Page 2 of Strangers She Knows

Cynthia slammed a lid on the sauce.

“Anyway, I cleaned the exterior and did repairs on the seals before I would let him in there.”

“Arthur William Earthman, you didn’tlethim in there. He’s dead. Youplacedhim in there. You could haveplacedhim in the casket viewing room where the carpet isn’t new!”

When she called him by his full name, it was time to distract her. “It’s only for one night,” he said in his most soothing voice.

“Don’t use that undertaker tone with me!” She stirred pasta into the now boiling water.

He got up from the table, strolled over close behind her and rubbed her bottom. “Nothing excites me as much as watching you cook.”

“Yeah, well. Nothing excites me as much as watching you vacuum.”

“After dinner, I’ll vacuum the living room.”

“You must be feeling guilty.” Her voice was still sharp. “Anything else you want to confess?”

“No. I swear. That’s everything. Isn’t that enough?”

“Plenty. Here.” She handed him a full bowl of greens and a bottle of dressing. “Toss the salad.” She watched him toss, and she sounded more like his Cynthia when she said, “After dinner, when you vacuum—wear a frilly apron and I’ll make you the happiest man on earth.”

So the distraction worked, as did the frilly apron, and when those disturbing noises from the mortuary woke Arthur out of a sound and well-deserved sleep, he tried to convince himself those sounds were his imagination. Finally he got up, murmured reassurance to Cynthia’s sleepy questions, pulled on his boxers, cursed his ancestor for attaching the family’s personal home to a funeral home, called 911 and went to investigate.

The noises were definitely coming from the casket display room where Mitch Nyugen had been placed prior to his transportation to Wyoming. Arthur wasn’t a superstitious man—his business precluded fearing vampires, zombies or any form of the human body after the soul had departed—so he kept the lights off as he crept through the funeral home, intending to catch the intruders by surprise. He figured it had to be a couple of teenagers on a dare, and he intended to give them a good scare.

As he got closer to the chapel, it didn’t do his nerves any good to see a faint light coming from under the closed door—it had been open earlier—and hear a low hum, like an electrical appliance.

Reaching the casket display room, he slammed open the door, flipped on all the lights and yelled, “Hey!” And reeled back in horror.

The coffin was open.

A dark-haired, young and slender woman stood over it, doing something inside—to the body.

“What are you doing?” Arthur shouted.

Right away, he realized something was off. She hadn’t jumped, and he hadn’t frightened her; it was almost as if she’d been waiting for him. She looked up at him through her veil of hair. Her blue eyes glowed with a mad obsession.

Miranda Nyugen. It was Miranda Nyugen. “Arthur,” she crooned.

He started forward.

She lifted one finger, then pointed it at the object on the top step. “Don’t step on that.”

He stopped. He looked. “Is that part of the body? His hand? My God, woman, that was your husband.”

She laughed wildly, her head thrown back, her enjoyment rich and intense. “Arthur, you vain and silly man. Don’t you know when you’ve been played?” She started toward him. She held a small circular saw in one hand. She held her other hand behind her back.

“You’ve been cutting up the body? Miranda, you need help.”

“It’s my own interesting little obsession. We all get to have our obsessions, don’t we?”

“No.”He turned to leave, to get back to Cynthia and make his report to the sheriff who was on her way, but couldn’t get there fast enough.

“You don’t imagine you can leave?” Miranda grabbed his arm in a surprisingly strong grip and spun him around—onto the point of the arterial tube she’d stolen from his embalming set. A moment of resistance, then the six-inch-long needle pierced the skin and sank between his ribs in a long, upward motion. He had one moment of stupid hope: that she had grabbed a clean and unused arterial tube.

Then he realized it didn’t matter. He knew anatomy as well as any physician; either through skill or blind luck, she had penetrated his heart.

He looked into her avid blue eyes.

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