Page 4 of Dead to Rites

All right, I couldn’t really argue with that. And I had to admit that I’d feel better not to be knocking around in that big old house by myself, at least for the first couple of days. We’d be close enough to Prescott’s downtown that we could order in all kinds of fun takeout, and we’d still be able to have our little girlie getaway.

Probably better to avoid the garden, though.

“Okay,” I said, then looked up at her through my lashes. “You packed stuff for a couple of days?”

“Of course I did,” she replied. “I had no idea if I was going to have to camp out here and talk to the police or have you transported to a funeral home or something, so I figured I’d better be prepared.”

“Just like a Boy Scout,” I said, and she grinned, runny mascara making her look like a cheerful raccoon.

“Well, I did date a couple of Eagle Scouts.”

I didn’t doubt that for a second.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter 2

Seeing Things

The nurse insisted on having Celeste wheel me to her car, which, for some reason, I found funny. I kept laughing as the nurse helped me out of the wheelchair and onto my feet, while Celeste started clearing out the passenger seat of her ramshackle Honda.

“Hang on a sec,” she told me as she started shoveling old fast food bags off the seat, and the nurse stood to one side, her expression beyond disapproving.

Eventually, the seat was cleared, and the nurse helped me sit down, then began pushing the wheelchair back inside.

“Looks like Nurse Ratched doesn’t approve,” Celeste remarked as I fastened my seatbelt, and I couldn’t help laughing again.

Her car had always been like that. She was on the go so much that she practically lived in the thing, and even though she swore up and down that she cleaned it out occasionally, most of the time when she drove, I had to wait…just as I had a couple of minutes earlier…for her to shovel off the passenger seat so I could sit down.

We pulled out of the parking lot. Everything around me — restaurants, banks, real estate offices — looked completely unfamiliar, which I supposed wasn’t so surprising. I’d been in a coma…or something close to it…the last time I came this way.

“It’s cute,” Celeste said.

I shifted in my seat to look at her. At least I’d been able to change out of that horrible hospital gown and back into my own clothes, which consisted of a black elbow-sleeve sweater, black skinny pants, and black flats, so I was starting to feel a little more like myself. Celeste had loaned me some lipstick, and that helped, too.

“You’ve never been here before?”

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. I noticed she was driving with more care than usual, and guessed she probably didn’t want to get pulled over while looking so trashy. That would have invited way too many questions. “My parents weren’t exactly into sightseeing, and I’ve never played a gig here, so….”

Celeste’s parents had gotten divorced when she was ten. We’d met right after high school, so we could have glossed over all the childhood trauma stuff and focused on our shared love of vintage fashion and The Cramps…but we didn’t. I knew all about how her father had skipped out with some woman he’d met at the gym and left her mother having to work two jobs to keep things going, and she knew all about my overachieving lawyer parents and the way I’d never been quite enough for them.

“Well, it’s very cute,” I agreed. Prescott definitely appeared to embrace its nineteenth-century origins, and although there were modern-looking buildings sprinkled in among the historic stuff, it seemed as if a lot of the new construction had still tried to give at least a nod to the town’s founding in the 1860s.

Celeste grinned. “They’re not going to know what hit them.”

I wasn’t sure I was quite ready to party hard yet, not when less than twenty-four hours earlier I’d been flatlining, but I decided to play along. “Stripper convention in town?”

She made a face, nose wrinkling. “That joke stopped being funny ten years ago.”

We’d met at the Monster Mall, an event held every year in Glendale, Arizona, where vendors catering to goths, monster lovers, psychobilly fans, and everything in between descended to add to their collections. The two of us had reached for the same coffin-shaped purse at the same time, and instead of getting all bitchy and territorial, we’d both laughed and offered it to the other person.

That led to us chatting about our favorite bands and exchanging names, and when I found out she was Celeste Dupree, I said, “Wow, that sounds like a stripper name.”

Instead of being insulted, she’d only replied, “Cool with me if I can have a wardrobe like Bettie Page.”

Since Bettie was my inspiration — I was still sporting those bangs some ten years later — I’d had to agree.

And thus a friendship was born.