Ever.
“Good.” He lifted a chin to me. “Have fun.”
I grunted in reply.
For a few hours this morning, my father and I were going on a ride around the lake, and it’d take us about two hours. Plenty of time to get back here, as well as plenty of time on the bike that I was needing.
I hadn’t been on a good long ride since well before what I was now calling the ‘incident.’ The incident being the night that I must’ve lost my wits and done things that never should’ve been done.
Done things that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Things with a person that annoyed the living shit out of me on a regular basis.
“You ready to ride, boy?” Dad asked.
I looked over at him and nodded, my eyes flicking one last time in the direction I’d last seen Jubilee.
“I was born ready,” I informed him.Chapter 8Dear Sweet Baby Jesus. Thank you for this cold front, and let all those mosquitos die and go straight to hell where they belong.
-Jubilee’s secret thoughts
Jubilee
“Was all of this really necessary?” I looked in disgust at all the cameras that I could now see around my office.
At least, the camera views, anyway.
I hadn’t been able to see the cameras at first as my dad had walked with me into the parlor of the funeral home. Which, I’d been told, was the point.
“It’s necessary when there’s a murderer going around your town and you lived next to said person that he murdered,” Dad said.
“But this is a funeral home,” I said. “This isn’t anything. Who would come here? The scariest thing that has happened here was a corpse letting off gas and scaring the shit out of me about two weeks ago.”
Dad winced. “That’s disgusting. You know how I don’t like hearing that stuff.”
And he didn’t.
Really, he didn’t.
I didn’t know what it was about preserving the dead that he didn’t like, but Dad still refused to go into my mother’s mortuary. Sure, he’d walk in the door and hang out in the lobby, but he didn’t do corpses of any kind. Which meant he didn’t go to viewings. He didn’t come down to help with the bodies even though there were times that my mother had needed his help moving them.
God forbid a problem arose in the basement where my mother did all of her work.
My mother could be getting murdered by a zombie corpse and my father would toss a gun down to her and tell her to handle it herself.
I stretched my arms.
“How do you think you’re going to be inspecting the cameras in the basement if you don’t come look at them yourself?” I teased.
I really had no clue if that was why he was there, but I couldn’t help but tease him about his fears.
“I got Gordon and Zee for that,” he answered. “They’re pulling up right now, as a matter of fact. They’re going to do the ones down there, and I’m doing the ones that don’t have any dead people in the room, and then we’re going to go eat dinner at Maynard’s.”
I groaned.
“Maynard’s?” I whined. “Really?”
Dad grinned his ass off. “Yep.”
Sighing long and loud, I tilted my head in the direction of my office and said, “I’ll be downstairs. Text me when you’re ready to go.”
Dad muttered something about ‘fuckin’ zombies’ and went to meet Zee and Gordon outside.
I chose to ignore him, and the man that made my heart skip a beat at the best of times, but made it stall in my chest when he was in leather, and practically ran downstairs.
I arrived to find Turner on the phone, looking haggard.
“Yes, sir.” Turner tapped her forehead lightly on the edge of the desk. “Yes, sir. That’s the mahogany. Yes, sir, it is eight thousand dollars. Yes. No. I’m sorry, but I have no control over the price. If you feel that it’s unfair, then you can take it up with the owner. I’m just the help.”
I snorted, causing Turner to look up so fast that her head likely spun.
“Oh, you’re in luck. The manager is right here.” She paused and held out the phone for me to take.
I did, placing it to my ear.
“Hello?” I answered, grabbing onto Turner’s shirt before she could make a mad dash toward the door.
“Is this the manager of Bear Bottom Funeral Home?” the man asked.
He sounded all hoity-toity, and I could imagine that was the first thing to set Turner’s teeth on edge.
Turner had something against men acting like they were superior, and always had.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“Is there anything more top-of-the-line than the mahogany casket pictured on your website?” the man asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, sir. We don’t usually place those on the website, though. If you’re interested in seeing different brands and pricing options, I can fax you over a comprehensive list of everything that we carry. However, the ones that are super top-of-the-line take two to three weeks to arrive.”