My foot let off the last step just as a girl bounced up from her desk. The office chair on wheels rolled back until it hit the cemented wall behind her, and she greeted me with a broad and welcoming smile displaying perfectly straight white teeth.
“Oh, yay!” she exclaimed, stepping toward us in bright yellow Vans. A pink pen with a rainbow pom-pom rested behind her ear. She was the most colorful creature I’d seen since arriving, wearing a tight neon long-sleeved shirt with yellow, hot pink, and electric blue stripes under her black overalls. Her fiery-red hair bounced as her hand jetted out. “Monday Mitchell. You must be Fallon. And don’t worry,” she leaned over, her cheery voice hardly turning into a whisper, “Jonah told me yesterday that you don’t deal with families. I have you covered.”
Jonah shoved his hands in his jean pockets. “Yeah, I was relieved when Benny called. We could really use an extra hand around here.” He shifted toward Monday and nudged his head. “Monday will train you on how things work around here. You’ll be responsible for dressing, cosmetics, and casketing the lo’s.”
My brow peaked, and I turned my head slightly from Monday to Jonah. “Lo’s?”
“Loved ones,” Monday answered, winking at Jonah.
He pressed his lips together in a fine line, adding, “And keeping the equipment and preparation room clean, which is upstairs.”
“Of course, everything sounds good.” I took one last look around the basement.
Monday’s desk was filled with photos of the deceased and a shrine to bobble-heads and figurines. An empty desk with an ancient computer sat at the opposite end of the basement, and pushed against the back wall was a bunk-bed and dresser.
“This is a twenty-four-seven, on-call job,” Jonah reminded me as if I’d never done this before. But over the last five years, being a mortician was all I’d done. I was aware of the late nights, spur of the moment calls and having to drop everything to arrive and take care of the deceased. Jonah walked toward the desk and swiped up a black object before returning. “You have to keep this beeper on you at all times.”
He handed me the beeper, and I looked up at Monday and raised a brow. “A beeper?”
Back in Jonah’s office, I filled out the non-disclosure agreement as he went on about how paperwork and reporting for the deceased were completed differently in Weeping Hollow. After hearing the rules and risky business of the funeral home, and how they keep everything “in house,” I made him sign a made-up non-disclosure agreement of my own, for him to agree to never report me to the state of Maine for his illegal transactions. Jonah didn’t find it funny.
He put me to work right away, and I spent the rest of my morning cleaning the preparation and display rooms, which showcased the coffins and different linings the funeral home had to offer. I didn’t mind and had always respected every job, big or small, even if it meant scrubbing toilets or mopping bodily fluids off the tile.
The rainbow-colored stationary taped to the full-sized refrigerator in the kitchen read help yourself in loopy letters. Monday had stocked the fridge with deli sandwiches from Mina’s Diner, and I grabbed one marked Italian, deciding to take a walk across the cemetery to get out of the stuffy building and into the fresh air.
The morning fog had cleared and fallen leaves crunched under my work tennis shoes through the maze of tombstones. Branches from the trees twisted overhead, almost as if the limbs were reaching out to grab whoever passed. The air was damp. It smelled like history.
It smelled like death.
And somewhere under this sacred ground, my mother was buried. The thought never left my mind as I continued my aimless stroll between the headstones, cracked and tilted from the earth's shifting planes. I forced my eyes away from reading the engravings, not ready to come across hers yet. Her spirit had never visited me, and a part of me always believed it was because I was the one who took her life.
I bit into the cold sub when fire-engine-red hair peeked from behind a large beech tree. As I walked closer, my eyes lowered onto Monday, who was sitting atop the dead grass with a bright sugar skull lunch box at her side and a carrot stick poking out of her mouth.
I swallowed down the food in my mouth. “So, this is where you ran off to.” Aside from the two of us, and the gravedigger a few yards away, the cemetery was vacant. “Typical mortician, eating in a cemetery …”
“Right?” Smiling, Monday patted the ground next to her and shifted her lunch box to the other side, scooting over. “Come, sit,” she insisted. “This is the best seat in town.”
I plopped beside her and crossed my legs.
Monday’s gaze slid to me, and I felt her eyes scanning my features. When I looked back at her, she quickly looked away.
Growing up, kids had only been nice because they were afraid of my ghostly traits. My natural platinum-white hair, my bone-white skin, my faint-blue eyes; two crystal balls no one would look into for more than a second. Kids had only been kind because of the rumors. I hardly had real friends. However, all those problems seemed trivial once high school ended and real life began. A time when more significant problems took over, like money, career choices, shelter, and a social status one would have to build solo, without one given by parents.
Adults didn’t care about what others were doing—what I was doing.
I popped the last of the Italian sub into my mouth, watching as the gravedigger shoveled mounds of dirt with a black bandana tied around his face. Monday’s knee nudged the side of my thigh, breaking my stare. “You arrived just in time, ya know. With Defy Superstition Day, Mabon, Samhain …”
I stretched my legs out in front of me and crossed my ankles. I knew Mabon was the equivalent to Thanksgiving in the Wiccan community, and Samhain was during Halloween to celebrate the dead. But … “Defy Superstition Day?”
“Ever heard of it?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s a stupid holiday if you ask me. You can’t trust a holiday that was invented in 1999. You can’t trust the same year LFO made the charts. You saw what happened to them…” she paused and turned to see my lifted brows hanging in the air. I shook my head, oblivious to anything she was saying, and her jaw dropped. “You’re kidding me, right? Rich died, dude. And that’s not even the freaky part. The band split up, then after they got back together again, bam! another one bites the dust. I’m telling ya. Su-per-sti-tion.” Monday shook her head and bit into her carrot. “You don’t believe in that sorta thing, do you?”
“I think it’s bad luck to believe in superstition,” I said through a laugh.
An awkward silence landed between us. She looked at me. I looked at her, waiting for her to find the hole in my joke. Then her lips quirked. Monday was a three-second-delay girl. I loved three-second delay girls.
“I got it now.” She nodded with a slow-forming smile.
“How do you know all that stuff? I thought Weeping Hollow was cut off from what’s going on out there.”
“I have a thing for nineties music,” she shrugged, “and when you have a thing, you find a way. But back to Defy Superstition Day. The festival is at night, and the whole town will be there.”
I immediately thought about Julian, the man on the rocks from the day before. The Hollow Heathen, as Milo had called him. I’d gone out at the cliff’s edge this morning to see if he would return, but he didn’t.