A/N: Sorry this took me so long! The good news is, I finished my NaNo story with a few days to spare. Also in the world of original fiction, my big news is that my first novel is now available. You can check my bio page for links, if you like.

Part Three

Breaking and entering was not, traditionally, part of the job description of the Pie Maker, and so he left this portion of the case to Emerson Cod, who happened to be very good at it. Why he was good at it was largely because of his experience as a detective; the illegal arts were often called for in this line of work, and he usually plied them with a minimum of fuss and mess. Today, however, he was fretting over his absolute failure as a stand-up comic, and as a result, was distracted.

Chuck watched as he attempted the dog-and-bunny for the fifth time, his thin metal dog slipping through his hands. The lock remained unpicked.

"Is everything alright, Emerson?"

Emerson grunted. "Let's just save those kinds of conversations for Pie Boy over there. He's the one in need of being psychoanalyzed."

Pie Boy exchanged a glance with Pie Girl. Pyschoanalyzed? her glance said. He's probably right, said his, sheepishly.

"I only ask because you seem a little distracted," Chuck went on, watching as the flat steel bunny turned exactly three quarters of a millimeter in the wrong direction. Emerson growled low at the door. The door did not growl back, but its silence was eloquent. Chuck put out her hands.

"Can I try?"

Emerson dropped his head and heaved a long-suffering sigh. "One of these days," he started, getting up off his knees laboriously and handing the metal implements over to Chuck, "Dead Girl is gonna have to realize that she was not brought back so she could show us poor mortals how it's—" The door opened with a slight creak. "—done," finished Emerson, but his heart was not in it.

Chuck handed him the tools back and smiled cheerily at him.

"Since when do you know how to pick locks?" asked Ned, a slight smile appearing on his face; the smile that always crept into view when he learned something new about lonely tourist Charlotte Charles.

"Well, I took a course years ago, but I never really put it into use after I learned. It's like riding a bike— it all comes back." She twiddled her fingers in the air and smiled gleefully, like a child contemplating ice cream. Emerson rolled his eyes.

"Here's somethin' else you obviously never put into use. After you open a door, you go through it. Not just stand around waitin' for somebody to see you and wonder what you're doing at that dead guy's house with those shiny metal hairpins in your hands."

Ned put a hand out, carefully, to prevent Chuck from entering.

"Let me go first. It could be dangerous."

She couldn't help smiling at him. "That's very gallant of you."

"Right," said Ned, who was secretly wishing that he'd volunteered Emerson to go first. Emerson seemed to divine this thought, for he glowered at the uncertain Pie Maker.

"The guy," he said deliberately, "is dead. He's not gonna come flyin' out of his bedroom with a shotgun all full of righteous homeowner's rage."

"He's not really dead," Ned pointed out. "He could be lurking in the rafters or something."

"Vampires got better things to do then just hang around their house. Nobody got an active social life like a vampire. This house is silent as the grave. Go in it." Emerson Cod was rapidly running out of patience, a virtue he had never been particularly flush with to begin with. Ned's face assumed the slightly pained expression it always achieved when he was about to do something he didn't want to do, and he seemed to be holding his breath; but he stepped inside the dark and gloomy house, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. This, lonely tourist Charlotte Charles thought as she watched her beloved, was the way he would meet all unpleasantness: ready for the blow, but also steadfast and determined to move forward. Such a blend of pessimism and optimism was music to her mental ears; in what could be called his "pestimism" (or perhaps his "opssimism" were one so inclined) the reluctant hero was no less heroic.

It made her smile, and, stepping forward, that was how she greeted the unpleasantness on her own terms.

Emerson Cod, for his part, put a hand to his churning stomach and wished devoutly that it was W-O-R-K that spelled R-E-L-I-E-F, for that was all he had at present and running out to the nearest corner mart for some antacids was not an option.

The interior of the abandoned house was pleasant, if dark. Emerson's flashlight sparked first off a mirror, which he ventured forward to investigate. A life-size photo of the Edmund Hillary's face was pasted onto the silvery surface, at the approximate height of his head if the vampire stood in front of the mirror. Emerson sniffed, recalling that vampires couldn't be seen in mirrors; of course, that didn't mean they had no need of checking to see that their tie was straight or their hat was facing forward.

Ned switched his flashlight on to play it around the walls; the light caught on stunning portraits of castles surrounded by flat green terrain.

"Think those are his ancestral homes?" guessed Chuck. "His family may have ruled for centuries, may still be ruling, the same old dusty lords and ladies looking out over land that is changing so much faster than they do—" She clasped her hands together in front of her heart. Lasting forever, was the unspoken phrase she was thinking. The undead do not die.

"I'm not all that up on vampire lore," said Ned, clearing his throat, "but would that mean that as the parents had children they would have to— vampirize them?"

"By biting them on the neck," said Chuck, and as the Piemaker swung the light around towards her she widened her eyes and made a face of theatrical horror. Ned gulped.

"Why would they do that? To someone they loved?"

"Because they loved them," said Chuck. She stepped forward and Ned played the light to accompany her; she had found a small picture on a table, and from it the face of Edmund Hillary and Esmerelda Hannity peered, both wreathed in content smiles. Chuck lifted the small frame and studied it intently. "Because they wanted their loved ones to be with them forever. And death—" She shook her head. "Death gets in the way of that. Even though you can love someone after they've died, they can't love you back."

Ned made a small strangled sound as he attempted to speak and clear his throat at the same time. It made Chuck smile and it made Emerson roll his eyes.

"Actions speak louder than words," he said, gesturing towards the door in front of them. "You all are whisperin', I want to shout. Lets go investigate the supposed scene of the alleged crime."

"Which would be?" asked Ned. Emerson gave him his I can't believe you can walk without trippin' over your shoelaces look.

"In the bedroom," he said, delicately. "Or coffin-room, whatever. Findings show that most accidents happen at home."

"Maybe he should have moved," suggested Ned. Emerson modified the face to I can't believe evolutionists think you evolved from monkeys. That's a major step in the wrong direction for a monkey.

"Don't look at me like that," said Ned, somewhat distressed.

Emerson opened his mouth without being quite sure what was going to come out, but before he could say anything and surprise them all, a sound spiraled up through the closed basement door and silenced the three of them. They all assumed slightly crouched positions, arms away from their bodies and raised, that made them look uniformly foolish. The crouched positions were to indicate their readiness for action regardless of what happened, and were entirely misleading as none of them felt ready at all.

"Someone's in the house!" whispered Chuck.

"I know," whispered Emerson scathingly.

Ned swiftly clapped a hand over his eye; but not swiftly enough. The twitching acted on the other two like a harbinger of doom, and together they all turned towards the basement door. Under it a light shone, and there was the sound of footsteps.

The someone was coming up.

Olive Snook, when in the grasp of a bout of story-telling, was a hard story-teller to silence. On and on she would go, as long as the audience in front of her was still breathing and had not fallen face-first into their plate of pie in severe cardiac distress, whereupon she would of course call the emergency services and, a considerate and kind woman at heart, wait to finish her story until the audience was convalescing in the hospital.

At present her audience had only a small risk of heart attack, and Olive was sailing blithely through the conversational waters, regaling the Coroner with the story of a soldier she once knew who dated an amputee.

"So then he said, 'Your arm's right where you left it!'" She laughed heartily. The Coroner did not crack a smile, but she had already learned to read his truncated facial expressions and she sensed that the grimness of his scowl was to a lesser degree than previously, indicating pleased agreement with whatever she said. "He ended up taking it into battle with him. Stuck it on the front of his plane. Used to freak the enemy out so bad they'd steer clear of him just because." She chuckled herself into a standstill, sighed, and wiped at one eye. "Oh, anyway. Tell me about yourself."

"I'm a coroner," said the Coroner. Olive clasped her hands and leaned on the counter, nodding in fascination.

"That so?"

"It is," said the Coroner with gravity. One could not call him a liar; at least, not truthfully.

"So you're in charge of the dead people?"

"That would be God," said the Coroner, with even more gravity. Olive nodded slower, to indicate reverence and a reluctance to be flippant at such a juncture in the conversation.

"As much as I hate to be flippant at such a juncture in our conversation," she said, "does he get a desk in your office? Or his name on the door, or something? I mean, a morgue's gotta be Dead People City Central. What exactly does your job entail?"

"Entrails," said the Coroner.

"That's what I meant," said Olive, before she realized that the Coroner had not been correcting her word usage, but answering her question. "Oh. I just—" She waved a hand between them. "I just got that. Do you figure out how people died?"

"I figure out what they died of," said the Coroner.

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"No."

She waited a moment, but there was nothing forthcoming. "Care to elaborate on that?"

"It's up to the police and the detectives to figure out the hows and the whys," said the Coroner, but his voice was beginning to show signs of strain from the unaccustomed length of his sentences. "All I can answer is the whats."

"Oh," said Olive, and she nodded. In her mind she was running through the directions the conversation could now take; she could jump the track entirely and tell him about a friend she'd had growing up who could stick a spoon up his nose, or about the day she was hired on here at the Pie Hole, or about how to win a horse race when your horse only has three legs and you've just put on five pounds on account of that Thanksgiving turkey (the secret: cheat). But instead she decided to go with the flow— something she only did when she felt like it. "My boss is a detective," she said. "Or he thinks he is."

"I thought he baked pies." The Coroner was stoic.

"He does," Olive assured him. "He bakes pies and fights crime. He's like a superhero except without all the spandex." The thought of Ned in spandex and a cape caused her to falter momentarily and look off into the distance. "If he was a superhero, he'd be— Pie Boy. Or— Pie in the Sky. Or— Captain Pastry."

"Mmm-hmm," said the Coroner.

"He hooked up a few years ago with this private dick, Emerson Cod. I say that in the strictly professional sense."

The Coroner looked up from his pie.

"Cod?" he said. "Like the fish?"

"Or like Cape Cod," said Olive. "Or like— no, that's all I can think of." She looked at the Coroner brightly. "Why, do you know him?"

"Hmmm," said the Coroner.