The Icing on the Corpse by Liz Mugavero

Author:Liz Mugavero [Mugavero, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2015-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

In her dream, two dogs Stan didn’t recognize dressed in wedding garb pranced around the town green. There were no humans in sight, but there were hundreds of dogs and only one cake, which the wedding couple didn’t seem to like. The pup-cake desserts were missing, and she ran frantically around the green looking for them. Instead, she found a groundhog behind a tree eating a cookie, but it wasn’t hers.

“Why aren’t you eating my cookie?” she asked the groundhog (probably Lilypad, since that was the only groundhog she knew of that ate cookies), but got no answer. When she ran back to the crowd of dogs, Sarah Oliver stood in the middle of the pack, holding a crystal ball. “My mother’s dead,” she kept saying, and the dogs were barking like crazy and wouldn’t stop....

Stan’s eyes flew open. It was her own dogs barking, not the dogs in her crazy dream. Which she hoped wasn’t a premonition of how the real “wedding” would go. But before she could worry about the wedding, she had to get through today’s funeral. After Sarah Oliver’s hijacking of last night’s town meeting, the funeral was sure to be a happening event. She’d certainly thrown the remainder of the meeting into an uproar.

After her offer to help Adrian Fox, the whole room had erupted into pure mayhem. Stan imagined there were a few different things going on—the camp who thought Sarah was nuts, the camp who thought the whole thing was nuts, and the camp who now wanted to go on a ghost hunt and be part of a seance. Edgar Fenwick’s friends had finally escorted him out of town hall before he had a heart attack. Betty had vanished, too. Don Miller had refrained from physically dragging his eccentric sister from the building, but Stan figured the after-conversation had not been pleasant. Char had soaked up the whole scene to discuss at the inn, and Izzy sat back and watched it all with the same amusement one would watch a particularly bad reality show—a train wreck you couldn’t help but remain glued to, glad it wasn’t your life.

But if Sarah really was on to something—if Helga did need to tell her story, and it was related to this ghost hunt—things could get interesting.

The dogs were still barking up a storm downstairs. Stan looked at the clock. Six-ten. A ruckus at this hour couldn’t be good. She got up and threw on her fuzzy robe and slippers. The house still had a chill to it, which meant it hadn’t warmed up at all outside. Racing downstairs, Nutty right behind her, she found the dogs at the front door, wooing and barking up a storm. She peeked through the blinds in the hall window. Didn’t see anyone. Perhaps Cyril had delivered another paper with his special report on the town meeting. She pulled the door open.

No paper, but there was a package. A regular, manilla envelope, oversized, propped against the door. Stan stuck her head out and looked around.

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