The body arrived at Nguyen & Sons Funeral Home just after three in the afternoon, which Linh always thought was the worst possible time. Too late for lunch, too early to close up shop, and the light coming through the west-facing windows had a way of making even the living look dead.
"Madame Celeste," Marcus said, reading from the intake form as they wheeled the gurney into the prep room. "Age seventy-three. Found in her apartment yesterday morning. Natural causes, supposedly."
Linh pulled on her nitrile gloves with practiced efficiency. "Supposedly?"
"Well, she was a psychic. You'd think she would have seen it coming." Marcus grinned at his own joke, his boyish face making him look even younger than his twenty-eight years.
"That's terrible," Linh said, but she was fighting a smile. After seven years of running her family's funeral home, gallows humor was the only kind that still worked.
The body bag's zipper sounded like thunder in the quiet room. Linh had unzipped hundreds of these bags, revealed hundreds of faces in various states of repose or rigor, but something about this one made her pause. Madame Celeste—real name Celeste Kowalski, according to the paperwork—looked like she was trying to tell them something. Her mouth was slightly open, her clouded eyes half-lidded, and her right hand was clenched in a fist.
"Help me turn her," Linh said, and together they shifted the body onto the preparation table. As they did, something fell from Celeste's closed fist and clattered to the floor.
It was a key. An old brass key, the kind that might open a music box or a diary. Marcus picked it up, turning it over in his latex-covered fingers.
"That's weird. The ME usually catches stuff like this."
Linh took the key and set it on the counter. "We'll give it to the family with her other effects."
But as soon as she turned back to the body, the overhead lights flickered. Once, twice, then steady again.
"Storm coming in," Marcus said, though they both knew the October sky outside was cloudless.
Linh began her external examination, the routine as familiar as breathing. Check for signs of trauma, document any marks or unusual conditions, prepare for the embalming process if the family had requested it. Celeste's family had, though from what Linh remembered of the woman—she'd been something of a local character, reading palms at Saturday Market and claiming to commune with spirits—she probably would have preferred a natural burial.
"Did you know her?" Marcus asked, preparing the embalming machine.
"Everyone knew her. She used to come to my parents' restaurant when I was a kid. Always ordered the pho and told my mother she was going to have another baby." Linh smiled at the memory. "My mother was fifty-two at the time."
"Was she ever right? About her predictions?"
"She told me I'd work with the dead."
Marcus whistled low. "Damn. That's specific."
"She said I'd help them speak. I assumed she meant I'd be a writer or something." Linh made the first incision for the arterial injection. "Turns out she meant this."
The formaldehyde smell filled the room, sharp and medicinal. Linh had long since stopped noticing it, the way bakers probably stopped smelling bread. But today it seemed stronger, almost aggressive.
"Jesus, it's cold in here," Marcus said, rubbing his arms. His breath came out in small puffs.
Linh looked at the thermostat on the wall. Sixty-eight degrees, same as always. But Marcus was right—she could feel it too, a cold that seemed to come from inside her bones.
"Check the HVAC," she said. "Might be acting up again."
Marcus left, and Linh was alone with Celeste. She continued the embalming process, working with mechanical precision, but her mind kept drifting to that key. Why had Celeste been holding it when she died? What did it open?
The lights flickered again, and this time they stayed off for a full three seconds. In the darkness, Linh could have sworn she heard breathing that wasn't her own.
When the lights came back, Celeste's head had turned. Not much, just a few degrees to the left, but enough that Linh knew she hadn't imagined it.
"Marcus?" she called out, her voice steadier than she felt.
No answer.
Linh set down her tools and walked to the door. The hallway beyond was empty, lit by the ugly fluorescent strips her father had installed in the nineties. She could hear Marcus somewhere in the building, probably in the basement checking the furnace.
When she turned back to the prep room, the key was gone from the counter.
Her first instinct was to check the floor—it must have fallen. But as she knelt down, searching under the table and behind the waste bins, she noticed something else. Celeste's right hand was closed again.
"No," Linh said aloud. "No, that's not possible."
She stood slowly, her knees protesting—thirty-two was too young to feel this old, but the job had a way of aging you. She approached the body, reached for the closed fist, and gently pried the fingers open.
The key was there, warm against the cold flesh.
Linh took it, her hand shaking slightly, and that's when she saw the writing on Celeste's palm. It hadn't been there before—she would have noticed, would have documented it. But now, in blue ink that looked fresh despite the impossibility of it, were four words:
HE KILLS THEM GENTLY
"What the hell?" Linh stumbled backward, the key falling from her hand. This time when it hit the floor, it sounded like a bell tolling.
Marcus burst through the door. "The furnace is fine, but—" He stopped, seeing Linh's face. "What's wrong?"
She pointed at Celeste's hand, but when they both looked, the writing was gone. The palm was clean, showing only the normal lines of age and lifeline that everyone carried.
"I need some air," Linh said.
"Linh, what happened?"
She pushed past him, pulling off her gloves as she went. In the small break room, she splashed cold water on her face and tried to rationsp;ize what she'd seen. Stress, maybe. She'd been working too many hours, handling too many COVID deaths that families were still trying to process. Sometimes the mind played tricks.
But she knew that wasn't true. In her family's tradition, the line between the living and the dead had always been thinner than most Americans believed. Her grandmother had prepared bodies in Vietnam, had spoken of the dead walking in dreams, of messages delivered through incense smoke and reflected water. Linh had dismissed it all as superstition, had gotten her degree in mortuary science precisely because she wanted to approach death scientifically, rationally.
Now, staring at her reflection in the break room mirror, she wondered if her grandmother had been trying to warn her about days like this.
When she returned to the prep room, Marcus had covered Celeste's body with a sheet and was cleaning the instruments.
"You okay?" he asked. "You looked like you'd seen a—" He caught himself. "Sorry."
"It's fine." Linh picked up the key from where it had fallen. It was cold now, ordinary. "I'm going to look through her effects. See if there's any indication what this opens."
The personal effects were in a plastic bag in the office—a purse, a wallet, some jewelry, and a cloth-bound journal that the police had apparently deemed unimportant. Linh opened the wallet first. Driver's license, credit cards, a photo of a much younger Celeste with a man who might have been her husband. Normal things, mundane things.
The journal was different.
The first entry was dated six months ago, and the handwriting was cramped, urgent:
"The dreams have started again. I see them before they die—always the elderly, always alone. He comes to them as a friend, a helper. They trust him because he wears the face of mercy. But it's murder, I know it is. I've seen eight so far. There will be more."
Linh flipped through the pages, her heart rate increasing with each entry. Names, dates, descriptions of dreams that Celeste claimed showed her murders before they happened. And then, near the end, a list of names with dates beside them. Some were crossed out. The crossed-out ones had dates of death that had already passed.
The ones that weren't crossed out had future dates. The nearest one was tomorrow.
"Eleanor Yamada," Linh read aloud. "October 15th."
She pulled out her phone and googled the name along with Portland. Several results came up, but one caught her eye—an elderly woman who ran a flower shop in the Pearl District. In the photo from the shop's website, Eleanor Yamada smiled brightly, surrounded by orchids.
Linh looked at the journal again. Below Eleanor's name, Celeste had written: "He brings tea. They always accept the tea."
The rational part of Linh's mind, the part trained in science and skepticism, told her this was ridiculous. Celeste had been a charlatan, probably mentally ill, constructing elaborate fantasies. But the other part, the part that had seen the writing on the dead woman's palm, told her to pay attention.
She called the flower shop. It rang four times before an elderly voice answered.
"Yamada Orchids, Eleanor speaking."
"Mrs. Yamada? This is..." Linh paused. What could she possibly say? "This is Linh Nguyen. I'm calling about... about a delivery."
"Oh, I'm not expecting any deliveries today, dear. Are you sure you have the right shop?"
"Yes, I... Actually, Mrs. Yamada, this might sound strange, but are you alone at the shop today?"
There was a pause. "Yes, why do you ask?"
"Please be careful about accepting any visitors today. Especially anyone offering to help you or bring you anything to drink."
"I'm sorry, who is this?"
Linh hung up. She sounded crazy, she knew that. But if Celeste's journal was right, Eleanor Yamada would be dead by tomorrow night.
She needed help, and she knew exactly who wouldn't give it to her.
Detective Rosa Alvarez looked exactly like what she was—a cop who'd seen too much and believed in too little. She sat across from Linh in the funeral home's consultation room, the journal between them like an unexploded bomb.
"So let me get this straight," Alvarez said, her voice carrying the tired patience of someone used to dealing with cranks. "A dead psychic left behind a journal claiming there's a serial killer targeting the elderly, and you want me to put surveillance on a flower shop because of it?"
"I know how it sounds—"
"Do you? Because it sounds like grief, Ms. Nguyen. Sometimes when we deal with death constantly, we start seeing patterns that aren't there." Alvarez's expression softened slightly. "I checked our records. The people on this crossed-out list did die, but they were all elderly, all had health conditions. Natural causes."
"All of them?"
"Every single one. Heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure. Nothing suspicious."
Linh wanted to tell her about the writing on Celeste's palm, about the key, about the cold that had filled the prep room. But she knew how that would sound.
"Just... could you have someone drive by the flower shop? Just to check?"
Alvarez stood, straightening her blazer. "I'll have a patrol car swing by during their normal rounds. That's the best I can do." She paused at the door. "Get some rest, Ms. Nguyen. This job... it takes a toll."
After Alvarez left, Linh sat alone in the consultation room, staring at the journal. The rational thing would be to let it go, to finish preparing Celeste's body for tomorrow's viewing, to go home and have a glass of wine and forget about prophetic dreams and messages from the dead.
Instead, she called Marcus.
"I need you to watch the shop tonight," she said when he answered.
"Linh, what's going on? You've been acting strange since—"
"I'll explain everything tomorrow. Just... can you stay here? Make sure everything's okay?"
"Of course, but—"
"Thanks, Marcus. I owe you."
She drove to the Pearl District as the sun was setting, painting the sky the color of blood oranges. Yamada Orchids was a narrow storefront squeezed between a yoga studio and an overpriced coffee shop. Through the window, she could see Eleanor Yamada moving among her flowers, a watering can in her weathered hands.
Linh parked across the street and waited.
At seven o'clock, Eleanor turned the shop sign to "Closed" but didn't leave. She moved to the back of the store, disappearing from view. Linh considered going in, introducing herself properly, warning her directly. But warn her of what? That a dead psychic had written her name in a journal?
At seven-thirty, a man approached the shop. He was unremarkable—average height, average build, wearing the navy blue scrubs of a healthcare worker. He knocked on the glass door, and Linh saw Eleanor appear, shaking her head, pointing at the closed sign.
But the man kept talking, gesturing, and finally Eleanor opened the door.
Linh was out of her car before she'd made a conscious decision to move. She crossed the street at a run, reaching the shop just as the door was closing behind the man.
Through the glass, she could see them talking. The man was holding something—a thermos. He was unscrewing the top, pouring something into the lid, offering it to Eleanor.
"Stop!" Linh yanked the door open, the bell above it ringing frantically. "Don't drink that!"
Both Eleanor and the man turned to stare at her. Up close, the man had a kind face, the sort of face you'd trust instinctively. His scrubs had a hospice logo on the chest.
"I'm sorry?" he said, his voice gentle, confused.
"Mrs. Yamada, please don't drink whatever he's offering you."
Eleanor looked between them, the cup halfway to her lips. "It's just tea. Thomas brings me tea sometimes when he's finishing his shift. He works at the hospice center down the street."
"Thomas," Linh repeated. She looked at him, really looked at him. He had pale blue eyes and laugh lines, the kind of caregiver who probably held his patients' hands while they died.
"Is there a problem?" Thomas asked. His voice was still gentle, but something in his eyes had changed, hardened.
"The tea," Linh said. "What's in it?"
"Green tea with honey. Eleanor's favorite." He smiled, and it was such a normal, pleasant smile that for a moment Linh doubted everything. "Are you a friend of Eleanor's?"
"She called me earlier," Eleanor said, frowning. "Something about a delivery. I don't understand what's happening here."
Thomas set the thermos down on the counter, his movements careful, precise. "Maybe we should all sit down. You seem upset, Miss...?"
"Nguyen. Linh Nguyen."
"The funeral director," Thomas said, and there was something in the way he said it that made Linh's skin crawl. "I've heard of you. You took over when your father retired."
"You knew my father?"
"I know a lot of people in the death business." He smiled again. "Occupational hazard."
Eleanor had set the cup down, looking uncomfortable. "Perhaps you should both leave. It's been a long day."
"Of course," Thomas said. He picked up his thermos, screwed the lid back on. "I'll see you next week, Eleanor. Same time?"
"I... yes, I suppose."
He moved toward the door, and Linh stepped aside to let him pass. As he did, he leaned close and whispered, "Celeste couldn't stop me. Neither can you."
Then he was gone, the bell ringing cheerfully in his wake.
Eleanor was staring at Linh with a mixture of fear and confusion. "What just happened? Who are you really?"
Linh picked up the cup Thomas had poured, sniffed it. It smelled like tea, nothing more. But she wouldn't let Eleanor drink it for a million dollars.
"I think you should close early tonight," Linh said. "And maybe don't accept any more visits from Thomas."
"He's a nurse. He's always been kind to me."
"I'm sure he has." Linh poured the tea into a nearby plant pot. "Do you have family you could stay with for a few days?"
"My daughter lives in Seattle. But I can't just leave the shop."
"Please. Just for a few days."
Eleanor studied her for a long moment. "You really think Thomas means to hurt me?"
"I think Celeste Kowalski thought so."
Eleanor's face changed at the mention of the name. "Celeste is dead."
"I know. I'm preparing her body."
"She came here last month," Eleanor said quietly. "Bought orchids for her apartment, but spent most of the time warning me about something. Said she'd had dreams about me. I thought..." She shook her head. "I thought she was having an episode."
"What exactly did she say?"
"That someone was coming for me. Someone who would seem kind but meant harm. She said the angels were trying to warn me through her." Eleanor laughed, but it was shaky. "I've known Celeste for twenty years. She was always saying things like that."
"But this time was different?"
Eleanor nodded slowly. "She was frightened. I'd never seen her frightened before."
Linh helped Eleanor close the shop and walked her to her car, watching until the taillights disappeared around the corner. Then she sat in her own car and called Detective Alvarez.
"The man's name is Thomas," she said when the detective answered. "He works at a hospice center near the Pearl District. He was trying to give Eleanor Yamada tea."
"Ms. Nguyen—"
"Just test the tea. Please. I poured it into the ficus by the register. Test the soil if you have to."
There was a long pause. "You poured tea into a plant, and you want me to get a warrant to test the soil?"
"He knew Celeste. He said she couldn't stop him."
"You talked to him?"
"He was there, at the shop. Navy blue scrubs, maybe late fifties, said his name was Thomas."
Another pause. "I'll look into it."
"Thank you."
"Ms. Nguyen? Don't do anything else. If this man is dangerous—and that's a big if—you need to leave this to professionals."
But after Alvarez hung up, Linh didn't go home. She drove back to the funeral home, where Marcus was watching Netflix on his phone in the break room.
"Anything weird?" she asked.
"Other than you asking me to babysit a building full of dead people? No, pretty quiet."
Linh went to the prep room. Celeste's body lay where they'd left it, covered in a white sheet, waiting for tomorrow's viewing. The room was normal temperature, the lights steady.
"What were you trying to tell me?" Linh asked the shape under the sheet.
No answer, of course. The dead didn't really speak. They didn't write messages on their palms or move keys with their cold hands. That was all stress and imagination and too many years breathing formaldehyde fumes.
But when Linh pulled back the sheet to check the body's condition, Celeste's eyes were open.
Linh stumbled backward, her hip hitting the counter. In seven years, she'd never had a body's eyes open on their own. The muscles should be fixed by now, held in place by the embalming fluid.
She moved closer, reaching out to close the eyelids, and that's when Celeste's mouth moved. No sound, no breath—the dead didn't breathe—but the lips shaped words:
"Don't. Go. Home."
Linh ran. She burst out of the prep room, past a startled Marcus, and into the parking lot where she vomited into the bushes. Her hands were shaking so badly she couldn't hold her phone steady.
"Whoa, hey, what happened?" Marcus was beside her, rubbing her back.
"She... the body... her eyes..."
Marcus went inside to check, came back looking confused. "Her eyes are closed, Linh. Everything's normal."
"They were open. She mouthed words at me."
"Okay, you're exhausted. You're seeing things. Let me drive you home."
"No!" The word came out sharper than intended. "I mean... I can't go home. Not tonight."
Marcus looked at her with genuine concern. "Linh, you're scaring me. What's really going on?"
So she told him. Everything. The journal, Thomas, Eleanor Yamada, the warning not to go home. Marcus listened without interrupting, his expression shifting from skeptical to worried to something like belief.
"My grandmother always said the funeral home was haunted," he said finally. "I thought she was just trying to scare me out of the business."
"You believe me?"
"I believe something's happening. And I believe you're not the type to imagine things." He pulled out his phone. "We should call the cops."
"I already did. They think I'm crazy."
"Then we stay here tonight. Both of us. Safety in numbers, right?"
They set up camp in the break room, brewing coffee and going through Celeste's journal more carefully. The entries went back years, not just six months. She'd been documenting deaths, patterns, suspicions for almost a decade.
"Look at this," Marcus said, pointing to an entry from three years ago. "She mentions Thomas by name. Says she saw him at the bedside of three different elderly people before they died."
"But he's a hospice worker. That's his job."
"Yeah, but look—these weren't his patients. She followed up, found out they weren't even in hospice care. They were just old people living alone who suddenly died."
Linh's phone rang. Detective Alvarez.
"We need to talk," the detective said without preamble. "Can you come to the station?"
"Now? It's almost midnight."
"Now. And Ms. Nguyen? Bring the journal."
The police station at midnight felt like a different planet, fluorescent bright and humming with a tired energy. Alvarez met them in the lobby, leading them to a small interview room that smelled of burnt coffee and desperation.
"Thomas Brennan," she said, dropping a file on the table. "Fifty-eight years old, registered nurse, works at Comfort Gardens Hospice. Model employee for fifteen years. No criminal record, not even a parking ticket."
"But?" Linh could hear the but coming.
"But I had a friend in the ME's office pull some records. In the last five years, seventeen of the names in that journal have died. All elderly, all living alone, all supposedly natural causes. But here's the interesting part—they all had Thomas Brennan listed as an emergency contact or recent visitor in their final weeks."
"So he's killing them," Marcus said.
"We don't know that. There's no evidence of foul play in any of the deaths. Tox screens were clean on the ones that were tested." Alvarez rubbed her eyes. "But it's enough of a pattern that we're opening an investigation."
"What about Eleanor Yamada?"
"She's safe. On her way to her daughter's house as we speak." Alvarez leaned forward. "But here's what I need to know—how did Celeste Kowalski know? How did she connect these deaths before we did?"
Linh thought about the open eyes, the moving lips, the message not to go home. "I don't know."
"There's something else," Alvarez said. She pulled out another piece of paper. "We did a welfare check on you tonight, Ms. Nguyen. At your apartment."
"What? Why?"
"Because Thomas Brennan was seen entering your building two hours ago. Your neighbor reported someone matching his description asking about you, saying he was concerned about a friend."
The room seemed to tilt. "He knows where I live."
"We have a unit watching the building now. But I'd recommend you don't go home tonight."
Don't go home. Exactly what Celeste had tried to tell her.
"He's escalating," Marcus said. "If he killed Celeste because she was onto him, and now he's going after Linh..."
"We don't have proof he killed anyone," Alvarez reminded them. "But we're bringing him in for questioning first thing in the morning."
They went back to the funeral home, Alvarez following in her unmarked car. She did a walk-through of the building, checking locks, testing windows, before declaring it secure.
"Lock yourselves in," she said. "Don't open the door for anyone but me. I'll be back in the morning."
After she left, Linh and Marcus barricaded themselves in the office. It was the only room without windows, the only room with a door that locked from the inside. They sat on the floor, backs against the wall, the journal between them.
"Read it to me," Marcus said. "From the beginning. Maybe we missed something."
So Linh read, her voice steady in the quiet building. Celeste's words painted a picture of a woman increasingly desperate to stop something only she could see. The dreams she described were vivid, detailed—always the same man, always bringing comfort before bringing death.
"'He thinks he's an angel,'" Linh read from an entry dated just a week ago. "'He believes he's helping them, releasing them from suffering. But he's choosing who suffers and who doesn't. He's playing God, and the real angels are angry. They show me his face in my dreams, always surrounded by the dead he's stolen.'"
"She really believed it," Marcus said. "The angel stuff."
"Maybe she was right." Linh thought of the eyes opening, the lips moving. "Maybe something was trying to warn people through her."
"You know what's weird?" Marcus was flipping through his phone. "I can't find any pictures of Thomas Brennan online. No social media, no hospice staff photos, nothing."
"Some people like privacy."
"Or some people don't want to be found."
A sound from somewhere in the building made them both freeze. A door closing, soft but distinct.
"Did you lock everything?" Linh whispered.
"Alvarez checked everything."
Another sound. Footsteps, slow and measured, coming from the direction of the prep room.
Marcus pulled out his phone to call 911, but Linh grabbed his wrist. If it was Thomas, if he was here for her, maybe they could end this. Get evidence, get a confession, something the police could actually use.
She stood, ignoring Marcus's frantic whispered protests, and unlocked the office door.
The hallway was dark, but she knew this building like her own body. Every creaking board, every cold spot, every shadow. She moved toward the prep room, her bare feet silent on the industrial carpet.
The prep room door was open, spilling chemical-scented light into the hallway. She could see a figure standing over Celeste's body.
It was Thomas, still in his scrubs, holding something in his hand. A syringe.
"She's already dead," Linh said, stepping into the doorway.
He didn't startle, didn't even look surprised. "Ms. Nguyen. I thought you might come."
"What are you doing?"
"Making sure." He set the syringe down gently. "Sometimes they don't stay dead, you see. Sometimes they try to tell secrets they shouldn't."
"Like Celeste tried to tell hers?"
He turned to face her fully, and in the harsh fluorescent light, she could see the madness in his pale blue eyes. Not wild madness, but the quiet, rational kind that was so much worse.
"Celeste was suffering," he said. "She had nightmares, visions. The voices in her head were tormenting her. I helped her find peace."
"You murdered her."
"I released her. There's a difference." He moved closer, his hands empty now, spread in a gesture of openness. "I've released so many. The lonely ones, the forgotten ones, the ones whose bodies have betrayed them. I give them dignity. I give them mercy."
"You give them death they didn't ask for."
"How do you know they didn't ask? How do you know their souls weren't crying out for release?" He was close enough now that she could smell his cologne, something expensive and subtle. "You work with the dead, Ms. Nguyen. You must see how peaceful they are. How grateful."
"The dead don't feel anything."
"Don't they?" He glanced at Celeste's body. "She spoke to you, didn't she? Warned you not to go home?"
Linh's blood turned to ice. "How did you—"
"Because they speak to me too. All of them. They thank me, you see. Every single one." He smiled, that kind, trustworthy smile. "Except Celeste. She's angry. She doesn't understand that I was helping her."
"You're insane."
"Am I? Or am I the only one who truly understands?" He pulled another syringe from his pocket, this one full of clear liquid. "Potassium chloride. Stops the heart quickly, painlessly. The body simply... gives up. Like falling asleep."
"The police know about you. They're coming."
"No, they're not. They're watching your apartment, waiting for me to show up there." He uncapped the syringe. "I've been doing this for fifteen years, Ms. Nguyen. I know how to avoid attention."
"Why? Why these people?"
"Because they're ready. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their energy. They're holding on out of habit or fear, but they want to let go." He moved closer. "You're not ready, though. You're young, vital. I don't take the young."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because you're going to help me continue my work. You see more death than anyone in this city. You'll know who's ready, who needs my help." His eyes gleamed with fervor. "Together, we could ease so much suffering."
"You're out of your mind if you think—"
The lights went out.
In the absolute darkness, Linh heard Thomas curse, heard the syringe hit the floor. Then, impossibly, she heard another sound—a whisper, dry as autumn leaves:
"Run."
It wasn't Marcus's voice. It wasn't anyone living's voice.
Linh ran, using her hands to guide herself along the wall. Behind her, Thomas was shouting, stumbling, crashing into equipment. She burst into the hallway just as the emergency lighting kicked in, casting everything in a hellish red glow.
Marcus was there with a baseball bat—where had he gotten a baseball bat?—and Detective Alvarez was coming through the front door, gun drawn, two uniformed officers behind her.
"He's in the prep room," Linh gasped. "He has a syringe, potassium chloride."
The officers moved past her, and she heard Thomas's voice, calm and reasonable, explaining that there must be some misunderstanding. Then Alvarez's voice, hard as granite, reading him his rights.
They brought him out in handcuffs, and he looked at Linh as they passed. "They'll thank me," he said. "When their time comes, when the pain is too much, they'll wish I was there."
After he was gone, after the statements were given and the evidence collected, Linh went back to the prep room. Celeste's body lay undisturbed, her eyes closed, her face peaceful. The syringe Thomas had dropped was being bagged by a crime scene technician.
"What made the lights go out?" Linh asked Marcus, who had followed her in.
"I don't know. Power surge maybe? They came back on their own."
Linh looked at Celeste one more time. "Thank you," she whispered, not caring if Marcus heard, not caring if it made her crazy.
Maybe it was her imagination, but she could have sworn Celeste's lips curved into the slightest smile.
The next morning, Eleanor Yamada called from Seattle. She was safe, grateful, and somehow unsurprised.
"Celeste saved me," she said simply. "Through you, but it was her doing."
Linh wanted to argue, to maintain some grip on rationality, but she couldn't. Not after everything.
The viewing went ahead as scheduled that afternoon. Celeste's family—a sister from California, a few cousins, a surprising number of people whose lives she'd touched with her predictions and palm readings—gathered to say goodbye.
Linh stood in the back, watching as people filed past the casket. Some cried, some smiled, some whispered secrets to the still form within. Death was always like this, she'd learned—a mix of grief and gratitude, endings and beginnings.
Detective Alvarez appeared beside her. "The lab found potassium chloride in that plant soil," she said quietly. "And we found more in his apartment, along with detailed records. You were right—he'd been killing them. All of them."
"Will it stick? In court?"
"He confessed. Once we started talking to him, he couldn't stop. He's proud of what he did." Alvarez shook her head. "Fifteen years. Maybe more. We're still counting."
They stood in silence, watching the mourners. Finally, Alvarez asked, "How did you know? Really?"
Linh thought about telling her everything—the moving body, the written message, the voice in the darkness. But some truths were too strange for police reports.
"Celeste told me," she said simply.
Alvarez looked like she wanted to ask more, but someone was calling for Linh. The family was ready for the final viewing.
As the casket was closed for the last time, Linh found herself thinking about her grandmother, about the thin line between the living and the dead, about messages delivered through dreams and shadows. She'd built her career on the scientific handling of death, but maybe science wasn't everything. Maybe sometimes the dead did speak, if you knew how to listen.
That night, she went home to her apartment—now cleared by the police, safe and ordinary. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat on her balcony, watching the city lights twinkle below.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Marcus: "You okay?"
"Yeah," she typed back. "Just thinking."
"About?"
She considered her response, then typed: "About how my grandmother was right. The dead do walk in dreams."
"Is that a Vietnamese thing or a funeral director thing?"
"Maybe both."
"Well, if any more dead people start writing messages, I'm finding a new job."
Linh laughed, surprising herself. After everything, she could still laugh.
Three days later, she got a call from a lawyer. Celeste had left her something in her will—not money, but a box of journals going back thirty years. Hundreds of dreams, thousands of predictions, a lifetime of listening to voices others couldn't hear.
The key from Celeste's hand opened the box.
Inside, on top of the journals, was a note in Celeste's shaky handwriting:
"For the one who helps them speak. The gifts we don't ask for are often the ones we need most. Trust the voices, even when they come from silence."
Linh spent weeks reading through the journals, finding patterns, warnings, predictions that had come true and ones that might yet. She found references to Thomas Brennan going back a decade, Celeste's growing certainty that he was dangerous, her frustration that no one would listen.
But she also found other things—predictions of joy, of love found in unexpected places, of children born against all odds. Celeste had seen it all, the full spectrum of human experience, filtered through dreams and intuition.
A month after Thomas Brennan was formally charged with seventeen counts of murder, Linh got another late-night call. Another body, another elderly person found dead in their apartment. But this time, the family mentioned something odd—the deceased had left a note saying they were ready, that it was their time, that they were grateful for a peaceful end.
Natural causes, the medical examiner confirmed. No sign of foul play.
But Linh wondered, standing in her prep room with another body on her table, if Thomas had been right about one thing—sometimes people were ready. The difference was, it should be their choice, not his.
She prepared the body with extra care, talking to the deceased as she worked—a new habit she'd developed since Celeste. She didn't expect answers, didn't expect signs. But sometimes, in the quiet moments between heartbeats of the living, she could almost hear something. Not words, exactly, but a presence. A feeling that the dead were not gone, just... elsewhere.
Marcus found her one evening, sitting in the viewing room after hours, Celeste's journal in her lap.
"You've been reading those a lot," he said.
"There's so much in here. Predictions about people still living, warnings about dangers that haven't happened yet."
"Are you going to do something about them?"
Linh looked at him. "What would you do? If you knew someone might be in danger, but you only knew because a dead psychic wrote it in a journal?"
"I guess I'd try to help, even if people thought I was crazy."
"Yeah," Linh said. "That's what I figured too."
So she started making calls. Subtle warnings, anonymous tips, gentle suggestions. Most people ignored her. But some listened, and sometimes that was enough. A woman decided not to walk home alone one night. A man went to the doctor about chest pains he'd been ignoring. Small choices that might have meant nothing, or might have meant everything.
Six months later, at Thomas Brennan's sentencing—life without parole—Linh sat in the gallery and watched him being led away. He looked smaller in his orange jumpsuit, older. But his eyes still held that terrible certainty, that belief that he'd been doing good.
As he passed her row, he stopped. "They still thank me," he said. "In my dreams, they thank me."
"That's not them," Linh said. "That's just your guilt trying to justify itself."
He smiled that kind smile one last time. "You'll understand someday. When you're old, when you're suffering, you'll wish someone like me was there."
"No," Linh said firmly. "I'll wish for someone who helps me live, not someone who decides I should die."
After the trial, life returned to something like normal. The funeral home stayed busy—death never took a vacation. Marcus started dating someone he met at a coffee shop, proving that love could bloom even in the shadow of mortality. Detective Alvarez became a friend, stopping by occasionally for coffee and conversation about cases that defied easy explanation.
And Linh kept reading Celeste's journals, kept listening to the voices others couldn't hear, kept helping the dead speak their truths to the living.
One year after Celeste's death, on a quiet October afternoon, Linh stood in the prep room with a new body—a young man, motorcycle accident, tragic and sudden. As she worked, she found herself telling him about Celeste, about Thomas, about the thin line between helping and harming.
"We all want to be angels," she said to the still form. "But real angels don't choose who lives or dies. They just hold space for both."
The lights flickered, just once, and for a moment she could have sworn she smelled orchids—Eleanor Yamada's orchids, maybe, or maybe just her imagination.
But imagination or not, she smiled.
The dead didn't really speak. She knew that, scientifically, rationally.
But sometimes, in the quiet spaces between heartbeats, between breath and silence, between ending and beginning, they found ways to make themselves heard.
And Linh Nguyen, funeral director, skeptic, and reluctant believer, listened.