Page 61 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
‘I thought that was one of Gramps’s snores,’ Lily admitted sheepishly, as the phone buzzed away.
Mort nodded, but the energy between them was …off. Lilywondered if he regretted coming over, if she’d taken things too far. She grabbed her nightie, holding it against herself, wondering what on earth Mort’s eyes were seeing right now. A lunatic in thermal leggings covered in cake and marker? A sex fiend who lured shy men with prosecco and cake and then had her way with them?
Or the business owner next door he had to endure until her lease was up?
‘I … should go,’ Mort said. Lily could see he was running through excuses in his head.
‘Ah, you’ve left something on the stove,’ she said wryly. She pulled on her nightie – dammit, Cinderella was on backwards. ‘A body?’
Mort ran his hands through his gorgeously mussed hair, the hair that seconds ago Lily had been twining her fingers through. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just … I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll … see you tomorrow. Sorry.’
He hurried downstairs, then out the front door, which as it swung let in a moment of late-night song: an owl, a drunken conversation between tourists, the hum of bass from somewhere up the hill. All intermingled with the heavy sigh that Lily let out.
‘Mrow,’ said Esmeralda, in a tone that was both sympathetic and judgemental.
‘Well, that wasn’t how that was supposed to go,’ Lily told the cat. But Esmeralda had already moved on and was busy inspecting Mort’s fork for leftover Chantilly cream.
Lily’s phone buzzed again, and with an aggrieved huff, she turned it over, scanning the text messages, which were not, as they usually were, from Annika or Mom. (Well, not all of them – Annikahadsent a few screenshots of an initiative in Italy where you could buy a home for one euro so long as you promised torenovate it. And Mom was asking Lily’s thoughts on the zodiac compatibility of her current partner, and whether it was time to call things off.)
Now it was Lily’s turn to run downstairs.
‘Mort! Are you up?’ she hissed through the grille. ‘We’ve found Veronica!’
A Corpse is a Corpse, of Corpse of Corpse
Mort
Like any film buff, even as one steeped mostly in the scarier side of what the movies had to offer, Mort had seenMy Big Fat Greek Wedding. He’d chuckled along and had even come around to the value of Windex as the ultimate panacea. But he hadn’t anticipated that he’d end up hosting one. Because weddings weren’t really his remit. Or at least, hadn’t been until recently.
Mort knew the deceased, of course; he knew just about everyone who ended up wheeled through the funeral home’s doors in some capacity.
Christos Georgiou had been a semi-famous local architect known for his ability to seamlessly add modern extensions to the storybook houses of Mirage-by-the-Sea without violating any of the heritage laws. You’d never know from the street, but if you snuck into many of the village’s back gardens, you’d find multi-storey additions with vast floor-to-ceiling windows, ivy-wrapped greenhouses, and elaborate tiered gardens with squared-off fish ponds all overhung by glass-framed patios that made it feel like you were hovering over a magical forest.
Christos had consulted on the funeral home’s pre-switcheroocasket displays and had helped Gramps expand the consultation room. The expansive windows had been his addition, although the cupcake-patterned chiffon curtains that now adorned them had not. That said, they were starting to grow on Mort, and the families seemed to like them. Even if they’d increased the client consumption of complimentary cake by a degree, that was not good for Mort’s bottom line. Or his waistline. Which in turn was not good for his EKG line. At least Mort had cultivated a strict fitness routine over the years – he was not about to invite Death in by slacking on his daily push-up regimen.
‘Sorry for your loss.’ Mort greeted the black-clad mourners one after another, turning his head to ignore the grille that connected the two Eternal Elegances – and the flashes from last night that simply would not stop bubbling up at this incredibly inappropriate time. He was meant to be overseeing a funeral, not thoughts of Lily’s body. He should be mourning a dead guy, not the chance with the girl next door that he’d horribly, irrevocably blown.
‘Christos’s buildings live on,’ said a burly man Mort recognised as a local general contractor. Mick something, or so the personalised licence plates on his enormous work truck parked out back proclaimed.
‘He designed my favourite rooflines,’ sobbed Timbo Jones, the roofer who’d come in to assist with the post-switcheroo leaks. (‘Can’t explain it. Roof’s sound. Just a freak leak. That’ll be five hundred bucks.’) He’d since become one of Lily’s best friends, and regularly stopped by to taste-test the club sandwiches she was trying out for upcoming weddings. According to the commentary Mort had overhead through the grille that joined the two businesses, Timbo was a fan of sandwich pickles, but had thoughts about smoked salmon.
‘Mort!’
Angela and Tink swanned through the door in head-to-toe black lace (polka-dot lace in Tink’s case), looking like an extremely cool punk rocker duo. Tink definitely played drums, while Angela definitely sang while attacking a bass guitar.
‘You knew Christos?’ Mort leaned in for an awkward hug.
‘My uncle,’ said Angela. ‘Or thereabouts. The man got around, let me tell you. I’m not sure where I saw him more often: at family dinners, or in my real estate listings. Speaking of, we need to talk about Whispering Waters.’
Mort nodded. They did in fact need to talk about that, because there was no way that Mort was shipping off Gramps to that place. (Unless Gramps kept up the snoring.)
‘I’ll never forget that grill out on the beach,’ said Tink dreamily. ‘Just us and the ocean and half the contents of the ocean on a firepit. And wine. So much home-made wine.’
‘Retsina, my first great love.’ Angela dramatically clutched her hands to her heart. ‘Oh, there’s my Yia-yia. I gotta go say hi – make sure I keep my rightful place in her will. Joking, joking.’ She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘Half joking.’
‘Quarter joking.’ Tink waggled her fingers in atoodlesand strode off to sign the guest book. ‘Oh look, someone’s drawn a dick. Three dicks. Mort, what’s your policy on dicks?’
Mort groaned internally. The funeral home had various policies on dicks, depending on what part of the funeral one was talking about. But in general they had a no-dick policy when it came to the guest book. This hadn’t typically been a problem in the past, but since the switcheroo, there’d been an alarming uptick in drunken dick drawings. And off-colour jokes during the eulogy.
