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Bunny couldn’t have been more shocked if he brother had come to tell her that he was running away to join the circus. “Really?”
“An autopsy?” Death asked from the living room.
Bunny ignored him, her eyes fixed on Ben.
“Really,” her brother nodded, his usually easygoing charm unnaturally subdued. “I thought about what you said. You’re right, Bun. Something wasn’t right, and we owe it to her to find out what. I managed to talk him around, but he wants the whole thing over and done with—and Mom laid back to rest—within forty-eight hours. Max.”
Death scoffed in the background. “What good do you think an autopsy’ll do?”
Blocking him out was no mean feat, especially when all Bunny really wanted was to duck into the living room and strangle him. She settled for placing a hand on Ben’s shoulder instead.
“I mean, that’s great news,” she began, studying Ben’s face. “Hopefully it can shed some more light on what really happened.”
“Doubt it,” Death called out.
Bunny shrugged her shoulders, trying to shake him off as though he were some kind of little shoulder-devil. “But I don’t know how realistic it will be to get her exhumed and autopsied in that kind of time frame. It’ll depend on a lot of factors, not least of which is how many other autopsies the coroner has on their list.”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed, his small nod betraying his doubts. “I know. But those are his terms. You either take them or leave them.”
“If neither Roberta nor I know what happened to your mom, I don’t think a human autopsy will show us anything new,” Death interjected from the living room. “There’s clearly higher forces at work there.”
Thatcomment made her take notice. Higher forces? Higher forces like who? She narrowed her eyes, wrestling between feeling pleased that their dad was finally seeing sense, and suspicious that Death might know more than he was letting on. Having a conversation with two people at once when one party couldn’t see or hear the other was proving difficult.
“Bun?” Ben touched her shoulder gently, startling her out of her reverie. “You okay?”
She shook her head to clear it—a tiny gesture that she tried to gloss over with a smile. “Yeah, why?”
“You just seem really… distracted.” Ben was studying her more closely now, frowning with concern. “Have you been getting enough sleep?”
“Probably not,” she admitted wryly before she could stop herself. “Occupational hazard. Upper Management’s been busting my chops.”
“Correct,” was all Death said. She heard him shift on the couch.
Ben wasn’t convinced. “Still no excuse not to look after yourself, sis. Thought you’d had enough of that in the ER.” He finished making his sandwich before wolfing half of it down in two bites. Bunny couldn’t help but smile for real—she’d done the same thing only minutes earlier. The Major genes were strong.
“Guess I’m a glutton for punishment,” she replied, with no small amount of sarcasm directed at the lump on the couch.
Ben polished off his snack and began to rummage in the drawer where she kept her junk mail. “You got any decent takeout places around here? I was hungry before, but now I’m starving. My treat.”
She looked up at Ben just as the coffee pot clicked to announce it was done brewing. A living room picnic with her brother and Death?
Oh, goody.
* * *
The Chinese foodarrived twenty-something minutes later. Bunny collected it from the door, her arms full of the giant paper bag that held way more food than two normal people would be able to eat. They always over-ordered, and they never had regrets. Leftover Chinese food was the bomb.
She placed the food on the coffee table and the two siblings laid it out like a buffet-style feast before settling in to fill their plates. Ben was sitting on the armchair that faced the TV, leaving her space on the couch next to the guest that only she could see or interact with. She perched on the far edge, ignoring the way the couch felt like it dipped down in Death’s direction. What would Ben see? An indentation? Nothing?
Bunny nibbled the inside of her bottom lip thoughtfully as she filled her plate, not looking up until Ben held up his chopsticks, a piece of Peking duck clamped proudly between them.
“Remember the time you cried when you realized this was duck and not chicken like Dad had told you it was,” he grinned.
Bunny felt a spike of embarrassment, not because she had once been a naive kid, but because she knew how the rest of this story went, and she really didn’t want to have to sit through it with Death’s impossibly dark eyes boring into her relentlessly.
“No, I don’t remember,” she lied. “Can you please pass the pork?”
“You do so,” Ben grinned, grabbing the pork and leaning over the coffee table to pass it to his sister. “No, Daddy!” he wailed, in a high-pitched tone that might have been a fair impersonation of nine-year-old Bunny. “You said it was chicken, not Donald!”
