Author: Molly Harper

“It’s so nice to meet a newcomer,” Missy trilled in her melted-sugar twang, more Texas than Kentucky. (We tend to abuse our long I sounds as opposed to…all the sounds.) Missy shook my hand in a digit-crushing grip. Unsure of whether this was some sort of test, I resisted wincing and squeezed right back.

“Jane Jameson,” I said, keeping a bland smile plastered across my face. “How did you know I’ve been…”

“Turned? Vayamped out? Recruited to the legion of soulless bloodsuckers?” She trilled again at my perplexed expression. “Oh, shug, you’ve got to keep your sense of humor about being undead. Otherwise, you’ll just go toppling over the abyss into madness.”

Yet another throw-pillow saying to be stitched.

“I can sense the location of other vampires, their energy,” Missy explained. “Newbies tend to give off mega-waves when they rise. That’s why I’m in charge of the welcome wagon.”

“Makes sense.” I nodded. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

“On my billboards, most likely. Up until two years ago, I was one of the top-selling real estate agents in the tricounty area. I went to a convention in Boca Raton. I had one too many margaritas, met a tall, pale, and handsome man in the bar, and woke up a vampire.”

“I was mistaken for a deer and got shot,” I offered.

“Oh.” Finally, she was speechless. It didn’t last long. “I have always loved this house. Great upkeep, considering the age. They just don’t make them like this anymore. High ceilings. Huge kitchen. Wonderful windows. Great natural light, even though you can’t really appreciate that now. Original hardwood floors?”

I nodded, watching Aunt Jettie materialize at her writing desk. I glanced over to Missy, who was still appraising my floors as her needle-thin heels clicked on the polished wood. She didn’t notice the dearly departed Wildcats fan scowling in the corner.

“Well, this is just a little welcome gift from the local branch of the council,” Missy was saying. “Sort of an orientation in a basket. SPF 500 sunblock, iron supplements, floss, a six-pack of Faux Type O, a bottle of plasma-protein powder, and the numbers of every vamp-friendly blood bank in the tristate area. There’s also a copy of The Guide for the Newly Undead.”

“There’s a handbook?” I asked, plucking it from the pink-wrapped cornucopia. “Thank God.”

Aunt Jettie cleared her throat and rolled her eyes toward Missy.

“Well, this is very sweet,” I said. “I really appreciate it. I’m sure I’ll see you at the next pot luck or something.”

Missy laughed, swinging her tiny pink bag onto her arm. “You’re gonna be a hoot at the meetings, I can tell.”

Meetings? I was just kidding.

A few more minutes of polite chitchat, and Missy was firmly ensconced in her black Cadillac. After watching her taillights depart through the window, I turned to Aunt Jettie. “What was with the facial charades?”

“I just can’t stand Little Miss Matching Everything.” Jettie sneered as I toted the basket into my cheerful yellow kitchen with blue gingham curtains and set it on the white tile counter next to the cookie jar shaped like a cheeky raccoon. Jettie perched next to the sink. “Back when she was living, she tried to talk me into listing this place with her. Said that maybe I needed to go into one of those nice assisted-living places. The little snot.”

“Why couldn’t she see you? I thought seeing ghosts is one of the benefits of being undead.”

“I didn’t want her to see me,” Jettie said.

“Well, she brought treats, so she’s not half bad in my book,” I told her, removing the ginormous pink bow. As my stomach rumbled, I read over the label of Faux Type O. From what I had heard, it was the Rolling Rock of artificial bloods. Light and palatable, with a smooth finish and 120 percent of your recommended daily allowance of hemoglobin.

“A stranger drops fake blood on your doorstep, and you’re going to drink it?” Jettie asked. “I thought we had a nice long talk about stranger danger when you were seven.”

“There’s a safety seal.” I held it up for her inspection. “It’s either this or I go hunting for hitchhikers to feed on.”

Jettie covered her eyes, but she was able to see through her hands. I was not exactly thrilled at the prospect of snacking on the blood equivalent of Cheez Whiz, but I needed to get used to it. There was no way I was feeding on live victims on a regular basis. I couldn’t stand the thought of hunting when I was living. Obviously, that was some sort of cruelly ambiguous psychic foreshadowing.

What the hell. If it was gross, I had a package of fudge Pop Tarts that I could rub on the raw hamburger in my fridge.

Faux Type O came in little plastic jugs that reminded me of milk bottles. I popped the top and sniffed. It wasn’t bad, vaguely yeasty and salty. Jettie came in for a closer look.

“Do you mind?” I asked as she picked up a pencil and poked at my right upper fang. I brought the bottle to my lips, pinched my nose, and swallowed. It rolled past my lips, thick and smooth. I didn’t gag, which I took as a good sign.

“How is it?” Jettie asked.

“Not bad,” I said, rolling the remnants off my tongue. “It has a kind of Diet Coke aftertaste, artificial and beefy.”

“You make it sound just delightful,” Jettie snorted as I drained the bottle. I wiped my mouth and tossed the bottle into the recycling bin.

“So, you’re dead,” I said. “I wasn’t together enough last night to ask, what exactly do you do all day? Besides hide my keys.”

“I listen to your phone calls. Make you feel like you’re being watched. Move things around. Create cold spots.” At this point, I glared at her. Unmoved, she levitated my dish of Hershey Kisses just to show she could. “Sometimes I visit other spirits around town. You wouldn’t believe how haunted the Hollow is.”

“Oh, I think my mind is opening up to the possibility,” I said dryly. “Give me a for instance?”

“Well, the golf course. If people realized how many dead men in ugly pants are wandering around there, they wouldn’t go near it,” she said, smirking like the proverbial cat with a canary and/or cream. “Including your grandpa Fred.”

“Aw, I loved Grandpa Fred,” I said, pouting, which was difficult considering the fangs. “I hate to think of him wandering the earth for eternity in plaid polyester.”

“Oh, he’s fine, honey.” She waved a hand. “Happy as a clam. And even happier now that we’ve been seeing each other.”

“You mean you’re seeing him as in dating him? I honestly don’t know what to say to that.” I shook my head.

“I can’t help it if your grandma married all of the good-looking men in town. We were bound to cross paths sometime,” Jettie said, shrugging.

She had a point. To recall childhood memories of my grandmother, I didn’t need the scent of oatmeal cookies or Ivory soap, just Designer Imposter Chanel No. 5 and hearing the phrase, “Darling, I’ve met the most wonderful man.” My grandma Ruthie, Jettie’s sister, had been married four times, so many times that I started calling every old man I saw at the grocery store Grandpa. Mama put a stop to that after Grandpa Number Four, Fred. He was a nice man. Shame about the lightning strike.

All of Grandma Ruthie’s husbands had died under weird circumstances. A milk truck hit Grandpa John, my real grandpa, back in the days when milk was actually delivered door-to-door. Grandpa Tom had a heretofore-unknown allergy to rhubarb and had an anaphylactic reaction while Grandma was baking her famous strawberry-rhubarb pie. Grandpa Jimmy died from a brown recluse bite on the inside of the throat. His doctor’s article on the improbability of such a bite was published in several medical journals. And poor Fred, struck down on the twelfth hole at the Half-Moon Hollow public golf course. It’s a wonder Grandma hadn’t been questioned by the police or at least gotten a cool nickname like the Black Widow.

Of course, that would probably be in poor taste, given what happened to Grandpa Jimmy.

That was why I was allowed to go to the Wacky Rivers Water Park with Rae Summerall on the day of Jimmy’s funeral. Apparently, Mama realized that it wasn’t normal for a little girl to have a designated funeral dress. After Fred, she told Grandma it was time to slow her prolonged death march down the aisle. Grandma had been dating a very nice man named Bob for the last five years. They’d been engaged for four and a half.

Bob was proof that medical science could keep pretty much anyone alive. He’d had his gall bladder, one of his lungs, part of his pancreas, and his prostate removed. He spent more time in the hospital than out. Why was this sweet man engaged to my Grandma? I can only imagine that he actually wanted to die, and he saw marriage to her as his only way out.

“As long as Ruthie keeps killing off husbands, I’ll have an active social afterlife.” Jettie preened.

“That’s just gross.” I shuddered. “But maybe your committing postmortem infidelity will distract Mama and Daddy from my nifty new nocturnal lifestyle.”

Jettie blanched. “Your parents are coming here? Now? Oh, honey, that’s not going to go well.”

“Thanks, that helps,” I told her, stuffing the pink bow and cellophane into the trash. “I bet you ten bucks Mama shows up with a pot pie.”

Mama’s almost-from-scratch chicken pot pie was my favorite B.D. meal. All crusty and filled with cream-of-chickeny goodness. I already missed it, though I did have seven of them in my freezer. Mama operated under the assumption that I was eight years old and incapable of feeding myself. It was physically impossible for her to cross my threshold without some form of nourishment. She once offered me cheese crackers from her purse while we were standing in my kitchen.

Like Grandma Ruthie, Mama attributed Jettie’s leaving me River Oaks to senility. Obviously, it would have been much better to leave the family manse to my sister, Jenny, who would be able to care for the house properly. Crafty, thrifty, and the proud owner of an industrial-grade glue gun, Jenny made Martha Stewart look like a bag lady. And she fulfilled each of my mother’s daughterly requirements by being (a) elected cheerleading captain in high school, (b) married to a chiropractor right after graduating from paralegal school, (c) the mother of two boys, Andrew and Bradley. They were barely children, really, more like hyper badgers in Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts.

Nonetheless, Jenny assumed that bearing fruit of her loins meant that all family possessions funneled to her. After I moved into River Oaks, I found dozens of little preprinted “Jenny” stickers marking a good deal of the antiques. In anticipation of Aunt Jettie dropping dead, Jenny had surreptitiously tattooed furniture, figurines, and family portraits, with the little blue dots to claim dibs on what she saw as her share of the inheritance. Fortunately, Aunt’s Jettie’s iron-clad, very specific will prevented what I’m sure would have been a posthumous robbery. But I was still finding stickers in strange places. I had no idea how she managed to stick them without me seeing her.

She was like a greedy ninja.

From the front walk, I could hear Mama haranguing my father about this big old place and how a single girl like me couldn’t keep up with mowing the lawn or cleaning the gutters. The house didn’t actually have gutters, but to point that out would tip them off to my super-hearing.

“Jenny could have turned this into a real showplace,” Mama was saying as they climbed the front steps. “And Jane, well, she never had any sense for decorating. And I just worry about her being out here all alone.”

“She can take care of herself, Sherry,” Daddy said, his tone weary. He seemed more and more weary these days when dealing with Mama.

My father. What can I say about the man who read with me every night from birth? And I’m not talking Good Night, Moon or Pat the Bunny. I’ll bet I’m the only person on earth to hear two Lincoln biographies before my first birthday. Daddy was the head of the history department at the local community college. It colored his parenting techniques.