Page 8 of The Last One to Let You Down

“I need help,” she pleaded. “I’ve got the police department on the phone with a death call, and all I can hear is the family screaming! No one is making any sense! And he…” She pointed a finely manicured nail at Earl, “won’t get off his damn line! I’ve been trying to call him for five minutes!”

“I thought Junior was supposed to be helping up front today?” Aaron protested.

“He took off!” Miss Wheel threw up her hands. “Mr. Gerald is too busy screaming about something with chickens at Mr. Crosby to help me. Please? Can one of you please take this call?”

Aaron visibly shrank down in his chair.

“I’ll do it,” Tom said, already getting up to follow Miss Wheel to the front.

Sure, he was terrified of ordering a pizza over the phone but taking a first call?

That he could do.

Aaron mouthed his gratitude as Tom followed Miss Wheel, bypassing the door that led into the prep area and through another that led to the front of the funeral home.

Viewing rooms and bathrooms were to the left, and arrangement rooms were to the right alongside another hallway that led into the main chapel. Between the viewing rooms and hallway was their lobby, modestly decorated with a small desk where Miss Wheel and the other receptionists would sit to answer the phone and greet people who came through the front door.

Tom quickly sat down at the desk and picked up the phone, taking a deep breath and clicking the blinking hold light. “Hello, this is Tom Hill,” he said, using his most professional phone voice. “I’m so sorry for the wait, how can I help you?”

“Hey!” a male voice impatiently replied. “Look, I’ve got a hell of a situation. I’ve got a dead kid here, and his mama is freaking the eff out. How soon can you guys be here to pick up this body?”

Tom’s blood froze. He could hear someone crying and screaming in the background, and he hoped the mother hadn’t been in earshot for any of that. He cleared his throat, asking calmly, “May I have your name, sir?”

“Lawrence Fester with the Mayfield Police Department.”

“Officer Fester, would it be possible for you to step outside for a moment? I’m having some difficulty hearing you.”

“Oh, sure. One sec.” There was some faint crackling on the line, a brief pause, a door opening and shutting, and then he said, “Okay. Better?”

“Much better, thank you, sir. May I get a little bit of information about the deceased before we go on, Officer Fester?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Name of the deceased?” Tom prepared to write.

“Brady Dresser.”

“Date of birth?”

“March third, nineteen ninety-eight.”

Tom swallowed back a mouthful of bile when he did the math in his head. “So, he’s twenty-two?”

“I told you, he’s a kid.”

“And the date of death, is that today?”

“Yessir. Hospice pronounced him at one o’five.”

Frowning, Tom asked, “Hospice is there?”

“Yessir. Kid had some sort of cancer.”

Tom eyed Miss Wheel frantically wringing her hands and refocused on the conversation. He cleared his throat again. “I take it then you already have a doctor’s name for the death certificate?”

“Yessir. That’ll be Doctor Thompson. He’s one of the Hospice With Hearts physicians.”

“And I’m assuming that the death occurred at Mr. Dresser’s residence? Where he was on hospice?”