“Isn’t it just like you to be thinking about Garden View, even when you have so much else to do!” Finally at the tent, Ella hoisted her bag onto the lopsided card table under it and deposited it with a thunk. “Careful with that,” she said, moving forward to help when I lifted the twin tote. “We don’t want to aggravate that wound of yours.”
I stretched my left shoulder and felt a little pang in my side. “It’s fine,” I told her because she was already worried and there was no use making things any worse. Ella is the single mother of three teenaged girls. Worry is her middle name.
Not that I could blame her for her concern. She wasn’t used to sending an employee-me-off to a cemetery conference and having that employee-me-end up in the hospital with a gunshot wound. If only she knew all the things that happened in between!
Even after a couple months, the thought of nearly losing my body to the ghost who wanted to keep it for herself still sent heebie-jeebies up and down my spine. My solution was simple: I’d think about something else.
What’s that old saying about being careful what you wish for? No sooner had I decided to put everything that had happened to me in Chicago the winter before on the back burner than Ella reached into the closest tote bag and pulled out one of those little pink message slips.
“Don’t want to forget to give that to you.” She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and let’s face it, it should have been. It was. Until I glanced down at the message.
The words were carefully written by Jenine, the woman who worked the front desk back at Garden View and answered our phones when we weren’t around to do it ourselves. Give him a call sometime, it said. He’d like you to come out and visit. Jenine’s loose, flowing script was a sharp contrast to the icy claw that gripped my insides when I saw that on the line marked “From,” she’d carefully added, Your dad.
Ella tried to look casual when she leaned over my shoulder, but since she was a full head shorter than me and had to stand on tip-toe to read the message, her strategy didn’t exactly work. “Important?” she asked, as nonchalant as can be.
I stuffed the pink slip in the pocket of my black cotton sateen cargo pants. “Not really. I’ll take care of it later,” I said. I wondered if Ella knew I was lying to her and to myself.
“So…” I glanced at the overstuffed bags. A better strategy than thinking about my dad or about how last time we talked, I promised I wouldn’t let so much time pass again before I gave him a call. Except I did. I had. And really, there was no wondering why. If I talked to him, he’d ask me-again-to get on a plane and fly out to Colorado, and I’d have to come up with some excuse-again-to explain why I couldn’t.
Me? In a prison?
I’d rather shop for a new wardrobe at Kmart.
Seeing my dad, Gil Martin, the once-prominent plastic surgeon, in his khaki federal prison uniform… Well, if I did, it would make the whole thing all too real, wouldn’t it? Facing Dad would also make me face the facts: no matter how many times I told myself it couldn’t be true, it was. He really had done all those things the US attorneys accused him of. He really was guilty of Medicare fraud. And in the process of committing it, he’d betrayed his profession and his family. He’d hurt Mom so much she was hiding out in Florida. He’d broken my heart.
I cleared a sudden knot from my throat and concentrated on the totes. “You planning on camping out here or something?”
I could just about see the advice dripping from Ella’s lips. Instead, she grimaced to keep her opinions to herself and looked where I was looking-at those overstuffed tote bags. She was wearing a flowing orange skirt and an orange top with three-quarter sleeves. A trio of sparkling orange bracelets graced one arm. They were just summery enough and matched the beads around her neck in shades of melon, peach, and lemon that sparkled in the early morning sunlight.
“I needed to get these supplies over to you,” she said. “Log books, digital cameras, journals, T squares, and triangles. You know, for plotting out the new landscaping. There’s tracing paper and sketch books, too. Two sets of everything.”
I remembered my instructions to the ghosts-one line on the right and one on the left. “One set for each hand?” I asked Ella.
She laughed in the way Ella does when she’s nervous or a little unsure, and honestly, I wouldn’t have thought a thing of it if it also wasn’t the way she laughed when she was feeling guilty.
Nervous and unsure I could deal with. Heck, I’d never done a cemetery restoration. If I cared enough, I’d be nervous and unsure, too.
But guilty was another thing.
And wondering what Ella was feeling guilty about, I was suddenly a little nervous myself.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.” I looked at her hard as I said this, and I knew for sure something was wrong when she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“It was Jim’s idea,” she said.
Jim is the administrator over at Garden View, and he’s Ella’s boss. Which means he’s my big boss.
This did not bode well. Neither did the fidgety little dance Ella did from Earth Shoe to Earth Shoe. “Jim said you’d be fine with the idea once you understood that it’s great publicity for Garden View.”
I folded my arms over my chest and waited for more.
It came in a rush, the way Ella usually imparts information when she knows there’s a chance it’s going to piss me off.
“You see, all the pieces just fell into place late Friday afternoon, and that’s why I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it because Jim was handling all the details, of course, but nobody was sure about anything until this morning, and I didn’t want to tell you before now because I didn’t want you to spend your weekend worrying when you should have been resting. And I hope you did get some rest, I mean, with that gunshot wound of yours, and you know, I don’t ever want anything to happen to you again, and so I thought it was just best if we left it all for today.”
She sucked in a breath and I took the opportunity to move a step closer. “And?” I asked.
“And…” She swallowed hard. “It really is brilliant. I mean, it’s brilliant publicity, and Lord knows, we need all the good publicity we can get. And by we, I mean both Garden View and Monroe Street. People hear about cemeteries and so many of them are creeped out. They don’t understand that cemeteries are actually museums without walls. There’s so much history in a cemetery. And so much interesting art and architecture and-”
“And so you and Jim decided…?”
“Well, I didn’t. Decide, I mean. Though if it had been up to me, I would have made the same decision Jim did. That’s how good of an idea it is. And I know you’ll agree once you hear the details. It was Jim and the board who decided, and the people over at the Historical Society. Since they’re going to be such a critical piece of the puzzle, they had to be in on it, too. And that’s why it took all weekend to come to a decision, because they had a lot of work to do on their end, and-”
A big black limo pulled up the drive into the cemetery, and we both turned to watch. Since there hadn’t been any active burials in Monroe Street for who-knew-how-long, I was intrigued.
Ella, I noticed, wasn’t. But then, she could afford to be blasé; she knew what was going on. I still didn’t, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.
“They’re here.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me toward where the limo stopped. “You’re going to love this,” she said in a stage whisper just as the limo door opened.
Jim, our boss, got out. “Good morning!” Jim is a pleasant guy who I’m convinced wouldn’t know me if he tripped over me in the hallway outside my office. It’s just as well since these days I spend more time investigating for my dead clients than I do working on cemetery business. “Ella told you what’s going on?”