double funerals in our cemetery.
We once had a couple who died in a car crash who were buried together, and once eighty-year-old twin sisters who died mere hours apart. In both cases, the families did a single funeral.
In neither case did any of them linger as a ghost.
This afternoon, when the church doors open and two caskets are carried out, the screams are so loud I’m guessing the ghosts in the cemetery of the next town over can hear them.
New arrivals.
“Jeez, that’s loud,” Clothilde says from her perch on her tombstone. Never a ghost for respecting the rules of the living realm, her worn Converse slide through the stone every time she swings her legs and her wavy shoulder-length hair blows in a non-existent breeze.
I shove my hands farther into the pockets of my jacket, hiking my shoulders up toward my ears, wishing it would help with the volume.
“Well,” I say tentatively. “There are two of them.”
A snort.
I hope they won’t take too long to accept that they’re dead. The caskets won’t let them out until they’ve made their peace with it—and until they do, we’re stuck listening to the screams.
I cock my head as I listen more closely. “Do they sound…off…to you?”
Clothilde rolls her eyes in true teenager fashion, but she focuses on the noise. “Yeah,” she agrees.
“It’s not quite the right type of screams, is it?” I squint at the advancing caskets as if that will help me figure it out.
Clothilde jumps down from her perch and advances toward the freshly dug grave, leaving me to scramble to follow. Her white shirt billows in the imaginary breeze.
“They’re not screams of panic,” she says, clearly intrigued now. “They’re screams of anger.”
She’s right.
Where most people—myself included—fight the panic for days on end by yelling for help, and by hitting the casket with all our force, this sounds like we should be expecting two enraged Hulks.
They’re pounding on their caskets, but it’s not the unrelenting thumps of panic. It’s calculated bursts of pure rage—maybe at the casket for keeping them prisoner.
Maybe at something else.
We reach the double-spaced grave at the same time as the group of mourners. Standing less than five meters from the caskets, I can make out swear words, inventive ways in which to kill someone, and just pure, unadulterated fury.
“What the hell happened?” I wonder out loud.
“Dunno,” Clothilde says with a smile. “But I can’t wait to find out. I’m gonna go listen in on the friends’ conversations.” And off she goes.
At first, I’m dumbfounded by her enthusiasm. Usually, she lets me do the work on investigating the circumstances around a new arrival’s death, and she’ll tag along helping me figure things out when she feels like it.
The priest clears his throat, and I snap back to the present.
I have a job to do.
The funeral procession isn’t particularly large for a double funeral, and I can only make out one “family” group, so at first, I think we’re talking about two members of the same family. Siblings?
The “friends” part of the group seems to average in the late twenties—probably the age of our victims, too.
As I sidle closer to the family members to eavesdrop on anything they might say during the ceremony, I realize there are actually two families.
I most definitely have two pairs of parents—in their late fifties or early sixties—but they’re standing together. They know each other well enough to lean on each other.
Our Hulks are most likely a couple, then.
“I just don’t understand,” one of the mothers—a regal woman with long, graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses—says to her shorter and darker-haired counterpart. “The local police keep saying there are no dangerous currents in the area. But Bruno and Audrey both knew how to swim. How could they have drowned?”
“I don’t understand it, either,” the other mother replies. “We spent entire weeks by the ocean while Bruno was growing up. He never needed rescuing no matter where we went.”
The first mother dabs a handkerchief at the tip of her nose. “I have half a mind to make a scene at the police station downtown tomorrow and insist they send someone to Tenerife to investigate properly.”
Seems likely we have a double murder on our hands, in other words.
It might explain the anger.
A bloodcurdling shriek emits from the casket on the right.
I take an involuntary step back. We’ve had our share of murder cases in this cemetery, but none of them have been this angry at being dead.
I glance over at Clothilde, who’s standing between two women in the “friends” section, eavesdropping with a glint in her eyes.
Clothilde, like so many teenagers, has a very short fuse, and although I don’t know much about the circumstances around her death, I do know she’s very, very angry about it.
“Clothilde!” I yell, not needing to worry about the priest taking offense at me yelling during his speech. “Were you this angry when you woke up?”
She glances up at me with half a smile lurking on her lips. Shakes her head.
I stay with the parents until the caskets are in the ground and people start moving toward their cars, but don’t learn anything useful.
“You get anything?” I ask Clothilde as we’re once again alone in the cemetery and strolling back toward where our own graves lie.
Clothilde shrugs. “They were on their honeymoon in Tenerife. Drowned together in a secluded but calm and not-at-all-dangerous creek on the fourth day. Local police say no foul, but nobody here believes it.”
I sit down on the slight mound that marks my grave. My gaze goes to the fresh grave and those screams.
“Maybe they were killed,” I say without conviction, “and they know who did it. That’s why they’re so angry?”
Clothilde jumps up on her tombstone and sits with her feet dangling and crossed at the ankles. “They’ll tell us when they get out.”