aria,” she breathed.

  “Yeah?” I tried to keep my own breath even.

  “After that movie you just made me watch, I don’t ever want to hear about my taste in music again.”

  I grinned. “No promises.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  On Monday, Nick announced we’d be getting our first field agent apprentice assignments by the end of the week.

  “I thought we were supposed to intern with the clerks first,” Sloane said.

  “Normally, you’d be right,” he said. “But since you two are a little late to the party, we are doing some accelerated plans. You’ll go over and shadow the clerks a bit this week, probably Wednesday and Thursday, see what they do and what the day-to-day is for them. It won’t be a formal apprenticeship like you would have had if you’d quickened at eighteen or twenty. The goal is to get you guys up to speed so you’ll be ready to become full interpreters by twenty-five. That means we have a lot to cover in a short amount of time, so we need to condense some things.”

  “Does that mean we won’t be learning as much?” A few days ago, I wouldn’t have minded that our training was going to be shorter than expected, and it surprised me to realize I cared about learning everything I could. Somehow, I’d begun to want to know all the ins and outs of being an interpreter.

  “Not at all. You’re still getting all the knowledge you need; we’ve just sped up the pace.”

  I wasn’t completely sold. If most interpreters started their training by the time they were twenty, we were a full two years behind. How could they really cram five years of training into three years and say it was just as good?

  Nick must have guessed my thought process. “Listen, when trainees come in here at eighteen or twenty, a lot of what we do is develop the maturity to handle what is happening. We can skip most of that with you guys because not only are you twenty-two, you’re both mature in general. We also only train two or three days a week when the quickening happens that early, as opposed to bringing you in for five days.”

  “What hap
pens when I start my field agent assignment, as far as my surface job?” I asked. “It’s going to be tough scheduling singing for funerals around me being out in the field, right?”

  “Your parents have decided that for your portion of assignment training, you’ll only be performing the aspects that get completed here at AfterCorps,” Nick said. “You won’t be going into the field.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Your parents are still doing a bang-up job of telling you what’s going on with your own life, I see.” Those deep grooves appeared again on his forehead, and he rubbed his temples. “It was a condition your mother set.”

  “But why?” I couldn’t understand my parents. They wanted me to give up everything to go to ghost training, and now that I was here, they were putting caveats on what I could do and how much I could learn. It made no sense.

  “Talk to them,” he said, and it felt as if his voice stabbed me. He softened a bit. “I’ll speak to your father again on your behalf. He needs to do a much better job of keeping you informed. He acts as if none of this even affects you.”

  “I agree,” Sloane said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  Fresh anger swelled in me. I’d been so angry that I wasn’t going to live the life I’d planned that I hadn’t spent enough time examining why this life had been so hidden. My parents had known there was more than a fifty percent chance I’d be an interpreter, yet they’d let me build my dreams around my musical aspirations. They knew being an interpreter was dangerous and had left me unprepared and unprotected. They hadn’t been able to control whether I inherited the interpreter gene, but they had complete control over how they communicated with me since my quickening, and they were doing it very badly.

  “Nick,” I said. “Would you be willing to sit and talk to my parents with me? I’m getting all my information through you, and I know you’re not comfortable telling me what is obviously stuff I should be hearing from them. Maybe if we talk to them together, they’ll be more willing to give up the goods.”

  “You want to strong-arm them into telling you everything?” he asked, a small smile on his face.

  “If that’s what it takes, yeah.”

  “Let me think about it. You might be on to something.”

  Now that I was invested in learning what it would take to be an interpreter, I didn’t want the half-assed version of training, nor was I willing to continue to accept my parents robbing me of knowledge that would inform my decisions and keep me from harm. I hoped Nick would agree to help me, but I was going to get some answers, with or without him.

  * * *

  “Hey,” Sloane said after class, “when is the next funeral you’re singing at?”

  “Wednesday afternoon. Why?”

  “I was thinking, maybe that would be a good time for me to poke around in the office and see what I can find about Mrs. Braverman.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yeah, think about it.” She spoke faster when she got excited. “Everyone is busy during the funerals; they don’t have time to hang out in the office. Your mom, the one who usually goes in and out, will be accompanying you on the piano, right? So she won’t be in there. It’s perfect.”

  “Snooping around the office when the funeral home is packed isn’t exactly perfect.”

  “Okay, not perfect. But it’s a decent plan.”

  “It’s an okay plan.”

  “Fine, fine.” She laughed. “If we come up with a better plan before Wednesday, we’ll do that. If we don’t, will you at least think about this one?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  * * *

  But on Wednesday, we hadn’t come up with a better plan. I’d been racking my brain looking for opportunities to sneak, and short of breaking in after hours, I couldn’t think of an idea better than Sloane’s.

  “Aria?”

  “Huh?” I broke from my deep thoughts to see Sandy Dennison, Sloane’s mom, staring at me.

  “I was telling you how we process the field agent assignment paperwork after we get the information to the priors,” she said.

  I’d been sitting at Sandy’s station all morning, learning how to establish the start of prior-field agent relationships and the importance of good customer service and thorough explanations, as well as detail oriented processing procedures.

  When Nick told me that I’d be shadowing Sandy, I felt as if it was the perfect opportunity to score some brownie points and make an awesome impression with my crush’s—or possibly my girlfriend’s—mom.

  Instead, I’d been distracted, my mind busy trying to think of a better solution to the Mrs. Braverman problem than having Sloane snoop around when there would be close to a hundred people milling about in the building.

  “Are you okay, love?” Sandy’s eyes were brown, not gray, but her eyebrows furrowed the same way Sloane’s did when she was concerned. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I…I have to sing at a funeral this afternoon. I guess I’m already thinking about that. I don’t think I’ll have time to do a run-through like I normally do.”

  She smiled. “I can let you go a little early if that will help.”

  “It might. Thank you.”

  “No problem. Here, take these papers over to Janet at the other end of the counter, will you?”

  “Sure.” I took the stack of forms.

  Sloane was shadowing Janet, and if I could get her away for a moment, maybe I could make a last-ditch effort to talk her out of sneaking into the office.

  “Sandy asked me to give you these,” I told Janet.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  “Hey, I’ll walk you back over there,” Sloane said. “I need to ask my mom something, if that’s okay with you, Janet?”

  “Of course, that’s fine.”

  “Are you still planning on going through with this madness?” I whispered as we took baby steps back to her mother’s station.

  “Have you come up with anything else?” she asked.

  “You know I haven’t.” I scowled.

  “Look, I’m not going to do this if you’re dead set against it. I think it’s our best shot right now, but if you think it’s that bad an idea, I’ll scrap it, and we can figure something out later.”

  “I don’t know. Your mom is letting me leave early to go practice. Do you think you can cut out a little early too? Meet me upstairs?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Sloane,” Sandy said when she saw us. “How’s Janet treating you?”

  “She’s sweet. No complaints.”

  “Good. Maybe we can talk you into being a clerk after all?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” She wrapped her mom in a tight hug when Sandy’s face fell. “But anything’s possible.”

  * * *

  Mom and I ran through “How Great Thou Art” a couple times before she went to take her place at the piano in the main parlor.

  “Are you coming?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m going to run to the restroom, and then I’ll be there.”

  “Don’t take too long; it’s less than ten minutes before the funeral.”

  I stepped out into the hall and waited for Sloane. The minutes slipped by, and two minutes before the funeral started, I was getting ready to give up when I heard Sloane whisper my name from down the hallway.

  “What took you so long?” I whispered. “I have to go in now.”

  “Sorry. Janet kept giving me more paperwork to file. Are you ready? Is this office empty?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay with me doing this?”

  I’d thought I’d have a couple minutes to talk things out a final time, but instead, I had about ten seconds to make the decision. “Go ahead. Just be careful.”

  “I will.” She grabbed my wrist and whispered, “Break a leg, babe.”

  I sat next to my mother and made sure my chair was turned so that I
could see the door to the office. I didn’t have a plan in case Nick or my dad or one of the funeral goers decided to go in, but it made me feel better to have a good view.

  The minister welcomed the mourners and began her short sermon, we sang a hymn, and the deceased’s son gave a eulogy. Finally, it was my turn to sing, and when I was finished, there would be a prayer, and the funeral would be over. I stood, and my mother played the intro. I breathed deeply and began to sing. I had just gotten to the end of the first verse when my dad passed behind the last row of people with an empty box of tissues and went toward the office. I wanted to lunge past the people in their folding chairs and put myself between the door and my father, but that wasn’t an option. Instead, I kept singing as my dad opened the door and went in, closing it behind him.

  I was nearly to the end of the song when he came back out with a new box of tissues and handed them to a bereaved woman. I finished the last note, my voice much steadier and stronger than I felt, and sat.

  I hurried to the empty office at the end of the service and got my purse out of the coat closet. I hadn’t seen Sloane leave, and she was nowhere in sight, and I was worried that something had gone very wrong. She could have exited through the back hallway, but why would she go without telling me? I texted to ask what happened. By the time my phone buzzed, I was almost to my car where she was waiting for me.

  “Did my dad see you?” I asked.

  “What? No. He came into the office?”

  “Tissue refill. Did you find anything?”

  “Nope. I looked through all the drawers, but there wasn’t much of anything in terms of paperwork besides funeral arrangement agreements, and even those were over five years old. I’m guessing Jasper Funeral Home has gone completely digital. I tried the computer, but we didn’t think about needing a password.”

  I groaned. “Dummies.”

  “Not dummies,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t make a habit of hacking into business systems.”

  “And here I thought you were an expert.” I frowned. “What now?”