Set against the backdrop of the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, a young woman, Gravely Eaton, is stuck working at the family funeral home with a father she hates. The world is dying around her, but there seems no escape from her boring life with no friend...
Back to the embalming room I trudged, more tired than I was ten minutes earlier. I put the tux bag and coonskin hat on the bench outside the big wooden door where I had stood just a day or so earlier watching my father defile Mrs. White's wedding gown. I would deal with clothing my dead father the next day. At that point, job one was to get his corpse into the deep freeze and fall into bed.
The lights flickered down the length of the hallway, and it was clear that the storm was taking its toll on the power grid. Tired as I was, I was still lucid and decided to retrieve a flashlight from the utility closet, just inside the door. No sooner had I grabbed the bulky lantern-style light, when the power failed. The embalming was blacker than black. Through the open door, I could see the hallway lights were out too. The only illumination came through the mortuary window as the lightning continued to quiver in the night sky.
It had been years since I had held that flashlight, and I fumbled around the casing for the "on" switch. When I moved it, I heard the click, but the illumination was faint. Obviously, the battery was weak. That meant I might only have a few minutes before the lantern light gave out altogether. I shone it quickly around the closet shelves to see if we had any fresh batteries or even candles. No luck. Suddenly, my foot slipped on something wet in front of the mortuary door. I pointed my light down on the floor. It was a puddle. "Just rainwater. Never mind," I thought. Then, it dawned on me. I had closed that window before I went downstairs to Mitch. Somehow it got open, and a stream of water was inching across the floor. I dashed to close the window again. Just as I did that, a sheet of perfectly pulsing illumination filled the room, and I caught a glimpse of the embalming table. It was empty.
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The lightning was gone as quickly as it came, and I trained my weak lantern beam on the empty table. I flited it on and under the table in stunned disbelief. Drops of father's blood hung here and there on the stainless steel surface, but his corpse was surely not there. I kicked off my wet shoes and ran to the walk-in freezer. "Was I so drunk that I forgot I had already put daddy away for the night?" I tugged on the heavy freezer door and shone the light around inside the frosty vault. No. He wasn't there either. It crossed my mind that Mitch was pulling a prank. He was a jokester after all. But no. I discounted that quickly. Even Mitch wouldn't pull such a tasteless ruse. I slammed the freezer door shut and leaned on a mortuary stool to think.
I grabbed the bag of Miss Vickie's chips from the counter and stuffed a handful in my mouth. The Sherlock in me mulled things over. All of the other exterior doors in the building were locked. The only way to get in was if somebody had a key. Who had a key and a motive to steal my father's body? It became clear to me that Jonathan Crawford, the funeral home accountant, was the culprit. Underpaid, overworked and treated like a lackey for years, it would have been the perfect way for Jonathan to get back at my father. I'd seen him leave earlier in the evening, but he must've come back and let himself in the back door. It had to be. He probably lingered for a while downstairs, waiting for the right moment to come up to the mortuary. When Mitch arrived and I was down there with my uncle, Jonathan could have crept upstairs undetected - creep that he was. I reasoned that he probably had a helper carry father dearest out of the mortuary window and down the fire escape to a waiting vehicle.
