Page 21 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
As Desdemona angled her parasol to avoid as much pesky sun as possible, an older woman wobbled past, dressed in a dramatic frock that she’d topped with a veil and a bouquet of roses. She reminded Lily of someone, but she couldn’t quite place who.
‘Iadoreyour outfit,’ said Desdemona. ‘It’s so delightfully melancholy.’
‘Thanks, love.’ The woman managed a spin on her glittery pumps. She leaned on the bougainvillea-smothered railing outside the shop for balance. ‘It’s our fiftieth anniversary, and we just renewed our vows. I’m Fran. This is my beau, Derrick.’
Lily blinked. Derrick? Fran? She’d heard those names before.
An older man in a flat cap who’d been tying his shoelaces stood and waved at Lily, who suddenly wished smelling salts were something people still kept around. Maybe she could duck back inside and find something suitable amongst the wedding favours. Or perhaps Desdemona had some at hand? Someone who wore corsets for fun was surely acquainted with the rousing properties of dilute ammonia.
‘Everything all right, Lily?’ asked Ambrose.
‘All right? All right?’ chirruped Sunny, happily nibbling on Ambrose’s shoulder.
‘Spectacular. Business calls but, um, make sure you grab a macaron at The Hot Pot and let me know what you think. I’ll start scouting locations and will be in touch … tomorrow?’
‘Be sure to scout at night,’ noted Desdemona. ‘I expect verisimilitude.’
‘Verisimilitude,’ sighed Ambrose, quite romantically. (He definitely had a touch of a piratey Baudelaire to him.) ‘I love that word. If we have a daughter, that’s my second choice for a name.’
‘Fabulous,’ said Lily absently. She had, after all, just figured out where she’d seen the passing couple before.
She’d seen them in passing. Literal passing.
Let’s Grow Cold Together
Mort
Hearing Lily’s voice, Mort glanced down from where he’d been valiantly attempting to repaint the cornices of the foyer in the wake of the switcheroo. (He still hoped that things would somehow return to rights after a good night’s sleep, but even a day of being surrounded by hot pink froufrou decor was too much.) The black seemed to be sticking, at least. He’d never been so glad for Gramps’s hoarding tendencies: the storeroom off to one side of the embalming area in the cellar was brimming with paint tins and excess wallpaper and coffin hardware.
Mort squinted, peering through the front windows, which were letting in a highly improper amount of sunlight more befitting of an art studio than a funeral home.
Weird – that woman passing by outside looked like Fran Hemsley of keeling-over-at-the-cinema-fame, which was odd because Fran Hemsley was currently in the morgue alongside her beau Derrick Hemsley waiting to be embalmed prior to their combined funeral on Tuesday.
And why was there a trail of rose petals in the hallway?
Setting his paintbrush down on the lid of his paint tin, Mort followed the rose petals, which as he’d feared led to the cellar, which not only housed the morgue and the cremation urns, butalso had the dubious honour of having been his bunk room when he’d visited as a kid. His childhood stuffed owl Hooty, modelled on a taxidermied model crafted by Aunt Dot in her pre-cinema days, still sat on the vintage cabinet to one side of the embalming room.
Alas, Hooty was presently the only inhabitant of the morgue. The rose petals led to what Mort had feared he’d see: the two lockers that had housed the Hemsleys were wide open, with not a single body inside. But that wasn’t the weirdest bit. Each of the lockers glimmered with tiny tea candles – a fire hazard that Mort promptly doused. And were those long-stemmed roses? A sticking hazard if Mort had ever seen one – Mort preferred his flowers of the non-thorny variety.
Mort’s heart thumped in his chest. The Hemsleys had beendead. Thoroughly, absolutely, undeniably dead. The coroner had signed off! They’d been on ice!
And yet, he’d just now seen them flouncing down the promenade, hands clasped and looking the very picture of matrimonial bliss. Something very strange was going on, and it ran deeper than mere appearances.
Mort picked up the mortuary phone – Gramps still insisted on a landline – and pressed the speed dial.
‘Coroner Bill speaking. You maul ’em, we call ’em.’
(Bill’s mantra was that you couldn’t take death too seriously. Except the murders. And even then, you could often find humour in the event. There were silly murders, after all. Mushroom pies that had wiped out a whole potluck, slapstick-style door clobberings, vengeful flocks of sparrows and so on.)
‘It’s Mort. From Eternal Elegance.’
‘Hey, buddy. How’s death treating ya?’
‘Weirdly.’ Mort paused to blow out a candle he’d missed. ‘You signed off on the Hemsleys, correct?’
There was a moment of silence as Bill mulled over the many corpses that had apparently paraded through his office in recent days. ‘Hemsleys, Hemsleys …’
‘The older couple with the double cinema death.’
