by Molly Harper
Frankie’s mouth dropped open. “How did you . . . ?”
“She’s crying over a Halloween party. She picked a baggy costume. And the last time I saw her at your office, she was drinking ginger tea instead of your mom’s battery acid–flavored coffee.”
“You should have made detective,” she told him. “She hasn’t told Kyle yet. Or anybody, really, so mum’s the word, okay?”
“Exactly,” he said. “So, I like this costume.”
“Thank you,” she said, twirling for him. “Of all my options, this one was the fruitiest.”
“Well, I was thinkin’ that you could bring the other, less fruity options to my place and maybe try them on for me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve checked out McCready’s. All of the cameras are intact. The doors are locked up. It’s all secured. And Jared Lewis just got into his parents’ car with them. I think you can rest easy for the night.”
“It’s Halloween night. He always strikes on Halloween. He won’t break his pattern.”
“He’s a teenage boy, not a serial killer,” Eric retorted. “You’re like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin. You’re obsessed! He’s not going to show up to the place where he just got arrested.”
“But he didn’t suffer any consequences, which will make him that much bolder.”
He pulled a sour face. “Hey.”
“I’m just sayin’ he was witnessed by the sheriff breakin’ into a buildin’ and nothin’ happened to him yet. That’s the kind of thing that builds a criminal ego.”
“You seem to be ‘just sayin’ ’ quite a bit!”
Across the lot, she saw Stan hand Margot off to Kyle. With Hazel and June tugging at her sleeves, Margot immediately stopped crying and began questioning the girls about their night and how much candy they’d snagged. Kyle put his arm around her while the girls dragged her toward his car.
“Maybe we should stop talkin’ now.”
“Maybe we should,” he said. “Look, you don’t have to come over to my place, but please promise me that you won’t go stake out your family’s funeral home for the night. Just go home. I don’t want to hear about you goin’ to the Lewis house and tryin’ to shut Jared’s bedroom window with a nail gun.”
“That’s not a terrible idea,” she said.
“Frankie, please, for the sake of my job, just go home.”
Frankie nodded and headed toward her uncle, who was climbing into the funeral home van. She didn’t feel bad for not offering some sort of PDA before she walked off. They didn’t seem to be in the right place for it, literally or figuratively.
“Margot okay?” Frankie asked Stan.
“Yeah, I think she just kind of hit her limit for the day,” Stan said. “Poor thing. Kyle will take good care of her. He’s a good guy.”
Frankie smiled, but she wondered how Stan was going to feel about that “good guy” when he found out Kyle had knocked up his little girl. The mix of elation at finally becoming a grandparent and horror at realizing his Margot was not just playing tiddlywinks when she spent the night at Kyle’s was going to produce the most complicated expression ever to cross his leathery face.
“So, you want me to drop you at home?” Stan asked.
She pressed her lips together in a contemplative expression. “No.”
SITTING AT HER desk in the mortuary, Frankie poured milk and chocolate syrup into an oversize Ravenclaw mug of her mama’s high-test coffee. After her uncle had dropped her off at the funeral home, she’d changed into some comfortable clothes and spent a very long evening sitting in her morgue, eating mini candy bars, watching the security feeds, and waiting for Jared to try to open the back door.
At 6 a.m., she finally figured out that he wasn’t coming and nodded off at her desk with her face smashed against her keyboard. And now she had three bodies to prep. She’d had maybe an hour of sleep. And she had nougat in her hair with no way of getting it out.
Why hadn’t Jared shown up? He always made some attempt on Halloween. Had she really misread him so much? Or maybe he didn’t feel the need to break in again, when he had already humiliated her with an arrest and potential lawsuit over his headlight? Maybe that was better than whatever he had planned in the morgue? Maybe the real prize for him wasn’t seeing a body in the morgue, but torturing Frankie.
Was Eric right? Was she obsessed?
She startled fully awake when a fist hammered at the back door. She glanced at her phone. It was only 8 a.m. With the late night at the Trunk-R-Treat, no one else in the family was planning to come in before ten. Maybe Naomi was bringing her another client? Surely she would have gotten a call if there’d been some sort of fatality. She opened the door to find Eric in plain clothes, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.
And he was not happy to see her.
“I thought I asked you, very reasonably, to go home last night,” he said, sounding very tired and very angry as he cautiously entered the room. He glanced around, but relaxed after seeing that the only body on the tables was covered with a sheet. “But you came here anyway, and you slept here?”
“You don’t know that I spent the night here.”
Eric glanced down at her legs pointedly.
Oh, right. She’d forgotten that she was wearing her Pac-Man pajama pants under her lab coat.
“It’s casual Friday,” she insisted.
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Which makes it even more unexpected and special,” she said, fanning her fingers into jazz hands. And when his expression didn’t change, she threw her head back. “Okay, so I came here after the Trunk-R-Treat. And I sat at my desk, completely safe, watching the security feeds.”
He groaned, dropping his face into his hands. “Frankie!”
“I had to make sure my clients were okay!”
“So your dead people are more important to you than your safety or my career?”
“Yes.” She gently tugged the sheet off of the body on the table. “This is Horace Lowell. He was a nice old man who sat in the corner booth of the diner every single morning, sipping coffee and smiling at everybody while he read his paper. You know how people realized something had happened to him over the weekend? Because he didn’t show up in his corner booth. So Ike sent one of his line cooks to check on him.”
She crossed the room to pull open a morgue drawer.
“Frankie, don’t!” Eric said, wincing.
She gently pulled the sheet away from the body of an elderly woman. “This is Beulah Lawrence. She was eighty-five and died in her sleep on Sunday. She’s the mother of four, the grandmother of nine. She taught me piano when I was a kid and she always told me I did a good job, even when I played terribly.”
She reached for another drawer. “This is—”
“Okay, stop, I get it.”
“Do you?” she asked. “These are people I’ve known my whole life. That’s why I get so nuts at the idea of someone coming in here and disturbing them. Not because it’s my domain or because I don’t want to be embarrassed, but because I don’t want them to be taken advantage of by some entitled teenage jackass who’s got an ax to grind with me. I won’t be the reason their families are put through hell, on top of grieving.”
“I never said I didn’t understand why you wanted to keep Jared out of here!” he shouted as Frankie closed both morgue drawers. “I said you needed to go about it like a noncrazy person. I said I needed you—for once, just once—to rein in your lack of impulse control and act like a damn adult!”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, you know what’s not fair? This. This is an official censure,” Eric said, throwing his bundle of papers on the exam table. “From the county commission. They actually met in a special session at six this morning to discuss how I’m handling my responsibilities. Apparently I’ve been too ‘heavy-handed’ in how I’m dealing with certain youngsters within the community. It was also mentioned that I was letting my personal relationships affect my professional de
cisions.”
Frankie scanned the pages, which looked awfully official. “Oh, big woo, they gave one of these to Ron Ludgate last year because he didn’t smile as he emptied the trash cans behind the high school.”
“Yeah, except instead of not applying enthusiasm to trash removal, I was noticeably absent from one of the biggest community events of the year, because I was busy hanging out in a parkin’ lot, waiting to ambush a teenager. Oh, and in my absence, a massive fight broke out and a bunch of people got injured and kids got the crap scared out of them. And since it’s kind of my job to provide law and order at community events, they officially sanctioned me a week before the election! And Vern Lewis went directly to his cousin-in-law to get the story on the front page of the Ledger. Landry might actually get elected sheriff of your county. Because of the threat to public safety alone, you should be concerned.”
“Oh, no one in their right mind is going to vote for Landry. He shot himself in the foot.”
Eric glared at her.
Frankie sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked you to come out here and keep watch for Jared, and I hate to point this out, but that’s kind of part of your job, to keep watch over people and businesses in the county, particularly if that business has been the victim of a recent break-in.”
“Well, not all of us have the luxury of working for our family. Some have to go out into the real world and get real jobs. We can’t dress like a circus freak and get away with murder because Mommy and Daddy still baby the hell out of us.”
Frankie’s jaw dropped. Almost immediately, Eric’s face turned white.
“Frankie, I’m sorry.”
She raised a hand. “No, you said what you meant, the meanest, most low-down thing you could have said to me. Don’t try to take it back now. I’m sorry that’s what you think of me. I’m sorry that when you’re stressed out, the first thing you do is lash out at me. And I’m sorry that you’re a coward who doesn’t know how to make a place for himself here, so you blame everybody else for not being able to hold on to another job.”
“Looks like you’re not too bad at the low-down insults, either,” he said, before walking out of the morgue and slamming the door behind him.
And then Frankie did something she’d never done in her morgue. She sat on the floor and cried like a baby.
FRANKIE DID AS much work as she could possibly accomplish with her eyes nearly swollen shut from crying, and then she went home. She dodged her family as much as possible, using the intercom to tell Bob and E.J.J. that the smoke from the chili station the night before had made her congested and headachy. Bob immediately wanted to take her home, but she managed to duck into Duffy’s truck and drive herself before he or her mama could spot her. And then she’d curled up on her bed and cried until she wanted to throw up. And she was pretty sure she was having a heart attack, because she kept feeling twinges in her chest. Or it was possible the pain was just from knowing that Eric not only thought those things about her but was able to say them.
She supposed this was some sort of karmic payback for never having a messy breakup in high school. And she wasn’t even sure she could call it a breakup, because she and Eric weren’t officially dating. They’d just slept together. And they hadn’t gotten along particularly well. So why did this hurt so much? Why did she feel like there was no hope? Like this wasn’t going to get better?
Grown-up feelings sucked.
“Frankie, open up!” Marianne called from outside her locked bedroom door. “Your mama called us. She’s been really worried.”
“Go away!” Frankie yelled. “I’m fine! I’m just sick and I don’t feel like talking.”
“Come on, Frankie,” Duffy called. “We know you’re not sick. You’ve got man trouble. Open up.”
“Look, I appreciate you coming over, but just let me wallow, okay? Adult feelings are an awful tear-soaked hellscape, but I think it’s better if I just feel them without someone trying to prop me up. It’ll probably give me character or something.”
“Frankie, I’ve got an hour before Nate is finished with basketball practice and comes home to break something. You’re wasting precious time!” Marianne cried.
Frankie ignored her and pulled a pillow over her head.
“That’s it! I’m using the hidden key!”
Frankie gasped, throwing off the pillow. “The hidden key is for emergencies only!”
“So you see how far you have pushed me!” Marianne called.
“You are breaking a sacred trust!”
The door popped open. Marianne bustled in, carrying takeout boxes from the Rise and Shine and a three-pound bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “And you are being a drama queen.”
Duffy followed, carrying two twelve-packs of beer. “Et tu, Duffy?”
He pulled a sour face. “Discussing your romantic problems is literally the most uncomfortable I will ever be in your presence. All of this beer is for me.”
“Yeah, ’cause your romantic problems with your ex-wife and her demon vagina are a walk in the normal park.”
From the hallway, Frankie heard Margot yell, “I’m here! I’m here! Don’t start without me!”
“Margot, too?” Frankie sighed.
“Oh my God,” Margot cried when she saw her. “What happened to you?”
Frankie ran a hand through her hair, which she’d dyed a rich brunette shade in a fit of anger. Between that and the pink plaid cotton pajamas that had been a gift from Leslie’s sister, she was practically unrecognizable. “Oh, yeah, I was trying something different.”
“Was that part of your Halloween costume?” Margot asked. “I swear you had blue streaks last night.”
“This is my natural hair color,” Frankie said.
“Really?” Marianne poked at her thick mane. “I hardly remember.”
“It looks nice,” Margot told her. “Personally, I miss the rainbow of possibilities. But this is nice.”
Marianne and Margot started unloading the food on Frankie’s tiny bedside table. Duffy cracked open a beer and sat on her beanbag chair. Marianne and Margot sat on the bed.
“I’m sticking with this,” Margot said, holding up a bottle of fancy French bubbly water. “I’m keeping the girls tonight. Kyle has parent-teacher conferences.”
“Where did you get that?” Frankie asked.
“I stocked up at Whole Foods while I was in Atlanta this morning.”
“Why did you go to Atlanta?” Marianne asked.
“Can I have one?” Frankie asked Duffy before Margot could answer.
“I told you, this is all for me,” Duffy said, chugging his beer. “There has to be some payoff for my participation in all this lady talk. I begged my parents for a brother.”
Marianne snorted. “So did I.”
“Hey!” Duffy shot back. And then when Frankie snagged one of his beers, he said, “Hey!”
Margot snickered as she and Marianne divvied up burgers and fries. Frankie, who hadn’t eaten since her candy bar binge in the wee hours, dove face-first into her double bacon cheeseburger. Margot picked at hers without much enthusiasm. Her cousins remained quiet as they chewed. Frankie knew they were giving her the floor so she could unload all her Eric angst. But what came out of her mouth was “Am I spoiled?”
Everybody stopped chewing and turned to her with somewhat guilty expressions on their faces.
“Aw, man, that means he was right.” Frankie flopped back on her bed and pulled the pillow over her head again. She felt the mattress dip under the weight of her cousins.
“You’re not spoiled, hon,” Duffy swore.
“You’re a little self-involved sometimes, with the limited grasp of how your more . . . zealous behavior affects people around you.”
“I mean, your parents do find every single thing you do to be the greatest thing ever. But I don’t think it’s made you go rotten,” Marianne said. “You don’t treat people badly. You don’t take advantage. You’re not lazy. You’re just not used to a lot of obstacles b
eing thrown your way.”
“Isn’t that how E.J.J. describes millennials?” Frankie sniffed.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you’re not competent or mature. You’re just sort of used to getting your own wa—You know what? I am not helping,” Margot said, shaking her head.
“Can you tell us where this is all coming from?” Marianne asked. “Maybe that would help us figure out what to say here.”
“Eric’s mad at me because I endangered his job with this whole Jared situation. He said I can’t understand how he feels because I can’t be fired. I work for my family. That some people have to go out into the real world and work for people who won’t let them dress like circus freaks and baby the hell out of them.”
Marianne winced. “He said ‘circus freak’? Really?”
“Yeah, but Frankie, you’ve said that yourself, that your parents don’t pick at you about your clothes or your hair because they’re just so happy you’re here and you’re well that they don’t sweat the small stuff,” Margot said.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I want him saying it!” Frankie cried.
“Fair enough,” Marianne conceded.
“Was it the spoiling part or the circus freak thing that bothered you more?” Margot asked.
“He wasn’t exactly callin’ me a circus freak, he just said that he wasn’t allowed to dress like one. And he apologized as soon as he saw how much it hurt me.”
Marianne asked, “But is that why you dyed your hair? To try to look non–circus freaky?”
“No, mostly it was pouting. I thought, ‘I’ll dye my hair and I won’t be nearly as cute and he’ll see that I have to have the brightly colored hair, because it’s what makes me so interesting.’ But I’m still super cute. So I failed.”
Margot burst out laughing.
“What?”
“It’s just most people don’t say things like that about themselves. Most people don’t have that kind of confidence.”
Frankie protested, “But I’m not confident!”
Marianne arched her eyebrows.
“About some things!”
“It’s not a bad thing to be confident. Clearly, your personality is one of the things that attracted Eric to you in the first place. He’s under a lot of stress right now, which doesn’t make it okay to talk to you that way, but you might consider how a couple of your actions may have contributed to that stress,” Marianne said. “Like busting out Jared’s headlight.”