Body
It took longer to get a response than Mary had anticipated. By the time she’d screamed twice, and no one had come running, she opened the bedroom door and tried again. “Help! Someone, help! Ella’s dead! She’s dead!”
Even that took longer than it should have. It was Henry Caron who reached her first, dressed in pajama pants and nothing more. “What’s going on?” he asked in his thick French accent. Mary might’ve forgotten she was upset that her friend was dead if she had stared at his chiseled chest for too much longer, but he pushed past her into the bedroom.
“It’s Ella! She’s dead!” Mary pointed at the bed. Henry was already past her and had seen the body for himself.
“Oh, mon Dieu!” he exclaimed. Henry leaned over Ella, shaking her, calling her name. The woman didn’t budge, of course. She was quite good at playing dead, thanks to Bart’s serum.
By then, others had arrived. “What is the meaning of this?” Lloyd Sinders demanded. “Why are you here, Mary? I thought we’d let you go.”
She pulled her phone out. “I received a text from her phone number at three in the morning. Look! And now, she’s dead!” She bit back any sort of explanation, such as, “Thanks to you,” as much as she wanted to say it. He’d figure that out soon enough on his own, and there was no use to point suspicion at herself, especially when they wouldn’t be able to find Ella’s phone. With any luck, it wouldn’t occur to them to think about that.
“Dead?” Lloyd echoed, his eyes fully opening for the first time. “Whatever are you talking about? She can’t possibly be dead!”
“She is dead!” Mary insisted. “See for yourself. I’m calling the police.”
Lloyd said nothing to her comment as he, his wife, and a few other people pushed inside of the room and joined Henry at the bed.
Mary made a phone call, but it wasn’t to the actual police. She’d spoken to Bart the night before and decided not to risk getting the real police involved. With his connection to the film industry, it wasn’t hard for Bart to find two unknown actors and two uniforms. They’d show up soon. The coroner would be the real one, though, as Bart had connections to him, and the funeral home that came to carry her away would be real as well. Bart was a well-connected man when it came to dying.
No one was listening to Mary at all, so she merely said, “Come over,” into the phone. Then, she hung up and watched carefully as Ella’s father found her note and the empty bottle.
The argument that ensued would’ve been laughable if Mary wasn’t observing her friend’s apparently dead body.
“This is all your fault!” Lloyd screamed at his wife, holding up the pill bottle. “If you didn’t have to take drugs every night to sleep!”
“My fault?” Teresa echoed. “It’s your fault! She blames you in that letter, not me! You’re the one who wouldn't let her stay married to that Verona boy, not me! I couldn’t give a damn who she was married to!”
“You always hated her! You were jealous because she looks like her mother, because she’s more beautiful than you!”
“More beautiful than me? Don’t be ridiculous! Neither your dead wife nor your dead daughter was as beautiful as me!”
“Let’s just calm down, everyone,” Henry said, coming to stand next to them with his hands up.
“Shut up!” they both shouted at the same time.
“Clearly, there’s no reason for you to be here anymore, Henry. I have nothing of value to you now.” Mr. Sinders spoke of his daughter as if she was a used car he’d been looking to trade in that had suddenly been stolen or wrecked.
“I’m here because I care about your daughter!” Henry said with conviction. “While the two of you can quibble over whose fault it is until you’re blue in the face, it doesn’t negate the fact that she’s dead!”
By then, the crowd around the door had grown. Ms. Spinner, the head of the house crew, waved everyone out the door. “You, too, Mary.”
“I don’t answer to you anymore, Ruth,” she said with her head in the air. “I came to see my friend, and I’m not leaving until the police get here. I want to make sure they have all of the facts.”
The other woman glared at her but didn’t get a chance to say more because Ella’s stepsisters arrived and started screaming their heads off.
Their mother came over, wrapping them in her arms. “It’s all right, girls. It’s all right. It’ll all be okay.”
“Was she murdered?” Anna asked.
“No. She killed herself. Over that boy.”
“Over a stupid boy?” Drew asked. They both seemed to be calming down now that they realized no one had snuck into their house and murdered one of them as she slept.
“I’m afraid so,” Teresa said, kissing their heads. “Go back to your beds, now, and I’ll come and check on you shortly.”
She was treating them like they were toddlers. They both turned and left, and Mary fought the urge to roll her eyes.
The “police” showed up shortly. Bart had asked them to be nearby so that they could arrive before anyone called the actual police. They asked a lot of questions and cleared the room, jotting down all of the information necessary. The coroner arrived a few minutes later and declared Ella Sinders Verona to be dead. Her father didn’t like the use of that last name, but the coroner only glared at him and asked if he should read the letter again.
When the people from the funeral home showed up, Mary watched them carefully load her friend onto a stretcher and take her downstairs. It seemed as if everything was going according to plan. So long as Ella wasn’t actually dead.
Once Ella was placed in the back of the vehicle that would transport her to the home, Mary decided it was time for her to go. She didn’t even bother to say anything to Ella’s dreadful parents. She hoped this ruined both of them, but she had a feeling neither of them cared too much about the girl for it to even sting for more than a day or two.
She walked a few blocks before she called for an Uber. She had some more errands she needed to run on behalf of this scheme. Hopefully, she’d get all of them done as easily as she’d pulled off her role in this one. Perhaps she was the one who should’ve been an actor….
Now, they’d wait for her funeral, which would hopefully be sooner rather than later, and she and Bart would bust Ella out of the mausoleum and escape to France. As Ella got into her rideshare car, she couldn’t help but think, “What could possibly go wrong?” Her own sarcasm had her rolling her eyes as the car pulled away, headed for her next task at Ella’s apartment.
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