Page 31 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
‘Ah. I think I see the problem.’
‘Trader Joe’s 21 Seasoning Salute apparently doesn’t reverse dark magic. Smells good, though.’
‘Should’ve tried the Everything But the Bagel seasoning.’ Mort sighed. ‘Still, you did better than me. After the boys put poor Moira in the ground I went to the library and went through old newspaper articles looking for reports of something similar happening.’
‘Anything?’
Mort shook his head. ‘Although the press hasn’t covered our situation, so who knows.’
‘Other than Coriana.’ Lily made a face. ‘I can’t wait to see her article.Unwed Spinster Lives Matrimonial Dreams Vicariously through Wedding Planning Business.’
Mort wasn’t sure what to say to this.DidLily dream of a wedding for the ages? Was that why she’d started the business? Or was she being self-deprecating? Mort glanced over at Lily in her adorably ridiculous outfit, wondering what kind of wedding she might plan for herself. Shehadlooked cute in that black funeral veil last night.
‘A Vegas elopement,’ Lily said suddenly. ‘That’s what I’d do. With or without Elvis. Hey look, it’s Derrick and Fran. They look well. And they have an entourage!’
A small group had surrounded the resurrected couple, heads bowed in reverence (and phone cameras out).
‘Please bless my market tomatoes, Derrick,’ pleaded one.
‘Will you minister to my turtle, Fran?’ begged another.
‘Did you see a white light?’ a third was asking.
Derrick looked quite pleased by the attention, and was handing out discount vouchers for the bodega as he anointed his new fans. Fran, on the other hand, was fiddling with a cross around her neck and seemed to be having a bit of a crisis of faith.
‘It was just a spot of bradycardia!’ she snapped. ‘We overdid it on the beta blockers at Toastmasters before the movie!’
‘Maybe I won’t say hi,’ whispered Lily. ‘They look … busy. Besides, we’re just about here.’
Jogging up the last of the hill, Lily pointed to a purple fairy-tale house with green trim and an extravagant assortment of glass frog garden ornaments.
Out the front sat an ancient pianola with a FREE sign stuck to the front. One of the local peacocks (a family of them had escaped from a nearby zoo and had since bred) regarded him from its perch upon the closed keyboard cover.
‘How on earth did you hear about this?’ Mort regarded the battered old pianola, which someone had had a go at decorating with a paintbrush and sponge, and which sported crooked candelabra holders covered in wax.
‘I was talking to Desdemona and Ambrose about their wedding, and they were very insistent that their nuptials involve a piano-like instrument in some shape or form.’
‘Well, you’ve got the “piano-like” and “some shape or form” down.’ Mort tentatively depressed the rickety middle C key, which was missing its plastic veneer.
‘And then on my way out from the funeral yesterday I found this guy bashing out “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on that—glockenspiel?’
‘Marimba.’
‘Right. I mentioned something about the organ, and he saidthat his cousin had this beauty sitting around looking for a new home. Kismet!’
Kismet was certainly one way of putting it. Getting a warning call from the Board of Funeral Directors about the seven noise complaints that had apparently been lodged in relation to the funeral was another. They had to find a way to reverse this thing. Even if it took all the Trader Joe’s herbs in the world. Mort was prepared to stand in front of a midnight mirror and reciteback to realitythree times, if that’s what it took.
But then he caught sight of Lily’s sunny smile as she turned from the top step of the house, where she was happily knocking away with the brass carp doorknocker (‘Like the ones in Malta – my bestie Annika is always sending me pictures of those!’), and he wondered if maybe, just maybe, this switcheroo wasn’tentirelyterrible.
After all, if their businesses hadn’t performed their ownFreaky Friday/Vice Versadance, he wouldn’t be here with Lily collecting a deformed piano from one of the all-singing, all-dancing mourners at yesterday’s disastrous funeral.
All right, so maybe it wasn’t agreatdefence of the switcheroo. But it wasadefence.
‘How are we going to get this thing back to the funeral parlour?’ Mort regarded the rickety pianola with the critical eye of his high school musical composition teacher. It looked held together by a whisper and a prayer. A pianissimo prayer.
‘It has wheels.’ Her shoes flashing, Lily crouched to demonstrate. ‘We can push it back down the hill.’
‘And risk a runaway player piano? Absolutely not.’
