Page 3 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Mort

Mort’s week was off to a lousy start. Literally.

No one wants to learn that the family business is overrun by termites, especially within just a few months of taking it over.

It would have been nice for Gramps to mention the whole persistent woodlouse invasion thing, but then, he couldn’t really fault the old guy – he should have retired twenty years ago.

He probably would have, if he’d been able to find anyone to take over the business, and damn had Gramps tried.

But it takes a special kind of person to become a funeral director.

Or in Mort’s case, a special kind of failure.

Mort had given himself until age thirty to make his dream of becoming a concert pianist reality, but life had a habit of running the clock down.

So now, here he was, doing his bit to help Gramps out by sending off grizzled old gents and smart-mouthed widows and a worrying number of motorcyclists into the Sweet Hereafter.

Or wherever it was that people went once they closed their eyes that final time.

Mort had spent a good deal of time considering the whole thing, but still hadn’t come up with an answer he was happy with.

‘At least you gave yourself time to pursue your dream,’ Gramps had said. ‘Not everyone gets that. And there’s still the organ.’

The organ Gramps had been referring to was the one inside the funeral home upon which a young Mort had belted out his early efforts at Mendelssohn, Mozart and Beethoven.

(Funeral attendance numbers had, thankfully, improved as he had.) Mort still played it – in fact, even more so these days, now that he was living in the drab apartment above the funeral home and had ready access to it.

Gramps, on the other hand, insisted on remaining in the huge, dark house that he’d raised Mort in.

Mort loved the house as much as Gramps did, even though it was a death trap (to be fair, everything in a funeral director’s eyes was a death trap), and the maintenance was becoming too much for Gramps to handle.

And for Mort to handle. Every spare day that Mort had was now spent hammering at loose boards or dealing with dodgy wiring or righting a tree felled by a savage gust of ocean wind.

He’d been trying to get Gramps out of the house and into somewhere more manageable, like one of the townhouses in the village, but Gramps was as stubborn as, well, Mort was.

But Angela was savvy – she’d use her realtor’s wiles to entice Gramps away from the house and into somewhere he wasn’t likely to fall down the carpeted stairs or get squashed by a crystal chandelier or suffocate while trying to draw the extremely thick velvet blinds, all of which were very real possibilities.

(Mort judiciously read each and every coroner’s report, and had a deep awareness of all the ways a house might try to kill you.)

Mort’s phone pinged, almost giving him a heart attack. Just a mild panic response, Mort, he told himself. After all, he was at low risk for heart attacks, and the body-weight exercises he did every morning were designed to ward off an early death.

Delivered , flashed an app on his screen. Signed for by … a squiggle.

Mort frowned. That squiggle should have been made by his hand, but it was decidedly not.

He’d absolutely not signed for the package, because right now he was sitting at The Hot Pot reading over the sheet music for the silent movie showing at Rerunning Up That Hill later tonight.

Unless Mort had a doppelganger running around the village, either someone had forged his signature, or Roddy, the village’s delivery guy, had slipped up.

(This was not unheard of, given that Roddy was well into his eighties.

But Roddy was a nice guy, and people gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Especially when he brought treats for their dogs, which was often.)

‘All done there, hon?’ Dierdre, the owner of The Hot Pot, was swinging by with a moon-shaped teapot and a stack of clattering half-moon teacups.

Dierdre was a town treasure, known for her colourful tattoos, her colourful language, and her colourful crockery collection, which she’d inherited from some distant hoarder aunt.

Mort gathered up his plate and teacup, setting them into the yellow tub atop the heavily decoupaged credenza along the far wall. Dierdre’s decor was entirely too bright for Mort, but she did make the best tea and the fanciest croissants in town. ‘Business calls.’

‘ Another death?’

‘Worse: a misdelivery.’

Dierdre made a face. ‘At least it’s not solar sales.’

Mort snorted. ‘If they come to the door again, we will be talking about a death.’

‘I, for one, would be happy to give you an alibi, hon!’ Dierdre waved as Mort headed out the door, stopping briefly to give a belly rub to Jenkins, the café’s resident terrier.

Then he hurried up the wide promenade towards the funeral home, dashing through tourists’ vacation selfies and interrupting a game of pathway Connect Four – something that the town advertised as a charming diversion that could result in a surprise dinner voucher discount, and which Mort personally thought was a public menace.

‘Hey!’ A dad with a sweater knotted around his neck scowled through expensive glasses. ‘You made me lose concentration.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you were playing a critical game of chess against Garry Kasparov,’ muttered Mort.

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing, nothing. Enjoy your stay.’ Mort, who hadn’t slowed one iota, waved vaguely as he hustled up the promenade. Thankfully he was no stranger to the journey, and was barely winded by the time the funeral home was in sight.

Well, not the funeral home precisely, but rather the red-and-blue stripes of the fumigation tenting covering the funeral home. He shook his head – they couldn’t have gone with a stately black? After all, fumigation was a death-related business, too.

‘Almost done here, bud,’ said Franco, the fumigation worker sitting on a bougainvillea-drenched rock wall, Ninja Turtle lunchbox in hand.

‘We should be able to take this off tomorrow, get you back in business.’ He took a bite of a peanut butter and honey sandwich with the crusts cut off.

‘Accidentally grabbed my kid’s lunch. Not bad. Lunchable?’

He held out a package of cheese and chopped ham. Mort shook his head.

‘Grape juice?’

Mort shook his head again. Vehemently.

With a shrug, Franco popped open the juice box, draining it in one sip.

‘Did you receive any deliveries today?’

‘What, through that?’ Franco nodded at the massive tent, which was wafting up and down in the breeze. A few pigeons had taken up residence on top and were enjoying the ride. ‘Maybe they went next door. There’s a new gal.’

Ah, next door. The yin to the funeral home’s yang.

Where the funeral home was an all-black affair that dripped with velvet and obsidian and had an entrance marked by two black marble greyhound statues (which were, annoyingly, a favourite photo op of the tourists), the building next door was an extravaganza of colour.

Sure, the exterior paint was mostly white, but there were pops of bright pink and yellow everywhere you turned, and more wildflowers than seemed acceptable in the planters out the front.

As Mort steeled himself to approach whatever perky creature would inhabit the building for the next twelve months, the front door swung, and a tiny woman with springy hair and a springy step emerged.

She was wearing what Mort could only describe as the outfit of a recently landed skydiver, and carried a wooden sign under one arm.

An orange-handled screwdriver poked out from one ear.

She was alarmingly bright, and alarmingly attractive. Mort’s heart was stuck somewhere between sinking with foreboding and ballooning with joy. He gulped, trying to get his sudden arrhythmia in order. No heart attacks, Mort, he chastised himself. Don’t be a statistical outlier!

‘Hey there!’ she said, in a voice that perfectly matched the crinkle of her bright blue eyes. ‘Looking to get married?’

‘What?’ Mort coughed, then thumped his chest. He was making an excellent impression here.

‘Guess not. I’m Lily, the town’s new wedding planner.

’ She gestured at the shop that had until recently been home to Janessa Hodges, who after a brutal bout with influenza had moved instead to a small six-by-one subterranean abode at the Mirage-by-the-Sea Cemetery.

Mort had helped her move in. (The town had advertised none of this on the small business application FAQs.)

‘Are you local?’ she asked, her brow wrinkling slightly. She gave him a very thorough once-over. Then a twice-over. ‘You don’t … seem like a tourist.’

Mort glanced down at his all-black attire. What, the gleaming black Oxfords and the black pocket square didn’t scream beachgoer? ‘Mort. I work … around here. I was just wondering, did you collect a package earlier? For Eternal Elegance?’

Lily cocked her head. ‘Are you some kind of delivery quality assurance guy? Because this lovely old man did drop off a package – he even came in for a cup of coffee and a chitchat about his granddaughter’s wedding last September.’

Ah. Amelia May’s wedding. Mort had been invited, but he’d spent the day dealing with a funeral emergency instead.

Who knew it would be so hard to find an on-call archaeologist to deal with some potential dinosaur bones in a funeral plot?

At least Roddy had come by after with some sugared almonds to thank Mort for his gift of a customisable casket cap panel.

‘That would be Roddy,’ said Mort.

‘But there was some kind of mix-up.’ Lily paused to point out a hummingbird in a burst of hot-pink bougainvillea. ‘Don’t you love hummingbirds? Anyway, the business name was right, but they got the address wrong. I didn’t realise until after I opened it and found this vase inside.’

Mort grimaced. Ah yes, a vase. For flowers. Definitely not for the ashes of Meryl Halston, who was booked in for a date with the crematorium.

Then he frowned. ‘Wait. What do you mean the business name was right?’

Lily flashed the pink-and-white sign she’d been preparing to hang up outside her new building. Eternal Elegance – Wedding Planner , it read, in a carefully hand-painted script surrounded by folk-art-style flowers and birds.

‘On top of that, I’ve been getting phone calls from beyond the grave . Well, their loved ones, I suppose. I think there’s a crossed-line situation going on.’

Oh shit, thought Mort. Oh shit.

Just then, there was an incredible swishing sound as Franco and his workers hauled the striped tent down from the funeral home … revealing the black and gold hanging sign that perfectly matched Lily’s, right down to the name.

Eternal Elegance – Funeral Director.

‘There ya go, boss!’ called Franco. ‘Ain’t nothing alive in there now. Not even a cockroach could’ve survived that.’

It didn’t take a glance in the newly revealed windows to know that the look on Lily’s face mirrored the one on Mort’s.

‘I’ll … go get your urn,’ said Lily.