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  Raising Hell

  SHANNON WEST

  Raising Hell

  Copyright © 2020 Shannon West

  Published by Painted Hearts Publishing

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  Raising Hell

  Copyright © 2020 Shannon West

  Publication Date: July 2020

  Author: Shannon West

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2020 by Painted Hearts Publishing

  Cover Design by S Hardy

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  From the thunder, and the storm—

  And the cloud that took the form

  (When the rest of Heaven was blue)

  Of a demon in my view

  —Edgar Allan Poe

  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 time visiting with her since moving to Atlanta for college. With my parents now gone, I felt guilty about leaving her all alone. She had a roommate—her sister, my Aunt Rose, who had moved in with her shortly after the two widows had retired from teaching at the local high school. But Rose was nearly the same age as my grandmother.

  After my grandmother fell on some icy steps later that month, scaring the hell out of me and bruising, but thankfully not breaking her hip, and after a few failed attempts to get both my gran and my aunt to move to Atlanta, I finally made the decision to move back to Alabama. I quit my job, gave up my condo in the city, and moved to Indian Springs—a place I’d left years ago, vowing never to return. Not because of the town itself—I’d grown up there and it was familiar and still felt like home. It was because of the man who was now sheriff in Creek County, the youngest sheriff ever elected there.

  The last time I’d talked to Sheriff Nick Moody had been just before I left to go to Atlanta, ten years earlier. We’d had a bitter argument—our first and last, as it turned out. He had joined the Army and had been about to leave for his basic training. I didn’t know when I’d see him again, and it had occurred to me that I might never see him again, because the war was still going on then in Iraq. I later heard that he did go there directly after basic training and thankfully only served there a couple of months before the troops pulled out in 2011. Still, even in that short amount of time, he’d brought home a Bronze Star for bravery under fire. Ironic, in a way, since he hadn’t had the courage to face what was between us. But then again, I had bitter, complicated feelings about Nick Moody, and I suspected I always would.

  He spent four years in the Army and afterward, Nick went to work for the sheriff’s department. I guess he was a sucker for a uniform and a gun.

  Just five years after that, he ran for sheriff and won. There hadn’t been much competition against the war hero and favorite son. As for me, I went to Atl
anta, finished college there and got a job at a marketing firm in midtown. It was well-paying too, if a little boring. At least it paid well enough that I could afford a one bedroom, one bath condo just off Peachtree Street and still have enough money to go out clubbing with my friends on occasion. Life had been—well, not good, exactly, but not all that bad either.

  After my parents’ funeral, I couldn’t get my grandmother off my mind. She needed help, and I decided I would return to Indian Springs after all, because a lot of water had passed under the bridge since I last lived there, and surely enough time had passed that being in the same town as Nick Moody again wouldn’t be a problem. I’d decided to take over my parents’ little bakery and try to turn it around, even though I knew absolutely nothing about baking and had little interest in it, despite having been around my parents all those years. What I did have was a degree in Business and Marketing and a lot of ambition, which I decided I could use to my advantage.

  I’d started by changing the name of the shop from We Knead Dough—my father’s dumb idea—to The Donutery. Okay, so maybe equally as dumb, because the apple doesn’t fall from the tree, frankly, but I wanted to emphasize we just mostly did doughnuts and not much else. I started making doughnuts in the mornings.

  It was the one pastry I really liked, and I felt I was something of a connoisseur of them, especially considering I was a secret devotee of Krispy Kreme. I tried to limit my enjoyment of them, so I wouldn’t weigh three hundred pounds—seriously, you may as well apply them directly to the hips—but to me they were the pinnacle of southern doughnut art. And I’d so far been lucky about being able to eat pretty much whatever I wanted and never gain weight. Every morning, since I was a teenager, when I weighed myself after my shower, I crossed my fingers and made a wish that I hadn’t gained any weight. And so far, against all odds, that had seemed to work. My friends looked at me like I was crazy when I told them that, but I didn’t question it too much. It worked was all I knew. Like magic.

  I set out, then, to shamelessly get as close to duplicating the Krispy Kreme recipe as I could. Not because I had any insight into their ingredients, because I obviously didn’t. It was done more or less by trial and error. And I went back to running a mile every day, because I kept sampling the product.

  After dozens of failed attempts, because I really had no idea what I was doing, and after a couple of kitchen fires that did no real, or at least, no lasting damage, I finally perfected my version of a doughnut recipe, not to mention the use of the deep fat fryer. And I mean perfected—if I did say so myself, the doughnuts tasted amazing. They were really sweet, light and literally-melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and even better than the original. It was like magic.

  I really wasn’t sure how I’d done it, but I managed to duplicate that recipe again and again. I started opening for breakfast, offering the doughnuts, glazed, jelly-filled and chocolate covered, and my customer base grew accordingly. I even put up a “Hot and Fresh” sign in the front window, just like Krispy Kreme did. And the doughnuts flew out the door. My shop was packed every morning and usually customers took a box home with them. Along with serving some nice, flaky croissants that I purchased in bulk at Sam’s Club over in Birmingham, real butter and a nice selection of jams and jellies, my shop soon almost cornered the market on breakfast in town. It was all a little mystifying, but I was enjoying it while it lasted.

  As Indian Springs was the county seat, my best customers included most of the members of the county sheriff's department, including Sheriff Nick Moody. It wasn’t ideal that I had to see him almost every day, but I managed to cope, and since he largely ignored me, I tried to ignore him right back.

  I was busy enough that I was able to hire a couple of helpers and an assistant manager, Tina, so I no longer had to get out of bed at the crack of dawn every morning to make the doughnuts.

  After six months in business, doughnuts were still my specialty, because we were The Donutery, after all, but I’d begun to branch out into light lunches too. Business was amazing and life was good in general, even if my social life had almost completely dried up when I moved to Indian Springs.

  There weren’t a lot of gay men—or at least not openly gay men—in town, so any action I got was limited to a few forays to the bars in nearby Huntsville, and the occasional hook-up on Grindr, neither of which were great options.

  The sheriff’s department came into view with all the lights blazing inside the building, bringing me back to my current situation, which wasn’t anything I was looking forward to dealing with. I hurried inside, hoping that I could calm the situation down and get my grandmother and my aunt out of there before anybody else, especially someone from the funeral home, showed up. As the funeral home was located right across the road from the sheriff’s office, I didn’t hold out much hope of that.

  There was no one in the front lobby in the middle of the night, but in one of the rooms leading off it, the door was wide open, and I could hear my grandmother’s voice ringing out.

  “I know my constitutional rights!”

  Another voice I didn’t recognize piped up. “That’s right. You tell him, Pearl!”

  I stepped up to the door of the room and saw my grandmother, all five feet nothing of her, rheumy blue eyes blazing as she stared up belligerently at a large sheriff’s deputy. On one side of her stood her younger sister, Rose, wringing her hands, and on the other side a woman I recognized only by sight, but not by name. I only knew she was in my gran’s book club, which met every Saturday morning in our basement. She had silver gray hair and was dressed all in dark clothing. In fact all of them looked like geriatric ninjas, dressed in various shades of black, dark brown and navy blue.

  “I know my constitutional rights!” Pearl shouted again, banging her fist on the table to punctuate her point.

  The deputy in front of them tightened his lips. “Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to calm down.”

  Then I noticed the other man in the room. It was Willie Whatley, of Whatley and Sons Funeral Home.

  “In all my years as a funeral director,” he was saying, “I never…ladies, my goodness, I am shocked and appalled by your behavior. This is outrageous.”

  I stared grimly at him. His decades of dealing with bereaved families were legendary in Indian Springs, Alabama. His chubby cheeks flushing and nostrils flaring, he wiped a hand over his sweaty brow and brushed a tuft of carpet from the breast of his dark suit. Whatley was a man known for keeping his emotions firmly in check, but tonight he looked perilously close to losing his shit.

  I flicked my eyes from Willie Whatley’s sweaty, flushed face to my grandmother, who was glaring obstinately up at him. She pointed her finger toward him. “I’m fixin’ to leave here, Willie Whatley, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. None of y’all can legally stop me!”

  I spoke up for the first time, taking a step into the room. “Grandma, please! Calm down.”

  “I know my rights!” my gran yelled again, stomping a foot for emphasis. She turned on me then. “And don’t you start your sass, boy,” she sniped back at me. “I’m not in the mood for it.”

  “Well, that makes two of us!” I shook my head. “Tell me this is all some enormous joke. A prank that got out of hand? Give me something to work with here, Grandma, because I really don’t understand. What in the world were you doing at the funeral home in the middle of the night?”

  The deputy turned to me then. “Ms. Smith and her sister Rose broke into the funeral home, climbed through a window and vandalized the coffin of Ms. Emma Mae Millican. They knocked it off its pedestal and spilled the corpse out onto the floor.”

  “Spilled the…what? Oh my God,” I gasped and looked at my grandmother in horror. “Gran, is this true?”

  My grandmother stole a glance at her two accomplices standing beside her and looked back at me a bit sheepishly. I noticed she was wearing a pair of black jeans that looked suspiciously like a pair I had last seen in my own closet. She also wore my black hoodi
e over my black t-shirt.

  She pursed her lips and crossed her arms, the movement causing a pair of disposable gloves to fall out of the big old white vinyl pocketbook she had slung over her shoulder. Only my gran would bring a pocketbook to a break-in.

  She quickly put her foot over the gloves as we all watched her. “They can’t keep us here, Noah. We know our rights. Tell ‘em, Rose.”

  Rose, who had once taught History and Government at Indian Springs High School, cleared her throat. This was her big moment and she had obviously been preparing for it. “The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly…”

  I stopped her before I started screaming. “All right! All right, that’s enough. Aunt Rose. I know you’re just trying to help, but this is not an unlawful search and seizure, for God’s sake. You three broke in Mr. Whatley’s place of business and molested a poor woman’s corpse.”

  My gran gave me a look of outrage. “Molested? I beg your pardon!”

  I looked from Pearl to the petite woman standing by her side. “Rose? Would you care to explain what on earth happened tonight?”

  My aunt Rose had been Pearl’s partner in crime for as long as I could remember. Probably as long as either one of them could remember. She, at least, was gracious enough to look guilty as she brushed a hand through her longish gray hair. Flushing a deep pink, she waved an arthritic hand in the air. “Well, dear, you know how it is…”

  “Damn it, Rose,” Pearl snapped with a quick scowl, “he thinks you’re the weakest link. Don’t you say another word.” She turned on me. “I object! You’re leading the witness!”