She Staged her own Death

She staged her own death, I'm not kidding you. The coroner pulled up and parked in front of her house and everyone thought she had died but all the while she was inside her house writing, finishing her novel. The coroner was her second cousin's son, or something like that and she paid him lots of money to just sit there for 45 minutes so it looked real authentic. There was even a body taken away under a white sheet. It was her. She was alive, of course, probably holding her breath. Then, that night her obituary went to press, one that she wrote about herself. By the next week she had reinvented herself as a man, pretending to be a long lost brother who was a Los Angeles police detective. He fit the part perfectly. He always wore a trench coat, man's hat and polished policeman's shoes even when watering the lawn. Nobody suspected a thing. Not for many years after he died did the story come out. My grandmother told me this story, and her mother told it to her. It's legendary in these parts.