Page 13 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Mort

Hearing Lily’s voice, Mort glanced down from where he’d been valiantly attempting to repaint the cornices of the foyer in the wake of the switcheroo.

(He still hoped that things would somehow return to rights after a good night’s sleep, but even a day of being surrounded by hot pink froufrou decor was too much.) The black seemed to be sticking, at least. He’d never been so glad for Gramps’s hoarding tendencies: the storeroom off to one side of the embalming area in the cellar was brimming with paint tins and excess wallpaper and coffin hardware.

Mort squinted, peering through the front windows, which were letting in a highly improper amount of sunlight more befitting of an art studio than a funeral home.

Weird – that woman passing by outside looked like Fran Hemsley of keeling-over-at-the-cinema-fame, which was odd because Fran Hemsley was currently in the morgue alongside her beau Derrick Hemsley waiting to be embalmed prior to their combined funeral on Tuesday.

And why was there a trail of rose petals in the hallway?

Setting his paintbrush down on the lid of his paint tin, Mort followed the rose petals, which as he’d feared led to the cellar, which not only housed the morgue and the cremation urns, but also had the dubious honour of having been his bunk room when he’d visited as a kid.

His childhood stuffed owl Hooty, modelled on a taxidermied model crafted by Aunt Dot in her pre-cinema days, still sat on the vintage cabinet to one side of the embalming room.

Alas, Hooty was presently the only inhabitant of the morgue.

The rose petals led to what Mort had feared he’d see: the two lockers that had housed the Hemsleys were wide open, with not a single body inside.

But that wasn’t the weirdest bit. Each of the lockers glimmered with tiny tea candles – a fire hazard that Mort promptly doused.

And were those long-stemmed roses? A sticking hazard if Mort had ever seen one – Mort preferred his flowers of the non-thorny variety.

Mort’s heart thumped in his chest. The Hemsleys had been dead . Thoroughly, absolutely, undeniably dead. The coroner had signed off! They’d been on ice!

And yet, he’d just now seen them flouncing down the promenade, hands clasped and looking the very picture of matrimonial bliss. Something very strange was going on, and it ran deeper than mere appearances.

Mort picked up the mortuary phone – Gramps still insisted on a landline – and pressed the speed dial.

‘Coroner Bill speaking. You maul ’em, we call ’em.’

(Bill’s mantra was that you couldn’t take death too seriously.

Except the murders. And even then, you could often find humour in the event.

There were silly murders, after all. Mushroom pies that had wiped out a whole potluck, slapstick-style door clobberings, vengeful flocks of sparrows and so on.)

‘It’s Mort. From Eternal Elegance.’

‘Hey, buddy. How’s death treating ya?’

‘Weirdly.’ Mort paused to blow out a candle he’d missed. ‘You signed off on the Hemsleys, correct?’

There was a moment of silence as Bill mulled over the many corpses that had apparently paraded through his office in recent days. ‘Hemsleys, Hemsleys …’

‘The older couple with the double cinema death.’

Bill made a rude noise over the phone. ‘Oh, I hate that. Nothing worse than having to cut a showing short. Were you doing accompaniment?’

‘Mm-hmm. To Vice Versa , this old Freaky Friday sort of film. Remade in subsequent years a few more times than it deserved.’

There was some shuffling and tapping as Bill pulled up his report.

‘It says here that at 3.12 p.m. they were pronounced …’ Bill cleared his throat. ‘Um. Pronounced husband and wife.’

Mort almost dropped the receiver.

‘Dead. It’s meant to say they were pronounced dead .’

‘Some April Fools, huh!’

‘It’s March,’ pointed out Mort.

Bill huffed and puffed for a moment. ‘I dunno what to tell ya. Maybe the intern got into my files … or my brother. It is funny, though, you gotta admit.’

Maybe Bill would benefit from a new line of work. This one was doing a number on his mental health.

‘So they’re not … dead?’ asked Mort, his voice querulous. ‘They were just visiting?’

‘You didn’t ask them when they came in?’ asked Bill.

Mort counted back from ten, the way Gramps had had him do as a kid when Eliza Doone at school had called him Pugsley with regard to all-black attire. Of course, Eliza was now Sister Eliza and would go about in a black habit until the end of her days, so Mort had had the last laugh.

‘They weren’t really in any sort of state for that,’ snapped Mort.

‘Seems like they are now, though,’ said Bill.

Mort couldn’t handle any more of this. He hung up, feeling numb, like the time he’d suspected he had Bell’s palsy.

( You do not! Dr Rubenstein had snapped.) Zombies!

Now there were zombies! Or if not zombies, then a terrible case of medical malpractice that was making Mort reconsider every one of his doctor’s assessments regarding his own health.

Although, he thought, dead people who weren’t actually dead weren’t unheard of.

In the nineteenth century, after a few too many people had been buried alive, grave bells had become quite the trend.

And there were all sorts of horrible stories about people who’d tried to claw their way out of their caskets.

Not to mention that Derrick and Fran had been kept on the finest ice the funeral home had to offer, so it wasn’t entirely out of the question that Mort hadn’t heard anything from them while they’d been napping in the morgue.

Mort was musing on whether resuscitation or resurrection was the likelier option when the doorbell rang. Instead of the snippet from Mozart’s Requiem it usually played, the chorus from ‘It’s Raining Men’ blasted through the foyer.

Griping, Mort opened the door to an extremely tall guy with a basketballer’s physique (albeit clad in something closer to a candy striper uniform). ‘Singing telegram for Eternal Elegance!’

‘Which one?’ asked Mort suspiciously.

‘There’s more than one?’ bellowed the singer, who had admirable voice projection.

Lily’s door opened, and Lily emerged from her shop, a pink-tipped paintbrush in hand. She was wearing an oversized shirt covered in daubs of pink and splashes of glitter, and looked … astonishingly, gloriously beautiful.

‘I’m the owner of the other Eternal Elegance,’ she told the singer. Then, covering her mouth with her hand, she glanced at Mort and whispered, ‘Mort, did you see—’

‘I saw,’ said Mort, who had been doing his best not to think about the whole Fran and Derrick situation.

Although at least the bodega would keep its doors open, which was critical to the happiness of the village’s bodega cats and those in urgent need of overloaded deli sandwiches and a vibrant selection of seeded mustards.

‘Just a case of clinical misdiagnosis. Nothing to worry about.’

‘If you say so,’ said Lily, who did not sound convinced.

Propping his foot up on one of Mort’s poodles, the singer cleared his throat, then in a stunning contralto, belted out ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’.

Pigeons and hummingbirds took flight on the vibration of his voice.

Elderly neighbours raced to the phones to make noise complaints.

A passing middle-aged guy rubbed at his chest, complaining about his pacemaker.

‘Wow, you really put your heart and soul into that,’ said Lily, scraping her suddenly windswept hair back into place.

‘And my poodle,’ said Mort, regarding the party-hatted poodle that in his opinion was a poor replacement for his beloved greyhounds. The singer had left a footprint – and was that a crack? Mort wasn’t entirely opposed to this. Who knew – perhaps shattering the poodle would reverse the switcheroo.

‘But what’s this … serenade … about, specifically?’ added Lily. ‘Or who?’

The singer held up a finger, then pulled two elegant, swan-shaped cards from his pocket. He handed one each to Lily and Mort.

‘It’s a Save the Date,’ said Lily, tracing the precise embossing on the card. (This was definitely Tink’s work.) ‘But …’

‘But it’s for a funeral,’ finished Mort, turning his own card over. ‘In October.’

Lily held her card up to the sun, as though this might entice it to reveal its secrets. ‘How does that even work? Is this … an assisted dying situation?’

Mort was baffled. ‘I have no idea. Funerals are usually held on fairly short notice. They’re also not typically a singing telegram type affair.’

‘Don’t shoot me – I’m just the messenger,’ said the singer. At least he’d taken his foot off the poodle. ‘And it’s not my name on that card.’

‘Well, whose name is on it?’ muttered Mort. He fiddled with the card, which had a complicated opening mechanism (swans are notoriously beastly).

‘Candice Shelby,’ read Lily over his shoulder. ‘Is she the one with the bathtub kombucha brand in all the gift shops? That’s really good stuff.’

‘Excess kombucha consumption may cause hepatic necrosis.’ Mort pointed in the direction of her kidneys.

Lily brandished her paintbrush, fending him off. ‘I like to take a walk on the wild side. Aka the tasty side.’

‘I love kombucha,’ bellowed the singer. ‘It’s good for the vocal cords. Can I get it at the bodega?’

Sure, if you didn’t mind being served by a guy who had been dead half an hour ago.

‘And the second-from-the-left stand at the farmer’s market,’ said Lily. ‘Although there might be supply issues after October.’

‘Great, great!’ The singer mopped his forehead – voice projection was hard work. He nudged the small, open suitcase by his foot. ‘Is it all right if I move on? I have the rest of the town to cover.’

‘Sure.’ Lily popped a lollipop and some change in his suitcase. ‘Good luck breaking the news. Especially with Candice’s pickleball team. They’re really close-knit.’

Mort folded his arms. ‘How do you know Candice? You’ve been in town barely twenty-four hours.’

‘I talk to people. It’s called being affable.’ She winked. ‘You should try it sometimes.’

Mort had absolutely no intention of trying it. That was how you ended up with visitors. Or on the board of the library. Or buying half a dozen blocks of chocolate you’d never eat for a school fundraiser.

‘Did I hear someone say Candice?’ asked a cheerful middle-aged woman in striped athleisure and with a pickleball racquet under her arm.

A streak of white in her otherwise dark hair poked out from beneath her sun visor, and she swiped at it with a sweatband-covered wrist. She seemed the very picture of health – and happiness.

‘Candice Shelby?’ confirmed Mort, although he knew her vaguely from the Rocky Horror Picture Show showings at the cinema. She always had a few too many G&Ts and tried to get up on the piano.

‘I’m she!’ bubbled Candice, with the confident, wealthy cadence of someone who had a foundation set up in her name.

‘Um.’ Lily glanced down at the swan card in her hand. ‘We think there’s been some sort of … mix-up.’

She handed Candice the Save the Date.

Candice donned a pair of reading glasses and held the card very far from, and then very close to her nose as she tried to make sense of it.

Meanwhile, the resonant strains of ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ rang out from a charming set of townhouses across the promenade. The telegram guy really was singing for his supper. And a hot breakfast.

‘But that’s me!’ shrieked Candice, clutching the card tightly enough to fold the swan’s neck in half. ‘That’s me on the Save the Date.’

‘It does seem that way,’ agreed Mort, whose ears were ringing from the double assault of first the singing telegram guy and now Candice. What did one do in this particular situation? Offer a hug? A meeting with an estate planner? A cease and desist targeting the telegram guy?

Mort resorted to an approach that required neither empathy nor self-reflection: sales.

‘Do you need some help selecting a coffin?’ he asked. ‘We have some beauties at the moment. You’d look lovely in cherry. It suits your complexion.’

‘No, no, I wouldn’t! Not one bit! Because I’m not dead!

I’m not even close to it!’ shrilled Candice.

‘I’m right here! I’m fine! The doctor says my vitals were excellent!

I take a shot of wheatgrass juice every morning!

And I just finished a morning of pickleball doubles.

A very productive morning. You should’ve seen us!

Not an awkward grunt or twisted ankle among us. ’

Mort nodded calmly. This all seemed like a reasonable argument against an imminent death.

‘I’m sure it’s just a prank,’ Lily reassured Candice. ‘A very detailed, very committed prank. Or a typo!’

‘That’s probably it,’ said Mort, although Tink didn’t make typos – she was extremely exacting in her work. ‘Predicting a death down to the specific day is quite a feat. Unless …’

Mort swallowed. A few additional options had struck him.

‘Unless what?’ Candice cocked her head warily.

‘You’re not considering … you know?’

Candice spluttered. ‘Absolutely not!’

‘And there’s no one else who might …’

Candice whacked him with the invitation. The swan’s beak gave him a papercut. ‘I’m happily single! If I end up murdered, it’ll be a freak accident. Or a road rage incident. Or maybe my habit of picking up hitchhikers backfiring on me.’

Hmm, given the fatality statistics associated with all of those, the Save the Date might not actually be far off.

‘You might want to switch to a safer habit,’ agreed Mort. ‘Like riding a motorcycle. Or hard drugs. At least until October.’

Candice perused the Save the Date again. ‘Do we know how this happened? Or why? And who I should sue?’

‘Hey, Candice!’ A pickleball player (Mort presumed, based on the flared skirt and the dayglo shoes) hurried up, a bag of oranges slung over her shoulder. ‘I just wanted to let you know I’ve cleared my calendar for October. Looking forward to catching up!’

Poor Candice stood there stricken.

Lily put a hand on Candice’s arm. ‘I have wine inside. Lots of it. Shall we?’