A Man Who Faked His Own Death Must Be Found in Time

 This is a 15-minute writing prompt from "5,000 Writing Prompts".

Mystery Story Prompt #46: A Man who Faked his Own Death Must be Found in Time

John was an ordinary guy.  He had an ordinary hair cut.  He wore ordinary clothes.  He lived in an ordinary house. Even his name was painfully ordinary.  So, John decided it was time for a change. He wondered if an unordinary funeral was right for him.  And so John was "cremated" and invited all his friends and family to his own funeral.  It was quite the experiment...that is, until John was kidnapped the next week.  When family started getting ransom notes for him, they thought it was a joke.  You can't kidnap a dead man.  The kidnappers were frustrated.  Did no one in John's family care about him enough to pay the ransom?  What kind of worthless guy did they bother kidnapping?

But John's family had finally heard enough from the kidnappers and decided to contact the funeral home.  Who had done the cremation?  How had John died?  Who pronounced him dead?  Then the news came that the body had already been cremated when it came into the funeral home's possession.

Stopped at 7 minutes and 30 seconds because life has interruptions.