Chapter 15

Chapter

Fifteen

KEIR

“I’m sosorry for your loss, Mrs. Eads. When do you think you can come by to make the arrangements?”

Regina Eads had been referred to Dearly & Son by Rena Cox, Georgia Lane’s partner. Georgia was the office manager at Clegg Cycles and a dear friend of Dash’s, so of course, a friend of Georgia and Rena’s would be more than welcome at Dearly & Son.

“I need to call the coroner’s office to speak with someone about when the body can be picked up. I can’t believe I’m referring to my baby boy as a body. How do people get through this?”

My heart broke for the woman. Grief was a funny thing. No two people ever did it the same way, and nobody did it wrong. It was merely a process that we all endured in our own way. The pain was unbelievable and never went away. It only lessened over time, but that hole in one’s heart was always there, wasn’t it?

“What’s the name you were given at the coroner’s office, Mrs. Eads?” I was sure I knew who it was.

“Jonas Schiff. He’s the assistant to the coroner, I was told by the officer who made the death notification this morning.”

Brian Eads was a twenty-year-old kid who had died from a drug overdose on Friday morning at two a.m. His mother had been notified early this morning of his death by a patrol officer who’d come to her house after the identification was made by the police.

The young man had been found at an abandoned house in a seedy part of town, already deceased. The police had been called by someone in the neighborhood because of loud music coming from the abandoned house. When the police arrived, they arrested eight people for trespassing and found Brian’s body.

Clearly, Mrs. Eads was at a loss for what to do with the sudden death of her son, so she called her friend Rena, who gave her my name. Now, it was my job to help her through one of the worst days of her life.

“Good. I’ve worked with Jonas many times, so I’ll take that off your plate and contact him to arrange transportation. I’ll pick Brian up at the coroner’s office and bring him here. I’ll accommodate you any time you want to come over. Bring anyone you’d like to help you through the process. Your support system is very important right now.”

When my dad died, Mom and I went on autopilot until after the funeral because she knew what Dad wanted for himself, but after the burial, she just broke. Thankfully, she had friends she knew from the business and her varied interests, some of whom had lost a spouse themselves and understood her pain. They helped her process her grief and learn how to cope with being without Dad. She also said helping those going through the same thing as her was therapy unto itself.

Of course I’d done the thing they tell you not to do—I’d buried myself in my work at the software company and had begun taking mortuary science classes because I knew what was going to happen and had to plan accordingly. Mom couldn’t have run the funeral business alone.

“Thank you, Mr. Dearly. Can we come by tomorrow morning after mass at St. Robert’s?” Ah, it would be a Catholic funeral. I hoped the priest wasn’t an asshole.

“Will that be the church where you want to hold the mass for Brian?” I’d call the church and talk to the priest before I picked up Brian. In the past, some clergy had refused to work with me because I was a gay man. I didn’t want to traumatize Mrs. Eads more than she’d already suffered.

“How’s tomorrow morning at nine?” If she went to an early mass, I wanted to be dressed and ready for her.

“That’s good, Mr. Dearly. I’ll see you in the morning at nine.” We said our goodbyes, and I ended the call.

It was late Saturday afternoon. Mr. Josephson’s funeral had gone well with only twenty folks in attendance—including my staff. There were a few old-timers who were friends of Alfred’s and said kind words. The chaplain who knew Alfred from the nursing home said a prayer, and after the service was over, Adon delivered Alfred to Steinbeck’s Crematorium where Aaron—Murray and Jerry’s nephew—was now running the business.

There were footsteps on the stairs to the apartment, so I hurried to turn off the lights and lock the doors to the funeral home, having sent everyone home after the funeral. I was definitely looking forward to a quiet night with my husband.

A crash from overhead had me taking the stairs two at a time. “Dash?”

I walked into our great room to see a man I hadn’t thought I’d see again in my life. He’d broken down the door and entered our house without permission. “What are you doing here, Thane?” I was shocked he could break down the door, but he was inside, so I had to believe my own eyes.

“I love and need you, Keir. I’m here to save you from that asshole you married. He’s on his way home, so let’s get your things another time. I have a car downstairs to take you where I know you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you. You need help, Thane, but I can’t give it to you. How did you find us? Did you follow us home?” The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as a prickly feeling skittered down my arms.

“Keir, it’s okay to be in love with me. We’ll go somewhere Clegg will never find you. We can have a wonderful life together.” He stared at me as though he couldn’t believe I hadn’t agreed with him. The guy was clearly living in a fantasy world of his own making. I had never given him any indication I had any feelings for him.

I was about to argue when the doorbell for the funeral home rang. I reached for my phone to see who it was, only to have Thane jerk it from my hand. “Come on. Let’s go out this way.”

He grabbed my arm and tried to drag me with him onto the stoop, but I kicked him in the ankle. He began hopping around on one leg, and I took that as the right time to put my hand on his chest. "Get out! I cast you back to hell. Leave Thane alone!”

For a moment, Thane appeared to be stunned, and then he began laughing hysterically. That damn black cat slinked in through my broken door and leaped into the air, attaching itself to my pants and scrambling up my torso by way of sinking its nails into the fabric of my shirt and my skin. I grabbed it. “Get out!”

I was able to swipe the cat off me while Thane was busy jumping around from his injured ankle. The air in the apartment smelled of sulfur, and in the blink of an eye, a tall woman stood in front of me, completely nude. She didn’t even try to cover up.

She cackled as though she had lost her mind, and then she and Thane disappeared, taking the cat with them. I found my phone on the small porch, but the battery was completely drained.

I hurried to the kitchen and called Dash’s cell from the landline. When it went to voicemail, I hung up. I couldn’t begin to describe what I’d just witnessed in a voicemail.

I put my phone on the charger before walking to the liquor cabinet in the dining room and grabbed a bottle of whiskey, twisting off the top and glugging from the bottle. WTF just happened?

My phone rang on the counter, but I was too shaken up to answer. A moment later, the number for the funeral home began to ring, so I picked up the extension in the kitchen. “Dearly & Son Funeral Home. Keir Dearly speaking.”

I hadn’t checked the caller identification to see who it was. I hoped it was a telemarketer I could hang up on.

“Keir, Dean Lester. Maybe you can clear up a couple of mysteries for me? We’ve checked the fingerprints we collected in the mortuary the other day.” He had a chuckle in his voice. Maybe it was nothing bad?

“Sure. Did you find any fingerprints that don’t belong?” I hoped it wasn’t any of the kids who lived in the neighborhood.

“There are two sets of prints I have questions about. First, that guy who helps out at the funeral home, uh, Adonis Steward? We couldn’t get a hit on him anywhere.”

No surprise there, but now I needed an excuse. “He, uh, he was a homebirth to parents from Eastern European heritage. Maybe they didn’t record his birth?”

“Hmm, maybe. Anyway, the other one is a lot more puzzling. Do you deal with exhumed bodies if they’re being moved from one cemetery to another?”

That was a strange question. “I, uh, under a special circumstance, maybe?” It came out like a question because I couldn’t comprehend why he’d asked. We’d just had the internment memorial for the ashes of the unknown boy not long ago, but he hadn’t been buried yet.

“So, you haven’t had a body in the mortuary that came from another cemetery? Maybe the prints could have been transferred to the keyboard by touch or something?” Dean didn’t sound like he knew the answer any more than I did.

“Are we talking fingerprints or touch DNA?” I watched television, which was the extent of my knowledge of anything DNA related.

“We didn’t do DNA analysis on it. Hell, maybe we will. We’ve got it on the fingerprints, so maybe. Anyway, the fingerprints came back for a guy who died about forty years ago in Baltimore. Name of, uh...” I could hear pages being flipped. “Ah, yeah. Norman Evans. His name was Norman Evans. I requested Baltimore PD pull the file from the archives. How’s that for weird?”

I chuckled. “It’s par for the course, Dean. Thanks for checking into it. As long as it’s not one of the folks from the neighborhood, I guess I’ve got nothing to worry about. Thank you, Dean, for looking into it. I really appreciate it. Thanks for calling.” We hung up, and I took the whiskey to the kitchen to dump it.

I checked my phone to see the missed call was from Dean, so I went to a search engine to look up someone who could do something about the front door. That was far above my abilities.

Just as I was about to call someone nearby, there was stomping on the stairs to the apartment and a lot of mumbling. “That motherfucking son of a— What the hell happened here?”

Dash stood on the porch with an expression of disbelief on his handsome face. “It’s a long story. Come inside, please.”

My strong man picked up the door and leaned it against the wall before he walked over and kissed me. “What the fuck, Dearly?”

I sighed. “Thane Nyxon broke it down.”

Dash’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “That scrawny little bastard broke down our door? What the hell did he want?”

I knew this next part was going to be tricky. “Me. He seems to be under the impression that he and I are in love.”

He stared at me for a minute before he cursed under his breath, “I’ll kill that motherfucker.”

“No, nobody’s killing anybody. Honestly, I’m still of a mind that he’s a supernatural being. It gets worse. I tried to cast a demon out of him, thinking maybe he was possessed, but nothing worked. Then, that fucking cat came in and tried to attack me.”

I stepped back to show him the holes in my shirt where the cat’s claws dug in, which were now spotted with my blood. Dash sniffed me before unbuttoning my shirt, which was odd. “Lemme see.”

When he opened my shirt, he licked the spots where the claws had sunk into my flesh, and then he stepped back from me quickly. I watched as the scratches healed instantly.

“It gets better. The cat was possessed, and I cast out the demon. It was a huge woman who laughed at me before the two of them disappeared.”

“I knew it! I knew there was something weird about that fucking cat. Did you recognize the demon?”

It was my turn for my eyes to bug out. “In case you didn’t know this, I don’t have much experience with demons. I didn’t recognize her. I smelled sulfur when I touched the cat, but I don’t know what that means. We can’t bring children into a home where demons drop in without notice, Dashiell.”

His laughter echoed around the living and dining room. “Baby, we’ll take that on as we get there. I love you so much.”

Dash hugged me, and I immediately felt safe and calm. That was exactly what love was supposed to do, wasn’t it? Without my Dash, I really didn’t know how I’d survive.