Gone Home to Rest: An Odessa Pruitt Mystery

"If a man don't have no family, who is it that says what happened to him?" Nobody, Odessa told him. The paper doesn't run what nobody brings it. Herman Otis Spivey swept the floors at Comfort Elementary for thirty-eight years, and not one of the children he raised there ever learned his name. He came in on a Tuesday to cancel his own obituary - no service, no notice, nothing for anybody to have to pay for. Six weeks later he was dead and Odessa Pruitt had given her word. Then her nephew Cornelius started saying the boxes were coming back too light. Ashes weigh what bone weighs. Cornelius carries every box that comes into Pruitt & Sons, and he knows what a grown man ought to weigh in his hands. Nobody believes him, because it isn't written down anywhere, and Odessa has spent thirty-two years trusting paper. Her archive can't hold this one. His body can. Book three of the Odessa Pruitt Mysteries.