Raising Hell - Shannon West

Chapter One

I was having the weirdest dream involving a box of chocolate doughnuts decorated with pink Peeps and rainbow sprinkles—an irate customer was yelling at me that I had her order all wrong and that I’d ruined her birthday. I was trying to apologize when she suddenly began singing, “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” I jolted awake, realizing it was my cell phone, blasting Meatloaf and juddering across the top of the bedside table.

Heart racing, I fumbled for it, jammed it to my ear, and croaked out something meant to be hello.

The man’s voice coming at me from the other end made no sense at all for a few seconds until I finally honed in on the words, “sheriff’s office,” “your grandmother,” and “detained.” That got my attention pretty fast.

“Wait! What? Slow down, please. Who is this again?”

“This is Deputy Jim Harrison from the Creek County Sheriff’s Department. Is this Mr. Noah Smith?”

“Yes, yes, it is. What are you saying about my grandmother? Has she been in an accident? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine, but we have your grandmother and your aunt here on suspicion of breaking and entering the Willie Whatley and Sons Funeral Home.”

“I…what?”

I felt a big lurch in my chest as my heart started banging away. Maybe I was still asleep and having a nightmare? But no, the man on the other end was patiently repeating every word.

“Your grandmother and her sister have broken into the funeral home, sir, and they have molested one of the bodies. The sheriff wanted me to call you and get you to come on down here to the station right away.”

Molested one of the bodies? Yeah, this was officially a nightmare.

“Okay, uh yes, of course. I-I’ll be right down,” I said, scrambling from the bed and fumbling for the same clothes I’d taken off only a few hours before. I stopped long enough to splash some water on my face, grab a jacket and stuff my too-long hair up under a baseball cap.

Seconds later, I was in the car, trying to replay that crazy ass phone conversation again in my head. Had the man actually said my grandmother and her sister had tried to molest a corpse? What the everlovin’ fuck? Surely, I’d misheard him, or he was mistaken, because there had to be some other explanation. Though it was hard to understand what my gran and my Aunt Rose could have possibly been doing down at the funeral home in our little north Alabama town at five fucking o’clock in the morning!

As I flew through the empty streets of the little town of Indian Springs, I saw the sun just beginning to peek over the horizon, and I thought there had been a time in the not too distant past when I would have been up like this every morning at the crack of dawn, energized and eager to start my day. I used to run a mile every morning, eat a healthy breakfast and stop by Starbucks for a vanilla latte on my way to work.

Then came the call, completely out of the blue, saying my parents had been killed in a plane crash on their way to a vacation in Florida. Ironically, it had been the first vacation they’d had in years. They had left everything to me—their home, their bank account and their little bake shop on Main Street in downtown Indian Springs, Alabama. The only problem was their home was falling in, their bank account was practically empty and their little shop was failing. My parents had been wonderful people, but impractical, and not very good at business.

Coming back to Indian Springs for the funeral, I did all the things I had to do. The funeral was a blur, but afterward I arranged for the sale of my parents’ little falling-down house and put their business up for sale too. The real estate agent assured me the house was worth way more than I would have thought, because it was downtown, near the courthouse. Some law firm wanted it for the land it sat on, planning on tearing the house down so they could rebuild their offices. She said the bake shop might take a bit longer to move, and would I be willing to rent it out?

I headed back to Atlanta, but after I left, I found myself worrying over how much my grandmother had aged. I’d kept in contact with my gran over the years, of course, but hadn’t really spent any considerable