weeks, but our work finally bears fruit.
Two police cars pull into the cemetery’s parking lot, followed by two hearses and the gravediggers’ lorry. The gravediggers come first, followed closely by two police officers—one young man in his late twenties and one lady in her forties with graying short hair—and go straight to Lise’s grave.
The ghosts follow, of course, but we try not to touch any of them for fear of scaring them off.
When the shovels hit the casket, Lise shudders. “That’s so creepy,” she whispers.
They haul out the casket and put it on a gurney, then roll it out of the cemetery.
The minute the casket passes the gates, Lise’s eyes widen. “Uh oh.” In a streak of gray and white, she zips to her casket and disappears.
“Did she move on?” Manon asks, her voice trembling.
I shake my head but can’t find my voice.
As the gravediggers move to Manon’s grave, she follows.
Clothilde and I stay put for just a minute.
“Seems like there might be a way to get out of the cemetery after all,” Clothilde says.
I nod numbly. Of course, to get them to remove your casket from the cemetery, somebody actually has to know where it is.
While they exhume Manon, I listen in on the police officers’ conversation.
“Is this really necessary?” the young man asks. “Overdoses are pretty common these days, including with rich kids.”
“It’s necessary,” the lady officer says. Her name tag reads “Evian” and she has an air about her that I would not have liked while I was alive, because she would have made me actually work, but which I appreciate all the more now, especially on this case.
The young man shoves his hands in his pockets. “No parents ever believe their kids to be able to do stuff like that. Why listen to these two moms?”
“Because without knowing each other from before, they tell very similar stories,” Evian answers. “Because these are the only two deaths of this kind in this little village, but if you look at all villages in a hundred kilometers radius, you’ll find a lot more. All young, pretty women. All dead from an overdose of the same type of drug.”
She glances around to make sure nobody can overhear. “All the victims of very sloppy police work.”
The young man freezes and meets his colleague’s gaze. “That why they brought you down here from Paris?”
She tips her head to the side as if considering. “It’s why I was sent down here. The locals were not happy to see me come through the door.”
The man gulps. “Then why… You trust me with this information?”
She shrugs. “Have to trust somebody. I checked you out. You’ve not been involved in any of the cases I’ve tagged as suspicious, you seem to have very few friends at the station—that’s not going to improve now, by the way, sorry about that—and you’re so fresh out of the academy I’m not even sure your uniform’s been cleaned even once.”
He gasps in surprise. “It so has!”
Evian winks at him and he flushes as he realizes she was just teasing.
I meet Clothilde’s gaze where she’s standing right in front of officer Evian. “Seems promising.”
“It does,” she agrees. Then she moves away to talk to Manon, presumably to say goodbye before the girl is torn away with her casket.
I lean in and talk right into officer Evian’s ear. “Might want to look into similar cases going back quite some time.”