by Molly Harper
“Aw, I liked Mr. Gray,” Frankie murmured. “He had standards. Always kept molasses candy in his pocket, but only gave it to polite kids.”
“Well, his standards should have included detailed funeral plans, instead of telling his kids, ‘Y’all just do what ya think is best.’ ”
“E.J.J. will figure it out,” Frankie said. “He always does. He is the master at making chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
“Language. Your mama hears you talkin’ like that, she blames it on me,” he said, looking around furtively, as if Leslie were looming nearby with a parabolic mic.
“Because you’re the one who taught me the curse words in the first place.”
“That’s what your mama says. Also, you owe the swear jar a quarter.” He nudged her with his elbow.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I’m the picture of ladylike restraint,” Frankie said, gently shrugging off his arm and dropping to her knees to pick up a shiny object fluttering in the grass. It was a candy wrapper, ripped right through the fiery red logo for Atomic Mouth-Burners, one of those super-sour candies that combined the caustic quality of high-concentration cinnamon extract with citric acid that could actually dissolve dental enamel. It was thoroughly disgusting and Frankie knew only one kid in town who ate them.
“Lewis,” she hissed, crumpling the candy wrapper in her fist.
“Frankie,” Stan said, holding his hands up in the same sort of gesture a lion tamer would use to avoid becoming a feline chew toy, “just calm down, now. You’re already on edge. You don’t have any solid proof that it was the Lewis boy, and you don’t want to do anything rash.”
“I’m not going to do anything rash,” Frankie said, shrugging. “I’m going to go have a very calm discussion with the sheriff, just like you suggested.”
Stan gestured to the left side of his face. “I’m havin’ a real hard time buyin’ that, considerin’ the way you’re clenchin’ your jaw. Look, hon, don’t get all wound up about this. We’ve tried handling it on our own for the last few weeks, and now we need to call in the sheriff and tell him what’s happening. It’s his job to deal with junior jackasses-in-training, not yours.”
“I’m taking my lunch break!” Frankie hollered, holding the candy wrapper over her head as she stomped over to the funeral home van.
“Could you at least pretend to listen to what I say before running off half-cocked? Besides, you don’t have your purse—” Stan yelled as she raised her other hand to show she’d fished his keychain from his pocket. “When did you take my keys?”
THE SCENIC DRIVE through the hills that surrounded Lake Sackett did little to calm Frankie. Now that autumn had set in and the leaves were starting to fall away, one could see much more of the strangely fern-shaped lake. Damming the Chattahoochee had created a series of irregular inlets with the occasional tiny island of trees breaking up the steely expanse of water. That water was still heavily occupied by sailboats and fishing boats of all sizes, even with the tourist season hurtling toward its end.
Seeing the busy boaters did a tiny bit to ease Frankie’s grip on the wheel. Busy tourists meant more money in town, being spent at the local shops and restaurants. It meant businesses staying open and families staying in Lake Sackett, something that had been more of a challenge ever since some newb at the Sackett Dam had released enough water to significantly reduce the amount of lake they had to offer. The “water dump,” as it was called by locals, had coincided with an unprecedented years-long drought. The lake and the town had started getting pretty shabby, and people didn’t want to spend their vacation looking at shabby. Tourists booked their rentals in towns where the water was abundant and the locals seemed less desperate.
Margot had helped turn this nosedive around by planning the best Founders’ Festival ever just a few weeks before. The town was already seeing the benefits. They just had to keep pushing through the slower fall season. Distractions like Jared Lewis, and the havoc he tried to wreak at the largest marina in town, could only hurt their efforts.
Frankie couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment her war with Jared Lewis started, probably because there was a cascade of moments over the years that had cemented their enmity. Her mama blamed a Halloween costume contest when Jared was eight. Frankie was an honorary judge and gave first prize to another kid, who’d made his own Iron Man costume out of cardboard and duct tape instead of having his mama buy one online. There was another incident when Jared was ten involving her taking his Jet Ski keys from him when he kept trying to tip over a younger boy in a canoe.
But honestly, their mutual dislike probably started when Jared, unlikable even as a small child, demanded that Frankie’s late uncle and mortuary mentor, Junior, take him to the morgue during his great-uncle’s funeral so Jared could “see a dead body.” A then-teenage Frankie caught Jared trying to sneak downstairs to the morgue level. She blocked the door and told him to get his bony butt back to his mama. He tried to shove past her, and she used a pinching technique she’d learned from Marianne to grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him back to the chapel.
The little shit had tried to kick her in the shins all the way down the hall, which prompted her own parents to make a rare public fuss. Frankie had always bruised easily. Bob McCready had not been pleased to see Jared kicking his girl with his full soccer halfback strength. Then again, Marnette Lewis didn’t appreciate Frankie depositing her son in her lap and announcing his bad behavior in front of all of her kin.
The very public interparent skirmish in the chapel had made relations between the McCreadys and the Lewises tense ever since. The fact that Jared’s father, Vern Lewis, was the head of the county commission, and technically Frankie’s supervisor, didn’t exactly ease that tension.
Jared was an annual pain in Frankie’s ass. Every October for four years, he’d tried to break into the mortuary using increasingly annoying means, like throwing a brick through the front window of the chapel or distracting Stan with a flamin’ bag of dog poo while trying to sneak through the back. But this year, Jared had started his charming shenanigans early. And he’d changed tactics, going after the businesses attached to the marina. He unleashed a plague of bait crickets in the bait shop, emotionally traumatizing one of Duffy’s charter clients. He’d replaced the ketchup in the Snack Shack with hot sauce and inflicted gastric chaos on some poor tourist. He’d screwed around with Aunt Donna’s fishing equipment, which made Aunt Donna react like, well, Aunt Donna.
The only things that had stopped the series of pranks were installing the security cameras near the back door and Stan sitting vigil on the dock at night. Because nothing is as terrifying as the sound of a McCready shucking a shotgun full of rock salt while shouting threats against your ass cheeks.
Once the cameras went up and the pranks stopped, Stan hadn’t felt the need to stand guard every night. But it seemed that Jared had found a way around the cameras and was back to his usual tricks-and-treats. Of course, Frankie didn’t have any actual proof that Jared was the one who had done these things. But it had to be him. In all the years the family had been running McCready’s, no one else had ever tried to break in. The creep factor of a mortuary had served as its own security system for generations.
It seemed unlikely Jared had a plan for what he would do when he finally got into the funeral home. Frankie had told him that he wasn’t welcome there—gasp, she’d told him “no”—and that had given the funeral home the appeal of forbidden fruit.
Breathing through her rage enough to safely use the voice commands on her phone, Frankie called the sheriff’s department and was informed by Eric’s dispatcher/secretary that he’d gone to the Rise and Shine for lunch. Nestled in the “business district” on Main Street, the Rise and Shine was a traditional circa-1963 diner with worn red vinyl booths and a shiny black-and-white tile floor. The mustachioed owner, Ike Grandy, kept Hank Williams Sr. on a continuous loop on the jukebox while he slung hamburgers and waffles at the same families who’d eaten ther
e for decades. No one left Ike’s place hungry, even if they couldn’t pay for months at a time—a situation that had come up frequently during the tourist-season doldrums.
Frankie parked the van in her regular spot, passing a rather bland red-white-and-blue election sign announcing LINDEN FOR SHERIFF in the Rise and Shine window. Frankie supposed that you didn’t spend a lot of money on election advertising when you were the only candidate running.
The diner was packed as usual with the lunch crowd. Ike waved at her with his spatula from the grill as she spotted Eric sitting in a booth in the back, picking at a bowl of chicken and rice soup.
Frankie greeted several people as she wound her way between the tables, most of them lifelong family friends—George Pritchett, Sweet Johnnie Reed, Dobb Cunningham. They smiled, squeezed her hand as she walked by, asked after her parents and E.J.J., passed along messages and little tidbits of news.
Others, though, avoided eye contact, and some even scooted away from her as she passed. She blew a breath through her nose, keeping a slightly less genuine smile plastered on her face. This was the problem with small towns. Everybody had an opinion about how you lived your life and thought they had a God-given right to express that opinion. Frankie had been informed from a very young age that her interest in the more practical aspects of the family business was unseemly and unladylike—by everybody except the people who Frankie actually cared about. Little old church ladies, elementary school teachers, clerks at the gas station—they all felt the need to tell her that nice Southern girls did not spend their time with dead bodies. That was “men’s work”—the art of mortuary science lumped together with traditional male activities like changing flat tires, lifting heavy objects, and killing spiders. The fact that Frankie had devoted years of college and additional specialized training to become skilled at this manly task did nothing to convince her fellow Lake Sackett residents that this was not just a creepy teenage phase.
And so some of her neighbors chose to avoid Frankie as if she carried a communicable social disease. Some of the local kids even called her “Dr. Frankenstein,” which, Frankie admitted, was an unfortunate but not unexpected result of her parents’ choice of name. She tried not to let it bother her. She armored herself in her bright colors and odd pop culture interests, because if she was going to be considered “other” by the people she’d grown up with, she was going to go for broke. She had a family who adored her, a select few neighbors who understood her. She figured that put her ahead of a good number of people in the world.
Borrowing a smile from someone who gave a damn what her neighbors thought, Frankie slid into the booth seat across from Eric and waggled her eyebrows at him.
“No, please, join me,” he said, frowning at her. “I insist.”
As if by magic, Ike Grandy appeared at her side with a double bacon cheeseburger platter, complete with onion rings and a strawberry shake. “Your usual, Frankie.”
“Thanks, Ike,” Frankie said, grinning at him as she popped an onion ring in her mouth.
“Finish it all,” Ike told her, wagging a stern finger at her. “There’s a lot of essential nutrients in that bacon.”
“I promise.” Frankie winked at him. Ike’s mustache swept up at the corners and he ruffled her bright hair.
“Do you call ahead?” Eric asked, watching her repair the damage to her do. “Or does he just keep bacon cheeseburgers waiting for you in reserve, just in case?”
Frankie shrugged. “No, he probably bumped a few orders when he saw me walkin’ through the door, because he knows I rarely take a lunch break outside McCready’s and he’s been tryin’ to fatten me up like a Christmas hog since I was a toddler. It’s called being part of a community.”
“Are you aware that there’s an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease affecting our country?” he asked as she swirled a healthy dollop of mayonnaise on the top of her burger.
“Everybody dies,” she told him. “I could eat kale and run ten miles every day and still walk out that door and get hit by a semi. I’d much rather go with a belly full of onion rings and my veal-like calf muscles.”
Eric shuddered as she tore into the thick burger. “But how can you eat that after dealin’ with all that blood and gore?”
“After a while, you don’t even think about it,” she said, wiping ketchup from the corner of her mouth. “Look, I give people dignity. I give their families comfort. That’s my purpose in life. But not the purpose for me comin’ here.”
“That was a strange conversational lane switch,” he told her, pushing his soup bowl away.
Frankie slapped the foil candy wrapper on the table between them, then took a respectable-for-a-caveman bite out of her burger.
Eric lifted a sandy brow. “Thank you for the garbage on my lunch table?”
“This is evidence. I found this wrapper outside the back entrance of the funeral home. Right under some brand-new gouge marks on the lock. And someone took the time to spray-paint over the lens of our security camera, so all we have is footage of a hand aiming a can at it. And this candy wrapper proves exactly who it was.”
“Okay, let’s pretend for a second that I believe this random litter you found in your parkin’ lot is a smoking gun. In the interest of our workin’ relationship, I’ll humor you. Who do you think tried to break into the funeral home?”
“Jared Lewis,” Frankie spat. “He’s been trying to get into the funeral home after hours for years. At this point, I think it’s about beatin’ me and Stan more than the cool factor of breakin’ in. He’s in high school, and I have two more years of this crap to look forward to until he goes off to college, flunks out in a tragic ‘bought a paper off the Internet’ incident, and comes right back to mess with me some more.”
“So, your archenemy is a teenager?”
Frankie nodded. “Ours is an epic battle of wills.”
“Do you have any proof, beyond the litter, that it’s this particular teenager?”
“No, because he’s a small-town criminal genius, like a penny-ante Lex Luthor. He’s been getting away with this bullshit for years.”
“What did Sheriff Rainey do about it?”
“Chalked it up to anonymous but mischievous ‘kids.’ Never approached Jared or his parents. Never spent any time watching McCready’s to catch Jared in the act. Never opened a case file. Hinted that maybe if I were married with children, I would have less time to worry about people breaking into my workplace.”
Eric was halfway through a shrug, as if he was considering his predecessor’s point. Frankie pointed her finger at him. “I know how to end you and get away with it.”
“You don’t think it’s possible you’re blowing this out of proportion?”
“No,” she said, dipping an onion ring in ketchup. “And I’ll tell you why. One, because if you don’t stand up to people like Jared Lewis, no matter how old they are, they learn that they can walk all over you and you won’t do anything about it. So they escalate.”
“It sounds like it’s escalating anyway.”
“Oh, hush,” she told him. “And two, if you don’t stand up to people like Jared Lewis, no matter how old they are, other people like Jared Lewis will see that and know that they can walk all over you and you won’t do anything about it.”
“Wait.” Eric grimaced. “Jared Lewis . . . why does that name sound familiar?”
Frankie turned as the bells over the diner’s front door jangled. She jerked her head toward the woman walking through the entrance. “That’s why.”
“Are you ever going to say something straightforward?” he asked her.
Frankie took a long draw from her strawberry milkshake, hoping its nostalgically sweet flavor would improve her mood as Marnette Lewis clipped her way across the diner. Marnette was tall and greyhound-thin, with a razor-sharp streaked blond bob and a permanently pinched expression on her face. She approached their table and folded her arms in such a way that her knockoff Coach bag nearly smacked Frankie in the face.
Eric nodded and fidgeted with his soup spoon. “Mrs. Lewis.”
“Marnette, how are you?” Frankie asked, her expression neutral.
“I’m just fine,” she said, smiling without showing any teeth through her thin lips. “I hear your cousin is going to be settin’ up the Trunk-R-Treat this year.”
“Oh, she’s real excited about it,” Frankie said, smirking around her straw. Eric’s eyes seemed to follow an invisible tennis ball between the two women, an expression of uncomfortable dread spreading over his features. “You know, she was just cuttin’ her teeth on the Founders’ Festival, but now that she’s comfortable, I think she’s really going to pull out all the stops.”
Marnette’s face soured, like she’d just swallowed a wasp.
“Yes, little Margot has made quite the impression around here. It must be so nice for her to come home and spend time with her daddy after all those years they missed,” Marnette simpered. “It just seems so odd to me that her mama up and moved and never told Stan where they went so he could see his own daughter. Why was that again?”
Frankie’s eyes narrowed. It was no secret in Lake Sackett that her uncle Stan once had a drinking problem. But given how long he’d been a sober, productive member of the community, most people were polite enough not to bring it up.
“Oh, it was such a long time ago, no one with any sense cares,” Frankie said.
Marnette made a shallow attempt at a smile while she internally regrouped for her next attack. “Well, I hope we’re not going to have any confusion this Halloween. You will try to keep control of yourself, right? You won’t go telling wild stories about burglars and bumps in the night?”