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No one ever knocked at my door, and Rose was the only person I was acquainted with in the neighborhood. It had to be her, I thought; that was just cold hard logic.
So I opened the door looking down, expecting to see my diminutive neighbor’s wide face under a thatch of black hair turned gray.
Instead I was looking at the red-and-blue vest of a white man even taller than me. He had a bald head and not much facial hair. His skin was the color of yellowing ivory and his eyes were a luminous gray—like a mist-filled valley at dawn.
“Mr. Vaness?” the stranger asked, in a magnificent tenor voice.
“Yes?”
“My name is Harding, Lance Harding. I am here representing the last wish of Seth Vaness.”
“What?”
“I work for a small firm called Final Request Co. We execute the last wishes of clients who have passed on.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
I looked the slender tenor up and down. He had on a nice suit, but it was reddish-brown, not a lawyer’s color, in my estimation.
“No, Mr. Vaness. We at FRC don’t execute wills. Our job is to deliver messages from the dead.” He smiled after the last word, giving me a slight chill.
“Uh-huh. You use a Ouija board or somethin’?”
“We are engaged by the deceased before their demise.”
“My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?”
Harding smiled and nodded.
“He died six and a half months ago,” I said. “What took you so long?”
“His wish was for us to execute his instructions not less than half a year after his demise.”
“Is this some kinda legal thing?”
“It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,” Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. “Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.”
“Seth didn’t have much,” I said. “He couldn’t have anything to hide.”
“We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.”
by Walter Mosely, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Bryce Duffy
