Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  Once again, around midday Gottfried settled down in the kitchen for paperwork. After Elizabeth’s attempted document-signing trick, I’d decided to hang around the whole day and had brought lunch with me. So while Gottfried pored over his notes and blueprints, I found a relatively dust-free spot at the counter to eat my ham sandwich and apple.

  C.W. came to speak to Gottfried, got snarled at for not meeting code, and then grabbed a Coke out of the refrigerator, one of the few appliances in the house that was plugged in.

  “You ready to change jobs and go into construction?” he asked me.

  “I’m thinking not. You guys work too hard. And I’d probably never be able to keep to the code.”

  “The what?”

  “I heard Gottfried saying something about keeping to the code.”

  He laughed. “He meant the building code. This house was built long before a lot of the regulations were established, but our renovations have to be up to code.”

  “So it’s nothing to do with pirates?”

  “Just Captain Bligh over there.”

  I lowered my voice. “Sorry Gottfried is giving you a hard time. Revenants aren’t good at compromise.”

  “Gottfried was never good at compromise. He’s actually easier to deal with now than when he was alive.”

  “Seriously? Why did you work with him?”

  “Because when the job was done, I knew it was something that would last. That made it worthwhile.”

  He finished his Coke and headed off for code-meeting while Gottfried continued to bark orders at everybody in range. Since he didn’t look as if he was going to be moving any time soon, I said, “Gottfried, I’m going to go visit the little houngan’s room.”

  Since my bladder capacity didn’t affect the task at hand, he didn’t bother to respond.

  The bathrooms were not in usable condition, which meant I had to brave a Porta-Potty. That was enough to make me go as fast as possible, even if I hadn’t been on watchdog duty. But despite the added incentive, by the time I got back to the kitchen, Gottfried was gone.

  I wasn’t immediately alarmed—he hadn’t promised to stay put, after all. So I spent a few minutes looking for him. When I had no luck, I started asking all the workmen I came across if they’d seen him. That was worse than useless because construction workers concentrating on their work don’t pay attention to the clock, so I couldn’t tell who’d seen him last.

  I finally spotted him after I’d gone outside—C.W. thought Gottfried went to inspect some ongoing work on the foundation, but he was actually inside when I spotted him at the entrance to the second-floor balcony. As I watched, he stepped over the yellow caution tape that had been strung up to block the entrance.

  I wanted to call up to warn him to be careful but was afraid to distract him. Instead all I could do was hold my breath as he bent over to examine the junction of the balcony with the house. I heard rather than saw the wood give way, and later decided that I must have screamed when he tried to grab for a handrail that splintered under his weight.

  Even at that distance, I could still sense that Gottfried was aware, but a split second after he started to fall, I felt him give up the ghost. All that hit the ground was a body that had been dead for weeks.

  PEOPLE CAME RUNNING from all directions, but the first to reach Gottfried was Elizabeth. She turned away when the smell got to her, her hand over her mouth. I thought she was going to cry, but then she saw me and she went from sad to furious in nothing flat.

  “You incompetent moron! You let him die again!”

  “I didn’t do anything. He fell!”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “A real houngan can keep a revenant alive for months, years. You can’t even manage two days.”

  “He fell,” I repeated. “The floor he was on broke. Go look!” But in looking at the faces around me, I could tell nobody really believed me, and nobody rushed up to examine the evidence, either. “Fine, I’ll raise him again and we’ll ask him what happened.” I wasn’t completely sure that Gottfried would care enough about the question to answer it, but if I framed his repeated “deaths” as a barrier to finishing the job, it might get his attention. “Get me a sacrifice and I’ll get him up and moving again.”

  But Mrs. Hopkins was shaking her head. “No, we can’t do it to him again. You said it yourself—a revenant has to want to stay long enough to finish the task. It’s clear that Gottfried doesn’t. We have to let him rest.”

  “He doesn’t want to rest!” I protested.

  “Obviously he does,” Von Doesburg said. “It seems to me that if you’d done your job properly, you’d know that. I think the courts will agree with me.”

  “There’s no need for that—I’m sure Dodie did her best,” Mrs. Hopkins said kindly, “but it’s over. I need to see about getting Gottfried back to his grave.”

  The people there didn’t literally turn their backs on me, but they might as well have. Even C.W. just shook his head sadly when I looked at him.

  “I’ll mail your check back tomorrow,” I said to nobody in particular, and walked away.

  MY PHONE RANG as I walked in my front door, and the voice on the other end said only, “The council be wanting to see you at full dark.” Then whoever it was hung up.

  It was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall. Maybe there was something to the loa business—how else could they already know?

  I knew Papa Philippe would want me to dress the part, so I took the time to rummage around and find my loose cotton skirt and blouse, the myriad strings of beads and amulets, and the curly black wig I’d worn as an apprentice. Then I fastened on my tignon of calico scarves knotted together, needing a dozen bobby pins to keep it on my head. It was while I was applying makeup six shades darker than my real complexion that I got a good look at myself in the mirror. And nearly laughed my ass off.

  So when I arrived at the Order’s compound, it was only after I’d washed my face, pulled the tignon from my head, dumped the jewelry onto the floor, and changed into blue jeans and my Shaun of the Dead T-shirt.

  Screw ’em if they couldn’t take a joke.

  A pair of apprentices—one in tignon, one in top hat—was waiting for me at the head of the path leading to the council’s gathering place with burning torches in hand. They didn’t speak, but produced some excellent expressions of contempt when they saw my clothes. I just said, “Hey, fabulous outfits! Are those new looks for you?”

  They led the way down the path until I could see a clearing with the roaring bonfire the council kept lit no matter what the weather was, then stopped. Obviously I was supposed to make the rest of the trip on my own.

  “Tweet me!” I said to my exiting escorts as I followed the dusty path to the gathering place. The fire should have been comforting in the chill of a fall evening, but it really wasn’t.

  I stepped into the center of the clearing and waited. I knew there were people around me, but I couldn’t see them until somebody struck a match. Then I could just barely make out the features of Papa Philippe as he walked around the edges of the clearing, stopping every few feet to light a candle in the hand of a council member. There were thirteen candles—the full council was there. It wasn’t a good sign.

  Then Papa Philippe came to stand beside me, which was a relief. At least he was still willing to act as my sponsor.

  Tante Ju-Ju was standing in the middle of the row of council members. “I see you, Dodie Kilburn. I want you to tell me what you been doing since I talked to you before.”

  I did so, ending with my walking back toward my car after Gottfried’s fall.

  “And you just leave after that?”

  “I thought about it, but no, I didn’t leave. I turned around and went back.”

  There were murmurs from the rest of the council, but Tante Ju-Ju kept eyeing me. “What you waiting for? Keep on talking.”

  I REALLY HAD intended to drive off in ignominious defeat, stopping only at the nearest Publix to pick up a gallo
n of fudge ripple ice cream, but just before I got to the car, I turned around and stomped back to the people clustered around Gottfried’s body.

  Somebody had found a tarp to lay over him, and most of the workers had wandered away, but the key players were still there: Mrs. Hopkins, Elizabeth, C.W., Von Doesburg, and Scarpa.

  “Hang on,” I said, “something stinks here, and I’m not talking about Gottfried.”

  Elizabeth sputtered, but I didn’t give her a chance to go into a righteous tirade.

  “I spent all of yesterday with Gottfried and he was fine. I spent half of today with him and he was fine. But the second I leave him alone, he falls. Again. Don’t you people think that’s just a little bit suspicious?”

  “What are you talking about?” Elizabeth said.

  “I’m talking about murder.” Well, technically it wasn’t, since you can’t murder a dead man, but it sure got their attention. “I know Gottfried’s will was strong, so he didn’t just die, and I don’t believe he had two accidents. Somebody either pushed him, or set a trap. Both times.”

  “Who would have done that?” Mrs. Hopkins asked. “And why?”

  “Why does anybody kill somebody else? Either the killer hated Gottfried or he—or she—benefited from his death.”

  I spent a second considering the possibility that Hopkins had been the one, mainly because of the way she’d refused to let me raise him a third time, but it didn’t compute. She needed him to finish the job, and I hadn’t picked up on the first hint of her having anything against him.

  “This is ridiculous,” Scarpa said, starting to inch away. “I’m not going to stand here and be accused of . . . Of whatever it is you’re accusing me of.”

  “I haven’t accused anybody yet. But you—and the rest of you, too—can stand here and listen, or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Von Doesburg scoffed. “Call the cops? There’s been no crime committed.”

  “I won’t call the cops. I’ll call the loa.” The disadvantage of being a houngan is that people think you can commit creepy acts. The advantage is that people think that you will commit them.

  “What do you want from us?” Scarpa asked in a strangled tone.

  “Answers. And the loa will know if you’re lying.” Of course, the loa wouldn’t have told me squat, but they didn’t know that. Having already tentatively eliminated Mrs. Hopkins from my list of suspects, I went on to Elizabeth. “Did you talk to Gottfried while I was in the bathroom?”

  “How would I know when you were in the bathroom?”

  “Okay, fine. Did you talk to him while I wasn’t around?”

  “No. I was in the trailer most of the day unsnarling purchase orders.”

  “Did anybody see you?”

  “People came in and out, but nobody was with me constantly.”

  “Okay.” I made as if to turn to somebody else, then jerked back to her—I’d seen the maneuver on TV. “What was that paper you tried to trick Gottfried into signing yesterday?”

  “I wasn’t trying to trick him!” she said. “It was something he’d promised to do before he died, but he never got a chance.”

  “What was it?”

  “A recommendation letter. I’m applying to architecture schools. I figured I could get his signature and then fudge the date to make it look like he’d done it before he died.”

  C.W. said, “Gottfried told me that she was applying, if that helps any.”

  Actually, it did. Even if Elizabeth had wanted to kill Gottfried for some reason, she wouldn’t have done so until he signed her paper. True, she could have forged it, but she could have done that anytime.

  On to C.W. He’d been awfully nice to me—maybe he’d had an ulterior motive. “What about you?” I said to him. “If Gottfried was out of the way, you could have gone on to finish the renovation your way.”

  “My way? I don’t have a way. I’m a builder, not a designer. You give me a blueprint or even something sketched on a napkin, I’ll build it, but I wouldn’t know where to start on a project like this.”

  I would have loved to have a loa with a lie detector standing by, but he sure sounded sincere to me. “Then tell me this. Did you see Gottfried any time today when I wasn’t with him?”

  “No, you were sticking to him like glue.”

  “All right then, Mr. Von Doesburg and Mr. Scarpa. Same question. Did you speak to Gottfried at any time today when I wasn’t around?”

  Scarpa shook his head vigorously, but Von Doesburg said, “Yes.”

  “You did?” I said, surprised that anybody had admitted it.

  “I went looking for him, as a matter of fact, and found him on the second floor examining flooring. I assume it was after you left him.”

  “What did you want with him?”

  He gave me a condescending smile. “I wanted his advice on a project I’m working on—it’s fairly technical. I could explain it, but only another architect could understand.”

  “Did he help you?”

  “We talked for a few minutes, but then he said he needed to check something on the balcony. I thanked him for his time and went into an empty room to call my office. Then I heard a scream and ran outside. I suppose somebody else could have been upstairs when we were and followed Gottfried, but I didn’t see anyone.”

  I was about to make a stab at Scarpa when I realized what Von Doesburg had said. “Dude, you’re so busted.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Okay, all of you have interacted with Gottfried since I first got him back. Has he expressed any interest in anything other than finishing this house?”

  There was a round of heads shaking.

  “He wouldn’t even sign Elizabeth’s paper—something he’d promised to do—because it wasn’t directly connected to his task. So why would he have given Von Doesburg advice about a different project?”

  “I’m no expert in zombie behavior,” Von Doesburg said, “so I can only tell you what happened.”

  “Bullshit,” C.W. said. “The boss wouldn’t have given Von Doesburg the time of day when he was alive. Everybody knows he thought the man’s work was crap.”

  “I assure you that Gottfried respected me as a colleague,” the developer said, but he was sweating.

  “Let’s find out for sure,” I said. “Let’s ask Gottfried.”

  “SO YOU DONE raise him again?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.

  I nodded. “I hope that’s it, too—it gets harder every time. But Gottfried came back. His body is a bit banged up from the falls, but he’s still willing to do the task. And when I worded the question the right way—asking him what work needed doing on the balcony—he told us that it was Von Doesburg who told him to check for termite damage. Which there was, only not in the place Von Doesburg told him to look. Von Doesburg set him up to fall, and probably pushed him down the stairs the other time, too.”

  “Why he want to get rid of a revenant so bad?”

  “We’re not absolutely sure because Von Doesburg has clammed up, but I started thinking about what Gottfried said about substandard building materials, and how he wasn’t building an Emerald Lake house. I got C.W. to take a look at Mr. Scarpa’s house, and apparently the place wasn’t built to code. Fixing it will be expensive and Scarpa said he was going to sue Von Doesburg to recoup his costs. Chances are that all the houses in the development have the same code violations. The man’s going to be bankrupt.”

  “You think that enough? Or are you gonna send the loa after him for messing with your revenant?” Tante Ju-Ju said, with an ironic twist to her lips.

  “Actually, I suggested to Mrs. Hopkins that the police just might want to investigate Gottfried’s real death a little more closely. After all, he must have discovered the problems with the Emerald Lake houses before he died, and from what I know about him, I don’t think he’d have kept quiet.”

  “Where the revenant be now? You didn’t bring him here.”

  “They’ve lost so much time these past couple of days that Gottfried
insisted on working through the night, and you know how hard it is to argue with a revenant. With Von Doesburg out of the way, I figured he’d be safe enough there—C.W. and Elizabeth will keep an eye on him.”

  “I think Dodie done us proud,” Papa Philippe said firmly. “If she not be bringing that man back, people start to think we can’t keep a revenant up and doing his task.”

  “Maybe she did—maybe she didn’t,” Tante Ju-Ju said. “Tell me this. That third time you bring him back, where you get that sacrifice?”

  I was so screwed. I’d been hoping nobody would ask that question, which was why I’d kept my hands behind me while I was talking. “I used my Order ring.” I held out the hand with the white mark that showed where the ring had been.

  There were audible gasps, and if looks could have killed, I’d have been revenant material. I was afraid to look at Papa Philippe, who must have been wishing he were anyplace on earth other than standing next to me.

  “Why you sacrifice that ring?” Tante Ju-Ju asked. “You got nothing else to give the loa?”

  “What could I have given them? My car? My computer? None of that is worth anything.”

  “But the ring be gold so that make it valuable?”

  “No! Yeah, sure the gold is worth something, but that’s not what made it valuable. A sacrifice has to mean something, right? The ring was the only important thing I had.”

  “Why it be so important?”

  Was this a trick question? She knew what that ring symbolized. “Papa Philippe gave me that ring when I became a houngan.”

  “You saying being a houngan is something special?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You the one who never be serious about what you doing!”

  “Sure, I make jokes. It’s a funny job—people are funny, and dead people even more so. That doesn’t mean I don’t take raising the dead seriously. I help people finish their life’s work so they can rest easy. If that’s not special, then I don’t know what is!”

  She looked at me for what seemed like a year. The other council members were looking, too, and probably Papa Philippe, too. Then Tante Ju-Ju smiled so wide it was almost scary.