"Where are my drugs? Why am I kneeling in funeral white?" I gasped and pushed myself up from the bench.
"There she is!" Gerardo shouted. He scrambled forward, knocking over a folding chair.
"Stay back, child," Katharine hissed, stepping between us with her hands already on the ledger. "Sit. Lie still. You've been through—"
"I'm not dead," I said. My voice sounded small. My hands looked small. I held them up like proof.
"She's talking," Finch whispered from behind Aunt Katharine, voice high and thin. "She's talking, Gerardo!"
"Name?" the mortician asked without looking up. He was a squat man with ink-stained fingers. His apron still smelled of lavender and death.
"Lucia Moore," I said. The name fit my tongue the way a familiar glove fits a hand. Saying it made the parlor sharper, brighter.
"That's the plaque on the coffin," Katharine said gently, fluency in every false note. "We made the arrangements."
"You called a physician," I said. "You wrote the receipts. Who signed 'executor'?"
The mortician's head snapped up. He pushed his spectacles to the tip of his nose and tapped the ledger with a nail. "Katharine McDonald signed here. Paid a deposit. Requested the extras."
There was a hitch in his voice. People turned.
"That's a lie," I said. "I know how the ledger works. The deposit isn't enough. You signed 'executor' to take the estate when the board of folk checks. You meant to sell our tools