Do Wah Diddy Die Already

Luci Seymour eased her little 4x4 into the garage, and did it without scraping anything. Clearly she was in that zone place that normal people were always talking about and she liked it. It was the zone.
As evidence, look at Luci’s Aunts’ Bed & Breakfast. It had been open for three months now and, contrary to Mickey’s expectations, no one had died—not even of food poisoning.
That was probably because Luci had hired a new cook-cumhousekeeper-cum-au pair, though she still missed Louise. Saffron talked. A lot. Of course, she hadn’t killed anyone either, and Luci’s three-year old adored her—so much so, she wanted to have multi-colored hair, too. So far Mickey was holding out against that, but Luci’s money was on their daughter wearing him down. He was pretty much wrapped around her tiny pinkie.
Luci still had trouble wrapping her brain around the idea that her aunts’ housekeeper, Louise, had been the one who killed Miss Gracie all those years ago, leaving her to haunt the house in typical Seymour style. No real surprise the denouement had been mixed up in the birth of her and Mickey’s daughter. All the aunts, dead and alive, had put in a bid to have the little girl named after them, but it seemed right to name her after Miss Gracie.
Mickey had been afraid the now-dead aunts would start haunting them, too, but while they hadn’t completely passed into the next life, they didn’t seem inclined to hang around the way Miss Gracie and Delaney, Mickey’s former partner, did.
Luci had toyed with the idea of using their gentle haunting as a selling point for the business, but the two ghosts had decided to take a vacation. Since Miss Gracie hadn’t left the house in over fifty years, she’d certainly earned it and Delaney went where Miss Gracie went. He’d been smitten with her before he got shot.
She missed them and she missed Louise, who was out on bail, awaiting trial. Mickey wouldn’t let her come back to work. Men were so unreasonable. It’s not like she’d killed anyone else. Okay, so she thought she’d killed someone else, which is why she’d killed Miss Gracie, but she hadn’t actually killed her former boss when she pushed him down the stairs for groping her. And she hadn’t held Luci hostage that long. When labor started, she stopped. For all Luci knew, being held hostage had started her labor, something she was very grateful to get going. She’d been pregnant for like, fifty months or something.
Mickey’s real grievance against Louise wasn’t the murder. No, he was mad at her for not talking for all those years. He thought she couldn’t talk and used the chalk and blackboard for a real reason—not because Louise was afraid if she talked she’d confess what she did.
He’d only lived with the squeaky chalk for a couple of years. Louise had to live with it for most of her life. Wasn’t that punishment enough?
Luci squeezed out of the truck and leaned over the side of the bed, digging through the grocery sacks, looking for the items that needed to go into the freezer. It wasn’t the same freezer her aunts had kept in the garage for so many years.
Mickey had hauled that one to the curb before the last aunt was cold in her grave, even though Louise had cleaned it very thoroughly after the body was removed. Okay, so it had been a naked body and it was kind of icky to think of the frozen, bare buns against the bottom, but it still worked. Seemed a waste to buy a new freezer when there were so many other things they needed to buy.
If finding bodies was the criteria for getting rid of something, then the bougainvillea should be history, too, but it was still blooming in the garden. And they still had the chimney in their bedroom. And that chair in the sitting room…
Luci paused to think. Yeah, she was pretty sure that was all the locations bodies had been discovered—if she didn’t count the spot in the garden where Miss Gracie had been killed, but there was some dispute about the actual spot. Luci had studied the crime scene photos, but the garden had changed a lot in fifty-plus years.
Usually Luci could think about Miss Gracie and she and Delaney would materialize close by. She missed them, but they deserved a vacation, now that the house had central air conditioning. Their death chill had been a godsend during August. The pair planned to be back in time for Halloween, though.
Luci had some ghost hunters booked. With any luck, the aunts would put in an appearance, too. Mickey had booked himself into a cop convention in Vegas for that weekend. Family reunions made his eye twitch, particularly if most of the family in attendance was dead.
Luci lifted the lid of the freezer and tossed the frozen stuff into the wire basket fixed near the top. She turned back to the Nash to get the non-freezer stuff and was actually bending to pick up a sack when what she’d seen finally registered.
She stopped. Started to turn around—stopped.
Did she really want to verify what image her eyes had sent to her brain? Because if she’d seen what it seemed she’d seen…
Mickey’s eye was going to start twitching again.
And they’d need a new freezer.