Home Improvement: Undead Edition

In Brightest Day TONI L. P. KELNER

I’d thought I’d have most of the day free for Internet surfing—a mixed blessing resulting from not having any clients in the offing—but the phone rang just as I was finishing the weekly lolcat roundup. I let it ring twice before answering, hoping that would demonstrate promptness without the betraying stench of desperation.

“Rebound Resurrections,” I said in my best business voice. “How can I help you?”

“Dodie? It’s Shelia Hopkins. Gottfried is dead.”

“Well, yeah.” He’d been dead for a couple of weeks.

“I mean he’s dead again.”

I could have corrected her once more—technically Gottfried was dead still, not dead again—but I figured it would go faster if I let her explain. The problem was that Gottfried was no longer moving or responding. That might be normal behavior for most dead people, but no matter what some of my fellow houngans might think, I’m pretty good at what I do.

I raise the dead for a living.

THIS PARTICULAR JOB had started out well enough. The work crew had nearly unearthed the coffin by the time I got to the cemetery the day before, so I just said hello-how’s-it-going and let them keep digging. A foursome—two women and two men—showed up a few minutes later, and I voted the distinguished woman in a navy skirt suit and sensible heels most likely to be my client.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” I asked. “I’m Dodie Kilburn.”

I know she was surprised—she and I had handled all the advance work via phone and e-mail—but she was too well bred to comment on the fact that I don’t look much like a typical houngan.

As soon as I got my ring and license from the Order of Damballah—the houngan version of a professional organization—I’d dumped the wannabe voudou queen look: hair dyed jet-black, loose cotton skirts, low-cut peasant blouses, and a tan-in-a-can. That meant I was back to my natural strawberry-blond hair and freckles and was wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

Mrs. Hopkins introduced the other three, and they all shook my hand somewhat reluctantly, but I didn’t take it personally. A lot of people freak when they meet a houngan, and it’s even worse when said houngan is about to raise a revenant. So it was no surprise that they stuck with weather-related chitchat while we waited. For the record, it was unseasonably cool for fall in Atlanta.

Once the workers got the coffin out of the ground and next to the open grave, they had me sign their paperwork and took off. Unlike Mrs. Hopkins and company, they weren’t bothered about what I was about to do—they just wanted to get home in time to catch the Falcons game. They’d be back the next day to take the coffin to a storage shed and temporarily fill in the grave.

Once they were gone I said, “I’m ready to get started.”

“Already?” asked Elizabeth Lautner, the other woman in the group. When Mrs. Hopkins had said she was the dead man’s assistant, Elizabeth corrected her—she’d been his associate. Elizabeth’s dark brown hair was in a short, asymmetric cut, and she was wearing more mascara than I use in a year. “I thought that you had to wait until midnight to raise a zombie.”

“Number one, we don’t like to call them zombies. Revenant is the PC word. And honestly, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is. We only work nights because the cemetery managers don’t want us working while they’re trying to have funerals. Go figure. By the time a cemetery shuts down for the day and the crew gets the coffin out of the ground, it’s usually close to midnight anyway. We just lucked out tonight.” Not only was there the football game, but the man hadn’t been buried very long, so the ground was fairly soft.

One of the men nervously asked, “Do you open the coffin now?” He was Welton Von Doesburg, and I think he’d picked his suit to live up to the name. He’d identified himself as Von Doesburg Realty, giving the impression that anyone in the known universe would know what that meant.

“I won’t open it until I’ve brought Mr. Gottfried back,” I said.

“Just Gottfried,” Elizabeth said.

“Right, like Cher or Gallagher.” I didn’t get so much as a snicker in response. “Anyway, the coffin doesn’t affect the ritual.”

“I read about that,” said C. W. Ford, a man with a solid build and worn jeans. “Loas can go right through a coffin.” Mrs. Hopkins had said he was Gottfried’s construction chief.

I said, “I don’t really have much to do with the loas. I’m more of a force-of-will kind of gal. You know, like the Green Lantern—I’ve got the power ring and everything.” I held up my right hand with the golden signet ring. The engraving was of an ornate cross, the vévé of Baron LaCroix, the Order’s mascot. “ ‘In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight.’ ”

I waited a second to see if anybody would finish the Green Lantern oath, but all I got were blank stares. “Green Lantern from the comic book?” I prompted. “Or the Ryan Reynolds movie?”

“We should let you get to work,” Mrs. Hopkins said with a hint of impatience.

“You bet. If you folks wouldn’t mind stepping back a bit . . .”

They did so, and I got my carton of Morton’s salt out of my satchel and started walking around the coffin, pouring it as I went. “Be sure not to break this line.”

“What happens if we do?” Von Doesburg asked.

“Nothing dire. I just won’t be able to raise Gottfried. Now I’ll need the sacrifice.”

“I’ve got it,” Mrs. Hopkins said, reaching into a leather briefcase.

“I read that houngans used to cut the throat of a rooster,” C.W. said.

“They do still do in some parts of the world, but it doesn’t work here. If sacrificing a chicken meant that you were going to go hungry for a week, that would be meaningful. But giving up a chicken isn’t a big deal for you or me. We need a real sacrifice. It could be anything valuable, even just sentimental value, but it’s handier to use something with a known price tag.” If for no other reason than because it made it easier for the Order to set standard rates.

“Here you go,” Mrs. Hopkins said, handing me a velvet pouch. I poured a quarter-carat diamond onto my hand, and even in the dim evening light, I could see the sparkle. I slipped it back into the pouch and then put it on top of the coffin.

Von Doesburg said, “What’s to keep you—I mean, an unscrupulous houngan from pocketing the diamond when nobody is looking and then pretending that the loas took it?”

I wanted to tell him that if I’d pocketed a diamond every time I raised a body, I’d have a better car than my six-year-old Toyota, but he wasn’t the first one to ask, so I restrained myself. “Tell you what, why don’t you come over here next to the coffin? Just be sure to step over the salt line.”

His eyes got wide, and I think he’d have made an excuse if C.W. hadn’t snickered. That was when he stomped over. “Now what?”

“Hold out your hand.”

He obeyed.

I reopened the pouch and let the diamond fall onto his palm. “Now make a fist and hold it over the coffin while I do the ritual. If that rock is still there when I’m done, you can keep it.”

Papa Philippe, my sponsor at the Order, wouldn’t have approved of my letting a civilian get involved, but I figured it was the best way to prove my point.

Once Von Doesburg was in place, I began the ritual, which really isn’t that much to see unless you throw in the voudou special effects and dance numbers some of my fellow houngans favor. First I knocked on the coffin three times. With some jobs, I add a knock-knock joke at that point, but this didn’t seem like the right crowd. Then I gathered my will and reached into the body of the man in the coffin, though to the onlookers it probably just looked like I had a real bad headache. That was pretty much it.

When I felt Gottfried stirring, I started unscrewing the fasteners holding the lid shut.

Von Doesburg stepped back in such a hurry that he broke the salt line, but I didn’t need it anymore anyway. It would have been nice if he’d helped me get the lid open, but I managed on my own and looked inside. The mortician had done a good job with Gottfried. He looked fairly natural.

The revenant blinked up at me, and when I held my hand out toward him, he let me help him out of the coffin. His skin was cold to the touch, of course, but I’m used to that. Fortunately he was wearing a real suit, not one of those backless things. A dead man’s ass isn’t particularly appealing to me.

“Gottfried?” I said.

“Yes, I’m Gottfried,” he said, showing the usual amount of new revenant confusion.

“Do you know where you are?”

“I’m . . .” He looked around the cemetery, then at the coffin he’d climbed out of. “Am I dead?”

“Yes, you are.” Back when houngans first went public, it had been tricky to convince a fresh revenant that he was actually dead, but I’d never resurrected anybody who hadn’t already known it could happen to them. That made it easier for everybody concerned. “I brought you back to finish your last job. Do you remember what that is?”

It’s important for a revenant to know why he’s back in this world. Houngans, at least licensed ones, don’t just bring people back for fun. First off, we need the permission of the next of kin. Second, there has to be a compelling reason for us to take on a job. It was okay to bring back Grandma to tell the family where she’d hidden the Apple stock certificates, or Dr. Bigshot to finish a research project, but not to bring back Marilyn Monroe for a reality show. Third, the revenant has to be willing to take on that task. Once Gottfried’s was done, he’d have to go back to the grave.

It’s like Papa Philippe says: we just raise the dead, we can’t bring ’em back to life.

Gottfried hesitated just long enough to worry me, but then said, “The house. I was renovating a house. I’ve never done a house before. It’s special. It’s going to be my famous house, like Frank Lloyd Wright had Fallingwater.”

It wasn’t the explanation I’d been expecting. According to Mrs. Hopkins, the house was special because after Gottfried fixed it up, it was going to be sold to raise money for the Stickler Syndrome Research Foundation, of which she was the chairman. But as long as it was important to him, the ritual would work.

“Are you willing to stay long enough to finish the house? Because if you’re not, I’ll lay you back to rest right now.” I could tell Mrs. Hopkins didn’t like it when I said that, but I’d explained to her that no houngan could make a revenant walk the earth if he didn’t want to.

So we both relaxed when Gottfried said, “I want to finish the house.”

“Awesome. Now do you remember these people?”

That was another test: to be sure Gottfried had come back with enough of his faculties to finish his work.

Gottfried focused on them, his reactions getting closer to normal every second. “Yes, of course. Hello, Shelia.”

“I’m glad to see you, Gottfried,” Mrs. Hopkins said, but she didn’t come any closer. No surprise there. No matter how determined my clients are, they still tend to freak when they see a dead man walking.

Gottfried went on. “C.W. Elizabeth. Von Doesburg.” He looked at me. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“No, I haven’t had the pleasure. I’m Dodie Kilburn. I’m going to help you get that house finished.”

“Good. I want to finish the house.”

Revenants aren’t known for their conversational skills—once one has focused on a task, that’s all he’s interested in. Gottfried must have had a strong focus even while living to have already fixated on his.

I said, “Gottfried, I’m going to take you to a special hotel for the night.”

“Because I can’t go home anymore.”

“That’s right.” We started down the path to the cemetery exit, and I said, “Mrs. Hopkins, I’ll bring Gottfried to the work site tomorrow.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“And Mr. Von Doesburg, you can open your hand now.”

He did so, then stared at his empty palm. The diamond was long gone.

THERE WAS NO need for me to stick around once I’d checked Gottfried in at the Order’s Revenant House. It was the job of the apprentice houngans working there to explain what he’d need to know about being a revenant: stuff like him not having to eat or go to the bathroom, though drinking water would help him speak; how his sense of touch wouldn’t come back completely, which meant that he wouldn’t feel much pain but would have to be careful to keep from damaging himself, since he couldn’t heal anymore. Of course, he’d likely seen a revenant at some point, so he might remember how it worked, but it was different when you were the dead one.

I was walking back to the parking lot when I saw a shadowy figure waiting for me. I stopped, and a man dressed in a shabby top hat and a tailcoat worn over a bare chest sauntered toward me. He was carrying a cane with a silver skull for a knob, and there was a chicken foot sticking out of his hatband. His black skin gleamed as if it had been oiled, which it probably had been.

“Dude,” I said.

He didn’t respond.

I sighed, then said, “I see you, Papa Philippe.”

“Dodie Kilburn,” he said in a husky voice, “I hear you raised a man for no good reason.”

“Says who?”

“The loa be telling me.”

“Don’t the loa have better things to do?”

“They do,” Philippe said, dropping out of his voudou patois, “but Margery doesn’t.”

“I should have known.” Margery, the woman who ran the office of the Order, knew the business of every houngan in the Atlanta area. “Then she should also have told you that I had an excellent reason to bring Gottfried back.”

“Actually, I should have heard it from you, what with being your sponsor.”

“Since when do I have to get approval for a job?”

“Since you took one that three other houngans turned down.”

I had wondered about that—it wasn’t like I had clients busting down my door. Most newer houngans get referrals from established ones, but most older houngans think I’m a flake. “I don’t know what their problem was, but I did my homework. The next of kin signed off on it, and the job fits Order guidelines.”

“Bringing back a world-famous architect to fix a house?”

“It’s a special house, like one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses.”

He didn’t look impressed.

“And it’s for charity.”

No response.

“Am I in trouble with the Council?”

“There’s been some talk, which could have been avoided if I’d known ahead of time.”

“I’m sorry—the client was in a hurry, and—”

“And you haven’t had much work this month.”

“No, not so much.” I hadn’t had much the month before, either. If things didn’t improve, I was going to have to either go work with my father’s insurance agency or go work for another houngan, which would probably mean doing the whole voudou queen thing, including trying to make Dodie sound appropriately exotic. If I’d had any dealings with the loa, I’d have sacrificed my autographed photo of the cast of The Big Bang Theory to get them to throw more work my way.

Philippe said, “Just give me the details.”

I told him what Mrs. Hopkins had told me, that a supporter had left a dilapidated mansion to the Stickler Syndrome Research Foundation in his will, and how she’d gotten the idea of reimagining the place in order to sell it for mucho bucks. Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Gottfried the architect and talked him into taking on the job pro bono. Unfortunately, midway through the project, Gottfried fell down a flight of stairs at his condo and broke his neck, which left the project in limbo.

“Couldn’t somebody else finish the job from his plans?” Philippe asked.

“Gottfried wasn’t big on planning. They had some rough sketches, but Gottfried is famous for adding things as he goes, and without all those special touches, they won’t be able to get nearly as much money. Not to mention the fact that Gottfried started the crew doing some things without telling them what he was aiming for, so there’s all kinds of work half-finished. They really do need him.”

“And he’s willing to do the job? You asked him?”

“Duh!”

“Okay, I think I can spin it the right way. But if you get another job like this one, please run it past me first.”

“You bet.”

“ ’Cause Papa Philippe think you make master houngan someday if even it kill you—if it do, he be bringing you back hisself.”

THE APPRENTICES HAD Gottfried all ready to go when I got back to Revenant House the next morning, and they had found him a pair of khakis and a polo shirt to wear instead of his burying suit. Though he told me good morning when he got in, he didn’t say anything else for most of the drive. I took that to mean that he was ready to hunker down and work.

The house he was working on was part of a gated community in Dunwoody, one of the pricier Atlanta suburbs, and the security guard didn’t look impressed by my beat-up car. Then he saw Gottfried and did a double take before letting me drive into the Emerald Lake development.

The town houses and lawns looked nauseatingly perfect, and Gottfried must have agreed, because he blurted out, “Cookie-cutter crap.” I saw several signs proudly proclaiming that Emerald Lake was a Von Doesburg development, which explained why the man had been at the cemetery the night before.

The mansion being renovated was at the end of a road, right on the lake, and obviously predated the cookie-cutter crap. It had three stories, wide white columns, a balcony on the second floor, and a veranda that stretched all across the front of the building. There were tarps and piles of supplies everywhere and a Dumpster in the middle of the front yard, but I could see it was going to be a showplace. No wonder Gottfried had been willing to come back to finish.

As soon as I parked, Gottfried got out and started walking toward a trailer parked on the edge of the lot, so I followed along. A sign on the door said CONSTRUCTION OFFICE, and when Gottfried opened it, we saw the four people from the previous night plus another guy.

“Good morning, Gottfried,” Mrs. Hopkins said, but Gottfried went right past her to go to the desk and start flipping through papers.

“Well!” said the newcomer, a scrawny man with his nose hiked up in the air.

“Dodie,” Mrs. Hopkins said, “this is Theo Scarpa, the president of the Emerald Lake Homeowners’ Association.”

I said pleased-to-meet-you.

“Mr. Scarpa has some questions about . . .” She glanced at Gottfried. “About your work.”

Scarpa sniffed, and at first I thought it was a comment on me, but then realized he was checking to see if Gottfried stank of rotting flesh.

I said, “No, he doesn’t smell. In fact, revenants smell better than most living people.”

“I see,” he said, as if suspecting a hidden insult. “Sorry, but this is my first experience with this kind of thing. Can you tell me how you expect him to be able to finish a renovation this complex? It’s my understanding that a revenant has limited mental capacity.”

“It’s not that his capacity is limited—it’s just very focused. Gottfried is just as capable of finishing this house as he was when he was alive. The difference is that he no longer has any interest in anything other than this task.”

“But he’s got to modify his plans to fit into our development,” he said, waving a handful of papers at me. “How can he do that?”

“This house predates the development,” Gottfried’s assistant, Elizabeth, said. “You should be modifying those trashy houses to match his work.”

The two of them started in on each other, ignoring Von Doesburg when he tried to calm them down. I said, “Mrs. Hopkins, if you want my advice, I’d say to let Gottfried get to work.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” she said. “C.W., why don’t you take him out to the house?”

The construction chief nodded and said, “Come on, boss, and I’ll show you what we’ve done while you were gone.”

“Gottfried, I’ll be back this evening to take you back to Revenant House,” I said, but he didn’t even pause. As I’d told Scarpa, his attention was all on the house. I checked with Mrs. Hopkins to see what time I should pick him up, and left her to handle the bickering.

It was at about three thirty that afternoon when I got that panicked call about Gottfried being dead. Again.

FOR ONCE I was glad I didn’t have any other jobs going so I could drive over there right away. A bunch of men wearing tool belts were standing around, and when I got out of my car, Elizabeth came running over to nearly drag me inside the house.

Just past the front door was a gorgeous set of stairs, the kind made for sweeping down in a ball gown. The image was spoiled by the sight of Gottfried’s body at the bottom. And it was a body, not a revenant—he didn’t even look a little bit alive anymore, and the smell of formaldehyde was strong. Mrs. Hopkins and C.W. were looking down at him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Your damned spell wore off,” Elizabeth snapped, “and he fell down the stairs.”

“Wait. He died before falling? You saw that?”

“No, I didn’t see it—I was in the trailer—but what else could have happened?”

I pushed past her and went up the stairs. The floor up there was covered with a sheet of sturdy paper that must have been taped down to protect the wood from the workers, and the tape at the very edge had peeled off, leaving a fat curl of paper.

Elizabeth had followed me up, so I had to push by her again to go look at Gottfried’s shoes. Revenant House must not have had any shoes in his size because he was still wearing the black dress shoes he’d worn in his coffin, and I could see scuff marks on the toes.

“His original cause of death was from falling, right?” I asked.

Mrs. Hopkins nodded.

“Then this is what must have happened. He tripped on that paper up there—revenants don’t have a lot of feeling in their extremities and tend to be clumsy. He could have survived the fall just fine—you can’t really kill him, just damage him. But when he felt himself falling, he remembered the other fall, and let himself die. You could say it scared the life out of him.” It was unusual, but not unheard of. Papa Philippe had once raised a drowning victim because she was needed to locate some important papers, but when the revenant saw she was going to have to go on a boat, she collapsed and he couldn’t raise her again.

I was afraid I’d get some push back, but Mrs. Hopkins was nodding. “The contract did say something like this was possible. The question is, what do we do now?”

“You’ll have to bring him back,” Elizabeth said.

“According to our contract, you’d have to pay me again,” I pointed out, “but since this is for a charity, I’ll do it for free.” Well, that and the fact that I was hoping that Mrs. Hopkins would mention my name to the wealthy friends her clothing choices implied she had. “But I need another sacrifice.”

“This is outrageous!” Elizabeth said, but C.W. was pulling a ring off his finger. “Use this.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, taking it. It was ugly, but it was gold and the sapphire looked real.

“Yeah, take it. My ex-wife gave it to me—I never did like it.”

“Is it enough?” Mrs. Hopkins wanted to know.

I hefted it. “Yeah, it should be.” I remembered Papa Philippe’s warning from the night before, and said, “I should talk to my sponsor first.”

“There’s no time!” Mrs. Hopkins said. “Scarpa is coming back with an inspector. Gottfried has to be up and talking.”

“How long do we have?”

“Von Doesburg is stalling him now. Twenty minutes, if we’re lucky.”

I should have called Papa Philippe anyway, but instead I sent Elizabeth out to my car to get a fresh carton of salt. I could have done it myself, but what was the fun of having a minion around if I didn’t take advantage of her. Then I made a circle, put the sacrifice on the floor next to Gottfried’s body, and did my thing. Five minutes later, I was explaining to Gottfried why I’d brought him back again, and with my fingers crossed, I asked if he was still willing to finish the house.

He agreed just in time for Von Doesburg to arrive with Scarpa and the inspector. I stayed around long enough to make sure Gottfried was compos mentis enough to hold his end of the conversation, then made myself scarce. I could have left entirely, but I was going to need to take Gottfried back to Revenant House in an hour or so anyway, and you can hardly get anywhere in the Atlanta area in that length of time. So I found where somebody had set up a bunch of folding chairs under a tree and swiped a bottle of water from a cooler that looked as if it was there for everybody.

C.W. came and got a bottle of his own after a while. “How’re you doing?” he asked.

“Not bad. You?”

“Not your average day on the work site, that’s for sure.”

“You mean you don’t work with revenants every week?”

“Not hardly,” he said with a grin. “I guess it’s old hat to you.”

“I don’t usually raise the dead on-site, but otherwise, same old, same old.”

“Have you been doing this long?”

“Since college. I was an apprentice for five years, then got my license about a year and a half ago.”

“You went to college for this?”

“Nope, I just happened to fall into it after a particularly wild Halloween party at one of the frat houses. Somebody had brought a stuffed black cat—the taxidermy kind, I mean—for decoration, and while I was drunk, I started patting it. Before I knew it, the thing was purring. We had to call a real houngan to put it back to rest, and he told me I should look into doing this as a career.” I shrugged. “What can I say? It’s a living.”

It took him a minute, but he eventually got the joke and chuckled.

“I am sorry about your ring.”

“Don’t be. I only wore it because the ex-wife wanted it back in the divorce settlement. I was just afraid it wouldn’t be enough of a sacrifice.”

“Something valuable, something important. Either will work.” We sipped for a few minutes, and then I asked, “So what’s Scarpa’s deal?”

C.W. made a face. “He hates this house being here because it makes the other houses look like slapped-together garbage, which is what they are. It pissed him off no end when Mrs. Hopkins brought us in to fix it up.” “Wow. He puts the ass in homeowners’ association.”

That got a snicker.

“Wait, didn’t Von Doesburg slap together the garbage? Why is he helping you guys fend him off?”

“He says it’s because having a Gottfried house here will increase the profile of the place, but I think he’s trying to persuade Shelia to let him buy up some of the acreage around the lake so he can put in a country club. He’s been trying to get hold of the land the house is on for years, but the owner wouldn’t sell. Von Doesburg thought he’d get it cheap from the heirs, but that was before Shelia got involved.”

He went on to tell me about the plans Gottfried had for the house. “When he died, I didn’t know what we were going to do, but now that he’s here, we’re on track.”

C.W. went back to work and I went back to killing time until construction shut down and Gottfried was ready to go. Again, conversation was spotty, though I did warn him again about poor sensation in his feet so he wouldn’t have any more “fatal” falls. I stopped in at Revenant House just long enough to suggest they find him some sneakers so he’d have more traction.

Papa Philippe was waiting for me again.

“I was going to call you,” I said before he could speak, “but there was no time. Then there were people around. Then I had Gottfried in the car, and I couldn’t talk in front of him and it would have been dangerous to text while driving and—”

“And you was hoping the loa not be watching you this day.” He shook his head. “The loa always be watching.”

“The FBI really ought to have the loa working for them. Do you want to know what happened?”

“Not me, but Tante Ju-Ju be wanting to know.”

“You’re joking.”

He just looked at me.

“When?”

His answer was to gesture toward a dimly lit path into the woods.

“Shit.”

I didn’t know how extensive the Order’s grounds were. Revenant House and the office buildings were close to the road, but stretching behind were all kinds of paths and other buildings, most of which I avoided whenever possible.

Papa Philippe let me lead the way until we got to the hut from which Tante Ju-Ju held forth. Presumably she had a house somewhere with a TV, a microwave, and plumbing, but I’d never seen her anywhere outside Order grounds, and I didn’t think anybody had ever seen her break character. She was either a true believer, or the best method actor ever.

Tante Ju-Ju was sitting outside her hut on a rickety stool, stirring a pot of something ominous over a fire. She was dressed like all the other voudou queens in the Order, but the skirt and the peasant blouse looked comfortable on her and her coloring was natural. Her tignon had seven points knotted into it, just like Marie Laveau’s supposedly had, and mysteriously it never slipped, even though I’d never seen a bobby pin in her vicinity.

“I hear you raised the same man twice,” she said without preamble. “Why he not stay moving after the first time?”

I explained how Gottfried had fallen, ending with, “He didn’t want to feel himself die again.”

“So why you bring him back?”

“His task wasn’t finished yet.”

“This task need doing that bad?”

“I think so.”

“You only think so?”

“Okay, I’m sure,” I said. “He’s finishing a house to raise money for a foundation that studies a condition called Stickler syndrome.”

“This syndrome, it be killing people?”

“No, but they have a lot of pain and sometimes they lose their sight and hearing. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”

“That what I be asking you.”

Okay, I was missing something. “If it were me, I’d want to come back for a task like this.”

“Why I care what you think?”

“You asked—” I stopped and tried to figure out what she was getting at. “I brought Gottfried back because the task is important to him. He doesn’t care about the charity, but he does care about leaving the legacy of the house.”

Tante Ju-Ju nodded. “Then maybe you do the right thing. What do the loa tell you?”

“I don’t talk to the loa.”

Papa Philippe winced, but it was nothing I hadn’t told him before.

“What if they be talking to you and you not be listening?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.

I didn’t have an answer to that.

She waved me away. “You go on. I talk to the loa about you. When they tell me, I tell you.”

I didn’t need Papa Philippe’s touch to tell me I’d been dismissed, but I was glad to have his company walking back down that path, even if neither of us spoke. If he hadn’t been there, I’d have been tempted to run.

“Why in God’s name did you tell her you don’t talk to the loa?” he asked once we were at my car.

“Because I don’t. Just because the first houngans were practitioners doesn’t mean that everybody needs the loa to raise revenants. I do fine without them.”

“Some people say the loa aren’t happy with that, and that’s why your revenant failed.”

“That’s not true!”

“I believe you, but would it hurt you to at least pretend to respect the loa?”

“I do respect the loa and voudou, but as a religion—it’s not my religion. For me to wear a tignon wouldn’t be showing them respect—it would be mocking them, just like it would be for me to wear a nun’s habit or a yarmulke. And you know damn well that most houngans only pay lip service to the loa.”

“There are plenty of us that believe.”

“I know you believe, Papa Philippe, but you know I don’t.”

“Dodie, it’s just clothes.”

“If it’s just clothes, then why can’t I wear mine? Look, I don’t tell the other houngans how to do their job, and all I want is for them to do the same for me. If that means I never make master, then so be it.”

“I’m not talking about making master. I’m talking about you losing your license. I’m talking about you getting ejected from the Order.”

“Because of blue jeans? I don’t wear my zombie movie T-shirts to work anymore.”

“It’s not just that. It’s everything, the attitude toward the loa, the jokes. And now you’ve not only brought back an architect to fix a house, you had to bring him back a second time. You need to tread carefully.”

“Hey, I’m not the one falling down stairs.”

He shook his head and sent me home, but I knew he was worried. Which got me worried. What if I was wrong about Gottfried? What if I hadn’t done a good job bringing him back? What if he collapsed again? What kind of job could a former houngan get?

I didn’t sleep very well.

I WAS HAPPY to see Gottfried in brand-new Converse sneakers when I picked him up the next day—plenty of tread on those babies. I was less happy to hear the apprentices whispering about me and looking at me in what they imagined was a subtle manner. One actually made devil horns at me, as if my being there could contaminate a house where dead people spent the night. I returned the greeting with a traditional one-finger salute.

“How are you today?” I asked Gottfried.

“Fine. I practiced walking last night—I won’t trip again.”

“Good. And the work is going well?”

He just smiled, which was enough of an answer.

C.W. was waiting for us on the porch of the house, but when he started to lead Gottfried in, I said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stick around today. Just in case.”

“If the boss doesn’t care, I don’t care.”

“All I care about is the work,” Gottfried said.

You have to admire that focus.

So I spent the day following him around, envying the fact that he didn’t have to breathe in the ever-present dust. I’d expected a world-famous architect to spend most of the day in the trailer, but Gottfried was a hands-on kind of guy. We went up to the attic to check out the roofing, down to the basement to check on mold, outside to see if the shingles were being attached properly, back inside to approve of the fixtures in the master bathroom—and that was just in the first hour. He didn’t actually sit down until nearly noon, and even then he preferred to work in the house’s kitchen so he could keep an eye on things. That was when I ran out to the nearest McDonald’s for a bag of grease, salt, and caffeine.

When I got back, Gottfried was in conference with Elizabeth. She’d managed to ignore my presence so far that day, and glared at me now. I would have stayed out of the way, but I realized Gottfried was signing his name.

“Gottfried, you know your signature isn’t valid, right?” The courts had decided that for a dead man to sign anything was the same thing as forging, and the people at Revenant House were supposed to have told him that.

“It’s just an order for supplies!” Elizabeth snapped.

But Gottfried was reading the paper in front of him. “This isn’t about the house,” he said. “I only want the papers about the job.”

“But Gottfried—” Elizabeth started to say, but when I got close enough to snoop, she snatched it up. “Sorry, my mistake. This wasn’t supposed to be in this stack.”

The afternoon was the same as the morning. We went up, we went down, we went outside, we went inside, Gottfried climbed a ladder, I stood below and wondered if I could catch him if he fell again.

Never having been on a building site that didn’t involve Legos or sand, I was surprised by the number of decisions that had to be made and the arguments that ensued. Who knew that using the wrong color of wood would totally destroy a house’s aesthetic? I didn’t even know that a house had an aesthetic.

By the time the living workers were ready to call it a day, I was exhausted. Back to Revenant House for Gottfried, and after making sure Papa Philippe wasn’t poised to issue warnings, it was home to takeout Thai food for me.

The next day was mostly the same, except a little more contentious as the arguments from the previous day escalated—Gottfried ordered one man to completely replaster the ceiling in the dining room because it swirled the wrong way and told C.W. to send back a whole load of lumber because they weren’t building an Emerald Lake shack. I tried to hide my grin when both Von Doesburg and Scarpa heard that latter comment, but I didn’t do a very good job.

Once again, around midday Gottfried settled down in the kitchen for paperwork. After Elizabeth’s attempted document-signing trick, I’d decided to hang around the whole day and had brought lunch with me. So while Gottfried pored over his notes and blueprints, I found a relatively dust-free spot at the counter to eat my ham sandwich and apple.

C.W. came to speak to Gottfried, got snarled at for not meeting code, and then grabbed a Coke out of the refrigerator, one of the few appliances in the house that was plugged in.

“You ready to change jobs and go into construction?” he asked me.

“I’m thinking not. You guys work too hard. And I’d probably never be able to keep to the code.”

“The what?”

“I heard Gottfried saying something about keeping to the code.”

He laughed. “He meant the building code. This house was built long before a lot of the regulations were established, but our renovations have to be up to code.”

“So it’s nothing to do with pirates?”

“Just Captain Bligh over there.”

I lowered my voice. “Sorry Gottfried is giving you a hard time. Revenants aren’t good at compromise.”

“Gottfried was never good at compromise. He’s actually easier to deal with now than when he was alive.”

“Seriously? Why did you work with him?”

“Because when the job was done, I knew it was something that would last. That made it worthwhile.”

He finished his Coke and headed off for code-meeting while Gottfried continued to bark orders at everybody in range. Since he didn’t look as if he was going to be moving any time soon, I said, “Gottfried, I’m going to go visit the little houngan’s room.”

Since my bladder capacity didn’t affect the task at hand, he didn’t bother to respond.

The bathrooms were not in usable condition, which meant I had to brave a Porta-Potty. That was enough to make me go as fast as possible, even if I hadn’t been on watchdog duty. But despite the added incentive, by the time I got back to the kitchen, Gottfried was gone.

I wasn’t immediately alarmed—he hadn’t promised to stay put, after all. So I spent a few minutes looking for him. When I had no luck, I started asking all the workmen I came across if they’d seen him. That was worse than useless because construction workers concentrating on their work don’t pay attention to the clock, so I couldn’t tell who’d seen him last.

I finally spotted him after I’d gone outside—C.W. thought Gottfried went to inspect some ongoing work on the foundation, but he was actually inside when I spotted him at the entrance to the second-floor balcony. As I watched, he stepped over the yellow caution tape that had been strung up to block the entrance.

I wanted to call up to warn him to be careful but was afraid to distract him. Instead all I could do was hold my breath as he bent over to examine the junction of the balcony with the house. I heard rather than saw the wood give way, and later decided that I must have screamed when he tried to grab for a handrail that splintered under his weight.

Even at that distance, I could still sense that Gottfried was aware, but a split second after he started to fall, I felt him give up the ghost. All that hit the ground was a body that had been dead for weeks.

PEOPLE CAME RUNNING from all directions, but the first to reach Gottfried was Elizabeth. She turned away when the smell got to her, her hand over her mouth. I thought she was going to cry, but then she saw me and she went from sad to furious in nothing flat.

“You incompetent moron! You let him die again!”

“I didn’t do anything. He fell!”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “A real houngan can keep a revenant alive for months, years. You can’t even manage two days.”

“He fell,” I repeated. “The floor he was on broke. Go look!” But in looking at the faces around me, I could tell nobody really believed me, and nobody rushed up to examine the evidence, either. “Fine, I’ll raise him again and we’ll ask him what happened.” I wasn’t completely sure that Gottfried would care enough about the question to answer it, but if I framed his repeated “deaths” as a barrier to finishing the job, it might get his attention. “Get me a sacrifice and I’ll get him up and moving again.”

But Mrs. Hopkins was shaking her head. “No, we can’t do it to him again. You said it yourself—a revenant has to want to stay long enough to finish the task. It’s clear that Gottfried doesn’t. We have to let him rest.”

“He doesn’t want to rest!” I protested.

“Obviously he does,” Von Doesburg said. “It seems to me that if you’d done your job properly, you’d know that. I think the courts will agree with me.”

“There’s no need for that—I’m sure Dodie did her best,” Mrs. Hopkins said kindly, “but it’s over. I need to see about getting Gottfried back to his grave.”

The people there didn’t literally turn their backs on me, but they might as well have. Even C.W. just shook his head sadly when I looked at him.

“I’ll mail your check back tomorrow,” I said to nobody in particular, and walked away.

MY PHONE RANG as I walked in my front door, and the voice on the other end said only, “The council be wanting to see you at full dark.” Then whoever it was hung up.

It was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall. Maybe there was something to the loa business—how else could they already know?

I knew Papa Philippe would want me to dress the part, so I took the time to rummage around and find my loose cotton skirt and blouse, the myriad strings of beads and amulets, and the curly black wig I’d worn as an apprentice. Then I fastened on my tignon of calico scarves knotted together, needing a dozen bobby pins to keep it on my head. It was while I was applying makeup six shades darker than my real complexion that I got a good look at myself in the mirror. And nearly laughed my ass off.

So when I arrived at the Order’s compound, it was only after I’d washed my face, pulled the tignon from my head, dumped the jewelry onto the floor, and changed into blue jeans and my Shaun of the Dead T-shirt.

Screw ’em if they couldn’t take a joke.

A pair of apprentices—one in tignon, one in top hat—was waiting for me at the head of the path leading to the council’s gathering place with burning torches in hand. They didn’t speak, but produced some excellent expressions of contempt when they saw my clothes. I just said, “Hey, fabulous outfits! Are those new looks for you?”

They led the way down the path until I could see a clearing with the roaring bonfire the council kept lit no matter what the weather was, then stopped. Obviously I was supposed to make the rest of the trip on my own.

“Tweet me!” I said to my exiting escorts as I followed the dusty path to the gathering place. The fire should have been comforting in the chill of a fall evening, but it really wasn’t.

I stepped into the center of the clearing and waited. I knew there were people around me, but I couldn’t see them until somebody struck a match. Then I could just barely make out the features of Papa Philippe as he walked around the edges of the clearing, stopping every few feet to light a candle in the hand of a council member. There were thirteen candles—the full council was there. It wasn’t a good sign.

Then Papa Philippe came to stand beside me, which was a relief. At least he was still willing to act as my sponsor.

Tante Ju-Ju was standing in the middle of the row of council members. “I see you, Dodie Kilburn. I want you to tell me what you been doing since I talked to you before.”

I did so, ending with my walking back toward my car after Gottfried’s fall.

“And you just leave after that?”

“I thought about it, but no, I didn’t leave. I turned around and went back.”

There were murmurs from the rest of the council, but Tante Ju-Ju kept eyeing me. “What you waiting for? Keep on talking.”

I REALLY HAD intended to drive off in ignominious defeat, stopping only at the nearest Publix to pick up a gallon of fudge ripple ice cream, but just before I got to the car, I turned around and stomped back to the people clustered around Gottfried’s body.

Somebody had found a tarp to lay over him, and most of the workers had wandered away, but the key players were still there: Mrs. Hopkins, Elizabeth, C.W., Von Doesburg, and Scarpa.

“Hang on,” I said, “something stinks here, and I’m not talking about Gottfried.”

Elizabeth sputtered, but I didn’t give her a chance to go into a righteous tirade.

“I spent all of yesterday with Gottfried and he was fine. I spent half of today with him and he was fine. But the second I leave him alone, he falls. Again. Don’t you people think that’s just a little bit suspicious?”

“What are you talking about?” Elizabeth said.

“I’m talking about murder.” Well, technically it wasn’t, since you can’t murder a dead man, but it sure got their attention. “I know Gottfried’s will was strong, so he didn’t just die, and I don’t believe he had two accidents. Somebody either pushed him, or set a trap. Both times.”

“Who would have done that?” Mrs. Hopkins asked. “And why?”

“Why does anybody kill somebody else? Either the killer hated Gottfried or he—or she—benefited from his death.”

I spent a second considering the possibility that Hopkins had been the one, mainly because of the way she’d refused to let me raise him a third time, but it didn’t compute. She needed him to finish the job, and I hadn’t picked up on the first hint of her having anything against him.

“This is ridiculous,” Scarpa said, starting to inch away. “I’m not going to stand here and be accused of . . . Of whatever it is you’re accusing me of.”

“I haven’t accused anybody yet. But you—and the rest of you, too—can stand here and listen, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Von Doesburg scoffed. “Call the cops? There’s been no crime committed.”

“I won’t call the cops. I’ll call the loa.” The disadvantage of being a houngan is that people think you can commit creepy acts. The advantage is that people think that you will commit them.

“What do you want from us?” Scarpa asked in a strangled tone.

“Answers. And the loa will know if you’re lying.” Of course, the loa wouldn’t have told me squat, but they didn’t know that. Having already tentatively eliminated Mrs. Hopkins from my list of suspects, I went on to Elizabeth. “Did you talk to Gottfried while I was in the bathroom?”

“How would I know when you were in the bathroom?”

“Okay, fine. Did you talk to him while I wasn’t around?”

“No. I was in the trailer most of the day unsnarling purchase orders.”

“Did anybody see you?”

“People came in and out, but nobody was with me constantly.”

“Okay.” I made as if to turn to somebody else, then jerked back to her—I’d seen the maneuver on TV. “What was that paper you tried to trick Gottfried into signing yesterday?”

“I wasn’t trying to trick him!” she said. “It was something he’d promised to do before he died, but he never got a chance.”

“What was it?”

“A recommendation letter. I’m applying to architecture schools. I figured I could get his signature and then fudge the date to make it look like he’d done it before he died.”

C.W. said, “Gottfried told me that she was applying, if that helps any.”

Actually, it did. Even if Elizabeth had wanted to kill Gottfried for some reason, she wouldn’t have done so until he signed her paper. True, she could have forged it, but she could have done that anytime.

On to C.W. He’d been awfully nice to me—maybe he’d had an ulterior motive. “What about you?” I said to him. “If Gottfried was out of the way, you could have gone on to finish the renovation your way.”

“My way? I don’t have a way. I’m a builder, not a designer. You give me a blueprint or even something sketched on a napkin, I’ll build it, but I wouldn’t know where to start on a project like this.”

I would have loved to have a loa with a lie detector standing by, but he sure sounded sincere to me. “Then tell me this. Did you see Gottfried any time today when I wasn’t with him?”

“No, you were sticking to him like glue.”

“All right then, Mr. Von Doesburg and Mr. Scarpa. Same question. Did you speak to Gottfried at any time today when I wasn’t around?”

Scarpa shook his head vigorously, but Von Doesburg said, “Yes.”

“You did?” I said, surprised that anybody had admitted it.

“I went looking for him, as a matter of fact, and found him on the second floor examining flooring. I assume it was after you left him.”

“What did you want with him?”

He gave me a condescending smile. “I wanted his advice on a project I’m working on—it’s fairly technical. I could explain it, but only another architect could understand.”

“Did he help you?”

“We talked for a few minutes, but then he said he needed to check something on the balcony. I thanked him for his time and went into an empty room to call my office. Then I heard a scream and ran outside. I suppose somebody else could have been upstairs when we were and followed Gottfried, but I didn’t see anyone.”

I was about to make a stab at Scarpa when I realized what Von Doesburg had said. “Dude, you’re so busted.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Okay, all of you have interacted with Gottfried since I first got him back. Has he expressed any interest in anything other than finishing this house?”

There was a round of heads shaking.

“He wouldn’t even sign Elizabeth’s paper—something he’d promised to do—because it wasn’t directly connected to his task. So why would he have given Von Doesburg advice about a different project?”

“I’m no expert in zombie behavior,” Von Doesburg said, “so I can only tell you what happened.”

“Bullshit,” C.W. said. “The boss wouldn’t have given Von Doesburg the time of day when he was alive. Everybody knows he thought the man’s work was crap.”

“I assure you that Gottfried respected me as a colleague,” the developer said, but he was sweating.

“Let’s find out for sure,” I said. “Let’s ask Gottfried.”

“SO YOU DONE raise him again?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.

I nodded. “I hope that’s it, too—it gets harder every time. But Gottfried came back. His body is a bit banged up from the falls, but he’s still willing to do the task. And when I worded the question the right way—asking him what work needed doing on the balcony—he told us that it was Von Doesburg who told him to check for termite damage. Which there was, only not in the place Von Doesburg told him to look. Von Doesburg set him up to fall, and probably pushed him down the stairs the other time, too.”

“Why he want to get rid of a revenant so bad?”

“We’re not absolutely sure because Von Doesburg has clammed up, but I started thinking about what Gottfried said about substandard building materials, and how he wasn’t building an Emerald Lake house. I got C.W. to take a look at Mr. Scarpa’s house, and apparently the place wasn’t built to code. Fixing it will be expensive and Scarpa said he was going to sue Von Doesburg to recoup his costs. Chances are that all the houses in the development have the same code violations. The man’s going to be bankrupt.”

“You think that enough? Or are you gonna send the loa after him for messing with your revenant?” Tante Ju-Ju said, with an ironic twist to her lips.

“Actually, I suggested to Mrs. Hopkins that the police just might want to investigate Gottfried’s real death a little more closely. After all, he must have discovered the problems with the Emerald Lake houses before he died, and from what I know about him, I don’t think he’d have kept quiet.”

“Where the revenant be now? You didn’t bring him here.”

“They’ve lost so much time these past couple of days that Gottfried insisted on working through the night, and you know how hard it is to argue with a revenant. With Von Doesburg out of the way, I figured he’d be safe enough there—C.W. and Elizabeth will keep an eye on him.”

“I think Dodie done us proud,” Papa Philippe said firmly. “If she not be bringing that man back, people start to think we can’t keep a revenant up and doing his task.”

“Maybe she did—maybe she didn’t,” Tante Ju-Ju said. “Tell me this. That third time you bring him back, where you get that sacrifice?”

I was so screwed. I’d been hoping nobody would ask that question, which was why I’d kept my hands behind me while I was talking. “I used my Order ring.” I held out the hand with the white mark that showed where the ring had been.

There were audible gasps, and if looks could have killed, I’d have been revenant material. I was afraid to look at Papa Philippe, who must have been wishing he were anyplace on earth other than standing next to me.

“Why you sacrifice that ring?” Tante Ju-Ju asked. “You got nothing else to give the loa?”

“What could I have given them? My car? My computer? None of that is worth anything.”

“But the ring be gold so that make it valuable?”

“No! Yeah, sure the gold is worth something, but that’s not what made it valuable. A sacrifice has to mean something, right? The ring was the only important thing I had.”

“Why it be so important?”

Was this a trick question? She knew what that ring symbolized. “Papa Philippe gave me that ring when I became a houngan.”

“You saying being a houngan is something special?”

“Are you serious?”

“You the one who never be serious about what you doing!”

“Sure, I make jokes. It’s a funny job—people are funny, and dead people even more so. That doesn’t mean I don’t take raising the dead seriously. I help people finish their life’s work so they can rest easy. If that’s not special, then I don’t know what is!”

She looked at me for what seemed like a year. The other council members were looking, too, and probably Papa Philippe, too. Then Tante Ju-Ju smiled so wide it was almost scary.

“You come here.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, but since Papa Philippe nudged me and I was outnumbered, I went.

“Gimme your hand.” When I held it out, she slipped a ring on my finger, right where the other one had been. “The loa, they do like jokes. They be wanting you to stay houngan.”

“They aren’t playing a joke on me, are they?” I asked.

Tante Ju-Ju said, “No, I think maybe they be playing a joke on the rest of us houngans!” Then she actually laughed out loud, and the rest of the council joined in. People started patting me on the back and kissing both my cheeks, as if they’d been in on it from the beginning, but I didn’t think they had been. Papa Philippe was nearly as happy as I was.

It wasn’t until I got back to my car that I took a good look at the ring Tante Ju-Ju had given me. It wasn’t the gold signet I’d expected. It was green plastic, and in place of the vévé of Baron LaCroix, it had a simple circle with two lines on either side.

“In brightest day, in blackest night,” I said. She’d given me a Green Lantern power ring.