The undead mr tenpenny, p.1
The Undead Mr. Tenpenny, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Behind the Scenes
Early Praise for The Undead Mr. Tenpenny
Dedication
Title
Prologue - The Unexpected
1 - Mr Boswick's Letter
2 - The Charming Mr. Morelli
3 - Show Time
4 - Mrs. Escobar's Cat
5 - Bottoms Up
6 - Mr. Wood to the Rescue
7 - Mr. Busby Tenpenny
8 - Jerkface Gods
9 - Bringing Home Strays
10 - When It Rains, It Pours
11 - Facing the Board
12 - Confession Session
13 - What's In the Box?
14 - Through the Door
15 - I'm a Believer
16 - On the Streets of MagicLand
17 - The Exam
18 - Reverse Hairballs
19 - Extract Me Now!
20 - An Inspection
21 - Moving On
22 - Questions & More Questions
23 - First Lesson
24 - Sorcerer's Apprentice
25 - Spellbound with Alastair
26 - Feathers and Films
27 - Kitchen Confessions
28 - A Deflating Demonstration
29 - Lessons Continue
30 - The Wandering Wizard
31 - J'Accuse!
32 - New Day, New Disappointment
33 - The Scent of a Magic
34 - A Spoonful of Sugar
35 - Paying a Visit
36 - The Records Room
37 - The Sacrifice
38 - More Test Results
39 - A Strange Day
40 - A Stranger Evening
41 - Things Get Worse
42 - Movie Poster
43 - Final Night, Part One
44 - Final Night, Part Two
45 - Test Prep
46 - The Draining
47 - Bargaining Chip
48 - True Motives
49 - A Lack of Skelegro
50 - Back to Mr Wood's
Author's Note: On Funeral Homes
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Back Copyright
THE UNDEAD MR. TENPENNY
The Cassie Black Trilogy, Book One
by
Tammie Painter
BEHIND THE SCENES
If you’d like to see some goofy videos that delve into the story behind the story, please head over to
The Undead Mr. Tenpenny Book Launch Video Extravaganza
* * *
—THE UNDEAD MR. TENPENNY—
Work at a funeral home can be mundane. Until you accidentally start waking the dead.
Cassie Black works at a funeral home. She's used to all manner of dead bodies. What she's not used to is them waking up. Which they seem to be doing on a disturbingly regular basis lately.
Just when Cassie believes she has the problem under control, the recently deceased Busby Tenpenny insists he's been murdered and claims Cassie might be responsible thanks to a wicked brand of magic she's accidentally been exposed to. The only way for Cassie to get her life back to normal is to tame her magic and uncover Mr. Tenpenny's true killer.
Simple right? Of course not. Because while Cassie works on getting her newly acquired magic sorted, she's blowing up kitchens, angering an entire magical community, and discovering her past is more closely tied to Busby Tenpenny than she could have ever imagined.
EARLY PRAISE FOR THE UNDEAD MR. TENPENNY
The Undead Mr. Tenpenny is a clever, hilarious romp through a new magical universe that can be accessed through the closet of a hole-in-the-wall apartment in Portland, Oregon.
—Sarah Angleton, author of Gentleman of Misfortune
When I saw the book title…my first thought was, “another zombie apocalypse”. A wonderful surprise greeted me with an entertaining story that was written with humor, a great story line and new twist on the undead.
—J. Tate, Eugene Reviewer
Man oh man, did I love this book! …The plot was great, and got even better as things progressed…. I think the biggest pro of this book is the characters.
—Jonathon Pongratz, author of Reaper
…suffused with dark humor and witty dialogue, of the sort that Painter excels at…a fun read for anyone who enjoys fast-paced, somewhat snarky, somewhat twisted, fantasy adventures.
—Berthold Gambrel, author of Vespasian Moon’s Fabulous Autumn Carnival
…a fun and entertaining read. Great wit too.
—Carrie Rubin, author of The Bone Curse
Wow and wow again! I absolutely loved this book! You get such a feel for the characters and the story is so fast paced you don't want to put it down.
—Goodreads Reviewer
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Martha. I can truly say without your having passed into the Great Beyond, this story would never have come to life.
And a million thanks go out to my review team for giving me the confidence to publish this thing!
THE UNDEAD MR. TENPENNY
PROLOGUE - THE UNEXPECTED
I WORK IN a funeral home. I’m used to seeing all manner of dead bodies. I’m used to bodies ranging from young to old, fat to thin, dark to pale. I’m used to the peacefully deceased to the horrifically killed. I’m used to them lying there still, silent, and slowly decomposing.
What I am not used to, is them getting up and walking away.
Which is why when Mr. Boswick — he of the untimely coronary embolism — started drumming his fingers against the cold surface of the metal work table as I added the final touches to his makeup job, well I’d like to tell you I kept my cool, that I maintained my composure, but that’d be a lie.
Nope, I screamed like a baby boomer who’s just lost every dime in her 401K, then promptly upended my tray of cosmetics as I jumped several feet backward. Five weeks and two walking bodies later, and I’m still scraping beige powder out of the oddest places.
As the cloud of talcum-soft haze filled the chilly workroom, Mr. Boswick sat up with a grunt, put his hands to his ears, and gave me the dirtiest would-you-shut-the-hell-up look I’ve ever seen on a guy — dead or alive.
Still giving me The Look and moving with uncertain slowness, Mr. Boswick eased himself off the table. His legs trembled a little as his feet and legs took their owner’s weight for the first time in several days. I could have taken him then. I could have just pushed him over and hogtied him, but let me tell you, no matter how many zombie movies you’ve seen or novels you’ve read, no matter how well you can suspend belief, you still go around living your life assuming the Zombie Apocalypse is something that happens to other people.
And so, rather than attack, double tap, or run, I stood there getting coated in Dewy Chiffon dust while Mr. Boswick took two clumsy steps with his hands held out like an unsteady toddler.
He looked back and forth between the two doorways in his line of sight. First one, then the other, then back to the first, then he headed toward Door Number Two. Unfortunately, this first effort at post-mortem decision making landed him in our storage closet, but we here at Wood’s Funeral Home don’t deduct points for guessing. Standing amongst a year’s supply of paper towels and bottles of extra-strength cleaning solution, Mr. Boswick turned to me with a question on his heavily made-up face.
I suppose I should have rushed over, slammed the closet door, locked him in, and burned the place down to save humanity, but at this point my neurons were more than a little numb with shock and were refusing to chat with one another. Instead of being the hero, I pointed to Door Number One above which shone the green glow of an exit sign. Mr. Boswick gave a little nod of thanks before shuffling to and out the door.
With my brain operating about as quickly as a dial-up modem from 1992, I glanced down at the metal work table. To all appearances it was empty, but I reached out and patted it just to make sure all the chemicals I work around weren’t giving me hallucinations. With a grimace, my hand landed on a cold, smooth surface that was definitely lacking the corporeal remains of Mr. Boswick. Then my eyes caught the photo of him I’d been working from. The photo his family had loaned us.
His family! If he tried to get to his family—
And there we have it, folks. Miracle of all miracles, Cassie Black’s brain is functioning once again.
1 - MR BOSWICK'S LETTER
YES, IT REALLY took me that long to register that I had just released a dead guy to wander the streets of Southeast Portland, but you’ve no room to judge until you see how well your brain operates when you encounter your first walking corpse.
It was up to me to bring in Mr. ZomBoswick. And thanks to my love of zombie movies, I knew that required weaponry. We didn't have anything useful like a machete or crossbow or rifle in the funeral home — again, much like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects the Zombie Apocalypse. What we did have was a baseball bat. The neighborhood Mr. Wood’s place is in isn’t the worst in Portland, but some strange people had been lingering around lately and it was comforting to know I had a blunt object at hand.
I grabbed my zombie-whacking, maplewood slugger and raced out the door expecting to see hundreds of former humans shuffling along with herd mentality, drooling over brains, and doing their best to spread the zombie virus as the non-infected dashed about in sheer pand
I scanned the area. The few people who did glance up with glassy eyes from their Twitter feeds, gave me odd stares, but I couldn’t blame them. I was standing outside a funeral parlor covered in Dewy Chiffon powder, dressed in my mad scientist lab coat and purple nitrile gloves, and brandishing a bat.
"Where’s the zombie?" some oh-so-clever kid in a black hoodie asked.
"You tell me," I muttered as my gaze darted over the area, trying to spot my quarry and hoping he wasn’t satisfying any brain-based munchies.
I was expecting to see a guy lumbering awkwardly forward, maybe dragging a half-shod foot as he went along. Again, in the space of less than three minutes, zombie movies and apocalyptic novels had done me wrong, and it took me several agonizing moments to locate Mr. Boswick. In his navy blue suit and his anchorman makeup, he stood about halfway down the block at the nearest Trimet stop, craning his head as people do to see if their bus is on its way.
I pulled off my gloves and approached him with extreme caution. And I mean Extreme with a capital E. I've seen Shaun of the Dead. I know what happens if you get bit by the undead: You end up locked away in your best mate’s garden shed. Oh, sorry, spoiler alert.
"Mr. Boswick?" He glanced up and, possibly recognizing me as the screeching lunatic from his resurrection, he rolled his eyes then looked past me to check for his bus. "Are you going somewhere?"
He shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows with exaggerated resignation.
"I know. Today’s schedule for this line sucks, but that's what you get for returning from the dead on a Sunday." After a pause I tentatively asked, "Are you trying to get home?"
He nodded and his heavily made-up chin started quavering.
By this point, passersby were starting to give us some strange looks and I could tell at any second they’d be doing that I’m-just-holding-my-phone-at-an-unnaturally-odd-angle-for-the-fun-of-it thing people do when trying to sneak a photo of someone or something they shouldn’t be taking a picture of.
"Maybe we should talk about this elsewhere." I indicated the park behind us with a tilt of my head. Mr. Boswick looked again for his bus. "It’s not coming," I said as I slipped off my lab coat. Mr. B’s shoulders slumped, but he shuffled toward the park where we found a bench that was surprisingly free of any homeless person’s clutter.
"You can't go home," I told him. After shaking another layer of the spilled powder from my lab coat, I took a seat next to my client. "You do know you're dead, right?"
Was I really having this conversation?
Mr. Boswick nodded.
"Can you speak, or do you enjoy making me ask a bunch of yes or no questions?"
Mr. Boswick put his hands to his belly. "Speak hard," he said, literally pushing the words out. It took that push for me to realize he couldn't speak because to speak you need to breathe in air then use your diaphragm to move that air over your vocal cords in just the right way to make the sounds we modern humans call words. Granted, normally you also need to breathe in order to jump off work tables and wait for buses, but I guess speaking was a higher-order thing.
Anyway, setting the evolutionary anatomy lesson aside, to utter those two words Mr. B had to press his gut to push the air out. How did he know to do that? I mean, who’d have thought the dead would have instincts? Still, it looked uncomfortable so I dug my phone out of my back pocket, turned it on, and opened the Notes app. I handed the device to Mr. Boswick and hoped he wouldn't run off with it because how do you explain to your carrier that the really nice dead guy made off with your phone?
"Why do you want to go home?" I asked. His pale thumbs danced over the tiny keypad, then he stopped and showed me the screen.
Fight with wife.
"You want to go home to fight with your wife?"
He rolled his eyes again. Seriously, he was giving off a lot of attitude for someone whose current claim to fame was a death certificate. He tapped away, then showed me the phone.
Had fight with wife then died. Said bad things.
"And you want to make amends?"
He gave me a well-duh face. It was like having a surly emoji brought to life. Mr. Boswick thumb-drummed a few more characters.
Want to tell her I'm sorry.
Okay, I know I let him go wandering out into the streets without fully considering the potential havoc he might wreak, but now that I had my senses back I had to show a little responsibility.
"Nope. No way." Mr. Boswick scowled and stuck out his lower lip, his thick makeup creasing as he pouted. "I know that's not what you want to hear, but most living people aren't as cool as I am about dead people strolling up to them." The pout turned into a sidelong look and I just knew he was recalling my earlier banshee impersonation. "That was a rare moment of uncool on my part, but look at me now. If you showed up on your wife’s doorstep, you'd scare her. I think that would be harder on her than a fight she's probably long forgotten."
Jenny good at holding grudges.
Ah, one of those. I paused for a moment during which an off-leash St. Bernard charged over, slobbery tongue lolling with doggy glee. He sniffed Mr. Boswick, whined, then, with hackles raised and tail tucked, scurried back to his owner’s side.
I knew no wife would believe me if I went up to her door and announced that her husband was sorry. She’d probably call the police thinking I was some tarot-card-reading con artist. I shifted my lab coat on my lap and felt the spiral coils of the notebook I always carried with me. I squeezed the pocket. Yep, the pen was in there too. Surely, Mrs. B would recognize her husband’s handwriting.
I slipped the pad and pen out of the pocket and, trading them for my phone, handed them over to my new zombie buddy.
"Write out what you want to say to her."
Mr. Boswick flipped the cover open and started adding his words to the top sheet. The sheet that already had the beginnings of my grocery list. Zombies, they have instincts, but no common sense.
"No, start a new one." I grabbed for the pad, but Mr. B held tight to it. After a couple pulls back and forth, Team Cassie won the tug-of-war competition. I ignored Mr. Boswick’s grumpy huff over his loss, turned to a blank page, and handed the pad back to him. When he began to write, I added, "And use proper grammar, not Zombie Speak."
So, Mr. B wrote out his apology. It must have been a doozy of a fight because he was pouring his heart and soul onto sheet after sheet of my notepad. When he stopped, I took the pad, tore out his note, folded it in half, then handed it back to him. "Put her name on it."
It wasn't "Jenny" he wrote, but a word that must have been her pet name. It was so ridiculous that to this day I refuse to repeat it.
What now, I wondered. If I left him in the park, he would wander off. If I left him in my workroom, he'd wander off. The only solution was to take him with me, but first we had to return to the funeral home. Mr. Wood, my boss, had caught the casino shuttle that morning and wouldn’t be back until evening. I didn’t own a car, but he always said I could use his Prius whenever I needed it. Well, today I needed it.
I slipped the keys off the ring by the door that led up to Mr. Wood’s living quarters, told Mr. Boswick to hop in and buckle up, then drove to the Westmoreland address I recalled from his paperwork. When I pulled up to the tidy, pale grey colonial with impossibly white trim, Mr. Boswick stared wistfully at the façade then gave me a pleading puppy dog look.
"No way. You're staying here. This is going be hard enough without a dead husband trailing after me. Now scooch down so she doesn’t see you."
Heading up the ruler-straight walkway lined with color-coordinated yellow and white primroses and pansies, I questioned my suitability for this line of work. I got into the trade of funereal cosmetics because I didn’t want to interact with people, but here I was about to do some serious interacting. Maybe I should consider a job stocking shelves in a grocery store. I mean, if the canned peas started walking down the aisles it might be weird, but who would complain? Well, besides the two people in the world who willingly eat canned peas. Still, I wouldn’t have to approach grieving widows with messages from their not-quite-dead husbands.
