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.