Excerpt from Tooth and Claw 

I love churches.  There is something almost magical about them.  I don’t mean my kind of magic, I just mean something that makes them feel special.  Maybe it’s the calm and hushed voices, the reverence they make you feel.  Whatever the case, St. Anthony’s, with its gleaming stain glass windows, was one of my favourite churches in the city.

I was here for a funeral.  Well, I wasn’t actually here to attend the funeral; I was working.  Often, we get an order to provide flowers for a funeral service that the family would then like transported to the site of internment.  It meant I had to hang around until the end of the service and grab the flowers, then drive them to the cemetery.  We had been so busy lately, I had actually hired a delivery guy, but he was out making deliveries across town, so I was working this one.

Mourners were slowly beginning to trickle in and find seats.  I was standing to the side in one of the small chapels off the main nave, trying to be discreet and watching the ghost of the recently departed pace back and forth in front of his own coffin.  At least it wasn’t an open coffin.  I really don’t get that.   Why would you want to stare at a dead guy?  Did you need proof he was dead or something?

Tooth and Claw – The Harry Russo Diaries, volume 2
by Lisa Emme

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