Dirge for the Departed by Manifold Lisa

Author:Manifold, Lisa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ocean Top Press
Published: 2023-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

It took me a minute or seven to get Dr. Flannigan on his way. Lola was yelling, striding back and forth in the mortuary room, tossing her hands up. I didn’t know how Dr. Flannigan couldn’t even feel her energy. I felt it moving around the room.

Lola Dempsey was a whirlwind in death as she’d been in life.

Finally, after I’d seen Dr. Flannigan out, leaving him with Sissy to do the administrative side of this process, I hurried back down to the mortuary room.

Lola was still there, staring at my wall of refrigerator space.

“This is where I end up. In a box in a basement.”

“It’s where most people end up, Lola,” I said.

“And because somebody killed me. Who would kill me? Janey, everybody loved me!”

“Or at least pretended to.”

Lola glared daggers at me, and then her shoulders sagged. “You’re right. When you’ve been a star for so long, you get to believing your own bullshit.”

“Do you have any idea?”

“I don’t know what happened with my security. They usually are on top of things. Someone must have gotten through.”

“Is there someone who holds a grudge?”

“My ex, Rick Chamberlin. He occasionally pops up, like the white part on top of chickenshit, trying to say look at me, I’m white and clean, but he’s still chickenshit. He wants alimony, or a piece of something, or whatever. He’s like a rash. I have an attorney that just deals with him.”

“Would he have enough of a grudge to kill you?”

Lola thought about it. “I was about to say no, but if I’m gone, then he can make a claim on my estate.”

“Would he have any merit?”

Lola laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. “Not a whit. I have estate attorneys that deal with that, and they loathe him.”

“Okay, so Rick, but maybe not really.”

“Can’t rule him out,” Lola said.

“Who else?”

“David Dean,” Lola said. “My daughter’s ex. He’s the one who got her into drugs, and he came around after she got sober. I had his ass tossed in jail. He’s the one who gave her the last hit she ever did. That feeling of hate is mutual,” Lola said grimly.

Oof. What did you say to that? “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could he get past your security?”

“Supposedly not. But someone did,” Lola replied.

“This is true.”

“We just have to figure out who it was.”

I felt my heart sink. This was the reason that Lola was still here. Like Victoria, like Kara, she needed justice. But I wasn’t Miss Marple, or a hobby detective on the side.

Even if I had figured out who killed Victoria. Kara was kind of a fluke, and not really my doing. This was something different. This was a much more involved murder—although were any of the other ghosts any less important?

They weren’t. All three of my ghostly visitors were of great importance.

This just felt… bigger.

“I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do that,” I said.

“The folks who live here tell me you’re pretty spunky. That you figure things out. You’ll figure this out, too,” Lola said with far more confidence than I felt.

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