“Sorry, Tacky Tourists. No sign of Howard.” I headed for the front, all ready to tell The Tackys I couldn’t help them, but when I walked into the living room I jumped like I’d stepped on a live wire. The woman was not only waiting for me out front, but she’d pressed her face up against the window and was peering in at me like an enormous bug.
Over here. Over here! she mouthed, pointing to the front door.
“You’ve got to be joking me.” I put my hand to my chest. My heart was going like a million beats per minute. You’d think life in a cemetery would be a lot more . . . dead. Ba dum tss! My first official cemetery joke. And first official eye rolling at own cemetery joke.
I pushed the door open and the woman trundled back a couple of inches.
“Sorry, darling. Did I startle you? You looked like your eyes were going to bug out of your head.” She was wearing one of those stick-on name tags. HELLO, MY NAME IS GLORIA.
“I didn’t expect you to be . . . looking in.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but Howard’s not here. He said something about having an office; maybe you could go look for him there?”
Gloria nodded. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, here’s the problem, doll. We only have three hours before the tour bus comes back for us, and we want to be sure we see everything. I just don’t think we have the time to be traipsing all over looking for Mr. Mercer.”
“Did you see the visitors’ center? There’s a woman who works there who might know where he is.”
“I told you we should try that,” the man said. “This is a home.”
“Which one’s the visitors’ center?” Gloria asked. “Was it that building near the entrance?”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know.” Probably because the night before I’d been way too panicked to notice anything but the army of headstones staring me down.
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I hate to inconvenience you, darlin’, but I’m sure you know this place better than a couple of tourists from Alabama.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“What?”
I sighed, casting one more hopeful glance back into the house, but it was as quiet as a tomb. (Ack! Second cemetery joke.) Guess I was going to have to jump headfirst into this whole living-in-a-memorial thing. I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me. “I don’t really know my way around, but I’ll try to help.”
Gloria smiled beatifically. “Grah-zee-aye.”
I walked down the stairs, the two of them following after me.
“They sure do keep this place up nice,” Gloria observed. “Real nice.”
She was right. The lawns were so green they looked spray-painted, and practically every corner had a grouping of Italian and American flags surrounded by patches of Wizard of Oz–worthy flowers. The headstones were white and sparkly and didn’t look nearly as creepy in the daylight. But don’t get me wrong. They were still creepy.
“Let’s go this way.” I marched toward the road Howard and I had driven in on.
Gloria nudged me with her elbow. “My husband and I met on a cruise.”
Oh, no. Was she going to tell me their life story? I slid a quick glance at Gloria and she smiled engagingly. Of course she was.
“He’d just lost his wife, Anna Maria. She was a nice lady, but real particular about how she kept house—one of those who puts plastic on all the furniture? Anyway, my husband, Clint, had passed a few years earlier, so that’s why we were both there on the singles cruise. They had great food—just mountains of shrimp and all the ice cream you could eat. You remember that shrimp, Hank?”
Hank didn’t appear to be listening. I sped up and Gloria did too.
“There were a bunch of horny old dogs on that boat, just nasty things, but lucky for me, Hank and I were assigned the same table for dinner. He proposed before the ship had even docked—that’s how sure he was. We got married just two months later. Of course, I’d already moved in, but we really rushed things because we didn’t want to be, you know . . .” She paused, looking at me meaningfully.
“What?” I asked hesitantly.
Her voice fell an octave. “Living in sin.”
I looked desperately around the cemetery. I either needed to find Howard or someplace to vomit. Maybe both.
“First order of business was ripping all the plastic off that furniture. A person’s got to live without their buttocks sticking to the darn sofa. Right, Hank?”
He made a guttural noise.
“This is sort of like a second honeymoon for us. I’ve wanted to visit Italy my whole life, and now here I am. You sure are a lucky duck, living here.”
Quack, quack, I thought.
The road curved and a small building appeared just ahead of us. It was right next to the main entrance and had a giant sign that said, VISITORS CHECK IN HERE. Easy to confuse with VISITORS, FIND THE NEAREST HOUSE AND THEN YELL THROUGH THE WINDOWS.
“I think this is it,” I said.
“Told you,” Hank said to Gloria, breaking his silence.
“You didn’t tell me anything.” Gloria sniffed. “You just followed me around like a lost puppy dog.”
I practically ran for the building’s entrance, but before I could reach for the handle, the door swung open and Howard stepped out. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops, like he planned to catch a flight to Tahiti later.