The Dead Won't Let Me Rest

The hearse was twenty minutes late, and nobody moved to find out why.

Kael stood near the back of the cemetery chapel, hands in the pockets of a black suit he'd borrowed from a neighbor. It was slightly too wide in the shoulders. His father had been buried in a better one.

Sixty people filled the rows. His father's business partners. Old friends who'd stopped calling after the debts became public. Three cousins he'd gone years without seeing. They all wore grief like accessories, adjusting it when someone looked their way.

Kael had not cried. He wasn't sure if that made him colder than the rest of them or simply more honest.

His Aunt Petra sat in the front row with her reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead, which meant she was already calculating. She did that whenever money entered the room. Her son, Elias, sat beside her with his legs crossed and one arm draped across the back of the pew like he was waiting for a flight.

Elias was twenty-eight and looked like something you'd see on a financial magazine cover. Tailored charcoal suit. Hair that cost more to cut than Kael's monthly food budget. He caught Kael's eye across the chapel and gave a short nod, the kind that wasn't a greeting so much as an acknowledgment. You're still here. Interesting.

Kael looked away.

The service was short. The priest spoke about Gerald Arden as though he'd met him once, briefly, in a corridor. There were two readings. A hymn nobody sang with conviction. Then Petra stood and said her brother-in-law had been a man of integrity, which drew actual murmuring from the back rows, because everyone in the room knew Gerald Arden had died owing money to half the people sitting in it.

What nobody said: that the police had closed the investigation in four days. That Kael had asked questions and been told, politely and then less politely, to let professionals handle it. That his father's study had been emptied before Kael ever got there.

He pressed his thumb against the inside of his wrist, an old habit when his mind started pulling in two directions at once.

Afterward, in the gravel car park behind the chapel, Petra found him before he made it to the street.

"The lawyer called," she said. No preamble. No expression. "Your father left you the funeral home."

Kael looked at her. "He left me the funeral home."

"Arden Funeral Home on Crabtree Street. The building, the equipment, and the debt attached to it." She paused. "Mostly the debt."

Behind her, Elias had appeared at a careful distance, listening without appearing to listen.

"The rest of the estate goes to settling the outstanding accounts," Petra continued. "After that, there's nothing. You won't receive a share."

Kael nodded slowly. "And the funeral home?"

"Is yours to do with as you choose." She tilted her chin slightly. "I'd suggest selling it, if you can find a buyer. It hasn't operated in months. The license is lapsed. There's back tax on the building." A pause. "Elias has offered a fair price, if you want to avoid the embarrassment of a public auction."

He looked past her at Elias, who was now examining his phone with great interest.

"I'll think about it," Kael said.

"Don't think too long." Petra turned back toward the chapel. "The bank won't."

He watched her go. The gravel crunched under her heels, precise and unhurried. The morning was cold and colorless, the sky the particular shade of gray that suggested it had given up on becoming anything else.

A funeral home. His father had left him a broken funeral home instead of answers.

He took the keys from the lawyer's office on his way through town. A plain ring with two old brass keys and a handwritten tag: Arden, Crabtree St. The lawyer had offered condolences and handed them over without making eye contact. Kael couldn't decide if the man was embarrassed for him or simply had another appointment.

He drove to Crabtree Street alone.

The building was worse than he'd expected, and he'd expected bad.

Victorian red-brick, four stories, tucked between a closed laundromat and a parking structure that had seen better decades. The Arden Funeral Home sign above the door was still there but had lost two letters, so it now read ARDEN FUN RAL HME, which felt like a message of some kind. The windows were dark. A gutter along the east wall had separated from its bracket and hung at an angle, pointing at nothing in particular.

Kael stood on the pavement and looked at it for a long time.

His father had kept this place running for twenty years. Had brought people here when they had no one else. Had apparently, in the end, died for it.

The first key didn't fit. The second turned with a groan that moved through the whole door frame.

Inside smelled like formaldehyde, old wood, and something faintly floral that had long since stopped being fresh. The reception area was intact but dusty. A wooden counter. Two chairs. A framed certificate on the wall with his father's name on it.

Kael stood in the dark entryway for a moment, listening.

The building was completely silent.

He let out a slow breath, found the light switch, and went in.

He didn't hear the sound from the embalming room until he was already at the bottom of the stairs. A slow, wet exhale. Like someone waking up.