all things considered.
She stops screaming the very next morning, just after ten. It takes her another hour to accept her current situation sufficiently for the casket to release her, then five minutes to crawl through the dirt.
She’s a pretty woman in her twenties, with a darker tint to her skin than Clothilde and Manon, and black curly hair that’s been forced into two tight braids framing her face and joining at the neck. Her clothes scream student, and one more focused on the studying than the partying.
“Are you guys ghosts, too?” she asks as she considers the three of us standing at the foot of her grave, waiting.
My lips curling up in a smile, I nod at her.
She scans the cemetery. “Where are the others?”
“It’s just us, I’m afraid,” I tell her.
“The others have moved on to wherever ghosts at peace move on to,” Clothilde supplements. She studies the new arrival from head to toe.
“Oh,” Lise says. “Right. Guess that makes sense.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “You agree with the assessment that you’re a ghost not at peace?”
Her lips draw into a snarl and anger shoots from her eyes. “Oh, hell yes. If you’re telling me I’m getting a chance at nailing the guy who killed me before moving on to the afterlife or whatever, I am so on board.”
Clothilde takes a step closer to Lise. “People at your funeral seemed to think you’d died of an overdose.”
“Oh, I did.” Lise stretches her hands out in front of her, making her biceps strain against her long-sleeved t-shirt, clearly itching for a fight. “But I’m not the one who put all those drugs in my bloodstream.”
“Do you know who did?” Manon asks. She has stayed quiet so far, but she’s hanging on Lise’s every word.
“I most certainly do,” Lise says, her voice a low rumble. “It was Laurent Lambert, and I’ll be damned if I let him get away with it.”
Manon freezes and draws in a sharp breath she no longer needs. She’s so shocked her entire body flickers off for a second, before coming back to its usual opaque gray.
And Clothilde? She’s growing. Usually on the tall side for a girl, she’s still shorter than me. But now she’s towering over me at about the height of the tallest of the professional basketball players. Her eyes are pools of black and her lips curl back in a feral snarl.
“I take it you’ve already heard the name?” I whisper, scared to upset her any further. “Laurent Lambert is a fairly common name.”
Manon raises her hand as if asking permission to talk. “I had a meeting with a lawyer named Laurent Lambert on the day I died. The day I don’t remember.”
Clothilde puts both fists over her eyes, clearly fighting to regain control over her body. Little by little, she shrinks back to her normal size.
“Remember how I told you there was a lawyer in the hotel room the day I died?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“His name was Laurent Lambert.” She lowers her fists to her side and turns to Lise. “Approximately how old is this guy who killed you?”
“Early sixties, maybe?”
Clothilde nods and meets my gaze. “In his thirties in the late eighties.”
I nod and try to gather my thoughts as they attempt to scramble all over the place. “What about your Laurent Lambert, Manon? How old is he?”
Her arms wrap around herself as she trembles. “I don’t know. I don’t remember actually meeting him.” Her gaze jumps from one to the other as we stand around the fresh grave. “But I got the impression he was rather well established?”
Clothilde nods decisively. “Good enough.”
Shit. Do we really have a serial killer on our hands?
And how am I supposed to solve this from the confines of the cemetery?