It's A Wonderful Midlife Crisis (Good To The Last Death #1) - Robyn Peterman Page 0,47

time with Sam and getting to see his wife’s joy was worth every second—even the scary parts. I wouldn’t change anything about it. However, a criminal lifestyle wasn’t going to work for me. While being a paralegal wasn’t the most exciting career path, it beat doing ten to twenty at the state pen.

“Okay, great,” I told the crowd suspended midair by the fireplace. “As soon as the Ouija board gets here, I’ll get right on it, unless someone is in a big hurry.”

No one made a sound and no one floated forward. That was a relief. However, every single dead squatter in the room pointed toward the kitchen. About five or six arms fell to the floor with a thud.

“Everyone that just lost an arm needs to pick it up and keep it with them, please,” I said, crossing the room and heading to the kitchen. “We’ll have a gluing party after lunch.”

Whoever was in the kitchen must have more urgent needs if I was to go by the actions of the ghosts. I just hoped it wasn’t a lot of dead folks. I actually had to do some of the boring paperwork from work. Losing my job because I was counseling cadavers would suck.

“Hi,” I said as I entered the kitchen.

There was only one ghost. It was a man. His age was probably somewhere around fifty. He wasn’t as rough-looking as some of the dead in the family room, but a sadness clung to him that was palpable. I also felt fear—not mine, thankfully. I wondered if spirits got worse-looking the longer they stuck around.

His eyes were sunken in his head and his skin was the papery texture I’d become accustomed to, but he still had some kind of strange vitality about him. He wasn’t missing any fingers that I could tell and everything looked pretty sturdy except his neck and head.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” I said, sitting down across from him and smiling. “I’m Daisy.”

“Joouuunnn,” he grunted.

“You can speak?” I asked, shocked and impressed.

The sound he made was similar to Sam’s. I couldn’t understand the ghosts in the family room, but this man, I could. Although to be fair, I hadn’t really sat down and had a one on one with any of my dead buddies yet.

“John?” I asked.

He nodded and averted his eyes.

He was decomposing, but not as much as Sam had or most of the others. I was grateful none of the ghosts had an odor. My gag reflex could only handle so much. His neck looked odd and his head wasn’t squarely on top of it. His suit and tie made me think he’d been some sort of professional when he was alive. It was ill-fitted, but he was dead. Nothing was quite right or normal with the deceased I’d experienced so far.

“Can you understand me?” I asked John.

“Yausssss,” he said, nodding carefully as if he was aware his head might drop off his body.

I appreciated that. I hadn’t glued a head back on yet and wasn’t really looking forward to it.

“Did you die recently?”

“Yausssss.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to think of other questions with one-word answers that could help me figure out his puzzle.

Realizing I was starving, I considered grabbing something to eat while I chatted with John. The thought of his head falling off and rolling around the kitchen floor made me wait. It might hurt his feelings if I puked. His sadness made me feel bad for him.

“Are you from around here?”

“Yausssss.”

The affirmative answer made me wonder if all the squatters were from around here. That was impossible. I had at least sixty in the house now. I would know if sixty people in my town had kicked the bucket. And Gram had said not all the dead needed help to move on. It was possible my uninvited guests were from parts all over.

“Here? In this town?” I asked.

“Yausssss.”

Interesting. Had anyone died recently? I hadn’t been to a funeral in…

Wait. I went to a funeral last freaking week. The banker who’d committed suicide that I didn’t believe was a suicide.

Was John that man? Did he really kill himself?

Well crap. There were consequences here that were potentially bad… for John.

Would John be sent to the darkness if he’d taken his own life? Suicide was a mortal sin according to religion that I still wasn’t sure I believed in. Should I even help him? Maybe staying here and just hanging out would be better than the darkness. I had TV and a