by Molly Harper
“They started it,” Frankie noted.
“Yeah, the higher-ups didn’t see it that way. They were pretty humorless about the whole thing. The lead clown ended up with a fractured arm. I got to resign before they fired me so I could keep part of my pension.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “By comparison, I guess our little town seems like a big vacation.”
“I’m not going to lie. I moved to Lake Sackett because the murder rate was pretty much nothing. I didn’t want to have to deal with bodies again.”
“So why were you pushing the murder agenda so hard every time someone died of non-natural causes?” she exclaimed.
“Because I wanted to be thorough. I wanted to do a good job, no matter what. I screwed up my last job so bad, I have to prove to myself that I’m not a chronic dumbass. And I don’t want to use the term ‘interim sheriff’ with you again, but with Sheriff Rainey’s legacy of hoardin’, I already had the cards stacked against me.”
“We would have had a way less antagonistic beginnin’ to our relationship if you’d just said so,” she told him, lying on her side and facing him.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly ready to lay myself bare to the sharp-tongued girl with the neon hair and friends in the morgue. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you can be pretty damn intimidatin’ when you want to be.”
“Thank you,” she said, yawning. Between the belly full of Ike’s comfort food and the drain of panic adrenaline from her system, she was getting pretty tired.
He lay down on his side, too, facing her. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had with a woman.”
“Well, consider the source.” She snorted, rubbing her face into the way-higher-than-standard-prison-quality pillow.
It was odd, being this close to Eric but having the bars between them. And yet, in a way, Frankie was grateful for the bars. They protected her from false hope. Well, he would reach out and touch me, but the bars are in the way. They protected her from potential rejection. Well, I would reach out and touch him, but the darn bars are in the way. She stayed in her space and he stayed in his, and there was some comfort in knowing that’s the way things were going to stay for at least the night.
“I’m kind of glad this happened,” he said, folding his own pillow in half under his head. “I mean, I’m sorry you were locked up and scared and everything. But I think it’s good, us talkin’ like this. Before, I thought you were this manic nightmare person. But now I know you have reasons for being completely crazy.”
“You say the sweetest things,” she murmured, her eyelids fluttering closed. It would just be for a second. Surely Landry would show up at any moment, keys in hand. She was just going to rest her eyes for a minute.
SHE WOKE TO sunlight streaming through the sheriff’s office window. Her face was pressed against the bars, her forehead lodged in the hollow of Eric’s throat. That spicy-smoky smell of him had leached into her own clothes and she found she didn’t mind so much. Eric’s arm had snaked through the bars overnight, his hand curled around her back. His fingers were flexed around the ridges of her spine. And he was breathing really heavily.
No, wait.
Frankie lifted her head to see Hercules standing on the other side of her bars, staring at her.
On her top ten list of weird dates, this ranked near number one.
A cold weight settled over Frankie’s chest, to the point that she couldn’t bear to stay still. She slid out from under Eric’s arm. She’d slept with Eric Linden, but not. She’d actually slept with the man. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent the night with someone, other than that one time she’d dozed off immediately after sex and woke to find her partner playing Halo with his roommates while she slept on his couch. But somehow, this seemed worse. That claustrophobic feeling squeezed at her belly again, and she didn’t think it had anything to do with the close confines of her cell.
She jerked back, throwing her elbow and knocking her bowl of potpourri to the floor with a crash.
“What? Frankie?” Eric jerked awake with a gasp at the sound of shattering glass. He glanced around the cells. “Why?”
She nodded toward the German shepherd. “Your dog is here.”
“Herc?” Eric said, lifting his head from the pillow. “Hey, boy, what are you doin’ here?”
Herc snapped to attention and trotted into the cell, nudging at Eric’s hand with his nose.
“How did he get in?” she asked, sitting up and straightening her clothes. In the night, she’d obviously drooled down her chin. She wiped at it furiously while Eric fussed with the dog. Also, it tasted like a squirrel had built a nest of Funyuns in her mouth while she slept. She pinched her lips together, lest the smell of her morning breath escape.
“He’s smarter than most people,” Eric told her, scratching behind Herc’s ears. “Either he found an open window or Landry left a door open.”
“I feel a lot less secure about the county’s tax records now,” she muttered.
“He must have jumped the fence and come lookin’ for me when I didn’t come home last night.” Eric rubbed his hands around Herc’s muzzle, making it look like he was stretching the dog’s cheeks to and fro. “I’m sorry, buddy. I didn’t mean to worry you. Frankie just ran into a little bit of trouble and I had to stick around to help her.”
Herc made a disgruntled whining noise and whuffed at Frankie.
“So that’s how it is?” Frankie said, raising her eyebrows at the dog. “I thought we were friends.”
“I’ll make coffee,” Eric said.
“Good, that means we can stay friends.” Frankie groaned. She was not a morning person. Eric didn’t need full exposure to uncaffeinated Frankie.
“Frankie!” Landry came charging into the jail. “I found it!”
Frankie turned to find Landry standing at the bars, wearing a fresh uniform and jangling the spare key. “My mama remembered as she was making breakfast. She put it in the urn with my daddy’s ashes because she figured we’d never throw that out. She just forgot till now.”
“Well, that was very helpful of her,” Frankie said, sliding out of bed. She had to pee so bad her eyes were floating, and the sooner Landry opened the door, the better.
Landry nodded toward the mussed bed in the next cell.
“Hey, did the sheriff keep you company last night? That was real nice of him.”
“Landry, would you please let me out?” Frankie said through gritted teeth.
“Oh, sure thing,” he said, unlocking the door.
“Don’t take this personal,” she told him. He yelped as she shoved him aside, out of the cell doorway, and ran down the hall to the (not quite as) public ladies’ room.
As she yanked the bathroom door open, she heard Landry moan, “I think she cracked my ribs.”
FRANKIE’S HOMECOMING FROM jail was not exactly triumphant.
After showering and changing, Frankie drove her uncle’s truck to work to find Duffy and her father standing at the open side entrance. She slid out of the truck, approaching them from behind. She could see large gouges in the metal door frame from across the parking lot, not to mention hear the increasingly annoying whoop of an alarm inside the building. As she approached, she noticed that the hallway lights were on and several of the paint-by-number Jesuses were strewn across the floor. Bob’s own office door was still closed. Frankie hoped that meant that the office records and all the customers’ payment information were safe.
It was rare to see Duffy with anything less than a jovial facial expression. But the frown didn’t leave his face as he said, “I’m starting to dislike Jared Lewis as much as you do.”
Frankie asked him, “What’s happened here?”
“Someone pried the office door open,” Bob said. “We didn’t want to disturb anything before the sheriff got here, so we haven’t gone in yet.”
“What about the security camera?” she asked. “Do you think it caught anything this time?”
�
��Took it out with a brick,” Duffy said, nodding toward the broken remnants of a camera, dangling by electrical cords.
“What about the trail cam?” She pointed toward the trees near the shoreline, where she and Duffy had installed a motion-activated camera of the type typically used by wildlife photographers and hunters.
“Apparently he brought two bricks.”
“What in the fu—?”
“Swear jar,” Bob reminded her.
“Fuuuuuudge,” she grumbled. “He’s a teenager. How in the hell is he able to get away with this stuff? Did he know where all the cameras were? Did he find a map of them or something?”
“He does seem to have a talent for it,” Bob said.
“From now until Halloween, we have someone sitting in the parking lot and watching the doors. With a shotgun. I’ll even take a shift myself.”
“No,” Bob said, shaking his head.
Duffy added, “No, no. No guns. We will not arm you. No one wins in a situation where you are armed.”
Bob tilted his head. “Sorry, honey, the whole family voted and agreed that you don’t get a gun. Besides, I’m sure one of the cameras got a picture of . . . whoever this was.”
“Daddy, please.”
“Your mama said we should keep an open mind,” Bob told her. “It’s not that we don’t believe you, doodle bug. We just need to consider the possibility it’s someone else causin’ the trouble.”
“Have you checked the other doors?” she asked.
“They’re all just fine,” Duffy said. “And the outbuildings, the Snack Shack, the bait shop, the dock, everything. It’s all fine.”
“Any way to shut off the alarm?” she asked, tapping at her ear.
Bob frowned. “Nope, it’s not really an alarm, just one of those cheap babyproofing motion sensor things you can put on doors when you’re afraid your kiddo’s going to bolt for the front yard. Margot’s taken to hangin’ it from the office door.”
“I happen to know a toddler who could use one of those,” Frankie muttered.
Frankie couldn’t help but feel guilty that on the one night she was locked in a jail cell and unable to defend her territory, Jared had actually broken into the building. He’d never managed to open a door before. And it was killing her, not knowing what he had touched and broken or whether he’d gotten into the mortuary. She had a pretty considerable lock on the interior morgue door. She couldn’t even imagine how awful and guilty she would feel if Jared had done something to one of her clients. Then again, maybe Jared had finally managed to see a dead body and was lying in a puddle of his own urine on her office floor.
It was probably wrong how much that thought cheered her up.
Eric pulled his police vehicle into the parking lot with his blue lights flashing. The fact that he considered this situation an actual emergency was also surprisingly cheering.
Eric cut the lights and parked. He smiled as he crossed the lot. She realized that she was standing next to her father while making eye contact with the man she’d just slept next to, and that was seriously awkward.
“Hey, folks, everybody okay?”
Frankie nodded, praying that her face wasn’t completely weird at the moment. “Just fine.”
“Yeah, but we’re not real sure what’s goin’ on in there,” Bob said. “We didn’t want to go in and disturb anything you needed to document.”
“Smart,” Eric affirmed. “How long have you been here?”
“About twenty minutes. Nobody’s come out and we haven’t heard anything except the damn alarm.”
“Jar,” Duffy muttered.
“I need y’all to stand over there and call the state police if you hear anything,” Eric said, carefully drawing his gun from his side holster. He walked toward the door, gun pointed at the ground, then stopped to add, “Do not call Landry.”
“Understood, do not make the situation worse,” Frankie agreed. “Please be careful.”
“Don’t worry. This is a situation I’m actually trained for.”
Eric walked down the hall, reached into the babyproofing monitor, and yanked out the batteries.
“Thank you,” Bob said, his shoulders relaxing under the lack of whooping noise.
Frankie gnawed her lip as she watched Eric disappear down the hall.
“Aw, you’re worried about your boyfriend,” Duffy cooed. “That’s so cute.”
Frankie smiled sharply at him. “I will burn everything you love.”
Duffy snorted.
After a tense few minutes, Eric was walking down the hall with his gun holstered. “It’s clear. Y’all can’t come in yet, but whoever was here is gone.”
“Did he get into the morgue?” Frankie asked.
“Nope, no damage to the door and it was still locked.”
“Oh, thank Drogon.” She sighed.
“What about the showroom?” Bob asked.
“No, that looked okay, too. But your hallway is pretty wrecked,” he said, pulling out his phone and taking pictures of the damage. “I think he got this far, set off the alarm, and ran out.”
“Are you going to take fingerprints?” Frankie asked. “Swab for DNA? I have the kits in my office.”
“Frankie, you’ve seen our budget. I have about enough in my forensics fund to run DNA once a year. Do you think I should spend that money on a break-in where there was no significant damage, as opposed to, say, saving it in case one of our citizens gets murdered?”
“Probably the murder,” she admitted. “But fingerprints?”
“I can dust for them,” he said. “But considerin’ that the person who you think is responsible for this doesn’t have a criminal record, that probably won’t do you a lot of good.”
“But he can be charged for this, right?” she asked. “And for the damage to our door and the cameras?”
“If I can prove he did it, yes.”
“I’ll be right back.” She bolted around Eric, holding her hands in an upright surrender position so she didn’t touch anything.
“Frankie, what are you doing?” Eric asked, following her down the stairs.
“When we added new cameras, I asked the tech to route the signal to my computer, because I’m not eighty years old and I understand that you occasionally have to check the feed,” she said, using her key to unlock the morgue doors.
“Mornin’, everybody, sorry to run in all abrupt like this, I’ve just got something I need to do,” she called to the occupants of the drawers as she fired up the overhead lights. “I’ll make polite chitchat later.”
“Still weird that you talk to them.”
She turned to see Eric hovering near the entrance of her office, not quite willing to step inside. “Really? Everybody’s in storage. You’re not going to see anything.”
Eric shuddered and grumbled simultaneously as he walked to her desk. Frankie pulled up the feeds from the trail cam and the office entrance camera. The trail cam was activated by motion around 1:30 a.m. A dark figure wearing a hoodie and a ski mask stepped into frame from the dock area. Frankie couldn’t help but note that he was wearing gloves when he tossed the brick at the camera, ending the feed. She pulled up the office door feed from around 1:30 and watched the dark figure toss a brick at the camera. He never quite got close enough for the camera to pick up on any distinguishing features.
“Crap,” she grumbled.
“Well, I will be sure to put an APB out for all local ninjas,” Eric said.
She glared at him.
“Too soon to joke,” he agreed.
“He walked into frame from the dock area, so he must have used a canoe or kayak or something to get across the lake. Jared has this obnoxious orange kayak that he actually named. The Velociraptor.”
“I don’t like to call children foul names, but that kid’s a real douche,” Eric said.
“Agreed.”
“Can you e-mail me a copy of the footage?” he asked. “I’ll be back in my office in an hour or so.”
“Where are you
goin?” she asked.
“I’m going to go to the Lewis residence and imply none too subtly that a vehicle matching Jared’s SUV’s description was spotted near the funeral home last night and considering the break-in, it’s quite reasonable to question his whereabouts.”
“But I just told you, he probably took a kayak,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the screen.
“Yeah, but I doubt his mother knows that,” Eric told her. “And maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll say something dumb like, ‘I didn’t drive to vandalize the funeral home, I took my kayak.’ ”
“I know I’m the one who normally escalates these situations beyond all reason, but is it really a good idea to question Jared’s parents when you can’t prove anything?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes if you apply the right amount of social pressure, the problem can resolve itself. Even if we can’t prove this was Jared, maybe if we scare Jared’s mom without doing anything permanent, she can stop Jared from escalatin’.”
“It’s cute that you think that would work.” She stood and he took a step back. Suddenly, his posture became rigid again, as if moving reminded him of where he was, and he backed toward the door. “There is no reasoning with Marnette Lewis. There’s only dodging passive-aggressive barbs and trying not to get hit in the face with her fake designer purse.”
“Well, I’m gonna try anyway,” he said. “It’s time to get this matter officially on the record.”
“You have no idea how much I’ve wanted a man to say those words to me.”
IT TOOK DUFFY, Frankie, and her father more than an hour to clean up the broken Jesus frames. Gravity plus thirty-year-old cheap craft canvas meant very few of them were salvageable.
“Aw, this was Mom’s favorite,” Bob said, holding up a busted painting depicting Jesus holding a rainbow that arched between his palms. “She really liked all the purple in this one.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. It feels like this is my fault, with this whole weird rivalry with Jared Lewis.”
“Oh, doodle bug, you know that’s not true. You can’t be responsible for the actions of a teenage jack . . . rabbit.”