Chapter 1

1

Like most of the best stories, this one involves a dead body, and since I own a funeral home, dead bodies are not a problem for me. Certainly not as big a problem as Charlie Soder. How do I explain Charlie? And how do I solve this Charlie-shaped problem that fell into my lap?

Charlie. Charlie. Charlie.

Charlie!

I was smitten. Okay, there’s that. Let’s be honest, shall we? Let’s tell the truth. Let’s put it out there in words that even I can understand. My new funeral home embalmer and all-round assistant is a looker, a piece of eye candy so sweet I’m afraid my eyes will get diabetes just from looking at him. All the standard things: blond hair, silky and soft, courtesy of Nordic ancestors. Oddly dark eyes that can only be described as soulful and penetrating. Pale skin, fine muscles, a lithe, athletic frame—when God handed out the good stuff, Charlie Soder was standing first in line and clearly got more than his share.

It was distracting, how good looking this young man was. And oh, the raunchy, lusty thoughts he engendered in the back of my mind as I, his new boss and the owner of the business, tried my damnedest to be professional and detached!

I had been in love a time or two in my twenty-nine years of existence (or at least thought I had) but was no longer sure. Maybe age was a factor. The clock was ticking. Maybe my genes and hormones were telling me to get on with it. Whatever the cause, my life had not been the same since Charlie Soder had walked through the front doors of my funeral home and said he wanted to apply for the job of embalmer, which I had listed in the local newspaper the week before. Since he was only the second applicant and likely the last—embalmers are hard to come by, just so you know, in case you ever want to try to hire one—and since the first applicant had been a crotchety bastard old enough to my father, I had gratefully said yes on the spot. While doing so, I told myself it was notbecause he was cute. I was notthat shallow.

But as one week turned into two, I was beginning to have doubts. I’m a big bullshitter. Have to be, in my life of work. Every day I tell people everything’s going to be all right when clearly it’s not going to be. Their lives will never be the same. But I have to gently persuade them that death is a process and it takes time and we’ll walk through it and it’s going to be fine. Fine, fine, fine. I know it’s far more complicated, but what can I say? It doestake time and people doget through it, but the whole business is so ghastly and horrendous and so horribly final that one is reduced, in the heat of the moment, to pious, easily-digested platitudes.

On the evening this story begins—well, middle of the night—I was returning from a death call in the company van. Old Man Hankins on Maple Drive had finally given up the ghost, something he had been trying to do for the last five years but just couldn’t seem to get around to. I think his wife was relieved, to tell the truth. It was our third body this week—and it was only Wednesday. But that was the onset of winter; one day the bodies just start piling up.

I pulled into the back of Port Moss Mortuary and Funeral Home and hit the button on the remote for the garage door opener. It was just after two in the morning and I needed to deposit Hankins into the cooler and see if I could get some shut eye before the day began in earnest.

I had grown up in this funeral home; it had belonged to my father, and my father’s father before him, going back to the late 1800s. Death care was what we do, Daddy used to say. Death care was in our blood. Once an undertaker, always an undertaker.

As I waited for the bay door to rise, I noticed it was dark in the apartment where Charlie was staying until he could find himself a decent place. We called it “the apartment,” but originally it had been living quarters for the small kitchen staff in the old days when the home had first been built.

Was Charlie alone in bed? What was he wearing? Underwear? Nothing?

Blushing, I pushed the thought aside. Not that I didn’t want to know what he might look like naked and in bed, but…

I had never lusted after an employee. Honestly, I had never really lusted after anyone like this—not since I had been a teenager, at any rate. My pecker seemed to have a mind of its own and it was embarrassing.