CHAPTER ONE
He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
It was a pity he was dead.
Ginny reached into her rubber apron for the television remote control and turned down the volume on North by Northwest, muting Cary Grant’s velvet baritone and leaving nothing but the buzz of her equipment and tick tock of the wall clock. Watching classic movies was her norm when working, but the man lying on her metal embalming table deserved her undivided attention.
She walked a measured circle around his prone figure, her fingers creeping slowly to her throat, trying to massage the spreading pressure there. Death at such a young age wasn’t fair to anyone, but having grown up in a funeral home, Ginny had learned to compartmentalize sadness. Tuck it away for another day, her father had always said. Why was she was finding it so difficult to label and store the grief over this young man’s life being snuffed out?
What did he die from?
No bullet wounds were visible. No usual signs of long-term sickness. His body was strong and sliced with muscle. He looked as though he’d lain down on her table and gone to sleep, although for some off reason, he didn’t strike her as a man that rested often. Someone had pressed the pause button on an explosive life force. A kingmaker. A dynamo.
A special man.
How she sensed any of this from a corpse was beyond her. She should have been bathing the body by now and yet she hesitated to touch him. Once the embalming process began, that would be it. There would be no more denying that death had stolen this exceptional male from the world.
I need to know his name. Almost clumsily, she lifted a corner of the sheet covering his feet…but her search yielded no toe tag.
“Huh,” she murmured, replacing the sheet with a frown. “That’s odd.”
Despite a warning from her common sense, hope bloomed in her middle over yet another clue that this man couldn’t really be dead.
Which was another clue in an embarrassingly long line of clues that Ginny needed a social life.
No one wanted to get margaritas with Death Girl, as the (clearly very imaginative) young women in her dressmaking class—Embrace the Lace Dressmaking Endeavors—called her when they thought she wasn’t listening. Eavesdropping wasn’t even necessary. The fact that they arranged their sewing machines as far away from her as possible, whispered, stared and never invited her for drinks at Dowling’s after class was proof enough that they thought death was contagious.
It was a misconception she’d been living with since preschool. She should have been used to it by now, but it was times like these, while pining in eerie silence over a dead man, that Ginny wondered if isolation had taken its toll.
“What do you think, Cary? Have I gone around the bend?” she asked the man immortalized in Technicolor on her television. “Of course I have, you’re not even the first dead person I’ve tried to converse with this week.”
Her attention strayed, rather stubbornly, back to the man on her table.
“Might as well make it a hat trick. How do you do?”
No movement on the corpse’s end.
“Will there be a million weeping women at your wake?” She tapped a finger to her lips. “There will be, I’m sure of it. The place will overflow with tears. I better make sure our flood insurance is up to date.”
As she commenced circling the table once more, her white lab coat scratched against the hem of her green plaid dress, which fell sensibly to her knees. It was cold in the funeral home, especially downstairs where P. Lynn Funeral Home’s guests were kept in preparation for their final goodbye, so she’d pulled on thick black stockings with a flower pattern before coming below to work the night shift.
Dressing with care was Ginny’s way of showing respect to the people she worked on—a fact her stepmother and reluctant business partner often scoffed over—but a T-shirt and jeans simply didn’t cut the mustard when she’d been entrusted with a loved one’s care. Ginny had designed and sewn her current ensemble in class and she definitely shouldn’t be wondering what Dreamboat here would think about the cut and fabric. Or if he’d notice she’d fitted it a touch tighter in the hip zone than usually made her comfortable.
“I need help.” She gathered her auburn hair over one shoulder. “You agree, don’t you? Finally, you’ve gotten peace and quiet from your multitude of admirers and here I come, trying to annoy you into reanimation so I can find out the color of your eyes. You must want to die all over again.”
Continuing her journey around the table, Ginny’s gaze ticked to the clock, reminding her she should have started working half an hour ago. Why was she so reluctant to begin? Where did she get off experiencing the weight of loss when she’d never crossed paths with this individual before?