“Cathie was just asking about the budget.” One of the yuckier perks of being queen of the dead? I alone could see and hear ghosts. And they could see and hear me. And bug me. Any time. Day or night. Naked or fully clothed.
But even for a ghost, Cathie was special. As we all know, most ghosts hang around because they have unfinished business. Once they finished their business, poof! Off into the wild blue whatever. (God knows I'd never had that privilege.) And who could blame them? If it were me, I'd beat feet off this mortal plane the minute I could.
But even after I'd fixed Cathie's little serial killer problem, she hung around. She even ran defense between the ghosts and me. Sort of like a celestial executive assistant.
“So?” Marc asked.
“Don't look at. . . me,” Jessica gasped. Marc's lips thinned, and we all looked away. “Gravy train's. . . over.”
“Would your friend like some water?” a new attendant said, swooping in out of nowhere. “Got any chemo?” Jess asked tiredly. “It's, um, three million,” I said, desperate to change the subject. I couldn't look at Jessica, so I looked at my feet instead. My toenails were in dire need of filing and polishing. As they always were—no matter what I did to them, they always returned to the same state they'd been in the night I died.
“ Three million?” Cathie screamed in my ear, making me flinch. The attendants probably thought I was epileptic. “What, rubles? Pesos? Yen?”
“Three million dollars?” Marc goggled. “For a party?”
All the women glared at him. Men! A wedding wasn't 'just a party.' A party was just a party. This would be the most important day of my—our—lives.
Still. I was sort of amazed to find Sinclair had dumped three mill into my checking account. I didn't even bother asking him how he'd pulled it off.
“What the hell will you spend three million on?” Cathie shrieked.
“Cake, of course.”
“Talking to Cathie?” Laura asked.
“Yeah. Cake—” I continued.
“Cathie, you should go to your king,” Laura suggested.
“King?” Cathie asked in my head.
“She means Jesus,” I said.
“This haunting isn't very becoming,” my sister continued doggedly.
“Tell your goody-?goody sister to cram it,” Cathie said.
“She says thanks for the advice,” I said.
“Just think of all the charitable contributions you could make with that money,” Laura gently chided me, “and still have a perfectly lovely ceremony.” (Have I mentioned that the devil's daughter was raised by ministers?)
“There's the cake,” I continued.
“What, a cake the size of a Lamborghini?” Cathie .asked.
“Gown, bridesmaids' gowns, reception, food—”
“That you can't eat!” Marc groaned.
“Honeymoon expenses, liquor for the open bar, caterers, waiters, waitresses—”
“A church to buy from the Catholics.”
The others were used to my one-?sided conversations with Cathie, but Marc was still shaking his head in that 'women are fucknuts' way that all males mastered by age three.
“None of these are working,” I told the attendants. I wasn't referring to the dresses, either. “And my friend is tired. I think we'll have to try another time.”
“I'm fine,” Jessica rasped.
“Shut up,” Marc said.
“You don't look exactly well,” Laura fretted.
'Aren't you supposed to go back to the hospital soon?
“Shut up, white girl.”
“If I ever said 'shut up, black girl,' you would land on me like the wrath of the devil herself” Laura paused. “And I ought to know.”
“Stay out of my shit, white girl.”
“If you're ill, you should be in the hospital.”
“Cancer isn't contagious, white girl.”
“It's very selfish of you to give Betsy something else to worry about right now.”
“Who's talking to you, white girl? Not her. Not me. Don't you have a soup kitchen to toil in? Or a planet to take over?”
Laura gasped. I groaned. Jessica was in an ugly mood, but that was no reason to bring up The Thing We Didn't Talk About: namely, that the devil's daughter was fated to take over the world.
Before the debate could rage further, the attendant cut in. “But your wedding is only a few months away. That doesn't leave us much—”
“Cram it,” I snapped, noticing the gray pallor under Jessica's normally shining skin. “Laura, you're right. We're out of here.”
Chapter 3
But all that stuff at the bridal shop happened months ago, and I was only thinking of my friends because I was all alone. Worse: all alone at a double funeral.
My father and his wife were dead.
I had no idea how to feel about that. I'd never liked the Ant—my stepmother—a brassy, gauche woman who lied like fish sucked water, a woman who had shoved my mother out of her marriage and shattered my conception of happily ever after at age thirteen.
And my father had never had a clue what to do with me. Caught between the daily wars waged between the Ant and me, and my mom and the Ant, and the Ant and him (“Send her away, dear, and do it right now”), he stayed out of it altogether. He loved me, but he was weak. He'd always been weak. And my coming back from the dead horrified him.
And she had never loved me, or even liked me.
But that was all right, because I had never liked her, either. My return from the dead hadn't improved our relationship one bit. In fact, the only thing that had accomplished that trick was the birth of my half brother, Babyjon, who was mercifully absent from the funeral.
Everybody was absent. Jessica was in the hospital undergoing chemo, and her boyfriend, Detective Nick Berry, only left her side to eat and occasionally arrest a bad guy.
In a horrifying coincidence, the funeral was taking place where my own funeral had been. Would have, except I'd come back from the dead and gotten the hell out of there. I was not at all pleased to find myself back, either.
When I'd died, more than a year ago, I'd gotten a look at the embalming room but hadn't exactly lingered to sightsee. Thus, I—we—were sitting in a room I'd never seen. Sober dark walls, lots of plush folding chairs, my dad and the Ant's pictures blown up to poster size at the front of the room. There weren't coffins, of course. Nothing that might open. The bodies had been burned beyond recognition.
“—a pillar of the community, and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were active in several charitable causes—”
Yeah, sure. The Ant (short for Antonia) was about as charitably minded as that little nutty guy in charge of North Korea. She threw my dad's money at various causes so she could run the fund-?raising parties and pretend she was the prom queen again. One of those women who peaked in high school. It had always amazed me that my father hadn't seen that.
I looked around the room of mostly strangers (and not many of them, either, despite the two of them being “pillars of the community”) and swallowed hard. Nobody was sitting on either side of me. How could they? I was
