Death at Egg Harbor by Alannah Rogers

Author:Alannah Rogers [Rogers, Alannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-17T22:00:00+00:00

20

After our afternoon of horror, Blake seems to feel like we’ve had some kind of bonding experience. That or he really enjoys how squeamish I am. Because he comes back the next day just to hang out. Right now he’s perched on the edge of my heavy wooden desk, slugging down a coffee. He brought me a twelve-pack of donuts, which is making me feel a lot less like firing him.

“Don’t you worry a thing about that fall yesterday,” he growls. “I was picking up a Mrs. Henrietta Green during the winter. They lived on the edge of a steep hill. The walkway was all icy and I slipped, accidentally tipped the thing, and Mrs. Green went careening down that snow bank like a kid on a sled. Landed head first in a big bank of snow. She was real stiff at that point, so her little legs were just poking out. I hadn’t gotten a body bag on her either, because the family felt weird about it. They felt pretty weird about seeing her in a snow bank too. I had a heck of a time digging her out.”

“Blake, you’re really not good at your job, are you?”

He shrugs, unruffled. “Ah Jamie, give a guy a break. It’s a job just begging for accidents. Whenever I’m called into emergency, nurses tell me bodies fall out of gurneys all the time. Anyway, I can handle falling bodies. Even handle the smell. But it’s the noises they make that scare the living heck out of me.”

“What kind of noises?” I ask, unable to help myself.

Blake takes a long slurp of his coffee. “Some bodies get carbon-dioxide buildup in the lungs. You must’ve learned that in your fancy funeral school. So I’ll be driving and suddenly the thing just lets out this moan, yes just like in the movies with zombies. As if it’s about to eat my brains and everything. First time it happened, I parked the hearse at the hospital and went running in, screaming bloody murder. Nice emergency nurse told me all about the carbon buildup thing, assured me he wasn’t about to rise from the dead. I’m used to them groaning and moaning now but I still don’t like it.”

I shudder. “Well, that’s lovely. I have to work, Blake. You better scram or this place is going to fall apart.”

“You know, my cousin works at the Holey Donut,” he says, motioning with his head towards the half-empty box of donuts. “I can get you all you want.”

It’s a cheap ploy but he needn’t bother. I don’t know who else I’d get to drive a hearse in this tiny town, so he’s got the job for now. I go back to the loathsome task of trying to figure out Nana’s archaic double-entry bookkeeping system. I watch YouTube “how to” videos to try to figure it out, but either only geniuses can use this system or I’m denser than a slab of taffy. I want to call Duffy to figure

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