Undead and Unwary Read online

  And then for all of spring and summer and fall, the lake was just a lake. It wasn’t a community, and no one had much interest in getting to know the tourists. And then winter would come back, and . . . and it would be a town again.

  The only drawback was the way the ice tended to settle, sometimes with a shudder, and you remembered that this was a hobby that could kill you. But the same is true of bowling, so live dangerously, dammit! Embrace life!

  (Was all that a metaphor for something? I hoped not. Unless it was a metaphor for how much I missed ice fishing. In which case, it was pretty perfect.)

  Anyway. Back to Jessica. Cornering her had been tricky, mostly for the reasons I was complaining about earlier, to wit: it’s not nice to brain-rape your best friend and force her to vomit up all her secrets. But if she wasn’t avoiding me outright, she was physically absent from the mansion, doing who-knew-what. DadDick professed to know nothing, and since I figured he was running on about four hours of sleep on a good night, I believed him. It was possible DadDick didn’t know his own middle name.

  But at last she fell into my clutches and could not escape. I knew this because when I walked into the kitchen for midnight smoothies, she was waiting and greeted me with, “I have to talk to you. Right now.” Ha! She should have known she couldn’t escape my grasp for long.

  And she’d started with asking me how Dad had died. Like she didn’t know. Like I didn’t know.

  More worrisome, the others—had she called a meeting? sent out a memo?—were watching me like it was an ordinary question, up there with “Are we friggin’ out of ice again? It’s Minnesota in winter! Is it some kind of ironic joke? Is anybody listening to me?”

  I gaped for a few seconds and fumbled for the answer that, to me—and I assumed to them—was obvious. “I—you know. You know what happened, you all know what happened.” I looked around the butcher-block table at all of them. Jessica and DadDick looked tense, but they were new parents, so natch. Tina looked politely curious, but that was her default expression. Marc was wide-eyed, but he was always up for family gossip of any sort, or anything that would engage his interest and thus stop his rotting. DadDick was on Jessica’s left, idly scraping at what looked like a pureed peach stain on his T-shirt. And Sinclair, immaculate in Armani gray, was on my left and watching Jess with an unblinking gaze. He was in socks, his concession to the late hour and informal setting.

  “Dad and the Ant were in a car accident,” I continued, wondering why I was explaining stuff they all knew. “He got the gas mixed up with the brake—I inherited his brains, so I get how that happened—and plowed into the back of a garbage truck. You”—pointing to Jess—“you were in the hospital, and you”—to Sinclair—“you’d been kidnapped; my badass vampire husband was overpowered by a little-old-lady librarian.”

  “Not that little,” Sinclair muttered, the memory still rankling.

  It had been a terrible time. Like, Black Death terrible. My father and stepmother were dead in a silly accident, and their double funeral had been held where mine would have been, earlier, if I, as the “corpse,” hadn’t woken up pissed and vamoosed. (Wait. Since I was literally a corpse, the quotation marks might not be necessary.) Being back in that funeral home had been awful beyond belief. I could still see their poster-sized pictures at the front of the room, Dad with his vacant country club grin and the Ant looking like a blond piranha, pineapple-colored hair standing tall. And I was pretty sure her eyes followed me. There was no escaping that poster.

  No coffins, by the way. No chance. The bodies had been burned beyond recognition. I thought about my father, weak and nonconfrontational to the end, and my stepmother, Antonia, who threw his money at charities so she could plan balls and be the prom queen all over again. My return from the dead had horrified both of them. Their deaths had left me feeling bad that I didn’t feel bad.

  Jessica had been battling cancer from a hospital bed, a tormented DadDick (except he was Nick then—this was before I screwed up the timeline—he was Nick and he hated me almost as much as he feared me, and he was right to do both) only occasionally leaving her side to arrest bad guys.

  Tina had been out of the country, making sure the European vampire faction—who had come to town to wreak havoc and went out on the toes of my Manolos and Sinclair’s Louis Vuittons—were playing nice across the pond.

  My mother hadn’t gone to the funeral, and not just for obvious reasons. The accident had orphaned BabyJon, my father’s son by the Ant. I didn’t know it at the time, but BabyJon was about to become my son as well as my half brother. The accident made me his legal guardian, courtesy of my wish for a baby of my own, granted by my cursed engagement ring. It had been a monkey’s paw deal. Fucking antiques.

  Sinclair had also been nowhere to be found. Vanished. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d been kidnapped by a librarian; I thought he’d bailed on our wedding. Marjorie, the librarian, had been a tremendous pain in my ass, and killing her had been kind of fun. The blood rush I got from slurping down her life force like it was a blood-stuffed cream puff helped me cure Jessica of her blood cancer. Yeah, I know, but at the time it all made sense. Don’t ask me to do any of it again; I don’t even know how I managed it the first time. It was a perfect storm of supernatural nutjobbery.

  Oh, almost forgot—when all that awfulness was going on, I was also planning my wedding. So, stressful.

  To sum up: worst time of my life, and I was essentially alone for all of it.1

  “No coffins, though, right?” Jessica asked carefully.

  I barely heard her. I should have been paying attention, I knew that, but now that I’d started thinking about that dreadful month it blotted out everything else: unnamed babies, avoiding the Hell work-study program, Sinclair’s new terrible habit of playing in traffic . . . gone. It was all gone.

  Instead I remembered the eerie double funeral. I remembered feeling guilty because I wasn’t sad. I remembered feeling completely alone and it had nothing to do with their deaths and more to do with the sick friend and absentee husband.

  I had confused and annoyed my father before I died; I had horrified him after. And try as I might, that was all I really remembered of him: his confusion, his dismay. His horror.

  “The bodies,” I said, “had been burned beyond recognition.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it was her, and it was their car, and it was him. I mean, they had their IDs—mostly melted but good enough for identification—and the cops traced the car registration and they were on their way to a thing they were known to go to.”

  “A thing?” Marc asked.

  “Some charity something or other.” I waved off the specifics. One of the Ant’s “look at me, I didn’t peak in high school and this latest gaudy party proves it!” balls, most likely. (A ball, for God’s sake, like she was Cinderella and my dad was a balding prince prone to indigestion if he had too much dairy.) They could have been on their way to shave kangaroos for all I’d known; it didn’t matter. They were on their way, they never made it, the end. “So . . .”

  Marc was leaning in, concern writ large in his green eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “Hmm?” Betsy your father can’t make it Betsy your father is stuck out of town Betsy your father had to miss it Betsy your father loves you he’s just very busy Betsy your father is moving out Betsy of course it’s not your fault Betsy I’ll keep your father’s name but I won’t touch his money Betsy we don’t need it Betsy your father your father your father your father . . . “Sure.” I had to make a concerted effort to be an active participant in the conversation. In older movies, the heroine can often rely on someone to slap her, or at least shake her, to get her to focus

  (PAY THE FUCK ATTENTION, YOU DIMWIT, THIS IS IMPORTANT)

  but I preferred to skip the middleman and shake my own shoulders, metaphorically speaking.

  “Right!” Jessica visibly jumped, Ti
na’s eyes widened, and Sinclair arched an eyebrow. That came out a bit louder than I’d intended. “Uh, right. The whole thing was such a cliché it was pretty absurd. Which is not something you should think when a parent dies, I know.

  “Anyway, it was his midlife crisis—I think it was my dad’s third Jaguar and second midlife crisis—meets garbage truck equals kaboom. They had those urn things at the front of the room, with the posters sort of looming over them. Over all of us, now that I think about it.” I tried, and failed, to suppress the shudder. “No graves, no headstones.” Which was hilarious in a really awful way. I had a headstone and here I was. They didn’t, and they were gone, baby, gone.

  “And a few days after that, you saw the Ant’s ghost, right?”

  “While Sinclair and I were having sex,” I recalled glumly as my husband let loose with an almost imperceptible shiver. Whatever the female equivalent of losing an erection was, that was what happened to my junk when the Ant showed up: my lady parts had Closed Until Further Notice. Seeing ghosts was another vampire queen “perk,” and yes, those are ironic quotation marks.

  “But not your dad.”

  “What?”

  “Never your dad. You haven’t seen your dad’s ghost.” She was speaking with a peculiar intensity, practically pinning me in place with her bloodshot gaze.

  I could finally see where she was going and wasted no time reassuring her. “Well, no, but there are trillions of dead people, and I haven’t seen all their ghosts, either.” Either because they had the good manners to leave me the hell alone, or they couldn’t find me or didn’t need me.

  I was fine with any of those, by the way. The ghosts who did find me wanted something. They always wanted something. Sometimes it was easy. (“Yeah, you don’t know me, but your dead wife moved the money you embezzled to the Caymans, and also, she says everybody knows you’re wearing a rug and you should stop kidding yourself.”) Sometimes not so much. (“I don’t care how many mailmen you killed! I’m not going around to their next of kin and bitching about how it was society’s fault that you ended up with a hate-on toward the U.S. Postal Service.”)

  Frankly, I was glad my dad hadn’t popped by to ask for a favor. And not surprised. My dad hadn’t exactly been known to seek out my company. I figured, in death, wherever he was, he kept the habit.

  “And you didn’t see him in Hell.”

  “Yes, but again, that’s not a clue or anything.” Why was Jessica not letting up the intensity? I felt like I was sitting in the witness box on trial, which made her Sam Waterston, except her under-eye circles were darker. “I wasn’t in Hell very long and, again: trillions of dead people.” Whom I was successfully ignoring so far, thank God.

  “Yeah. Mm-hm.”

  I looked at her. Everyone else looked, too. Then they all looked at me, with various degrees of “what now?” expressions. My answer wouldn’t have reassured them (“I got nothin’. Maybe another round of smoothies? Take the edge off?”).

  Jessica cleared her throat, so we were expectant. But she didn’t say anything, so we went back to the waiting game. I saw Tina sneak a look at her cell phone, which made me wonder how long we’d been there, how long we’d have to stay there, and what time it was. Which Sinclair picked up on, because he looked annoyingly smug as he pointedly did not look at his phone while no doubt calculating the time to the nanosecond. Asshole.

  She cleared her throat again, because she apparently wanted to meet with us so we could listen to the phlegm follies. “The thing is, I saw your dad three days ago.”

  Jessica had spit that out so abruptly we all sort of froze. My mouth opened, but nothing came out. It opened again—dammit, I had to come up with something, this butcher block needed a leader!—and I managed to squeak, “The hell? What?”

  “Your dad. I saw him downtown on my way to meet my accountant.” I nodded, more at the accountant thing than the dad thing. And if it was a money meeting, she meant downtown St. Paul. Jessica was rich, but not idle. She was careful with her money and demanded accountability from accountants, and everyone else who worked for her, or for her money. DadDick loved this, and after the twins were born he encouraged her to get out of the house as often as she could, though these days she could keep tabs on her money gang from her laptop and cell phone. All that to say she tended to her business and her bucks, which was nothing new to me.

  Seeing my dead father, however, was.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  “Jess, I love you, but that’s nuts. My dad’s dead. You couldn’t have seen him.”

  Marc coughed. “Ah, that doesn’t exactly mean . . . well . . . anything. Not around here.”

  He had a point, which didn’t make Jessica correct. But yeah, I’d noticed death wasn’t really . . . you know . . . death. More like a time-out from God, who eventually relented and let you back in the game. God: the original tough love.

  It did make me wonder if Satan was going to pop up again, though. If anyone would come back from death solely to cause trouble, it’d be the Lady of Lies. Sure, she talked a good game about being sick of existence, about having the first and most thankless job (apparently not prostitution) in the history of human events and needing a permanent vacation, about being burned out because Hell had a shit HMO and no paid vacations. But in spite of all that, I couldn’t picture her staying off the checkers board. Not for long, anyway.

  (I don’t know how to play chess, so I am reduced to checkers metaphors.)

  “I did see him, though.” Jessica took a breath, then slowly let it out. “And he saw me.”

  “No.” I felt my irritation rise and squashed it. “He didn’t. D’you know how I know this?”

  “Maybe just let her finish?” Marc suggested. “And then start shooting her down?”

  I ignored the crazy talk from the zombie. “I know this because my dad was an ordinary guy whose idea of excitement was cheating on my mom and bringing a doggy bag to Country Buffet so the last trip up all went for next day’s lunch. That’s the guy who got into a dumb accident—the kind that happens every day—and was killed and is now dead and has remained dead all this time. It’s not a mystery. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s nothing we have to jump into and fix.”

  “Really?” DadDick asked, genuine surprise in his voice. “I kinda thought you’d be all over this.” Marc was nodding as he continued. “It’s just the thing to keep Laura off your—”

  “Do not bring Laura into this,” I snapped. “Not a word of it.”

  “Your dad saw me,” Jess continued, like I hadn’t just explained she’d seen something impossible and was therefore wrong and, frankly, owed me an apology for freaking me out and wasting everyone’s time. And, ah, God, if the Antichrist caught wind of this . . . “Our eyes met—”

  “Across a crowded room,” Marc hummed.

  “Yes, shut up now, our eyes met and when he recognized me he took off in the other direction. Flat-out jogged away from me.”

  Okay, that did sound like my dad, an Olympian-level avoider. And it wouldn’t have been the first time he physically fled from confrontation. It wouldn’t have been the first time he physically fled from Jessica. But of course it wasn’t Dad. Because, as I previously mentioned: dead.

  (Except not really, not in this house, not with this group, and it’s pretty plausible if you just stop and think about it for—)

  “Shut up!” I looked around the table of startled faces. “Sorry. If it helps, I wasn’t talking to any of you.”

  “It does help,” DadDick said, stifling a yawn. “Thank you.”

  “So.” Jess took a deep breath. Don’t know what she was all stressed and twitchy about; I was the one dealing with her hallucination. “Having known your father as long as I’ve known you, so, for almost two decades—”

  Marc grinned. “Thanks for doing the math for us.”

  “We need a chart of some kind, somet
hing that shows at a glance who has known who for how long and under what circumstances.”

  “On it.” Marc whipped out his phone and tapped it. His to-do list was horrifying, starting with the name: Things to Do So I Don’t Rot.

  “—I knew who he was and what he was doing and went after him.”

  Heh. The idea of Jessica barreling down the streets of downtown St. Paul as my dad frantically backpedaled to get the hell away from her was several layers of hilarious. All the more so because, as I mentioned, it wasn’t the first time. When she found out he blew off my eighteenth birthday to take the Ant to Cancún, she chased him through the Mall of America food court, screaming as he scurried. People called the cops. They were both banned for a year. Jessica dated one of the cops who arrested her, for three months. It was the best birthday ever. There’s been a special place in my heart for Orange Juliuses ever since.

  “He got away,” Jess was continuing in a voice heavy with regret. I was still lost in the fog of nostalgia and barely heard her explanation. “He must’ve zigged when I zagged or whatever. So I went to see your mom. For real this time.”

  Poof. Nostalgia fog burned off in a half second. “You had a hallucination from sleep deprivation and decided to get my mom involved?” I asked sharply.

  “I thought she’d have some ideas,” she replied. I couldn’t help but notice she had yet to apologize for anything. “And she did. She had no idea what he was up to—she assumed he’s been dead this whole time, just like we did—so she suggested we ask the person who would know.”