Free First Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones Page A

forward. “It’s June twentieth.”
    I looked at her. “He knows when your birthday is. He just wants to see if I do.”
    “No?” he asked. He seemed disappointed, like he wanted me to tell him, wanted to believe. For about five minutes, anyway. It was the fair-weather believers I had to watch out for. They had a nasty habit of sucker-punching me in the gut when I least expected it.
    “Just tell him,” Elizabeth said.
    “You don’t understand,” I told her. “People like him never believe, not fully. He’ll always have doubts. He’ll always quiz me, drill me for information he already has just to see if I fuck up.” I looked back at Garrett. “So fuck him.”
    “Elizabeth,” Sussman said, “maybe we should just—”
    “No!” she yelled, and I jumped, catching Garrett’s full attention. “Just tell him.” She rushed toward my desk, leaned over it. “He needs to get over himself and just believe you. He doesn’t know what he’ll be missing. He’ll go through life with this one-dimensional view of the world he lives in. He’ll have no sense of direction, no hope that the people he’s loved and lost will go to a better place. That they’ll be okay.”
    I realized Elizabeth was no longer talking about Garrett. She was talking about herself.
    I stood and walked around to her. “Elizabeth, what’s wrong?”
    She almost cried. I could see tears shimmering in her pale eyes. “There’s so much I want to tell my sister, but she’s just like him … just like me. I would never have believed you either.” Her shoulders deflated, and she leveled a guilty gaze on me. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, I wouldn’t have. Not in a million years. And neither will she.”
    A relieved smile spread across my face. Was that all? I’d come across this problem countless times. “Elizabeth,” I said, “of all the problems we have right now, that is the only one with a simple fix.”
    Garrett watched our exchange—or rather my exchange—but to his credit, his expression remained passive. I’d often considered how ridiculous I must look to the living, talking to myself, gesturing wildly, hugging air. But I didn’t always have a choice. If Garrett refused to leave, he’d just have to deal with my world. I would not modify my behavior to appease his delicate sense of propriety in my own office.
    Elizabeth sniffed. “What do you mean? What fix?”
    “You leave a note.”
    “A note?”
    “Sure. I do it all the time. It saves me so much explaining,” I said with an encompassing wave of my hand. “You dictate a note to me, I type it—and predate it to before your death, naturally—and then it’s miraculously found among your possessions. Kind of like an if-anything-should-happen-to-me note. You tell her everything you want her to know, and we just pretend you’d typed it before you died. I even have a guy who can forge your signature to seal the deal, if you’d like.”
    “Who?” Garrett asked.
    I glowered at him in warning. What I did with the departed was none of his business.
    A pretty look of astonishment came over Elizabeth’s face. “That’s brilliant. I’m a lawyer. I’m more organized than the Dewey decimal system. She’d totally fall for it.”
    “Of course she’ll fall for it,” I said, patting her back.
    “Can I write one to my wife?” Sussman asked.
    “Sure.”
    Then we all looked at Barber, expecting him to have someone to write to as well. “I only have my mom. She knows how I feel about her,” he said, and I wondered if I should be happy about that or sad because his mother was all he had.
    “I’m glad,” I told him. “I wish more people took the time to make their feelings known.”
    “Yeah. I’ve hated her guts since I was ten. There’s really not much else to put in a letter.”
    I tried to hide the shock I felt.
    He noticed anyway. “Oh, trust me, the feeling’s mutual.”
    “Okay, two notes, then.”
    “Hey,” Elizabeth said, suddenly thoughtful, “what day is