A Ghostly Mortality: A Ghostly Southern Mystery (Ghostly Southern Mysteries)

by Tonya Kappes

  How many new clients was she talking about?

  There was something fishy and it wasn’t just the smell of the can of cat food.

  Chapter 16

  The can of cat food didn’t help me get any answers from the cat or clues to what it needed from me. The cat did stay around a little bit longer and allowed me to pet him a couple of times but not as long as he let Charlotte. I guess that was the beginning of trust.

  “What do you think Bea Allen did to get new clients?” I asked Charlotte when we went back to my apartment.

  She sat down on the couch next to me and the cat sat in her lap.

  “I don’t know.” She sighed and picked at the cat’s loose fur. “I guess you could go look at her files or something since she is going to The Watering Hole.”

  I turned my head toward her and a smile eased upon my lips.

  “I could just make a pit stop since I do need to go by Softball Junction like I promised Arley.” The plan could work. Burns Funeral wasn’t in the town square; it was clear on the other side of town and if Bea Allen wasn’t there, that meant it was empty, unless there were a dead body or two.

  I glanced up at the clock. I had plenty of time to snoop around and see what I could find out.

  “Let’s go.” I jumped up and grabbed the keys of the hearse.

  Within a couple of minutes, Charlotte and I were walking down the sidewalk near Burns Funeral. I didn’t park directly in front or in the driveway in case someone noticed. If someone saw the hearse parked in front of a house, they would think I was there to collect someone or just visiting for arrangements. I walked around the funeral home to see if I saw any motion or lights inside and walked to the service entrance on the side when I felt like the coast was clear.

  Burns Funeral Home building was really no different than Eternal Slumber. Both were very old Victorian homes turned into funeral homes. The stately brick houses had wonderfully large rooms with big windows, perfect for layouts. The crown molding was something new buildings didn’t have; they could try to duplicate but it didn’t add the same character. The character added to the feel of the importance of a nice send-off. Just like Eternal Slumber, there was a large front porch with a fence. Burns had yellow brick and white trim; Eternal Slumber had red brick with white trim. Both were beautiful, but the employees and owners were quite different.

  “Why are you going in this way?” Charlotte asked.

  “When Mamie and I had to get her teeth, she told me to go in this side because it’s always left open.” I recalled Mamie Sue Preston, one of my Betweener clients who had been killed over money. Mamie’s false teeth were supposed to go with her in her casket, but the Burns people had left them in her file. She was insistent that I get her teeth and stick them in her casket. Her buried casket.

  Lucky for me, Mamie had one of those old-time bells on top of her tombstone that had a string going down into the earth and into a tiny hole in her casket. She was a hypochondriac and said she wanted the string in case she was buried alive and could pull the string to ding the bell to alert the living that she’d been buried alive. I was able to slip the dental plate into the ground through the hole the string was hanging through, making Mamie a happy Betweener customer.

  “Now what?” Charlotte bounced on her toes. There was excitement in her eyes.

  “Calm down.” I laughed. I couldn’t help but wonder if this Charlotte was somewhere buried under the Charlotte she put on display for the world to see.

  “Emma Lee Raines, you are getting sneakier than Granny.” Charlotte smiled. “She used to drag me around and sneak in here when I was a kid.”

  “She did?” Charlotte could’ve knocked me over with a feather. She nodded her head. “You never told me that.”

  “There are a lot of things I didn’t tell you about me and Granny.” She turned her fingers in front of her mouth like she was locking it. “Tick-a-lock.”

  We both laughed at one of Granny’s old sayings when Granny couldn’t keep a secret for the life of her.

  The sunlight was fading fast. I still had to get to the softball field. I took my phone out of my back pocket and used the flashlight instead of turning on the lights once I got into Bea’s office. I didn’t want to bring any attention to me.

  There was a bag from the same undertaker convention in Des Moines that Sammy Hardgrove was going to use as a cover-up for his rendezvous with Charlotte. I picked up the photo booth photo Bea Allen had taken with a group of other conference goers with the date and time stamp of around the time Charlotte was killed.

  “Look.” I held the photo up. “Bea was at the convention.”

  “Good for her,” Charlotte snarked.

  “It means she didn’t kill you even though she said she’d get you back for taking her clients.” I took a deep breath. Not that I was unhappy Bea Allen Burns hadn’t killed Charlotte, but the two main suspects I had had true alibis. “It looks like we are starting from ground zero.”

  “Aren’t you still going to look around?” Charlotte asked.

  “Maybe just to be nosy and see who ‘and then some’ are.” The curiosity was getting to me while I was in here so I might as well do a little snooping. Besides, it was good gossip for Granny when she felt better.

  The files were still in the metal cabinet like they’d been the last time I had broken in. There was a new box of yellow files on her desk and a hole punch as if she were working on files. I waved the flashlight over the paperwork and immediately noticed Cheryl Lynne Doyle’s name.

  “No.” I grabbed the paper and took a closer look. “No way.”

  The thought that Cheryl Lynne would switch funeral homes, not that she was already with me at Eternal Slumber, but we were friends. Good friends. The Doyles were Eternal Slumber people, not Burns.

  “Well, well, well.” Charlotte stood behind me. “I thought Granny said you were five bodies deep.”

  “I am busy.” I put Charlotte aside and tried to wrap my brain around why Cheryl Lynne would not only make pre-need arrangements at Burns, but at her age.

  She and I were just a couple years apart and she was younger than me. She was in her mid-twenties. Were her parents’ pre-needs here?

  I scurried over to the filing cabinet and dragged my finger down the front until I reached the D drawer for Doyle. The metal wheels screeched when I pulled the drawer to full extension. My fingers danced along the top tabs of the files.

  “D-O,” I repeated until I got to the D-O’s. “D-O-Y-L-E.” There weren’t that many people in Sleepy Hollow with the last name of Doyle and not in the filing system either.

  “Emma,” Charlotte called. She was still standing over the desk looking down at the files. “I think you want to look at this.”

  Satisfied there were no Doyles in the filing cabinet, I walked back over and looked at what Charlotte was pointing to. It was a copy of Cheryl’s driver’s license.

  “It’s her license,” I said in a no-big-deal way. “You know that every funeral home requires different forms of ID.” I winked and joked, “In Hardgrove’s case it just so happens that you have to sacrifice your next of kin.”

  “Not next of kin. Try next kidney.” Charlotte bit the side of her lip. “I think I know what’s going on.”

  “Huh?” I looked back down at Cheryl’s driver’s license where Charlotte was tapping her finger.

  “The little round black circle is really the orange organ donation sticker they give you at the DMV when you sign up for organ donation.” She slid her eyes up to mine and her stare sent a chill down my spine. “It shows up black when you photocopy the license.

  “I’m an organ donor.” I wasn’t following what Charlotte was saying.

  “Emma.” Slowly, Charlotte’s chin lifted. Her mouth dropped open, and she had tears on the rims of her eyelids. She gulped. “I think I know who killed me and why.”

  “Tell me.” I begged her before she ghosted away. “Charlotte, get back here,” I demanded and jerked around the room.

&n
bsp; I called for her a few times on the way out of the funeral home and grumbled down the sidewalk when I realized she wasn’t around.

  The entire ride over to the softball field I thought about what had just transpired. First off, Cheryl Lynne was going to donate organs. That wasn’t a big deal, but something about seeing those files triggered something in Charlotte that made her believe she knew what was going on. Sammy was off the hook and Bea Allen was no longer a suspect, so who and why? Nothing was coming to me.

  Charlotte Rae was going to have to show up and tell me what she was thinking. I had no other leads.

  The lights around the field were on and Jack Henry loved that. He said that there was nothing better than playing under softball lights. The team had on their old uniforms from last year, but they still looked good.

  Jack jogged over when he saw me standing at the fence. My heart jumped seeing him coming toward me, propelling me back into high school. He would jog over to the fence and talk to Jade Lee Peel, his high school girlfriend and my last Betweener client, say a few words to her and jog away. There were so many times I had pretended to be her; not so much now since she’s six feet under and I was standing there.

  “Hey.” He curled his fingers around my fingers as they stuck through the fence. “How’s it going?”

  Without saying it, I knew he meant Charlotte.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head and saw Arley walking over. “She said something about knowing who killed her and why. Then poof.” I puffed my fingers out like fireworks, acting like Charlotte disappeared into thin air.

  “Ms. Raines.” Arley took his hat off. “You here to make good on your promise?”

  “I sure am.” I smiled. “And to talk to you about making an appointment for some information.”

  “Yeah.” He looked down and used the toe of his cleat to move dirt around.

  “I’ll see you for dinner?” Jack asked and squeezed my fingers. It hurt a little bit, but I didn’t care.

  “Sounds good,” I said and turned my attention to Arley. “Can you get the sizes of the guys and some equipment you might need and I’ll get it ordered?”

  “Sure. Doc gave me some bad news about my dad and I want to make sure I get things all cleared up.” He looked up. His eyes were sad.

  “You don’t want to use Hardgrove’s?” The question was reasonable.

  “I . . . um . . .” His hesitation only made me more curious.

  “You what?” I asked. “Do you know something about Charlotte’s death?”

  “No!” He was quick and loud. “I mean, no. I just don’t know what kind of mood they are in since her death. I mean, it’s like business as usual. Even Mrs. Hardgrove is in there.”

  “Mrs.? As in the mom?” It had been years since I’d seen her.

  “Mrs. Mary Katherine Hardgrove.” Hearing her name sent a jolt to my gut. Mary Katherine was not an undertaker. “She’s like living there. Going through everything as if she owns the place.”

  The softball field spun around me. The lights were like a spotlight on Arley and me. “Mary Katherine? As in Sammy’s wife?” Suddenly all the air left my body and I started to gasp.

  “Are you okay, Ms. Raines?” Arley asked.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I waved my hand in front of me. I couldn’t help but wonder what deal Gina Marie had given Mary Katherine. If Mary Katherine had taken over Charlotte’s job already, she had something to blackmail Gina Marie and vice versa.

  “When I hired you, I told him to stay far away from this location. And now he tells me he is leaving his wife, which will put a piece of Hardgrove’s hard-earned dollars in her hands. Something I cannot let happen. Does this have anything to do with you? Because I swear if it does, you’ll regret it! Plus, you need to sign off on those papers your crazy sister was flapping her lips about because you are in breach of contract.”

  I gulped. Had Charlotte remembered something about Gina Marie and her job when we were at Burns? It only made sense.

  “Anyways, if my dad doesn’t get a lung soon, then he is going to die.” Arley’s lips turned down.

  “Oh. He’s on the donor list?” Donor list? When we saw the donor sticker at Burns Funeral Home, Charlotte went blank and that was when she disappeared. “I’m sorry, Arley, but I’ve got to get going.” I walked backward toward the hearse. “Let me know what I can do for you!” I called out.

  Charlotte was at Hardgrove’s Legacy Center. I could feel it . . . in my organs.

  Chapter 17

  My phone chirped in a text while I was zipping out of Sleepy Hollow and heading back to Lexington. Specifically, Hardgrove’s Legacy Center. If my hunches were right, then I knew exactly why Charlotte Rae was killed, but not sure by who. The only person who truly wasn’t accounted for on the morning of Charlotte’s death was Gina Marie. She loved her family. She loved her family business. And she loved the life she lived. It only seemed right to get rid of someone who was going to change that for you. In Gina Marie’s case it was Charlotte because Charlotte held the key to Sammy’s divorce, and no one had anything to gain from a divorce but Mary Katherine Hardgrove. By eliminating Charlotte, Gina Marie’s life would not be affected . . . until Sammy got a conscience and told Mary Katherine everything.

  I had the entire scenario played out in my head and I was going to confront Gina Marie.

  I waited until I made it to the gates of Hardgrove’s before I looked down at my phone. I figured it was Jack Henry wondering why I had scurried off so fast from the softball field, but it wasn’t. It was my mom. My heart sank. Before I had read her text, I knew she knew about Charlotte.

  She said that they didn’t have calling service and she’d had to be seen by a doctor when she got news about Charlotte. She and Daddy were on an elephant’s back and trying to get to civilization as quick as the damn lump could get them there—her words not mine. Her travel agent had booked them on the red-eye back to the United States and they would be here as soon as they could, which was probably going to be another thirty-six hours. She asked to keep Charlotte and the funeral arrangements open until she and Daddy got back.

  I simply texted back that I loved them and to be safe. I was taking care of everything and I’d be sure to keep Charlotte above ground until they got home. Little did they know, I couldn’t even get Charlotte, but I was determined to have this wrapped up before Momma and Daddy got home.

  The parking lot was empty except for the security guy’s car, so I parked around back next to the Dumpster. Somehow I had to get in Hardgrove’s to take a look at Charlotte’s body, get the papers she had for me in the top drawer and grab her outfit from her closet.

  There was a lot of work to do in very little time and, without her help, it was going to prove difficult.

  There were several service doors around the back of Hardgrove’s. Most of them were probably emergency exits from the banquet rooms and other behind-the-scenes rooms like the kitchen.

  Headlights darted down the side of the building and I took cover behind a Dumpster. The lights turned the corner and a white van barreled down, passing me and stopping a couple doors down. The man got out of the van and walked up to the door, giving it a good hard knock.

  The security guard stepped out and said a few things before he gave the man the go-ahead and propped the door open. The van driver walked to the back of the van and opened both doors. He let down a little ramp and rolled out one of those industrial linen baskets on wheels. When both men were inside, I tiptoed at a fast pace, hoping to get inside. The van had a dry cleaning logo on it. It wasn’t unusual for these bigger companies to come after hours to get the linens like the slipcovers, casket covers, table covers, along with all the other linens they used from all the other parties they hosted here.

  Before I could make it to the door, I heard them talking and getting closer. I ran to the back of the van and climbed in. There were several other baskets with fresh linens and some plastic bags with the hazardous symbol on them that we used during embalming. I jumped i
n one and shimmied my way to the bottom, moving around the plastic bags and covering my head with the clean linens.

  “This is a heavy one.” The van driver laughed. “Must be full of organs.”

  “Good.” The security guard’s shadow darted down into basket. “Get them out of here.”

  My body shifted to the side when the cart began to move. I tried to wedge myself with my feet and hands in a flat tent position. Thank God I was small.

  Full of organs? Huh? Shouldn’t it be full of clean linens and the hazardous bags we used for the organs to go out, not in?

  The sound of the beeping elevator let me know we were getting on and going down to the morgue, which was exactly where I wanted to go and see Charlotte’s body. It was one thing for the police not to release the body to the family because of the murder investigation, but another not to let us see her.

  The bumpy ride ended about five minutes later and when the sound of footsteps was followed up by the clicking of the door, I knew the coast was clear. Before I even emerged from the basket, I could feel the cold temperature of the morgue.

  I pushed myself up to get out of the basket and my hand landed on one of the plastic bags and something squishy. The ick factor made me move quicker and the shudder inside of me alerted me that something was very wrong with the linens.

  I took my phone out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight, hovering it over and in the basket. With the light shining down, I moved a couple of the fresh linens and stared at the clear bags filled with some sort of blood. I bent down and picked up the bag and held it up in the air before I realized what it was.

  “Oh my God.” Heavy and deep sighs escaped my body when I realized what was going on at Hardgrove’s.

  “What’s going on here?” The security guard had flipped on the light and found me standing there holding the fresh organ. Behind him was the dry cleaning guy with bags of ice propped up on his shoulder.

  “I’m here to get my sister.” My head turned toward Charlotte’s ghost, who was standing over her own body that was cut in a Y-formation with her blood circulating through a pump. My stomach curled. I felt dizzy and faint as I watched her body being kept warm for the organ extraction they were set to do to steal her organs.