Chapter 1 - The Funeral They Planned Before Audrey Was Dead
The first thing Audrey Cole understood when she stepped into the funeral reception area was that everyone in the room had already accepted a world without her.
White flowers covered the tables.
Soft gray Charleston afternoon light came through the tall windows.
Her own open casket remained visible through the adjoining viewing room.
Then she saw her sister.
Elise Harper stood in a champagne-colored mourning dress wearing Audrey’s gold necklace.
Audrey barely had time to register it.
Elise crossed the marble floor and slapped her.
Hard.
Audrey’s head snapped violently to the side.
Fresh scratches already marked her cheek and shoulder from whatever desperate struggle had brought her out of the viewing room alive.
Elise screamed:
“You were supposed to be dead!”
That sentence hit Audrey harder than the slap.
Not Audrey?
Not How are you alive?
Not Thank God.
Supposed to be dead.
Then Grant appeared.
Audrey’s husband rushed in from the far end of the reception area.
He stopped several paces away.
His face moved through disbelief so quickly that panic appeared almost immediately behind it.
“How did you get out of that coffin?!”
Audrey slowly turned toward him.
Again, the wrong question.
She touched the cheek Elise had just struck.
Her expression cooled.
“I heard everything.”
Grant’s face twisted.
“You didn’t hear anything!”
He lunged.
Audrey moved first.
She spun toward Elise and delivered one hard open-palm slap across her older sister’s face.
Elise’s head snapped aside.
Audrey’s necklace flashed against her throat.
Then Audrey turned back.
Grant was already charging.
She planted her feet and drove one powerful front kick into his chest.
Grant flew backward.
His body hit the beverage cart behind him with tremendous force.
The cart tipped.
Grant tumbled over it.
Glasses, trays, ice, and drinks crashed across the marble floor.
He remained stunned beside the overturned cart.
Audrey did not move toward him again.
She stood breathing hard.
Then said, almost quietly:
“Wasn’t five hundred thousand dollars enough to ensure I was actually dead?”
Grant’s face changed.
Elise stopped touching her cheek.
Neither spoke.
Audrey turned away.
The mourners silently stepped aside.
She walked straight through the center aisle without looking back.
Behind her, Grant remained on the floor.
Elise still wore the necklace.
Outside, a black Town Car waited at the curb.
Audrey climbed into the back seat alone.
Blue dusk light touched the scratches on her face.
She took out her smartphone and pressed it to her ear.
“My sister mixed my last drink,” she said. “Find out what she put in it.”
Then the car door closed.
May you like
And for the first time since waking inside her own funeral, Audrey allowed herself to think the question she had been avoiding.
If Grant and Elise had expected her to be dead, how much of her death had they arranged before she ever took that final drink?
