Patricia Briggs: Home Improvement: Undead Edition

Elizabeth had followed me up, so I had to push by her again to go look at Gottfried’s shoes. Revenant House must not have had any shoes in his size because he was still wearing the black dress shoes he’d worn in his coffin, and I could see scuff marks on the toes.

“His original cause of death was from falling, right?” I asked.

Mrs. Hopkins nodded.

“Then this is what must have happened. He tripped on that paper up there—revenants don’t have a lot of feeling in their extremities and tend to be clumsy. He could have survived the fall just fine—you can’t really kill him, just damage him. But when he felt himself falling, he remembered the other fall, and let himself die. You could say it scared the life out of him.” It was unusual, but not unheard of. Papa Philippe had once raised a drowning victim because she was needed to locate some important papers, but when the revenant saw she was going to have to go on a boat, she collapsed and he couldn’t raise her again.

I was afraid I’d get some push back, but Mrs. Hopkins was nodding. “The contract did say something like this was possible. The question is, what do we do now?”

“You’ll have to bring him back,” Elizabeth said.

“According to our contract, you’d have to pay me again,” I pointed out, “but since this is for a charity, I’ll do it for free.” Well, that and the fact that I was hoping that Mrs. Hopkins would mention my name to the wealthy friends her clothing choices implied she had. “But I need another sacrifice.”

“This is outrageous!” Elizabeth said, but C.W. was pulling a ring off his finger. “Use this.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, taking it. It was ugly, but it was gold and the sapphire looked real.

“Yeah, take it. My ex-wife gave it to me—I never did like it.”

“Is it enough?” Mrs. Hopkins wanted to know.

I hefted it. “Yeah, it should be.” I remembered Papa Philippe’s warning from the night before, and said, “I should talk to my sponsor first.”

“There’s no time!” Mrs. Hopkins said. “Scarpa is coming back with an inspector. Gottfried has to be up and talking.”

“How long do we have?”

“Von Doesburg is stalling him now. Twenty minutes, if we’re lucky.”

I should have called Papa Philippe anyway, but instead I sent Elizabeth out to my car to get a fresh carton of salt. I could have done it myself, but what was the fun of having a minion around if I didn’t take advantage of her. Then I made a circle, put the sacrifice on the floor next to Gottfried’s body, and did my thing. Five minutes later, I was explaining to Gottfried why I’d brought him back again, and with my fingers crossed, I asked if he was still willing to finish the house.

He agreed just in time for Von Doesburg to arrive with Scarpa and the inspector. I stayed around long enough to make sure Gottfried was compos mentis enough to hold his end of the conversation, then made myself scarce. I could have left entirely, but I was going to need to take Gottfried back to Revenant House in an hour or so anyway, and you can hardly get anywhere in the Atlanta area in that length of time. So I found where somebody had set up a bunch of folding chairs under a tree and swiped a bottle of water from a cooler that looked as if it was there for everybody.

C.W. came and got a bottle of his own after a while. “How’re you doing?” he asked.

“Not bad. You?”

“Not your average day on the work site, that’s for sure.”

“You mean you don’t work with revenants every week?”

“Not hardly,” he said with a grin. “I guess it’s old hat to you.”

“I don’t usually raise the dead on-site, but otherwise, same old, same old.”

“Have you been doing this long?”

“Since college. I was an apprentice for five years, then got my license about a year and a half ago.”

“You went to college for this?”

“Nope, I just happened to fall into it after a particularly wild Halloween party at one of the frat houses. Somebody had brought a stuffed black cat—the taxidermy kind, I mean—for decoration, and while I was drunk, I started patting it. Before I knew it, the thing was purring. We had to call a real houngan to put it back to rest, and he told me I should look into doing this as a career.” I shrugged. “What can I say? It’s a living.”

It took him a minute, but he eventually got the joke and chuckled.

“I am sorry about your ring.”

“Don’t be. I only wore it because the ex-wife wanted it back in the divorce settlement. I was just afraid it wouldn’t be enough of a sacrifice.”

“Something valuable, something important. Either will work.” We sipped for a few minutes, and then I asked, “So what’s Scarpa’s deal?”

C.W. made a face. “He hates this house being here because it makes the other houses look like slapped-together garbage, which is what they are. It pissed him off no end when Mrs. Hopkins brought us in to fix it up.” “Wow. He puts the ass in homeowners’ association .”

That got a snicker.

“Wait, didn’t Von Doesburg slap together the garbage? Why is he helping you guys fend him off?”

“He says it’s because having a Gottfried house here will increase the profile of the place, but I think he’s trying to persuade Shelia to let him buy up some of the acreage around the lake so he can put in a country club. He’s been trying to get hold of the land the house is on for years, but the owner wouldn’t sell. Von Doesburg thought he’d get it cheap from the heirs, but that was before Shelia got involved.”

He went on to tell me about the plans Gottfried had for the house. “When he died, I didn’t know what we were going to do, but now that he’s here, we’re on track.”

C.W. went back to work and I went back to killing time until construction shut down and Gottfried was ready to go. Again, conversation was spotty, though I did warn him again about poor sensation in his feet so he wouldn’t have any more “fatal” falls. I stopped in at Revenant House just long enough to suggest they find him some sneakers so he’d have more traction.

Papa Philippe was waiting for me again.

“I was going to call you,” I said before he could speak, “but there was no time. Then there were people around. Then I had Gottfried in the car, and I couldn’t talk in front of him and it would have been dangerous to text while driving and—”

“And you was hoping the loa not be watching you this day.” He shook his head. “The loa always be watching.”

“The FBI really ought to have the loa working for them. Do you want to know what happened?”

“Not me, but Tante Ju-Ju be wanting to know.”

“You’re joking.”

He just looked at me.

“When?”

His answer was to gesture toward a dimly lit path into the woods.

“Shit.”

I didn’t know how extensive the Order’s grounds were. Revenant House and the office buildings were close to the road, but stretching behind were all kinds of paths and other buildings, most of which I avoided whenever possible.

Papa Philippe let me lead the way until we got to the hut from which Tante Ju-Ju held forth. Presumably she had a house somewhere with a TV, a microwave, and plumbing, but I’d never seen her anywhere outside Order grounds, and I didn’t think anybody had ever seen her break character. She was either a true believer, or the best method actor ever.

Tante Ju-Ju was sitting outside her hut on a rickety stool, stirring a pot of something ominous over a fire. She was dressed like all the other voudou queens in the Order, but the skirt and the peasant blouse looked comfortable on her and her coloring was natural. Her tignon had seven points knotted into it, just like Marie Laveau’s supposedly had, and mysteriously it never slipped, even though I’d never seen a bobby pin in her vicinity.