that day, and glared at me now. I would have stayed out of the way, but I realized Gottfried was signing his name.
“Gottfried, you know your signature isn’t valid, right?” The courts had decided that for a dead man to sign anything was the same thing as forging, and the people at Revenant House were supposed to have told him that.
“It’s just an order for supplies!” Elizabeth snapped.
But Gottfried was reading the paper in front of him. “This isn’t about the house,” he said. “I only want the papers about the job.”
“But Gottfried—” Elizabeth started to say, but when I got close enough to snoop, she snatched it up. “Sorry, my mistake. This wasn’t supposed to be in this stack.”
The afternoon was the same as the morning. We went up, we went down, we went outside, we went inside, Gottfried climbed a ladder, I stood below and wondered if I could catch him if he fell again.
Never having been on a building site that didn’t involve Legos or sand, I was surprised by the number of decisions that had to be made and the arguments that ensued. Who knew that using the wrong color of wood would totally destroy a house’s aesthetic? I didn’t even know that a house had an aesthetic.
By the time the living workers were ready to call it a day, I was exhausted. Back to Revenant House for Gottfried, and after making sure Papa Philippe wasn’t poised to issue warnings, it was home to takeout Thai food for me.
The next day was mostly the same, except a little more contentious as the arguments from the previous day escalated—Gottfried ordered one man to completely replaster the ceiling in the dining room because it swirled the wrong way and told C.W. to send back a whole load of lumber because they weren’t building an Emerald Lake shack. I tried to hide my grin when both Von Doesburg and Scarpa heard that latter comment, but I didn’t do a very good job.
Once again, around midday Gottfried settled down in the kitchen for paperwork. After Elizabeth’s attempted document-signing trick, I’d decided to hang around the whole day and had brought lunch with me. So while Gottfried pored over his notes and blueprints, I found a relatively dust-free spot at the counter to eat my ham sandwich and apple.
C.W. came to speak to Gottfried, got snarled at for not meeting code, and then grabbed a Coke out of the refrigerator, one of the few appliances in the house that was plugged in.
“You ready to change jobs and go into construction?” he asked me.
“I’m thinking not. You guys work too hard. And I’d probably never be able to keep to the code.”
“The what?”
“I heard Gottfried saying something about keeping to the code.”
He laughed. “He meant the building code. This house was built long before a lot of the regulations were established, but our renovations have to be up to code.”
“So it’s nothing to do with pirates?”
“Just Captain Bligh over there.”
I lowered my voice. “Sorry Gottfried is giving you a hard time. Revenants aren’t good at compromise.”
“Gottfried was never good at compromise. He’s actually easier to deal with now than when he was alive.”
“Seriously? Why did you work with him?”
“Because when the job was done, I knew it was something that would last. That made it worthwhile.”
He finished his Coke and headed off for code-meeting while Gottfried continued to bark orders at everybody in range. Since he didn’t look as if he was going to be moving any time soon, I said, “Gottfried, I’m going to go visit the little houngan’s room.”
Since my bladder capacity didn’t affect the task at hand, he didn’t bother to respond.
The bathrooms were not in usable condition, which meant I had to brave a Porta-Potty. That was enough to make me go as fast as possible, even if I hadn’t been on watchdog duty. But despite the added incentive, by the time I got back to the kitchen, Gottfried was gone.
I wasn’t immediately alarmed—he hadn’t promised to stay put, after all. So I spent a few minutes looking for him. When I had no luck, I started asking all the workmen I came across if they’d seen him. That was worse than useless because construction workers concentrating on their work don’t pay attention to the clock, so I couldn’t tell who’d seen him last.
I finally spotted him after I’d gone outside—C.W. thought Gottfried went to inspect some ongoing work on the foundation, but he was actually inside when I spotted him at the entrance to the second-floor balcony. As I watched, he stepped over the yellow caution tape that had been strung up to block the entrance.
I wanted to call up to warn him to be careful but was afraid to distract him. Instead all I could do was hold my breath as he bent over to examine the junction of the balcony with the house. I heard rather than saw the wood give way, and later decided that I must have screamed when he tried to grab for a handrail that splintered under his weight.
Even at that distance, I could still sense that Gottfried was aware, but a split second after he started to fall, I felt him give up the ghost. All that hit the ground was a body that had been dead for weeks.
PEOPLE CAME RUNNING from all directions, but the first to reach Gottfried was Elizabeth. She turned away when the smell got to her, her hand over her mouth. I thought she was going to cry, but then she saw me and she went from sad to furious in nothing flat.
“You incompetent moron! You let him die again!”
“I didn’t do anything. He fell!”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “A real houngan can keep a revenant alive for months, years. You can’t even manage two days.”
“He fell,” I repeated. “The floor he was on broke. Go look!” But in looking at the faces around me, I could tell nobody really believed me, and nobody rushed up to examine the evidence, either. “Fine, I’ll raise him again and we’ll ask him what happened.” I wasn’t completely sure that Gottfried would care enough about the question to answer it, but if I framed his repeated “deaths” as a barrier to finishing the job, it might get his attention. “Get me a sacrifice and I’ll get him up and moving again.”
But Mrs. Hopkins was shaking her head. “No, we can’t do it to him again. You said it yourself—a revenant has to want to stay long enough to finish the task. It’s clear that Gottfried doesn’t. We have to let him rest.”
“He doesn’t want to rest!” I protested.
“Obviously he does,” Von Doesburg said. “It seems to me that if you’d done your job properly, you’d know that. I think the courts will agree with me.”
“There’s no need for that—I’m sure Dodie did her best,” Mrs. Hopkins said kindly, “but it’s over. I need to see about getting Gottfried back to his grave.”
The people there didn’t literally turn their backs on me, but they might as well have. Even C.W. just shook his head sadly when I looked at him.
“I’ll mail your check back tomorrow,” I said to nobody in particular, and walked away.
MY PHONE RANG as I walked in my front door, and the voice on the other end said only, “The council be wanting to see you at full dark.” Then whoever it was hung up.
It was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall. Maybe there was something to the loa business—how else could they already know?
I knew Papa Philippe would want me to dress the part, so I took the time to rummage around and find my loose cotton skirt and blouse, the myriad strings of beads and amulets, and the curly black wig I’d worn as an apprentice. Then I fastened on my tignon of calico scarves knotted together, needing a dozen bobby pins to keep it on my head. It was while I was applying makeup six shades darker than my real complexion that I got a good look at myself in the mirror. And nearly laughed my ass off.
So when I arrived at the Order’s compound, it was only after I’d washed my face, pulled the tignon from my head, dumped the jewelry onto the floor, and changed into blue jeans and my
Screw ’em if they couldn’t take a joke.
