Free Tulle Death Do Us Part by Annette Blair

which of us had instigated it. Must have been spontaneous, which often gets us into trouble.
    Holy zipper foot, I so needed his kind of trouble.
    “Why do you think this was stolen?” His question, as he perused the brass box found in my attic, took us to safer ground.
    I scoffed. “You think somebody bought it from the country club and hid it in my attic for several decades?”
    “You have a point,” he said. “But what makes you think it was there for decades?”
    “If it didn’t get left there the night the body drawers got ransacked, it has to be decades. Because I haven’t had a break-in since I bought the building except for that one incident, and even then it wasn’t a break-in as much as a walk-through. I mean the place was wide open. Any way to find out how often Dolly’s unoccupied building was broken into over the years? Or if it was burglarized when it was a funeral parlor–carriage house or before that when it was the old county morgue?”
    Werner hit a few keys on his computer, which sat on a table that formed an L off his desk, to move from his document to an official-looking legal database that needed a password. Once in, he checked what looked to be a national register. “No break-ins on record back to around 1985, when we first got computerized.”
    He hit speed dial on his phone. “Billings, send an officer down to the old records room to check Mad’s building in all its incarnations. See if and when it’s ever been broken into. If ever, how many times, dates, and details, please.”
    I bit my lip. “You’re right. It could have been put there anytime since 1923, when the country club opened.” Nottrue, strictly speaking, but Werner didn’t know that it had been stolen the night of the country club’s Golden Jubilee. “It could have happened when either Dante or his father was in charge.”
    Werner looked up from his computer. “Dante?”
    Werner doesn’t know about my psychometric gifts, that my mother was a witch, or that the late Dante Underhill, undertaker, had been cursed to live in his carriage house—aka my shop—for eternity. Which meant that he didn’t know I could talk to Dante the ghost, either, or that Aunt Fiona could, as well as Dante’s old flame, Dolly Sweet, age 106. Good thing we weren’t a couple, Werner and I. I’d have a lot of ’splainin’ to do.
    “Dante’s one of the former owners of my building. The undertaker Underhills. Dante, the son, took over after his father passed.” I tried to look innocent, realizing I shouldn’t act so familiar with a dead man. “Dante’s the one who died young and took the Underhill line with him, left Dolly his fortune and his building. And she sold the building to me…and told me all about him.” There, that should explain my knowledge.
    “Ah,” Werner said. “I remember now. Dolly’s infamous secret love affair…which everybody knew about.”
    I chuckled. “That’s the one. I’m always finding papers with his signature. Upstairs, some of the open struts have his name carved in them. I think he hung around upstairs at the funeral chapel–carriage house as a kid, with a jackknife. He’d carved the horse stalls, too, before they became my dressing rooms. Sometimes, I think I can hear the young Dante playing tic-tac-toe with a friend on the raw wood upstairs.”
    Werner sort of grunted. Then he slipped on a pair oflatex gloves to examine the box. “Why don’t you know what’s in it?”
    “I wanted a witness as to what’s inside when I opened it, but before we try, I’d like permission to take pictures of whatever we find.”
    “I don’t see why not, unless it’s a secret map to the Federal Reserve bank. The average ordinary shop owner would have kept this, you understand, and kept her mouth shut, à la finders keepers.”
    “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
    “It’s not that you’re extraordinary, Mad, just weird.”
    “Thanks.” I wondered if that was to establish our non-romantic