Patricia Briggs - Home Improvement - Undead Edition

“So Carter started making his presence known again now because . . .”

“Of the hammer. When you found the hammer, that was the trigger for his . . . activation.” Quiana shrugged. “I don’t know much about ghosts, but I got that from him. He was full of anger—well, we all got that. He was confused, and agitated.”

“What can we do? To get rid of him? He can’t stay here,” JB said, his mouth set in an uncharacteristically hard line.

“We can call the police,” I said. “They’d come get the bones and take them away for evaluation and burial. They’ll take the hammer, too. The closet has been reconfigured, so it’s no longer the place where Carter died.” I wondered, if we sent the bones and the hammer to the police, would the ghost manifest at the police station? I tried to imagine Detective Andy Bellefleur’s face.

“Will that do it? End his presence?” Tara asked.

“Ought to.” Quiana looked at me.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

There was a doubtful silence.

I cleared my throat. “Or we could just take everything, bones and hammer, and bury the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle in the cemetery. By ourselves. And no one would ever need to know, which was what the whole Summerlin family wanted.”

They all thought about my proposition for a few seconds.

“I’m for that,” JB said. “I don’t want people coming around to see where the body was buried. The babies wouldn’t like that. People might not let their kids come over to play with Robbie and Sara.”

Tara looked at her husband in surprise. “I didn’t think about that, JB. Sookie, since your house is right by the cemetery . . . can you and Sam . . . ?”

“This isn’t a usual best-friends job,” I said, maybe a little tartly. “But okay, I’ll do it. You got an old sheet?”

She vanished into the house and came back with a white percale double fitted. Quiana laid it out by the grave, and Sam and JB disinterred the bones. Wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, they transferred the remains of poor Carter Summerlin to the sheet. The ground was so shadowed by the side of the house, I needed the help of a flashlight to sift the earth, searching for anything they might have missed. I came up with two teeth and a few little finger bones. After a while, we were reasonably sure the entire skeleton had been harvested from the soil. Tara put the hammer on top of the bones, gathered up the sheet corners, and tied them in knots.

There was a pause when Sam picked up the grotesque bundle.

“Oh, all right, we’ll go, too,” Tara said angrily, as though I’d accused her of being callous.

There was a little car caravan out to my house: me, Sam in his pickup, JB and Tara and the twins in their car, and Quiana in her old Ford.

We tromped through my woods to the cemetery. The dark was closing in around us when we came to my family plot. I was going to be late for work—but somehow I didn’t think Sam would dock my pay for it. The space at the back of my family headstone was unusually large, and since it lay at the edge of the graveyard there wasn’t another family plot abutting it from the north. We took turns digging—again—by the light of the lantern-sized flashlights I’d snatched from my tool shed.

JB lowered the bundle of bones and hammer into the makeshift grave. We shoveled the dirt back in, a much quicker job, and the men stamped down the new patch with their boots so it wouldn’t look so raw. Maybe I’d come back tomorrow and stick a potted plant in the dirt to kind of explain the digging.

When that was done, there was an odd moment, when the night around us seemed to catch its breath.

Her dark head bowed, Quiana said, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” and we all joined in.

“God bless this poor soul and send him on his way,” I said, when the prayer was finished.

Then the night exhaled, and the air was empty.

We trudged back to my house in silence, Quiana stumbling with exhaustion from time to time.

There was an awkward pause as everyone tried to figure out how to cap off the experience.

Finally, JB said, “Y’all gonna come help finish the closet tomorrow?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“Sure,” Sam said. “We’ll be there, and we’ll finish.”

And tomorrow, it would just be us in the house. Us living people.

“Did the burglar hit any other rooms?”

Broahm shook his head, standing in front of the nearly empty cupboard, absently stroking his beard, which was only just now starting to form some respectable gray streaks. Clients wanted wizards with a little experience. Nothing said experience and wisdom like a bit of gray. He’d even known some journeymen spellcasters who’d used minor glamours to make themselves look older.

Broahm blinked. His mind was wandering again.

He turned to the young mage who’d asked the question. “What?”

“Anything else stolen?”

“A silver mixing bowl from my workshop and a few other minor items,” Broahm said. “Mostly it was the supply cupboard. I’ll be a year replacing those ingredients. More.”

The mage tsked , shaking his head. Broahm found him infuriatingly handsome and trendy. He was clean shaven, a fancy gold earring in one ear, hair cut short and spiky in the way that was fashionable among the young gentry. Trendy breeches and a loose shirt open at the neck. Unlike Broahm in his conservative burgundy robes, this young mage—Sulton was his name, Broahm now remembered—didn’t have to conform to conventional wizard fashions, since his clientele were other wizards and not the public at large.

Broahm had sent a message to Wizard Home Security, and Sulton had shown up the next morning.

“What security did you have on the cupboard?” Sulton asked.

Broahm shuffled his feet. “Well, I’d rather not give away any secrets.”

“Come now, sir. We need to know every detail if we’re to provide the best possible service.”

A sigh. “A rather expensive padlock,” Broahm said. “And the usual wards.”

“There’s your problem,” Sulton said. “Not good enough. Not by a long shot.”

Broahm bristled. “That’s self-evident.”

Sulton smiled in a way Broahm was sure was meant to be disarming but only irritated him. “No disrespect intended. I feel sure you took the appropriate precautions against your run-of-the-mill thieves. But if run-of-the-mill thieves were all you had to deal with, you wouldn’t have needed to consult Wizard Home Security, eh?”

“Get on with it.”

“The cupboard was full of valuable items, and any decent thief could have pawned them around the city for a nice bit of silver,” Sulton said. “But ask yourself, who needs those items the most? Don’t bother, I’ll answer for you. Other wizards, that’s who. You’re in the Wizard’s Quarter. You can’t swing a dead weasel or toss a stone over your shoulder without hitting a pointy hat. And with so many wizards in one place, all of whom are vying for the same ingredients to concoct the same spells, well, a few bad eggs are bound to resort to pilfering from their neighbors rather than paying the inflated prices.”

Broahm sighed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. That just figured. Nine years ago, when he’d finished his apprenticeship with Hemley, his old master had given him some advice. Try the edge of the Northern Waste. Ice City is the sort of place a young wizard can earn a good living. Twenty years ago this had been true. On the edge of the Great Frozen Sea, a wizard could get rich guiding ships through the seasonal storms or spelling fire stones to warm a hearth when fuel was short. But word must have gotten out, because Ice City had become simply lousy with wizards over the next two decades, all looking to score some quick silver.