She glanced at the big red numbers on the clock sitting on the bedside table, just like she had for the last two hours. It was five-thirty, which in her mind was at least a somewhat acceptable time to be up and about, and she did have work to do.
Delores Schriever was in the cooler and ready to be dressed and made up, so she could be laid out in slumber room one. Delores had been the first customer she'd had in weeks. Business wasn't exactly booming at the Last Stop Funeral Home. Which was a good thing for the citizens of Last Stop. Not so great for her.
Tess knew the funeral home should have been operating in the red. But her paycheck showed up like clockwork every two weeks in her bank account-and it was more than a decent paycheck-almost double what George had paid her. And when she went to pay the home's bills, there was always money in the checking account. Eve Winter had no interest in running a funeral home, but she had a lot of interest in keeping it afloat. Tess had no idea what those reasons were, but for the time being she had a paycheck and health insurance, so she couldn't complain too much.
The Last Stop Funeral Home had been in the Jessup family for three generations. And since George's son Jesse was a no-good son of a bitch, there'd been no chance of it being passed on to the fourth generation of Jessups. Which was why George had hired Tess when she'd moved back home after college. He'd shown her the ropes and she'd learned under his tutelage. The funeral home was supposed to be hers, and in another ten years or so, when George was ready to retire, it would've been.
Except Eve Winter had ridden into town like one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, with her floor-length white coat and cherry-red Porsche Carrera, and made George an offer he couldn't refuse. George had no chance against a woman like Eve. Apparently George had ignored weeks of phone calls from the woman and wouldn't entertain the offer of selling the funeral home over the phone. So she'd made the trip personally and brought cash. A lot of cash.
Fortunately, George had the wits about him to remember that he'd promised Tess the funeral home. And though he could no longer keep that promise, he at least had the wherewithal to put it in the contract that she'd be in charge of the funeral home until she chose to leave or until Eve decided to sell, in which case she had to give the first option to Tess to buy her out.
George had signed the papers, taken the exorbitant amount of money, and packed up his wife of thirty years so they could live on a Carnival Cruise ship. They'd left their no-good, son-of-a-bitch son behind.
The people in Last Stop weren't fond of change, so word spread like wildfire about the fancy city woman who'd bought out George Jessup lock, stock, and barrel. But since no one but George, Tess, and the attorneys had actually seen Eve Winter, the exaggerations of her physical appearance had grown by leaps and bounds.
They'd gossiped for months about the rich woman and the extensive renovations on the funeral home and outbuildings. Tess had been living there on the third floor the entire time, and even she wasn't quite sure what was happening with all the construction work. They'd set up partitions and giant drop cloths to keep the curious from seeing what was being done. In a place like Last Stop, hiding the progress only made people more curious, so there'd been a few late-night instances of people sneaking onto the grounds and peeking between the partitions.
The work had been completed in record time. Tess had woken up in the middle of the night more than once, hearing the distant sound of some kind of heavy piece of machinery. She'd worked around the chaos and clutter, but in reality, the construction crew had done a great job staying out of her way.
The unveiling hadn't been a big to-do. There'd been no ribbon cutting from the Chamber of Commerce or open house. One morning Tess had woken up and gone down to the kitchen to start her morning coffee. It had taken her a moment to realize that something was different. There were no partitions. No drapes or curtains covering certain areas. Everything was finished and looked as if it had been there forever.
She'd stared in shock out the back windows of the kitchen. A full-fledged English rose garden had been planted at some point. And the carriage house, which the Jessups had originally used to park the hearses in the bays on the first floor and storage on the second floor, had been gutted completely and doubled in size.
It now looked like a miniature version of the main house, which wasn't all that miniature if she thought about it. The carriage house had been painted solid white, and the bottom story still had the original carriage bays where buggies had once been stowed. The three bays were no longer used for parking, and large glass windows had been installed into each of them. The carriage house had been turned into a home gym of sorts, though she'd seen gyms that required a paying membership not have equipment as nice as that in the carriage house.