Dan of the Dead Read online

  Patty looked right at the man who stared right back, unblinking. “If not,” he continued, “I’ll move right on.”

  “Sir,” said Patty, unwavering. “Take a look around. What do you need?”

  “Spices. Would you have any of those?”

  Before the exchange could go on any further, Cassy decided to intervene. She hadn’t recognized him at first, but the tone of his voice and the annoying sense of humor meant it could only be one person.

  “Elliot!”

  Arms outstretched, Cassy went to the man at the counter and embraced him. He feigned being crushed, and then hugged her back. Over Cassy’s shoulder, Elliot saw Helena.

  “Would you mind getting your sister off me. I know she always had a crush on me, but this is ridiculous.”

  “You haven’t changed, have you?” asked Helena, smiling wryly. “I mean, if you don’t count the gray beard, and a few extra pounds.”

  “Love you, too, Hell.” Elliot extracted himself from Cassy then looked down at her. He was at least a foot taller than her, and always had been, even as a teenager. “So we ready or what? Kinda crazy, huh? Stuart, the first one of the old gang to go. I thought we had a few more years until we started dropping off. Makes me feel old.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Cassy. “It puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Anyway, it’s good to see you again, though. And the others, if they show up.”

  Elliot had always been a goofball. Tall, spindly and awkward like a marionette, Elliot had naturally fallen into the role of the joker of the group. Always playing pranks, or teasing the girls. The intervening years had filled him out somewhat, making him look a little more comfortable in his body. He was well dressed, almost like he’d put his suit on a day early for the church.

  “So where are you staying, Elliot?” asked Helena. “I managed to bag myself an exclusive spot above a place that smells like a drug factory.”

  “Like you know what that smells like,” Cassy said jokingly, kicking her sister in the shins. It was strange to her how quickly they all fell back in to old routines. The three of them were grown adults, but already it felt like none of them had moved on with their lives. They’d been brought back to a moment in time and were playing the parts.

  “I’m staying at this Lodge place just out of town. Dan’s up there, too. I had breakfast with him.”

  Simultaneously, the sisters sighed, then catching the other doing just that, both burst into laughter.

  Feeling a little left out, Patty decided to join in the fun. “Do we not like Dan?”

  “Oh, he’s a good guy. He just seems tired of everything. Like every waking moment is a burden. Always sighing, hence the Spooky Sisters,” Elliot explained.

  Again in perfect unison, which also made them laugh, Cassy and Helena took a sharp breath.

  “Spooky Sisters?” asked Helena. “This one, maybe.” She jabbed a thumb at Cassy.

  Cassy dismissed the gesture with one of her own. “Is that what you called us behind our backs, Elliot?”

  Realizing his error, Elliot stepped back. “Not behind your backs so much as just when you weren’t around. You’ve got to admit, you know, with your mom and…” He could see he was fighting a battle as the sisters advanced on him. “It was just a name. You had that whole Goth thing going on.”

  “It wasn’t Goth,” protested Cassy.

  “I can’t believe we have to find this out years later,” said Helena. “Spooky Sisters? Seriously?” She began to pinch at Elliot, who flinched as he swiped at her feebly. “You know what we called you?” Pinch. Pinch.

  “I can guess. Cassy, stop your sister, would you? First, I’m crushed, now this? I’m a grown man with two kids, a job at a respectable firm. I pay my taxes. Do I really deserve this kind of treatment?”

  “You’re getting nothing from me, pal,” said Cassy who slammed her fist repeatedly against the palm of her other hand.

  All the while, Patty looked on in near disgust as the scenario played out before her. It was bad enough that her boss acted this way, but she was used to that. Cassy had never been the strictest and was always game for a joke. But the other two looked like they had proper jobs and lives and families and all the rest. Her head fell forward into her open palms and she let out a concerned, overly dramatic sob.

  “I give up, I give up,” yelled Elliot in supplication and retreat. “Girls please. Contain yourselves. I can understand you’re overwhelmed at seeing me, but I’m spoken for.”

  “Oh, get over yourself, Elliot,” said Helena, turning away.

  Relieved to no longer be under assault, Elliot straightened his collar and adjusted his cuffs. He made his excuses, having only stopped by to ‘touch base’, as he put it.

  The tiny bell above the door tinkled as he exited, leaving the Spicery oddly quiet. Cassy felt her sister’s arms wrap around her from behind. Their hands locked. It was oddly reassuring; something that Cassy hadn’t realized that she had missed until then.

  “Hey, Spooky Sis,” she whispered into Cassy’s ear. “Before we go to the church tomorrow, I want to go visit Mom.”

  Nodding silently in agreement, Cassy was taken away from the frivolity of just moments earlier. She’d put off returning to the gravesite for too long.

  “Sure. First thing tomorrow.” She looked back at Helena. Of the two of them, it was Helena who looked most like their mother, even if their lives couldn’t have been more different.

  Cassy was just about to say something that she hadn’t said to Helena in a very long time; the truth that she loved her and always would despite their differences, when a voice came from behind the shelves.

  “I think I’m going to call you the Spooky Sisters from now on. It’s catchy.”

  If there had been anything to hand Cassy, she would have lobbed it across the shop and struck Dot in the head. Thankfully, the day continued without violence.

  Chapter Five

  The modern trend for funerals was cremation, but it was something that Magdelena Dean had been very vocal about opposing.

  “Do you remember that big speech she gave us about why she didn’t want to be cremated?”

  “Speech? It was more like a TED talk for funeral arrangements,” said Helena.

  It was just after dawn and a low mist still clung to the ground. The sun struggled to rise over the distant treetops. The two sisters had driven up to Oak Hill Church while it was still dark, but by the time they arrived at their mother’s plot, a tranquil light was beginning to fill the surprisingly pleasant resting place.

  Fruit trees, crab apple and pears, had been planted among the weathered and crumbling tombstones. The effect was to make it look like the motley orchard had been there first, and the granite slabs were just visiting.

  Lena, as their mother liked to be called and who got annoyed when people used the name ‘Mags’, had been very particular about what would happen after she was gone. Despite her daughters’ unwillingness to talk openly about the inevitable, Lena had no such problems.

  “I absolutely, absolutely don’t want to be put into an urn. This is so important. It goes against everything I believe in,” she’d said. “It’s not right, you see. As people, we take and we take from the land. All our lives we’re just hungry little beasts. So when it’s our time to move on, I think it’s right to give something back.”

  She’d meant it quite literally, wanting her body to return to the earth. It wasn’t just a spiritual thing, which it certainly was, but also a very pragmatic view.

  “The energy used in cremation is just a waste, and for what? So my ashes can be uselessly scattered somewhere? No, thank you. There’s a good reason these apple trees grow better here than anywhere else in Havenholm and that’s because they’re well fed.”

  Her plot was a humble little thing; a narrow stone marker embedded in the ground with the simple Epitaph ‘Here lies Lena Dean. Mother, Sister, Witch.’

  The last word had caused some contention among the family, even Cassy felt it was a
little weird, but then again, their mother was a peculiar kind of woman. Had it not been for Cassy’s intervention, that final word, their mother’s last stamp on the world, would have been omitted. As the elder sibling, it had fallen to Helena to arrange everything and early on she had vetoed it, only for Cassy’s impassioned defense to sway her.

  Shaking the dew from the brittle petals, Helena crouched to place a small bouquet on the stone that marked their mother’s grave. It amused Cassy that the flowers had been placed over the offending word. She smiled, but said nothing.

  “I miss her, Cass.”

  It was the first thing that Helena had said since they’d arrived.

  “Me too. But she’ll always be with us. You know that, right?”

  With a shrug, Helena stood back up.

  “Would she be proud of me, do you think?”

  There was no way that Cassy could have said no. But truthfully, she believed that their mother would have been very happy with her eldest daughter.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, of course she loves you. Carrying on the family tradition and all that, but I never bought into any of it. Not my thing.”

  “But what you did end up doing is what you love and that’s all she ever wanted.” Such validation was necessary to Helena, who despite being the more overt of the two sisters, always had an insecure side.

  Helena faced away from the gravesite to look back at the small church they’d passed on the way up to the top of the hill. The spire was crooked and made the squat building look like its hat was falling off.

  “Looks like we aren’t the only ones up early,” said Helena, drawing Cassy’s attention to a van parking outside the church. From this far away, it was hard to see who was getting out.

  “Who do you reckon it is? Could it be Maybe? I can’t wait to see her again.”

  “Well whoever it is, it’s not Dan, that’s for sure.”

  They both sighed in unison, prompting a fit of giggles.

  “I don’t think that boy has ever been early to anything in his whole life.”

  “He’s not a boy anymore—it’s odd, right? I still think of all of them the way they were back when we were kids. I’ve even seen most of them since, but that mental image remains.”

  The sun finally broke over the jagged silhouette of the dark pines and the world was flooded with crisp light. Cassy held her hand up to shield her eyes and watched as several people disembarked from the black van. Three came from the sliding door on the right and another three from the left. Three more emerged from the front. A man, still an indistinct shape in the distance, went to greet the priest who was waiting for them at the side entrance to Oak Hill Church.

  They shook hands. Whoever it was seemed to be in charge of proceedings.

  “Who is that?” asked Helena, stepping forward to match Cassy’s curiosity. It was something they both shared.

  “Family, I guess,” said Cassy. As she looked on, Cassy spotted a second priest who hadn’t been there a minute earlier. He and the first priest both talked to the man in charge, who Cassy could now see was a tall but well-built man with wispy blond hair. They seemed to come to a conclusion, shook hands and each parted ways.

  There was no deciphering what had been said, but Cassy had no reason to know the details of the private conversation. She realized that her curiosity had only been piqued as a kind of defense against having to deal with visiting their mother’s grave. Anything to get her mind off it.

  “Shall we go? We gave her the flowers,” said Helena in a more dismissive way than Cassy believed she had really intended.

  “Yeah, it looks like we’re going to be late to the party. We should get going.”

  “Race you there,” said Helena. She bolted, slipped on the grass and fell heavily on the moist ground. With her head bowed and a hand raised, Helena beckoned her sister to her.

  “We’re not kids anymore, Hell.”

  “So I keep on being reminded.” With a minor struggle, Cassy got Helena to her feet. She brushed herself down, took one look at Cassy, and then ran down the incline to the church. “Still going to beat you!”

  For a second Cassy was frozen to the spot, then spurred on by Helena’s whoops as she galloped down, ran after her.

  After the black van, the first car to arrive was a compact European thing painted pink, which made a delightful contrast to the more somber vehicle when it parked right up against it. The driver of the compact then had to reverse back out of the spot and attempt parking a second time when it became clear that he/she was too close to easily get out of his/her car.

  “Ten dollars says that’s Cat,” said Helena. She put out her hand so that Cassy would seal the deal.

  “The odds are so high in your favor, there’s no way I’m taking that action,” said Cassy. They sat on a low wall at the edge of the lot, a perfect place to observe all the comings and goings as mourners arrived. Slowly, the place was filling up. A second black van had arrived and in addition to the small pink car, a flashy looking convertible rounded the corner. Its tires squealed to a halt, kicking up loose stones as it skidded perfectly into place.

  Predictably, the driver was Elliot, no doubt trying to impress the girl he had come with. From the small pink car, emerged an equally small woman, though thankfully not dressed in pink, which had been Cassy’s worry. Even for Stuart’s funeral, it wouldn’t do. Dressed in a black pantsuit, but with her blond hair tipped with a candy-cane shade, Cat waved to the Dean sisters.

  “Another one trying to hold on to her youth,” said Cassy, returning the wave.

  “You keep saying that like we’re old,” said Helena. The comment earned a raised eyebrow. “Well, we’re not that old.”

  “We are that old, Hell.”

  “Isn’t it all about how old you feel inside?”

  Cassy shrugged. “Isn’t it ‘you’re only as old as you feel’?”

  “Speaking of which; are you feeling anyone at the moment?” Helena leaned toward Cassy intrusively as if threatening to never back off unless she got a response.

  “I see people sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Well, more than sometimes. Dot—the ever-faithful Dot—well, she keeps me busy with blind dates.”

  Though she could see her sister’s shoulders bobbing up and down, Helena had at least contained her laugh. “Blind dates?” she asked. “Come on, Cass. Like you said, we’re not kids anymore. Tell me, who’s the guy you have your eye on?”

  “It’s hardly the time and place for this conversation, don’t you think?” she said, tilting her head to the church. The other mourners were already filing in. It was a significant turnout, were this for a normal family, but for the eldest son of the Wellingtons, it somehow didn’t seem enough.

  “Well, it’s not a happy occasion,” said Helena. “But life moves on and I want all the juicy gossip about my sister. Besides, I can tell by that look in your eye that there’s someone. You went all dreamy when I mentioned the possibility that there was. So spill the beans. What’s the deal?”

  There was no denying it, Helena knew her all too well. “There is this one guy, works at the Sheriff’s office.”

  “But not a cop?”

  “A Deputy—so yeah. The real deal.”

  “Who’s a deputy? Are you a deputy sheriff now? Oh my god, that’s so cool, Cassy,” said a squeaky little voice that would have sounded fake coming from anyone else but Cat. Helena looked up at their old friend, and then stood to hug her, looming over the diminutive woman as she rose.

  “This isn’t over,” Helena said to Cassy before turning her attention to the newcomer. “Cat, darling! You look amazing.”

  “Don’t I?” Cat gave a twirl, oblivious to how inappropriate she looked doing it. “So the Dean sisters; how’ve you guys been?” Before either of them could answer, Cat continued on her rambling trail of thought. “Isn’t it so sad about Stuart—you know, I dated him briefly, so this is so emotional for me right now.” Absentmindedly, Cat a
djusted the large tinted glasses propped up on her head. She did not look upset at all.

  “Seems like he dated a lot of people back in the day,” said Cassy, casting a sly glance to her sister. “Funny how rich kids are so popular.”

  “Did someone say ‘popular’?” It was Elliot striding over from his car. He pressed a button on his key fob and the roof, which had been down until then, lifted and slid back into place. The woman he was with trotted behind him in high heels that wobbled in the loose stones of the parking lot. “I thought someone was talking about me. Did any of you say the words ‘handsome, charming, witty and athletic? I’m sure I heard those, too.”

  Cassy was about to rebuke him when the woman teetering on her shoes let out a yelp. “God dammit!” She bent awkwardly to collect her shoe, the heel of which had snapped clean off. “I knew this was a bad idea.” Taking the broken heel between her fingers, she lifted it up to inspect it like some curious botanical specimen. Satisfied that it was truly beyond repair, she tossed it over her shoulder. “Never liked those things anyway.”

  It took a moment before Cassy recognized the woman, though the voice was familiar; surprisingly deep for a woman, which some men find sexy. Including, if Cassy remembered correctly, a certain Mr. Wellington. “Maybe!” she cried out, “I didn’t even recognize you.” Cassy stopped half way to greet the woman who remained tall despite having removed her heels. “Wait a minute, are you two together?” She pointed back and forth between Maybe and Elliot.

  “I wish,” he said, “I have a thing for giant women.” He flinched as Maybe went to smack him on the back of the head. “What’s with females attacking me? Ever since I got here I’ve been under constant threat.”

  “It’s not what it looks like, fellas,” said Maybe, “I had a little car trouble and this chump stopped by to help.” She punched him affectionately on the shoulder. “Which was really sweet actually. He didn’t know it was me at the time.”